It’s an obvious trend that we accept to reveal more and more information about ourselves to cloud services, and fewer and fewer consider that a risk, because they don’t understand the risk. This is not a good thing in my opinion, but the trend is set, until something serious happens with the collected information.
Hunch is just one example of a Web app that I think gets a bit too personal.
It’s one thing to run a local application for setting up a profile for interests to generate more relevant search result. It’s a completely different thing to hand that information over to a company that you know nothing about and you don’t know what they will use the information for beyond the official statement.
You can’t be completely anonymous on Hunch, as you have to use Facebook or Twitter to register. Of course you can set up a Twitter account just for this purpose, and that you don’t use for anything else, kind of like how you might have used Hotmail accounts before to be able to sign up to services you don’t trust, so there’s a workaround.
Many will though log in to their Facebook accounts, which I don’t recommend. Even though Oauth covers the tracks so to speak, Hunch wants access to a lot of stuff in your account. Check this out:
I probably sound like as a whiny old geezer about this issue, but I stand by my opinion. Not that the evolution of social network services will stop. We are still just at the beginning.
A related note:
Do the Companies that Hold Your Data Stand with Users- – Electronic Frontier Foundation