What do you mean that "social media is public to begin with"? As I'm sure you're aware, while most social media sites have options to post publicly, many (at l

What do you mean that "social media is public to begin with"? As I'm sure you're aware, while most social media sites have options to post publicly, many (at least ostensibly) also offer a wide variety of options for sharing data in narrower circles (i.e. private groups, direct messages, etc). If you're talking about only the content that the users intended to share publicly, that seems like a reasonable enough position to take, but if it goes beyond that I hope you wouldn't still say "big deal". One of the "Key Points" on the Privacy International release linked from the TechCrunch story and available at https://privacyinternational.org/node/1532 https://privacyinternational.org/node/1532 is that "GCHQ collected and accesses this information by gaining access to private companies’ databases." That sounds an awful lot like they're going beyond simply indexing the public web.