Googling and Doodling Online – At the Cost of Privacy?

How do we balance efficiency and the effective use of resources at work with concerns regarding our personal privacy? How personal should our working lives be? Should we make our diaries accessible so that others can see our availability? Productivity tools, especially where they allow others to consult, can be great at streamlining time-hogging activities such as daily scheduling of Skype calls – but at what price? Just recently I had an invite to schedule a call using Doodle (‘Easy Scheduling’ at http://www.doodle.com/)… Dig deeper into the Doodle’s privacy policy and you’ll see they’re using Google Analytics to measure web traffic on their site. Who’s to know exactly what options under the various privacy settings that Google Analytics allows have in fact been selected?

Doodle notes: “A recent survey performed on behalf of Doodle shows that while there are simple tricks and tools that can be used to maintain a lean calendar, most Internet users still organize their calendars in a rudimentary way… 85% don’t use online tools for sharing calendar data or scheduling events.” See:  http://bit.ly/IvUYD3

Why people are not electing to share their calendars online is open to conjecture, but surely a primary concern for many is the thought that other parties might discover there whereabouts, their schedule and, furthermore, determine the same details of their co-workers and clients. This raises a broader question of whether those using online collaboration tools consider the privacy of their peers. Increasingly protecting our online privacy appears to be ‘social’.