Privacy Management & Data Portability for Social Networks

Dan Farber is editor-in-chief of CNET News.com, part of CNET Networks. He has more than 25 years of experience as a journalist covering technology. Prior to joining CNET News.com, Dan served as vice president and editor-in-chief of ZDNet. He also led the editorial teams at PC Week and MacWeek. In addition, he was the founding editor at MacWorld and part of the editorial staffs of PC World and PC Magazine.

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Joseph Smarr is Chief Platform Architect at Plaxo. He is currently leading Plaxo’s “Open Social Web” initiative to put users back in control of who they know when using socially-enabled sites by using open data-sharing standards. An active participant in the Web 2.0 community, Joseph has built web applications for many years, including Plaxo’s online address book, web widgets, and was architect and lead developer of the Plaxo 3.0 rich AJAX address book, calendar, and sync tool. Joseph has a BS and MS from Stanford University in Artificial Intelligence.

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David has an extensive background in marketing and product management and has held key senior positions in successful technology companies. He currently serves as VP Marketing & Product Strategy for WorkLight, a company that specializes in securing Web 2.0 technologies (e.g. Facebook) for the enterprise. Recently, he served as Chief Marketing Officer of V-Secure Technologies (sold to Radware – NASDAQ:RDWR). Prior to that, he co-founded and served as Vice President of Marketing and Product Strategy at Business Layers (sold to Netegrity – NASDAQ:NETE). He has held a variety of business and technical positions in technology companies and organizations. David has a B.Sc. in Physics from Bar-Ilan University, an MBA in Marketing from the Recanati School of Business at Tel Aviv University, and has completed advanced studies in Electrical Engineering at Tel Aviv University.

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Allen Hurff is the Vice President of Engineering. He has been working at the world’s most popular social networking and lifestyle portal since it was a privately owned start-up. In his position, Allen oversees the engineering and the overall development direction of MySpace as it matures into a company with global reach.

Allen joined MySpace in March 2005 with only 12 developers still located in Santa Monica, California. Allen has grown the engineering and quality assurance organization to over 250 employees now located in Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco, Atlanta, London, and Australia.

Before MySpace, I has worked at TRW, Unisys, AltaVista, Shopping.com, Experian, and private consulting. Allen Hurff continues to be a key influential player in the ongoing success and growth of MySpace.

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Originally from London England, Ben Metcalfe worked at the BBC for six years before transplanting himself to San Francisco 18 months ago. During his time at the BBC Ben worked his way up the organization, originally working as a software engineer through to finally co-launching and running the BBC’s developer network http://backstage.bbc.co.uk. Before that Ben launched his first startup, a free email service, when he was 17. These days Ben can be found advising several companies and startups in a number of overlapping skill and experience areas. He draws on his experience as a software engineer, product manager, technical evangelist and strategist to work with companies in the areas of:

• Platform & API projects
• Social media and the social graph,
• Web2.0 projects in the enterprise,
• Grassroots media/blogging and online media in general
• Disruptive technologies
• Community-orientated strategy

Ben is passionate advocate for the opening up of data sources, feeds and APIs – be they in the private or public sector – which in turn lead him to become a founding member of the Data Portability Initiative.

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