Mountains and Molehills
Is Facebook overplaying its hand with respect to privacy? There are certainly a lot of people who think so; Jason Calacanis has a long missive up on it, and the Times has a story about a startup dedicated to creating a social media site that "cares about privacy".
I guess my take on all this is a big bag of "so what?" Social media sites exist to share data; if you put something up that you don't want shared, then you're mostly just fooling yourself. Posit some site that has some perfect set of privacy rules. You put up a set of photos that you only share with a core group of friends. Well. If even one of those people copies one of those photos and emails it, then the privacy controls stop mattering, don't they?
All of this is much ado about less than nothing, IMHO. If you put it on a website of any kind, you should expect that it could get shared, period. All the controls in the world won't stop "copy" followed by "email". Once you realize that, you realize just how little this entire conversation matters.
