WhitePages.com grapples with privacy in Web 2.0 world

IDG News Service — Fri, 16 May 2008 11:23:39 -0700

WhitePages.com does exactly what you'd expect from the name -- it tries to provide phone book-style listings for both the U.S. and Canada. Of course, there's nothing new about that, so WhitePages.com tries to do an especially thorough job. The company claims that at the end of 2007, it had 180 million U.S. adults, about 80% of the population, in its records.

As Web 2.0, social networking and a changing idea of personal privacy have come to the fore, WhitePages.com has also started to ask itself how it might offer users more control over their information while providing more and different kinds of information. Forward-thinking, maybe noble even but, as experience is showing, far easier said than done.

Specifically, founder and CEO Alex Algard has said that the company would start adding features to let people edit and/or hide portions of their directory information. At the same time early this year, the company promised that it would work on a way to let people send text messages or e-mails, using the directory information but without revealing their information -- something along the lines of a social-networking site such as LinkedIn or Facebook.

For example, let's say you were looking for your old high school girlfriend, and she's listed in WhitePages.com's records, but chooses to keep her information hidden. With the system Algard envisions, you could send her a note via WhitePages.com, and she could then decide whether to get back in touch with you or to call the police because you're still stalking her after all those years.

How will WhitePages.com do it? Thereby hangs the tale, as the site struggles -- as so many are doing now -- to corral multiple systems and layered goals while moving on the Web 2.0 front. As Bobby Cox, senior privacy manager at WhitePages.com, said, "We are making great strides in overcoming this challenge, but aren't 100% there yet."

Where they're calling from

What WhitePages.com has now, according to Cox, is "the easiest and most comprehensive removal process in the industry. The process is completely self-serve and prevents information which a user has requested us to remove from appearing on any of our network of sites." Although some other directory sites -- 411.com, for example -- make it easy for users to remove themselves from their listings, others such as MetaCrawler, Numberway and PeopleData, make it as difficult to leave as the Eagle's "Hotel California" where "You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave."

Cox continued, "However, we believe that users should have even greater control over the display of their information. Too many sites and services require users to fill out forms, submit letters or jump through burdensome hoops just to remove or update some piece of personal information. We are developing products and services that will allow users to remove, update or edit any piece of their information."

And rather than decide for themselves what should or shouldn't be private -- thorny territory, as cultural and even generational shifts change the public's ideas on what information is public, private, personal or sensitive -- WhitePages.com decided to let you decide what you'd like to keep to yourself or to show to the world.

"Unfortunately, building this system is not as easy as we would like," adds Cox. "Not only do we publish hundreds of millions of listings every month, we believe that only 'you' should be able to change or edit 'your' listing. The system we are working overtime to provide includes an authentication solution which would enable customers to claim their published contact information."

Once the authentication system has been thoroughly proven and tested, according to plans, people will be able to change their listings in close to real time. (Of course, WhitePages.com is also considering having humans as a last ditch defense in case someone swipes your identity and gets up to mischief.)

Since the project's inception, the company has decided to try to add some social-networking functionality to the site. After all, there's a case to be made that directory services and social networks are all about the same thing: getting people together.

As explained on a developer blog posting by Scott Ruthfield, WhitePages.com's vice president of engineering and technology, "We believe that contact information is a core building block of the Internet experience, that connecting to the people you care about is a fundamental human need, and that keeping core contact information behind pay or log-in walls so that people can't manage their offline social network without using your online social network makes it harder for everyone -- ordinary people and developers alike."

Behind the scenes

One of the ways that WhitePages.com is working on this is by opening up their API to independent developers. The WhitePages.com developer site is now open for business.

Although the open API will certainly help create the interface for users to control their information, not to mention bringing social networking and Web 2.0 applications to WhitePages.com, hooking this up to the patchwork of back-end databases will prove to be a challenge. WhitePages.com uses " Oracle, Postgres, MySQL and BerkeleyDB, depending on which has the strengths we need for any given job," according to Dan Sabath, WhitePage.com's lead developer, in a blog post. The data is also messy in the way that only humans can devise, with such anomalies as "fractional streets, decimal house numbers and misleading names like streets named 'North.'"

Exhibiting a sense of humor (and, maybe, a healthy dismay concerning the task ahead), WhitePages.com decided to call these first steps the Ducati project. Why? As Ruthfield detailed on the developer blog, "But first we needed a code name, of course. So our bikin' vice president of products came up with Ducati -- 'fast, lean, maneuverable,' he said; 'expensive, hard to maintain, impossible to find spare parts for,' an anonymous wag pointed out; 'meaningless,' I said. So there we go: welcome to Ducati."

To make life easier, Sabath and the development team "decided that we would leverage our known strengths and use apache mod_perl, a YAML Ain't Markup Language file for config, Oracle for User preferences and an on-disk cache of those preferences to ensure reliability. It would have to be extensible to allow for new search types and versions, and we would have to allow for small developers, large partners who could send millions of queries/day, and internal use.

"We considered SOAP but decided that a RESTful interface was easier for more people to interact with. We would provide an [XML Schema] for people to validate the XML against and JavaScript Object Notation output for those who were doing JavaScript. New versions would only rev the version number when the output format changed, but that everyone would get additional data entries and data fields as they become available."

At first, WhitePages.com thought about "writing our own user management system, but decided the way to go was to partner with Mashery and leave that and the community site up to their infrastructure while we focused on building the actual API," said Sabath.

And the results

The result of all this development effort, according to Cox, is that "In April of this year, we launched the first step in allowing customers to have greater control over their listing information on WhitePages.com with a new product that enables consumers to publish their cell phone numbers and to have that record instantly update the results that appear up online."

So far, so good, as per informal Computerworld testing. Cox says that this is just the beginning: "Later this year, we will begin giving users control over their listings, which would include allowing them to remove certain portions of their listing and add other pieces of contact information, like e-mail addresses or links to personal profiles on social and professional networking sites. The ability to remove an entire listing will remain in place, as we understand there will always be consumers who do not want their contact information available in any way, shape or form."

The work is still ongoing but the programming structure -- that first hurdle -- is there at last. As Cox puts it, "Ultimately, it is our goal to make it as easy as possible for everyone to find and connect with each other, while respecting people's privacy preferences. By introducing user controls to our Web site, we address the concerns of consumers who want to limit the display of certain contact information. At the same time, we meet the needs of consumers who want to search, find and connect with other people."

It's a wide Web world, and one site's efforts are just that: one site's efforts. But as the wider Web grapples with the practical privacy and control issues raised by Web 2.0, WhitePages.com at least appears to be moving on a solution that balances as many factors as possible.