Privacy in the Context of Digital Social Environments: A cyber-Sociological Perspective1

The Internet is increasingly being employed as a means to facilitate the social process of human communities, and in particular a large variety of categories environments and mechanisms (such as Email, forums, blogs, reputation systems, wikis, MMORPG, etc.) are now available to mediate people interaction. In this context, people information (declared or observed) plays an essential role, since it intervene directly in the establishment and development of human relationships (for identifying others, for assessing trust, etc.). This paper examines and illustrates with a few examples, the concept of privacy in the context of social digital environments. It indicates in particular the difficulty to manage and protect a category of information that people are encouraged to disclose in order to fully benefit from these systems or that many people are not really aware of.