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I don't mind sharing with those I explicitly choose--- it is everyone else that bothers me. The idiotic mantra of 'privacy is dead' is being used to fanboy thos

• derefr 16y ago
  And what if those you explicitly choose, go on to share it further? Privacy is simply a byproduct of the large amount of friction the physical world puts on propagating information. Putting information online is like transmitting a signal through a vaccuum—there's nothing to stop it, so it just keeps going.
  • pyre 16y ago
    > And what if those you explicitly choose, go on to share it further? Consider applying that logic a little differently: 1. Should the Post Office be able to open, scan and publish all mail that they process? It should be perfectly reasonable. The person that I'm sending the mail to could do the same thing, so the Post Office has every right to do that! 2. If I put a gun into the hands of a convicted murderer, and he murders someone with it, does he get scot-free just because I 'should have known better?' When someone leaks information that was meant to be private/confidential, you are trusting that person to keep that information private/confidential. To say that someone "should have known better" than to trust anyone with any information is to say that we should all be hermits, and that society shouldn't exist. As ludicrous as that sounds, that is the basic claim that one makes when asserting that, 'no information shared between two people is 100% guaranteed to be private.' Whether you realize it or not, your basic claim -- at its heart -- is that it's ok for Facebook to breach your trust just because it's also possible for other people to do so.
    • derefr 16y ago
      I said nothing about Facebook. Facebook is a manifestation of a social network, and thus cannot be private by definition. All it does is allow people to spread things, and to do it efficiently as possible; it has no other use. Privacy exists going into the Internet, not on the Internet. But the Internet is not the problem. Instead, the problem is this attitude: > If someone in my circle of friends shares something with the outside world that they shouldn't have, then they are in the wrong and will have to accept whatever the punishment is This isn't how the real world works. Your friends have other trusted friends that aren't you. The separation isn't between "my circle of friends" and "the outside world"; there is no "outside world." Your circle of friends each has their own circles of friends, who have their own, and those circles, together, comprise the entirety of the world. There is no separation; no barrier there. It's a problem of incorrect perspective to put a dividing line around the people connected to you and no one else—because, to everyone else, that's not where the line is. It's around them, and their friends. You'll ask your friend for advice on something, who will delegate the question to their own friend. You tell someone a secret and ten other people will find out, all in complete confidence. You'll end up doing embarrassing things in other people's wedding pictures, or being captured in a photo alongside them in a bar. This isn't something that can remain private, because these aren't facts about you. They're stories occurring in other people's worlds, in other people's circles—they just happen, tangentially, to have you as a property of them. Now, usually, all this leaked information doesn't come back to you—people have the sensibility to keep the secret secret. And the world goes on that way just fine. Ten people will know about something embarrassing you did, but, because they are aware of the rules of our culture, they won't tell you they know, and you can go on leading your life pretending nobody knows. The problem with the privacy after the advent of the Internet is not that these people now know your secrets. The problem with the Internet is that it makes the slip-ups of the third-parties public, permanent, and irrevocable. It vocalizes the maid-and-butler conversations that we all managed to pretend weren't happening, and, in doing so, ruins our collective facade of propriety. And, unless we throw away everything about how the Internet works, we're just going to have to learn to work around that permanence. If anything, we need to kill the desire for sites like Facebook, not Facebook itself; we need to remove ourselves from our collective lecterns and podiums before we ruminate upon others' secrets. And that's hard–that's changing human nature, or at the very least, the nature of Western society. But that's what we have to do, if we want to keep this gift of a worldwide network of permanently-remembering machines alive. (And note—what Facebook is doing right now has nothing to do with all of this. Everything that Facebook has done to "decrease" the privacy level of its userbase could have been done by a third-party by collecting the login details of a few not-particularly-privacy-conscious[1] volunteers and then spidering Facebook from their viewpoints, re-building its social graph within their own servers. This could still be done today, and is not an exploit that can be patched in any way, shape or form. As I said: social networks are inherently public.) [1] Like these: http://www.silicon.com/special-features/protecting-your-id/2004/03/19/one-in-five-brits-not-learning-id-theft-lessons-39119357/ http://www.silicon.com/special-features/protecting-your-id/2...
      • pyre 16y ago
        > Everything that Facebook has done to "decrease" the privacy level of its userbase could have been done by a third-party by collecting the login details of a few not-particularly-privacy-conscious[1] volunteers and then spidering Facebook from their viewpoints, re-building its social graph within their own servers. Saying that something 'could have been done by someone else' does not prove the 'right-ness' or 'wrong-ness' of it.
        • derefr 16y ago
          All I meant by that was that Facebook isn't actually doing anything now; they're just demonstrating the effects of something they did long ago, when they first asked people to pick out their friends and store that list as part of their profiles. At that moment, everything became public, because a social network was formed. And you skipped over the point I made above—whether or not Facebook did anything wrong (let's say it did, so we can stop arguing), that is immaterial as long as social networks exist on the Internet, because they all do exactly the same thing, just not as visibly or as quickly. If you don't like what Facebook is doing, you need to face up to the fact that you just don't like putting your social network online, and accept that nothing—not a Diaspora, or a private mailing list, or anything else—will ever plug the hole that has been made in "privacy" by the advent of digital information.
• mortenjorck 16y ago
  Privacy is every bit as dead as courtesy, chivalry, or rock & roll – it's exactly as dead as you make it.