Charles’s post on MoreAbout points up an interesting question in this new “Web 2.0” world. As more and more services and tools to share information come on the scene, privacy starts to become an issue.

We blog, or post comments to blogs or contribute to forums or bulletin boards. What we write is thereupon indexed by services like Technorati. We attach a feed to our site, share photographs (with a service like Flickr), or audio or video. We leave signed reviews on Amazon or IMDB. Each time we take any of these actions, we share information about ourselves with the public. Because oftentimes when we use these services we seem to be alone, we are sometimes surprised to find out that, in reality, we have been engaged in publishing, and we have publish information that under other circumstances we would never consciously divulge.

Our anonymity starts to dissolve, to be replaced, if not with our real selves, at least with a persona who has our name and shares our email address and many other bits of information we had previously considered private, or at most, belonging only to ourselves and a certain designated recipient or recipients.

Now, the reason I’m discoursing on this is not to indulge in some amateur sociology. It’s a direct response to Charles’s announcement of MoreAbout. With MoreAbout, we are bringing together information on your email history with the recipient, your work history with the recipient using Basecamp and your photo. None of these three pieces of information can be said to be accidental. When you send a Mailroom user an email, you mean to (presumably). It’s very hard to accidentally collaborate on a project with a fellow Basecamp user. And as far as I can tell it is thoroughly impossible to upload a photo or image to Gravatar if you really don’t want to.

But, what if we brought together additional information into the MoreAbout function? What if your recent blog posts, your recent comments online, tags from Technorati, reviews from Amazon and IMDB and other freely available but not as yet consolidated information were also offered up to any Mailroom user you sent an email to? (Conversely, as a Mailroom user the same information would be available to you about others who write in to you via your Mailroom account?)

On the one hand, as a you could really get a great idea who the person was who was writing you; you could sell or serve or work with this person better because you know more about him or her as a person. As a sender, you could count on better service or cooperation and, on the personal side, you would achieve that human connection that is frequently the motivation for providing that information, for sticking yourself out there, in the first place.

On the other hand, although this information was not extorted from you, perhaps you did not realize how having it all brought together in one place and provided to another person would make you feel. Perhaps it would feel like an invasion of privacy, in spirit if not in fact.

Although we do not currently have any plans to add this sort of information to MoreAbout, it is a possibility. It seems like it could be a tremendously useful innovation. But it seems fraught as well. So instead of guessing and either taking an informed chance that you’d like it and finding out later that you hated it, or making an equally uninformed guess that you’d hate it and never finding out that you would have loved using it, we’re just going to ask you to join the discussion.

Would the addition of Web-wide information about a sender to the MoreAbout function on Mailroom be a good idea or a bad one? How useful would it be? Would anyone’s privacy be illegitimately invaded? If so, would an “opt out” take care of that issue or would it just be a band-aid on a bullet hole?

Rest assured, we can’t be the only ones who have thought of this. Someone is going to start putting this information together. Maybe they already have. But whether we’re developers or customers, senders or receivers, business people or customers, we’re going to have to do what we’ve done countless times in our history. We’re going to have to define for ourselves what is public and what is private. If we don’t, someone else will do it for us. And I don’t like the sound of that.