The Social Physics project, which I have been honored to have some promixity to (network tie-wise) has reached a significant milestone. It is now being proposed as the Eclipse Trust Framework (announced just yesterday).

Eclipse is an open source framework and toolkit for software applicatoin developers. Being a part of the Eclipse framework means that the concepts of social physics, specifically the abilty to collect user context information and interactions with “the right set” of privacy controls may become standard. One vision for what this means is that I can control how much software applications that I use collect information about the communities I participate in, the identities that I have in those communities, and who can access the information.

As a practitioner and teacher of social network analysis, I am constantly looking for responses to the question of individual privacy. This trust framework, when fully implemented, will provide the technology response. The human, personal, ethical response will always be just that: human, personal and individual.