Abstract

How Social Web has interesting impact on companies like Yahoo! that predate Social Web Revolution. Back in the day, users provided us a lot of personal information for their own consumption but we now want to encourage them to share some of it in the new world. What are the challenges in doing this from user education & expectation, legal & privacy disclosures, etc.?

We provide high level introduction to the scale of data at play within Yahoo!, how we comply with legal and privacy laws based on jurisdiction, challenges like sometime we can’t move the data closer to user geo which has performance implications.

Privacy in the new world is dead – this is a hug myth. People still care a lot about it in spite of the openness promoted by the new social web like Twitter where everything is public, or sharing unprecedented amount of data(content like personal photos, videos, messages) within friends on networks like Facebook. We look at why this is a myth and debunk this theory.

Lastly, we cover sharing data with 3rd party sites & developers via Apps & APIs – this introduces new set of challenges. Why does my alarm app on iPhone need my friends list? How to enforce retention policies? How to give better visibility to users on where their data is going, who is viewing it, etc.