Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

Today, someone on the progressive exchange list asked about a tool called Rapleaf. A story about Rapleaf in Clickz (a newsletter for online marketers) says this:

Rapleaf allows you to quickly and inexpensively find out the social networking footprint of those you’re marketing to. Just send the company your e-mail list and tell it what social networking sites those on your list are using, their demographics, the numbers of friends they have, how many widgets they’re using, even their interests. Rapleaf digs into the usual social networking sites (Facebook, MySpace, etc.), as well as newsgroups, commerce sites (like Amazon), review sites, forums, and news groups, and even searches the general Web to find out where your people are and what they’re doing online.

An interesting conversation ensued on the list - with some arguing that this was a problematic thing. I actually thought this could be quite useful for organizations to figure out how to allocate sparse resources in the Web 2.0 space. But that’s not the point of this post.

I realized that one of the most important things that we can do is educate the organizations we work with (as well as individuals) about privacy issues and data. When is data public? When is it private? How do we know? How can we assure privacy?

It is important to understand that Rapleaf is just gathering public information on people, based on their email addresses. It is an inevitable result of our desire for social networks, as well as our desire for information to be portable (like in RSS feeds.) What’s important is that we understand what is actually public, and what isn’t, and how to keep what we want to be private, really private.