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I agree, Ed. I'd also argue the it's not really about geeks being upset that their own privacy is being violated. It's about other people's privacy. A huge p

I agree, Ed. I'd also argue the it's not really about geeks being upset that their own privacy is being violated. It's about other people's privacy. A huge percentage of normals don't understand the difference between a desktop app and what's inside a web browser. That ignorance can put them in very awkward if not dangerous positions. Here's why I've been part of the privacy propaganda mob on HN (without the flaming) 1. My niece and my geek friend. She's a very sweet, naive 15 year old girl who is the daughter of a conservative pastor. She loves to post pictures of her and her friends going to the beach, and camp, looking cute and goofing off. For the brief month that I tried Facebook out seriously, I had my niece posting pictures of herself in a bathing suit as well as geek friends posting comments like "MySql sucks dog cock" on my wall. Those online "friendships" needed to remain separate and in different circles of friends. And, I certainly don't want the "suck dog cock" friend ogling my niece in a bathing suit. I needed to have those relationships compartmentalized and kept private. Even had I figured out how to maintain that separation, Facebook could change that at will. I opted out, but my family still doesn't understand why. 2. My mother. She's now 74 and she bought her first laptop last year. She's on "the Facebook" because her grandkids are on Facebook. There is no way to easily explain how to maintain private/public information on Facebook. While she wants a tool to share status updates about medical conditions with friends/family, she doesn't want those broadcast to the world. 3. Rafael. I work with Rafael at my hospital. He worked in a 3rd world country as an agricultural minister before he got a visa to work in the US. After he got his green card, he packed up, moved to the US and changed careers to work in the health care field. He's been homesick so he's been catching up with old friends via Facebook. He went to a university 20 years ago with very communist leanings, and he's been talking to his friends/intellectuals about the political situation in that country. He personally knows several journalists who have been killed because of what they've written in the press about government corruption and drug cartels. He was shocked when I told him that his wall posts/conversations with his friends on Facebook were publicly searchable. 4. Alan. A former coworker of mine is a nurse, and he has issues. For a while, our hospital administration was in a tail spin about missing narcotics. Alan didn't show up for work one day, and I haven't seen him since. Another friend said that he was friends with Alan on Facebook, and several weeks prior, Alan had posted a status update on Facebook: "Vicodin, Valium and Vodka... the Holy Trinity". I think you're right, Ed. It's about trust. But, for me it's not just that Facebook is changing their privacy policy. I, as a geek, know that anything I do online is inherently public. I use online tools with open eyes. Many Normals intuit wrongly that they are having private conversations when they interact with friends in a dark room via a laptop. That wrong belief can cause no end of problems for people. That's why I'm on the privacy propaganda bandwagon.

waterlesscloud 16y ago
What's weird is that it would be pretty easy for FB to make it easier to keep your stuff in the circles you'd like to keep it in. They have deliberately chosen not to do so, and I don't really understand why. There's no advantage to them in making it hard, and significant risk. All that's needed to bring them total disaster is one good nationally publicized horror story. The groundwork for that story is being laid now. I just don't the the upside of their choices. They could get away with selling anonymized data to advertisers. They could get away with letting marketers target you as long as they didn't sell your identity along with it. That's all stuff people will tolerate. But why make your information public by default? What's the real gain there? I see a reason they might think it's of use if they think really shallowly, but sure they've put more than 10 seconds of thought into their core business. FB can't go public while they maintain this approach. The investors would raise havoc over the risk it poses to the company. And rightfully so. One good sensationalized story. That's all it takes at this point.
- randallsquared 16y ago
  But why make your information public by default? What's the real gain there? The more public data there is, the stronger the network effects can be? There are a bunch of decently supportable practical and principled reasons for this. Since there are going to be leaks anyway, reducing the expectation of privacy is in their interest. Getting more data searchable and public means people are more likely to consume more facebook time/data (alluded to above). In the medium term, privacy for things people put on the internet is dead, and spending a lot of effort fighting a rearguard action seems pointless if you've already accepted where this is going. I think this is actually where most of this is coming from: Zuckerberg, Schmidt, and others have spent a lot of time thinking about privacy and the implications of a basically open internet (largely unused SSL, DNSSec, public key crypto), and they understand that the battle for keeping things private was lost more than ten years ago. We could have all been using encrypted-by-default everything by now, but the fact that we're not, and the fact that there's no movement on the horizon to do encrypted-everything, means that we're just not going to be able to put the privacy genie back in the bottle.

waterlesscloud 16y ago

What's weird is that it would be pretty easy for FB to make it easier to keep your stuff in the circles you'd like to keep it in. They have deliberately chosen not to do so, and I don't really understand why. There's no advantage to them in making it hard, and significant risk. All that's needed to bring them total disaster is one good nationally publicized horror story. The groundwork for that story is being laid now. I just don't the the upside of their choices. They could get away with selling anonymized data to advertisers. They could get away with letting marketers target you as long as they didn't sell your identity along with it. That's all stuff people will tolerate. But why make your information public by default? What's the real gain there? I see a reason they might think it's of use if they think really shallowly, but sure they've put more than 10 seconds of thought into their core business. FB can't go public while they maintain this approach. The investors would raise havoc over the risk it poses to the company. And rightfully so. One good sensationalized story. That's all it takes at this point.

randallsquared 16y ago
But why make your information public by default? What's the real gain there? The more public data there is, the stronger the network effects can be? There are a bunch of decently supportable practical and principled reasons for this. Since there are going to be leaks anyway, reducing the expectation of privacy is in their interest. Getting more data searchable and public means people are more likely to consume more facebook time/data (alluded to above). In the medium term, privacy for things people put on the internet is dead, and spending a lot of effort fighting a rearguard action seems pointless if you've already accepted where this is going. I think this is actually where most of this is coming from: Zuckerberg, Schmidt, and others have spent a lot of time thinking about privacy and the implications of a basically open internet (largely unused SSL, DNSSec, public key crypto), and they understand that the battle for keeping things private was lost more than ten years ago. We could have all been using encrypted-by-default everything by now, but the fact that we're not, and the fact that there's no movement on the horizon to do encrypted-everything, means that we're just not going to be able to put the privacy genie back in the bottle.