Moodgeist privacy vs data publication/reuse concerns

The mood message privacy model in Skype UI is not obvious

Did you know how mood message privacy works before you read the above paragraphs? I bet you didn’t. It’s just a bit of inside knowledge I happen to have. This isn’t communicated anywhere at all — in the Skype UI, in the preferences, in the guides, anywhere. On the contrary, in the UI it is treated very much like full name, which is by definition publicly viewable and searchable. You can search people by name in the Global User Directory. If you see and edit your own mood message, it is displayed right next to your full name. Ditto for your contacts in the contact list.

Thus, by looking at the UI behaves currently, a natural thing to do is to assume that the mood is public anyway, regardless of how it’s implemented “under the hood”. Which brings us to the next bullet.

People use mood messages as a personal broadcasting/publishing microformat

If I look at what my contacts both from among Skype staff and “outsiders” have set their moods as, I can see the following things.

• random jokes, good or bad
• “how am I feeling”, the current mood
• addresses and invitations to personal or business web sites
• vacation “warnings”, notices of forthcoming vacations or “out of office” events
• notices of what time zone the user is currently in or current location

I could make an argument that none of these are particularly private. Indeed, as shown by invites to web sites, many people, as discussed above, are rather assuming that mood messages are public and can drive traffic to their site. (Which is a bit unfortunate since links are not clickable in current implementation in Skype Client — but they are on moodgeist.com.)

So republishing them in a “collective anonymous” format would at the very least not do any harm to anyone, or in the best case, drive traffic to the person’s site and help them accomplish their objectives better. So we can have a hypothesis here: “Skype mood messages are a personal publishing microformat whose use is more geared towards public use, rather than authorized contacts only.” A large part of Moodgeist.com’s raison d’être is to test this hypothesis.

We do not publish personal info, moods and feeds

We feel there is a big difference between publishing someone’s mood message which is not connected to the Skype Name, and publishing the Skype Name and mood message together. If you see someone is just “going on vacation” without viewing that person’s Skype Name, it’s just another “drop in the ocean” among other random info. If you see a Skype Name combined with the “vacation mood”, it’s entirely different — you now have specific info about a specific person’s whereabouts. This info can be misused. We want to prevent misuse. This is the reason why there are currently no Skype Names associated with the moods on moodgeist, and you cannot get Skype Name-based feeds.

This means you currently cannot do some things with moodgeist.com like have your own personal “mood feed” for your site or blog. And there won’t be any personal info until we’re confident that we can prevent this sort of misuse — which most probably means having some sort of opt-in mechanism built here.

Moodgeist is about learning about the “collective state of mind” instead of monetizing users’ info and privacy

Moodgeist is not about making a buck from users’ info. We do not have financial objectives or pressure. This is why Moodgeist data and feeds are licensed under the by-nc-sa license from Creative Commons — you cannot use the data in any commercial applications and must share your results similarly to Moodgeist.

Let us know how you feel about this all — both as a Skype user yourself and the way you perceive and use mood messages, and when thinking of it from a distance and looking at what your own contacts have set as their mood messages.