Dis Connect.me , tagged and flagged.

connect.me.tag.posioning.useraccount

The next round of social media invites has flooded into my attention. This time it is Tag.Connect.me.

A service which says;

Tagging lets your friends and colleagues know you respect them AND it creates contexts for your personal Connect.Me. Learn more

connect.me.tag.posioning.choiceI got tagged today which is how I knew my details were now on their website although given the amount of betas I have signed up for I am not sure that I hadnt asked to sign up at some prior date( this is not a bad thing of itself )

I was tagged  “technology”, “admin” , “systems”, “digital”, “politics” and “digital”. What If I had disagreed with those tags ? What if I wanted to hide what people were saying about me on this site ? What if I wanted to opt out of being involved in the process ? There is nothing on their website that gives me that level of control.

Speaking of control what is top stop anyone from posting malicious or controversial tags ?

connect.me.tag.posioning

I have speculated in the past that there is a problem with #Hashtagging of articles and content. It is too easy to poison those tags with malicious content or associations. HashTag poisoning is simple to achieve and whilst it creates noise and spam for other listeners there is little to stop the trolls and bullies from using fake accounts to create profiles and in turn associate and ‘tag’ an individual in a harmful fashion. It is interesting to read Connect.me statement on Trust because I dont feel that the statement is reflected in my own profile settings or account control.

 

If Connect.Me want to make their service good, if they want to make their service useful they need to do three things immediately.

  1. Allow a person to remove tags that have been assigned to them and to report a person for allocating malicious tags
  2. Allow a person to opt/out .. not simply account delete but hide and remove their profile whilst remaining in control of the profile
  3. Make it easy to control if you will appear in searches by google from that site.

 

Many social media sites have to ‘automatically’ include a social media profile in order to provide any value these optioned in sites remove privacy for individuals by forcing them to login and ‘claim’ their profiles and I feel that this is a level of openness too far. But I could be being cranky, what do you think ?

 

Thanks for reading.

Category: blog, Commentary     Tagged: , ,

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3 Comments on “Dis Connect.me , tagged and flagged.”

  1. Nicholas,

    Drummond Reed from Connect.Me here. You’ve got great points, and we are completely aligned with you on individual control over personal data — that’s the point of the Respect Trust Framework you referred to.

    As we just posted to the Connect.Me blog, this first Twitter tagging app will only run for a few weeks to let build up their personal contexts in advance of our beta. The official Connect.Me app will give every user full control over their contexts, i.e., have all the protections you describe.

    In the meantime, as explained in the blog post, anyone using tag.connect.me can let us know if they want to have tags removed, or remove themselves from being tagged.

    Best,

    =Drummond

  2. I replied to Drummond and Connect.me on their blog post:

    “Thanks to Drummond for leaving a response on my blog re concerns over malicious tags I think we would rather have the control immediately and not as part of a feedback form. It would be better if you had to pre approve a tag before it went live for either user.
    Although you can remove a malicious tag we should not forget that “Nothing can be deleted from the internet””

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