Clique - Future Plans

Future Plans

In year 2 we would like to incorporate a number of different features for privacy and identity management issues. Here’s a list of them:

 

  1. Adding dynamic icons to the main page of Clique:

    1. These icons provide general user feedback with regard to the trail of (personal) information a person is leaving behind when using the site
    2. They change as a person alters the settings for access rights e.g., to more stringent
    3. This idea builds on work done in Activity 4 with respect to icons in privacy policies (ULD). Moreover, since it also involves work on privacy metrics we will combine it with writing an article for WP 2.3.

  2. Building pseudonym functionality for participation in groups in Clique:

    1. When the audience of a self-presentation is unknown or unknowable (as is the case when users participate in large groups) it is in the users’ interest to create distance between their ‘real’ identities and their persona displayed in the group. In everyday life this practice is known as masking -- think, for instance, of using a pen name to write a book, of stage names for pop idols and of code names for secret agents.
    2. Mimicking the everyday practice of masking we want to build a pseudonym tool for Clique, so that whenever users want to join or create a group they are asked to provide a pseudonym to use for all their postings.
    3. This pseudonym should be invisibly linked to the face(s) behind it, so that the user’s privacy is guaranteed.

  3. Building a fading and blossoming relationships tool in Clique:

    1. In real life relationships between people tend to wax and wane rather than remain exactly the same over time. When people do not see or speak to each other for long periods of time relationships may fade away entirely.
    2. In social network sites all relationships are stable and there is no (visible) difference between contacts that one engages with frequently and ones one doesn’t engage with at all anymore after the moment of adding them to the contact list. We want to remedy this fact by building a tool that mimics fading relationship in Clique, by allowing these to gradually disappear from the contact list. Similarly, blossoming relationships could be made visually more prominent and given more easy access to content and information.

  4. Building a fading content tool for Clique:

    1. One of the key problems with respect to privacy on the internet is the level of permanence of much of the information people place online. Content lives on in cyberspace, often times even long after the owner has forgotten about it, or, even worse, has attempted to remove it.
    2. To contribute to a solution for this issue we would like to build a fading content tool, which works in a similar way as the one mentioned under 3.

  5. Integration with and gaining feedback from the Open Source community, so we can return Clique into that community.