The lack of privacy do hurt our ability to freely connect, if only because of self censure. Surely you wouldn't tell the same things to your loved one if you were in public?
Facebook code being unknown let Zuckerberg be the man in the middle of every Facebook based communications. Facebook could log everything, for all we know. The sentence is accurate.
Censorship is a rather minor issue. It's ineffective because there are other channels, and it's risky because people are loud about that. I mostly worry about Spying, which is way less risky, way more effective, and way more dangerous.
I may be out of the prime facebook demographic by several years but even I understand the significance of this for a huge number of facebook users. A lot of people view facebook as something in the same genre of livejournal or blogger, a tool that allows you to keep in touch with friends but that is nevertheless still fairly public and limited. However, a huge number of people have taken facebook far more into their private lives. They use it as a replacement for email, for example. These people's entire digital lives are in facebook. Every sordid detail of their personal relationships. Every little bit of letting off steam about coworkers and bosses. Every piece of personal information from their home address and phone number to the sex toys they bought last week. For these people facebook's privacy settings are critically important.
To put yourself in their shoes imagine if your email provider or phone company made an announcement that they were making a change to their privacy settings. If you thought that there was a serious chance of your email, text messages, or phone conversations accidentally becoming public because you failed to tick the right checkbox somewhere you might demonstrate just the slightest bit of consternation at that prospect.
For myself I've been lucky since I hardly use facebook, and then only grudgingly (more out of a hatred for the UI than anything else), but for many of it's heaviest users facebook does not appear to be operating in, let alone even considering, their best interests.
For the record, I wouldn't recommend what I wrote to any sane person. I was just pushing the privacy rhetoric to the extreme to illustrate that there will always be a trade off between privacy and social life. People seem to forget this fundamental principle too often when they talk about the evil social networks.
Edit: To the people who down voted to disagree, I'd like to ask: Do you think the world would be a better place without Facebook?
If you share something with your 300+ friends on Facebook, I think it's obvious it's no longer private. I have always considered Facebook a tool for _finding_ interesting stuff intead of _hiding_ it.
A more open, non-evil alternative would be cool, of course. But good luck rebuilding the whole social graph there. Almost anybody who has tried that has failed.
(I view this as somebody who follows the Facebook News Feed all the time, posts several times a day, and often participates in long discussion threads about news, politics etc. with my friends.)
Facebook is creepy. They engage in deep cloaked surveillance, capturing as much as technologically possible of people's behavior in the world and mining it for profit. They don't want the people to know how and to what extent they're mining their personal lives, because they know people would be disgusted by it.
IMO the core reason people keep using this shady service is that they've just never been exposed to the truth.
FWIW, it has been months since facebook's privacy settings made headlines. I think anyone that cares should have and likely has adjusted their privacy settings to keep unwanted information out. That, or taken the smarter path of keeping things they don't want others to see off of facebook
I am one of the biggest fan of facebook's privacy settings and bat for them for providing such granular control. However, this has creeped the fuck out of me! I make extensive use of this feature and am going back through a bunch of posts reevaluating the settings knowing the person can see it.
Almost 100% of my posts in past 6 months have custom settings but there is no way I can go through each one of them.
This is HUGE from my perspective. I am typically the guy to tell others constantly bitching about fb's privacy settings to move on. But alas, the day has come when I am officially scared to use facebook.
At this point, if you care about your privacy, why would you even still have a Facebook account?
I used to think I could be 'safe', that my advanced knowledge of privacy settings and optimised usage patterns could somehow shield me from the fundamental nature of these data monger corporations. But the truth is concepts like cloud and social networking are fundamentally toxic to privacy and freedom.
I'm now pretty close to the day I delete my Google account, and that provides far more useful functionality than Facebook.
So, stop using Facebook if that bothers you. Same comment, re: privacy, goes for GMail, Google documents, Twitter, Yahoo, etc.
The sci-fi author David Brin (a cool guy, BTW, I once went to his house and had a long talk with him) has a good take on privacy (pardon my paraphrasing, but could not find a direct quote): lack of privacy can be tolerated if it is an even playing field. That is, if politician, corporations, etc. all have the same lack of privacy as people.
I fail to see a legitimate argument for using facebook when you simultaneously worry about your data being private. I may misunderstand the predicament here, is it that you don't want your boss/X knowing Y or you don't want facebook/companyX knowing Y? Hopefully it's not the latter.
It seems to me as though if you are on Facebook in the first place you should be posting, messaging, lolcats-ing with the knowledge that nothing is private - I understand the need for privacy, and concerns with identity theft etc. but have come to the possibly unfortunate, possibly sad realization that privacy, especially when the internet is concerned, is a thing of the past - I live in the UK where there is approximately one CCTV camera for every 32 people. With that knowledge, Facebook peeping on my pointless messages to friends somehow doesn't seem to concern me all that much.
Facebook is always against the choice of privacy and all about control disguised as socializing.
Didn't Zuckerberg once claim the time of privacy is over?
Except his of course.
Hate to be the downer, but the problem with this is that people don't really care about privacy. The NYTimes and every other mainstream news publication has been running this exact same story for five years: "New edgy upstart ______ is aiming to be the antidote to FB/Twitter oversharing by introducing innovative privacy controls..."
Most, if not all, of those services have seen a brief flurry of activity before eventually withering and dying. People don't truly care about privacy -- they like the idea of their privacy being important, in theory. No combination of new features, openness, or distributed systems is going to be able to overcome the fact that people largely only care about two things when it comes to social networking: being on the network that the most of their friends are on, and having their stuff seen by the most amount of people possible.
If you ask, people will tell you until they're breathless that privacy is important to them -- but almost no one will ever touch the robust privacy controls they asked for.
The Facebook privacy debacle isn't about privacy, it's about trust. Facebook is a company people trusted to keep their party photos private among a close group of college friends, then one day their aunt says she can see those photos. All of them. "Why??? I didn't change any settings????"
Did everyone suddenly stop using facebook because a few vocal people worried about privacy a month or so back? nope. Most people just don't care one bit.
I'm really excited about all the fun things we'll be able to do and have.
I wonder how long it'll be before we're all wearing augmented reality visors/goggles bluetoothed to your smartphone with useful advertising/help/wiki etc. You could be walking down the street and an advert shows above a cafe saying "half off coffee today". It could show you customer ratings etc.
You could walk up to your friend, the goggles/smartphone would recognize their face as being your friend, analyze their emotions, show you their details next to their face and so on.
Having the future we want means we have to allow people access to some information, like 'where we are', where we've been, messages, demographics etc. Either you get cool stuff, or you get privacy - up to you.
Facebook code being unknown let Zuckerberg be the man in the middle of every Facebook based communications. Facebook could log everything, for all we know. The sentence is accurate.
Censorship is a rather minor issue. It's ineffective because there are other channels, and it's risky because people are loud about that. I mostly worry about Spying, which is way less risky, way more effective, and way more dangerous.
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