Brandon Mechtley

Proximity refers to the distance from which information can be collected, and locality refers to the areas in which this information is used. In ubiquitous computing, these topics are typically understood in terms of the physical world. For our purposes, these two concepts have virtual analogues in social web design. Proximity often affects the acceptable locality of information use. In the case of Beacon, for example, information collected from a third party vendor was relayed to Facebook. In terms of proximity and locality, Facebook was acquiring data from a distance far too great.

A key feature behind the social web (and the web in general) is that it allows for large leaps in both proximity and locality, so we wouldn’t want to assume that these two concepts should be limiting. Rather, they should be understood in terms of other privacy aware principles, and be used clues for finding deeper problems. Going back to Beacon, Facebook faced problems with surprising all their users’ notions of the capabilities of the web. Proximity and locality are concepts that can be used to predict these surprises. Most importantly, the locality of the information should never be unknown, but should always be communicated through proper notice, preferably before any action is taken.

There are some services that implement custom locality for users, such as those that allows people to create custom friends groups (e.g. LiveJournal, Pownce). Revisiting choice, direct manipulation of locality by users is an extremely powerful way of providing them with notice of the destinations of their information.

Next will be “Adequate Security.”