13
votes
Walled gardens, privacy, SEO and the open internet
Hey all!
So I was thinking of how when looking at privacy, having a platform being a walled garden (i.e. data not being found on search engines) can feel like a worse experience for what is regarded as the open internet.
I don't have a solid solution for this. So my question to you is,
How do you respect privacy while sharing content for search engines on a platform?
Tildes withholds some profile data if you’re not logged in. Old BB forums would serve post data but require a login to view profiles. So require authorization for data that feels private. It’s kind of hard to get specific without knowing what kind of platform you have in mind.
Generally speaking I wanted to ask about all. With platforms becoming their own walled gardens and wanting people to stick to one place for everything (Meta's facebook, specifically).
The idea is that the internet is there to connect people, sharing information freely and widely. If platforms want to respect privacy certain things will not be available for search results.
Like @ogre mentions, the tradeoffs tend to be platform-specific, and depend on what kind of data is being shared publicly.
In general, there is always a tradeoff, because even if you anonymize everything before releasing it publicly, there’s always the risk of reidentification, or being able to identify a person from enough context clues in the data.
For example, Facebook allows you to lock your profile to only be visible by friends or friends-of-friends, which does support the idea of a walled garden (not visible publicly). However, even if you wanted to make results available to search engines by anonymizing profiles (say: remove name, picture faces, and birthday), there’d still probably be enough information on the profile to deduce who this person is.
On Tildes, when telling anything personal, I do change or hide any details so it’s harder for someone to go from Tildes content -> IRL identification. Someone who knows who I am IRL can probably conclude it’s me if they find me here and read enough of my comments. That I’m ok with, so it’s nice to know only others Tildes users can see my entire comment history.
I suspect the future way to get around the “walled garden” problem will be with decentralized protocols. That’s still a very new technical space, and there’s a lot of smart people that disagree on what that should look like, but I think most unbiased actors agree that some public protocol is better than media provided by one company.
Note that decentralized protocols will still likely hide a lot of data from public view via encryption (and therefore hide it from search engines), but at least you will have more than one option to find your friends online.
I don't think gating content is necessarily at odds with the concept of an open Internet. I have self hosted services that for convenience can be reached from the Internet but are only meant to be used by myself and family members and are therefore locked behind a login gate, with only me able to create accounts. I'd love to be able to open these services to arbitrary users, but I do not have the storage capacity nor moderation staff for that to not immediately become a disaster. This still leaves me with the possibility of sharing content I do wish for people to access through the same hardware I use for those gated services, and, if this was generalized, would lead to the Internet being a lot more open than the current "5 companies are hosting, and therefore have unfettered control of, everything on the Internet" hellscape. Having your own proverbial garden is fine, the problem is when a company lures everyone inside theirs, and proceed to close the gate behind them.