Lately I registered at Platial, a social networking platform that allows you to share places. It works quite similar to del.icio.us‘s bookmark sharing, Flickr‘s photo sharing or last.fm‘s music sharing. You can add every kind of place, you can tag them, comment, collect them in maps, publish maps where others can add still more places. You can do a lot of nice things with Platial. [Read more about Platial on Wired]
While exploring some maps and places people added, this marker came up in the recent places category:
Ok, hmmm, so what’s that supposed to mean. Well, I’m certainly not defending sexual offenders, but I doubt that a service like Platial is the right platform to list and pinpoint such citizens. How would I feel if I find a label saying “sexual offender” or “released murderer” floating over my or my neighbours address? There is no way to check this accusations or to find further information about it on Platial. Nor isn’t Platial designed to provide appropriate legal documents either. Such a label only makes room for several speculations, resulting in insecurity.
Platial is based on geographic information, enriched by personal experiences in order to enable social networking. The problem I see is that unlike other social networking platforms, Platial allows sharing others privacy. I can pinpoint my neighbours house and tag it with “tasteless architecture”. Primarily I would share my personal experience, but do I have the right to share my neighbours location too? Of course I could take a picture of my neighbours house, upload it to Flickr and tag it with “tasteless architecture”. But as long as I don’t add name and address nobody’s privacy would be violated. The photo description on Flickr, where I add name and address, would classify as additional information because Flickr is about photo sharing, not photo-description sharing. Furthermore, if my neighbour finds out about his house, address and my tag on Flickr he still could flag the photo as “may offend” and let the Flickr administration team know.
In del.icio.us I share my bookmarks, my favorite sites in the internet, something very abstract. I can’t share somebody else’s bookmarks. On last.fm the root of any social activity is sharing my taste of music. I can’t share the genres somebody else is listening to. It’s impossible and wouldn’t make sense.
In Platial the required information to enable social networking is the location. Combined with the single word “fraud” as place name this basic information can already do a lot of harm and heavily violate someone’s privacy. That’s the main difference between Platial and other social networking sites I think.
Platial is a great idea (hopefully it’ll be successful in Europe too, so far there are not many european Platial users) but something has to be done to prevent abuse and respect the privacy of people who don’t want to get involved.
Update #1:
Luistxo from Tagzania encounterd the very same problem: sex offenders of Detroit have been mapped by a user on Tagzania. [Read the post en español].
The first comment on that post is quite interesting. It points to Google Maps API Terms of Use where you’ll read:
You agree that when using the Service, You will not:
defame, abuse, harass, stalk, threaten or otherwise violate the legal rights (such as rights of privacy and publicity) of others
Says it all, or maybe not? Marking out some addresses and labeling them with the word “sex offender” isn’t violating any rights in Google’s eyes.