As one of my co-workers pointed out earlier last week, the SXSW Interactive convention is currently going on in Austin, Texas.  From the remarks that I have read on Twitter and the blogosphere is seems the overall conference has been somewhat of a let down, with a few sparks of excitement on the side of Localization applications and quality speakers like Danah Boyd.

Social Networking Expert and Researcher at Microsoft Research New England, Danah Boyd took the stage for her keynote which addressed how personal information is on a binary spectrum of public or private. To help underscore her points, Boyd focused on two large blunders both from Facebook and Google.

Tech Crunch did a very strong recap of the keynote which can be review here, but I did want to point out two major points that jumped out during the event:

• For Google Buzz, Google integrated a public facing system in one of the most private systems you can imagine. Lots of people thought Google was exposing their email to the world.  Google assumed people would opt out if users didn’t want to participate. “I can’t help but notice that more technology companies think it’s ok to expose people tremendously and then back pedal when people flip out”, she says.
• Years ago, researchers noticed people in a chat room would often ask “A/S/L” (age, sex, location). So some services, looking to streamlines things a bit, started building user profiles that had this information. What they failed to understand is that this “A/S/L” was a sort of chatroom icebreaker.
• Different groups of people view privacy in multiple ways.  Teenagers are much more conscious about what they have to gain by being in public, whereas adults are more concerned about what they have to lose.