Orkut celebrates 4th anniversary with new and secure privacy features for users

Orkut, Google’s ubiquitous social networking platform, completed four years of connecting people in early 2008.To mark the occasion, the site launched a slew of privacy settings to reflect users’ growing concern with personal information security. Orkut now allows users to set individual privacy levels for photos, videos, testimonials and text scraps so that only people they have added as friends can see them. “The Web has progressively grown more social, and the role
that social networking plays has evolved,” explains Google India Head of Products, Vinay Goel
in an exclusive interview with IC-CHIP. “The user’s needs evolved, they wanted elements of privacy, control on who to show pictures to, whom to talk to. The new Privacy settings allow people to control scraps, pictures, videos, photos and testimonials. If the user wants, no random people can access these”. The site has been criticized for making it a little too easy to locate people and see what they post on their profiles. Privacy has become a growing concern over the years. There have also been growing allegations of sexual predators using these networks to
stake out victims, and employers checking out the personal lives of prospective employees.
“If you don’t want the profile to be public to employers, parents or teachers, the onus is on the user. The web is open,” says Goel. “The web has a history now, Google is trawling through everything. Once something is part of the public domain, you can’t retract it. What you write becomes part of your history, what you open for the public to see remains. There is no easy way out,” he adds. The need of the hour now is to stay in constant touch with users, to understand their evolving needs and better suit them. “Looking into the future, I feel the web will become even more social. The Web 2.0 has been about social platforms, videos, photographs and blogging, which are distributed over 20 different networks. The next move is going to be to rationalize all of these,” says Goel. One storm of privacy-related issues might be fixed, but that’s just a small step in the direction of user protection. As social networking evolves into a safer and friendlier environment, future problems will continue to question our ideas of what is acceptable,
what information can be shared and what should remain visible online.