Laurel Fan, a very talented developer, found these thoughts on “publicity polices” (as a counterpoint to “privacy policies”) on the Robot co-op web log.

There’s an old New Yorker cartoon that shows some dogs at a computer with the caption “on the internet, no one knows you are a dog”. It’s a Web 1.0 joke about privacy and anonymity. But today, with the rise of blogs and websites like Flickr, del.icio.us and 43 Things, the joke is, “offline, no one knows you are a talented photographer, that you want to learn Italian, that you discover great links or know some great people”.

For now, “The Real World” still requires you to check your virtual aspirations and accomplishments at the edge of the internet. You can’t convert your whuffie just yet. But millions of people are building online identities and reputations that are accumulating meaning and value. That value gets created as we build an online reputation, as we move our private knowledge into the public domain. The issues that this brings up get lost when the only policy folks have to reference is a “privacy policy”. Perhaps we need a “publicity policy” for 2.0 websites.
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Privacy policies focus on what happens to your private information. But a publicity policy could make clear what the implications are of sharing information in public.

Search engines change the nature and significance of public information. They can gather and collate that information and make it conveniently accessible to complete strangers. For example there are search services that are capable of assembling a virtual resume of an individual by combining publically available information from across the web.

What is the contract of trust between the searcher, the search engine, and the individual being searched?

How can a search service allow individuals to opt in to the collation of publically available information about them, if the services has no involvement with that individual?

Equally importantly, what recourse does the individual have when the search engine gathers information that presents a misleading or inaccurate impression?

This is a very real possibility given the limitations of technology today.

For example, the resume search service mentioned earlier incorrectly identified Linus Torvalds as a co-founder of Microsoft, as reported in Business Week. Linus is able to laugh of the inaccuracy, but for others the error could be serious.

Enter “Microsoft (MSFT )” into the database and it spits out 5,200 names of “former” employees. Not so fast, though. The site lists Linus Torvalds as a “co-founder” of the software giant.

That should come as news to anyone who follows technology and knows that Torvalds is the creator of the Linux operating system, perhaps the biggest threat to Microsoft’s Windows empire. But Torvalds, tongue firmly in cheek, says it’s all too true. “We’ve kept it quiet for years, since I left early on after some technical differences of opinion,” he writes in an e-mail.

Torvalds goes on to explain how he was airbrushed out of an early company photo of co-founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen, and a handful of others. “Quite frankly, I think they should have airbrushed out the rest of the founders, too, if they really wanted it to look good, but hey, that may be just the bitterness talking.” Microsoft officials declined to comment.