Le Web3 Live

With social networks becoming more and more important every day, and users revealing more and more of their private life, there are bound to be problems - especially in terms of digital identity theft and protection of personal data. This was the subject of the opening session of LeWeb3. It was a good choice of topic, as the question has been in the news since Facebook tried to add social advertising to its services.

So a debate took place between Chris Alden from Six Apart, Dan Rose (the International Facebook vice-president), lawyer Michel Jaccard and Jaewoong Lee from Daum communication.

One of the most important points of the debate was the digital ID system launched by the South Korean government. In a country where 99% of students are online at least one hour a day, the government created an official certificate which anyone must get if they want to connect to the main websites of the country. Lee does not approve of a system that - according to him - sacrifices private life for security. And he gave facts: after only a month, 80,000 certificates have already been “stolen.”

Rose insisted on the fact that users can always protect their data on Facebook. According to him, it is impossible to extract anything from the website if the person looking for information is not authorized. Relationships on Facebook are based on the ones users have in real life. That is also a reason why there’s so little spam on the site - friends don’t spam friends, Rose says.

When asked about the Facebook Ads application, Rose confirmed Mark Zuckerberg’s mea culpa. He spoke of communication failure by the company.

Attorney Jaccard stressed the fact that users have the right to have information about them deleted, according to European law. Actually, it is very complicated and involves many people.