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I support the FSF's overall philosophy, and they raise important privacy issues here, but the "control over our data" part is dated. Things improved a lot this

by brlewis 16y ago

I support the FSF's overall philosophy, and they raise important privacy issues here, but the "control over our data" part is dated. Things improved a lot this year. I think the FriendFeed acquisition had a lot of influence. Thanks, Bret Taylor et al!

loup-vaillant 16y ago
Last time I checked, Facebook stills stores your data on their own data centres, unencrypted (or at least they have the keys). You still have zero control over that data. By the way, the same goes for web based e-mail.
- flyt 16y ago
  What kind of control over the data on Facebook's servers do you need? If they rsync some of your photos from one place to another in their data centers do they need to drop you a note? Keep in mind that you can always export all the data on your Facebook profile as a .zip file on demand. It's your data at the end of the day.
  - jeffdavis 16y ago
    Honest question: does that really include all of your data? All the messages, comments, friends, any friend ID or contact info (email addresses, IM names, phone numbers, addresses, etc.)? In other words, is it enough data that you can just export and jump ship to another social network without much interruption (assuming some reasonable transformation effort for the data)?
  - loup-vaillant 16y ago
    I need to be able to guarantee the privacy of my data when appropriate (assuming I trust my friends, of course). With Facebook I can't, because (1) they can read everything, and (2) I don't trust them not to. To fix that problem, Facebook needs to become a-centred. But that would be throwing away their busyness model along with their data-centres.
- brlewis 16y ago
  The article raised three concerns "for our control over the software we use to interact with each other, for control over our data, and for our privacy" By itself "control over our data" could mean privacy, or it could mean the ability to export our own data and use it as we please. But if you take it to mean privacy, the third item is redundant.

by brlewis 16y ago

loup-vaillant 16y ago

Last time I checked, Facebook stills stores your data on their own data centres, unencrypted (or at least they have the keys). You still have zero control over that data. By the way, the same goes for web based e-mail.

flyt 16y ago
What kind of control over the data on Facebook's servers do you need? If they rsync some of your photos from one place to another in their data centers do they need to drop you a note? Keep in mind that you can always export all the data on your Facebook profile as a .zip file on demand. It's your data at the end of the day.
- jeffdavis 16y ago
  Honest question: does that really include all of your data? All the messages, comments, friends, any friend ID or contact info (email addresses, IM names, phone numbers, addresses, etc.)? In other words, is it enough data that you can just export and jump ship to another social network without much interruption (assuming some reasonable transformation effort for the data)?
- loup-vaillant 16y ago
  I need to be able to guarantee the privacy of my data when appropriate (assuming I trust my friends, of course). With Facebook I can't, because (1) they can read everything, and (2) I don't trust them not to. To fix that problem, Facebook needs to become a-centred. But that would be throwing away their busyness model along with their data-centres.
brlewis 16y ago
The article raised three concerns "for our control over the software we use to interact with each other, for control over our data, and for our privacy" By itself "control over our data" could mean privacy, or it could mean the ability to export our own data and use it as we please. But if you take it to mean privacy, the third item is redundant.