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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

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
  There's all sorts of private content available to approved people via the internet that's not available to the public. Entire organizations use it as such. The idea that everything on the internet must be public simply ignores reality and is shallow thinking.
  - randallsquared 16y ago
    There's all sorts of private content available to approved people via the internet that's not available to the public. It's not how much oil hasn't leaked that concerns people.
    - loup-vaillant 16y ago
      If I surrender data to a big corporate server like Facebook, Amazon, or Google, even when they promise you privacy, I'd better assume it's public. There, privacy is dead, and information will leak. I think everyone on this thread will agree with that. Now don't forget that the internet is not limited to the web of cloud computerized big servers. E-mail, file sharing and social networking are not that, for instance. They are decentralized by nature. They do not require Gmail or Mega Upload or Facebook. Such services can't last. They are a fad that will fade… …If we do things right. We just need ubiquitous, easy to use personal internet servers. They are technically and economically possible right now. We have cheap hardware, and cheap software. We just need to wrap that up together, and massively sell them. With a suitable propaganda about privacy and independence on the internet, the dream of a mostly decentralized internet may come true in less than 3 decades. And at that point, privacy on the internet won't be a problem any more.

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
There's all sorts of private content available to approved people via the internet that's not available to the public. Entire organizations use it as such. The idea that everything on the internet must be public simply ignores reality and is shallow thinking.
- randallsquared 16y ago
  There's all sorts of private content available to approved people via the internet that's not available to the public. It's not how much oil hasn't leaked that concerns people.
  - loup-vaillant 16y ago
    If I surrender data to a big corporate server like Facebook, Amazon, or Google, even when they promise you privacy, I'd better assume it's public. There, privacy is dead, and information will leak. I think everyone on this thread will agree with that. Now don't forget that the internet is not limited to the web of cloud computerized big servers. E-mail, file sharing and social networking are not that, for instance. They are decentralized by nature. They do not require Gmail or Mega Upload or Facebook. Such services can't last. They are a fad that will fade… …If we do things right. We just need ubiquitous, easy to use personal internet servers. They are technically and economically possible right now. We have cheap hardware, and cheap software. We just need to wrap that up together, and massively sell them. With a suitable propaganda about privacy and independence on the internet, the dream of a mostly decentralized internet may come true in less than 3 decades. And at that point, privacy on the internet won't be a problem any more.