Orkutting Into Your Privacy?

Andrew Orlowski, professional loudmouth for The Register (motto: “not Slashdot, not quite Wired News”), takes some swipes at Google’s Orkut for potentially invasive privacy policies. Huh? Are people on social networking sites that worried about giving out their data, what with giving out data being pretty much the essence of being on a social networking service? I appreciate privacy as much as the next cypherpunk, but honestly, if someone wanted to scrape through data on Orkut there’s little that’s going to stop them, certainly not some legalese. Whatever deep-pocketed partners Gookut/Oorkle sells data to are probably at least consumer friendly enough to have legitimate “unsubscribe” links in the spam they’ll send us suckers.

Good jab on Orkut being served on Windows, though. I was pretty shocked when I saw the “.aspx” extension on the site’s pages. Wouldn’t be half surprised if Orlowski’s source was yanking his chain, and the system is actually a *nix set up to evade OS fingerprinting. That’d really cramp that DDoS I wanted to launch.

Actually, I think Orkut’s just dandy. Lots of real people I really know in real life have spontaneously made their way on to it, without my request or aid, and invited me into their friend networks. As in, Orkut is doing what a social networking service should do. Tribe never really did much of that for me, though I was able to meet some Internet people and share in a mutual friend-adding before we promptly forgot about each other. For those kinda reasons I only do one social networking service at a time, so I split Tribe (again! That’s right, bitches!). I only want so many inane discussions to keep track of, and Orkut discussions are easily ignored. Just dandy.