Omar Shahine just wrote an interesting piece over on the Inside Windows Live Blog (you should subscribe to the content being written by the people building Windows Live – rss).
The post talks about lots of different aspects of privacy. The points that jumped out at me are:
I’ve summarized (and included chunks) below (read full):
As the amount of information we share and our connectedness to people increases, the importance of privacy controls that are understandable, personalized, easy, and flexible has grown. For the next release of Windows Live, we've been working hard to meet this challenge and create an online environment where you can feel secure about sharing, and know that your personal expectations for privacy are respected. Things we believe in – People don’t want all their data to be public Different people have different tolerances for how openly they share People have different privacy needs for different kinds of content A one-size-fits-all model for privacy is untenable for everyone) Accidentally sharing something private can be disastrous Not all friends are the same
As the amount of information we share and our connectedness to people increases, the importance of privacy controls that are understandable, personalized, easy, and flexible has grown. For the next release of Windows Live, we've been working hard to meet this challenge and create an online environment where you can feel secure about sharing, and know that your personal expectations for privacy are respected.
Things we believe in –
There is a ton of background and additional info in the post – check it out.
I agree with it all Angus and look forward to seeing what has been acheived regarding privacy settings for users in Wave 4. The trick is to allow full customization of settings but make it all easy to do from the users end.
It's great that there is so much customization on Windows Live but.........it can be difficult to set up especially for newbies.