SlideShare is nice but what about privacy and security?

SlideShare is great for sharing presentations, getting feedback from invited users, or the SlideShare community as a whole. With a smart little embeddable player and easy tools, anyone can take a PowerPoint presentation and make it into a Flash based presentation that everyone can access. So with all these user-centered features--within a culture increasingly high on user generated content--why would anyone dare suggest there could be a problem with the way it works?

Not long ago I was looking for an easy way to post our Q3 company presenation to our company wiki, and SlideShare came to mind. Since there had been so many recent privacy upgrades, like being able to make some presentations private yet still share your content, we thought it was the solution to our slide sharing problem. But in the process of uploading our quarterly company presentation, we encountered some obstacles that underscore SlideShare's true lack of substantial privacy options. Here's what I noticed:

1. During the uploading process, a user cannot set the presentation to private, so you need to remember to do this immediately after uploading.
2. Enabling links or embedding a SlideShare presentation still allows others to forward (share) this content, even if it's private.
3. Posting company information or other sensitive data on SlideShare's non-enterprise network means you have very little control over where that data eventually ends up.

#3 really threw us for a loop, and it should really any user of a site that gathers and retains sensitive or personal data (think about it: MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and many other social networking sites do the same thing--you may never truly know how and where your information could be accessed by a third party). It's a problem SlideShare and many other sites similar to it all face, yet because everyone's so eager to jump on the social media/user generated content bandwagon, the issue doesn't get much attention.

After thinking about these questions I set out to find a secure solution that would allow us to control the data storage and access. Did a few quick Google searches and found two sets of products: applications made at least 5 years ago that had horrible players and interfaces, and at the other end of the spectrum, complex PowerPoint replacements with audio, and tons of useless features. A minute or two of despair was followed by a bit more searching, and I eventually found iSpring and their slideboom . With a free conversion tool I was able to convert the presentation quickly and easily and upload the Flash file to our wiki behind our firewall.

SlideShare is a great tool for non-sensitive information, but if you're a company (or a person) interested in privacy and data security, you'll probably prefer a tool like iSpring, which offers total user control on a platform that's very similar to SlideShare.