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social media

Mountains and Molehills

May 12, 2010 8:55:11.000

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.

posted by James Robertson

Comments

Re: Mountains and Molehills

[anonymous] May 12, 2010 19:46:32.345

Sure that's fine when people are able to control what they publish.

What happens when someone else starts sharing information about you - it's no longer in your control, and your entire social network gets notified.

There was the recent example of the researchers who were able to apply an algorithm to the Facebook API, and discover with some degree of accuracy, peoples sexual preferences based on the contacts in their friends lists. Certainly not information they were publishing directly, but simply inferred. Sure, a private diaspora like p2p social network doesn't stop that, but it's just one example.

Re: Mountains and Molehills

[james Robertson] May 12, 2010 22:54:38.537

"What happens when someone else starts sharing information abou you - it's no longer in your control, and your entire social network gets notified."

You mean like after I post it online somewhere (or send an email), and it gets forwarded around? The simple reality is this: if it's online, it's not private. Period

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