When Google rolled out Buzz in mid-February, people were angered by the type of privacy breaches which have plagued another social medium. The three main issues for Buzz were:

• auto generation of follower lists from individuals’ private email and chat behavior
• auto completion of some email addresses in a feature similar to Twitter’s @reply
• auto connection to Google Reader and Picasa Web Albums.

Google responded to privacy concerns within days. However, for some who had very real privacy concerns, this simply wasn’t good enough.

I use my private Gmail account to email my boyfriend and my mother.

There’s a BIG drop-off between them and my other “most frequent” contacts.

You know who my third most frequent contact is?

My abusive ex-husband.

Which is why it’s SO EXCITING, Google, that you AUTOMATICALLY allowed all my most frequent contacts access to my Reader, including all the comments I’ve made on Reader items, usually shared with my boyfriend, who I had NO REASON to hide my current location or workplace from, and never did.

There’s still a lot to learn about how we integrate privacy into new products, but we know the golden rule - personal information should never be published without personal consent.

We were so excited to watch our ‘link-ometer’ click over to 2 million that, with our noses pressed against our monitors, we took screen shots of the exact moment it happened.

What does it mean to have this many web pages mapped? You can now sort more of your search results by their relevance to your profile!

The number of links keeps doubling as we collectively visit an increasing variety of webpages. A half million links were mapped by April 2009, 1 million by June 2009, and now we’ve mapped 2 million!

Thank you for contributing to this grand experiment. As we create a virtual topography of the World Wide Web together, let us know if your profile has led you to web pages you wouldn’t have found otherwise or if anything isn’t working for you.

You can enrich your own experience by matching your DNA profile with people you know, or asking them to give feedback on your profile.

If you’ve logged in to Facebook since 9 December, you’ll have been introduced to the new Facebook privacy settings. As with Beacon, these new settings have outraged Facebook users and rights groups. Again, Facebook has relented, retracting the all (Google-wide) or nothing (not even your Facebook friends can see) visibility of friends lists.

The Facebook blog is a hotbed for complaints. As Peter ‘mos Undef’ Mann observed, since the new settings were rolled out, Facebook users have had to navigate six distinct versions of what aspects of our friends lists we can protect and how to set those restrictions.

Well Facebook, you fooled me once with Beacon, and now you’ve fooled me twice with your new privacy settings. Please don’t fool me again – make the profit you’re entitled to, just don’t invade my privacy or my friends’ privacy to do so.

From using the MyWebDNA extension, you know that you don’t have to sacrifice privacy for personalization. Unfortunately Facebook didn’t know this when they introduced Beacon.

Beacon, which shared sensitive data across users’ Facebook profiles, has been a disaster from the start, causing outrage over incidents like broadcasting the price paid for an engagement ring — before the ring had been presented. In response to the widespread backlash, (the “How dare you betray me?” response we’ve detailed in previous posts) Facebook has had to backpedal dramatically. First they switched from case-by-case opt-out to permanent opt-out, then to opt-in only, and finally they canceled the program altogether.

Facebook still doesn’t get it; they don’t have to invade your privacy to deliver ads which are meant for you. Until Facebook learns that they can give you what you want without tracking you, they are under-serving you.

The Web Genome Project is powered by VortexDNA data — which has applications beyond sorting web searches. VortexDNA data is what’s known as a ‘universal predictor’; just like credit scores are used to predict your ability to repay a loan, VortexDNA data can be used to predict a variety of events.

This ability has some pretty impressive applications for a range of fields. In online advertising it’s being used to serve up more relevant ads; in the insurance industry it’s being used to offer fairer premiums.

VortexDNA’s potential implications caught the attention of men’s magazine M2, which featured VortexDNA CEO Branton Kenton-Dau in their July issue. The two-page spread featured an in-depth interview — and a very styley photo of Branton with a Maserati! Click on the image below to view full-size.

Ideas are amazing. For one thing, they have infinite inventory: if I share an idea with you, that doesn’t take it away from me. For another, they are alive: your response to my idea grows both of our imaginations. And for a third, they are the source of everything in our world. Carl Sandburg said, “Nothing happens unless first a dream,” but what is a dream if not an idea?

These properties of ideas are why I get so excited when I see people whose ideas are in alignment with ours. The more of us in alignment, the bigger our dream becomes. And so I just about fell off my chair when I read Cracking the Green Code from John Marshall Roberts. Roberts assesses why people’s statements about the environment differ from their behaviors — and his assessment describes with exactitude how the Web Genome Project works and why purpose and values can be used to predict behavior. Here’s an excerpt:

Although inherently dynamic and non-linear in nature, a person’s daily behavioral choices are patterned by their core values—those fundamental beliefs, assumptions, and aspirations that they use to make sense of the world around them. A person’s core values act as a gravitational force of consciousness, literally shaping the way the world looks to them, and in turn how they look to the world vis-a-vis their day-to-day behaviors.

To illustrate by way of analogy, imagine spinning a marble around a bathroom sink. At any given point it would be difficult to predict the marble’s exact location, because its movements are somewhat chaotic and random, fluctuating wildly based upon even the most minute textural gradients in the sink surface. In fact, even the most learned physicist would have a terrible time devising an equation that would predict this marble’s exact path. Yet, anyone with an ounce of common sense can easily predict where the marble will end up eventually—right down the drain.

This metaphorical drain shapes our marble’s path in the same way that a person’s core values shape their thoughts and behaviors. Understand a person’s value systems and you will grasp the size, shape and contours of the mental sink around which the myriad “marbles” of their everyday thoughts are endlessly pulled as they strive make sense of the data their five senses send them.

Roberts’ analogy is a wonderful description of how the Web Genome Project works, and why we can personalize search results without knowing anything about your history. We don’t care about your history — what you’ve done or where you’ve been. We care about the sink — what shapes you?

So how do we get an understanding of the sink? We emulate physicists and doctors.

Physicists often work by inference: the only way we know about black holes, for example, is by observing the behavior of matter near them. Doctors do the same thing: we search for antibodies to tell us whether someone has a disease instead of searching for the disease itself.

So too with the Web Genome Project. We all have a numeric profile, and we’ve mapped a certain number of links with their own profiles. The numbers are sticky in both directions: as you click on a link, its number gets integrated into yours and vice versa. No retention of clickstream, no way to know where you’ve been, just the image of the sink that guides who you are.

Thank you, John Marshall Roberts! Thank you, Web Genome Project participants! Together, we are creating the topography of our online universe.

It’s a brave new world.