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The world seems to be turning into a messed up place where we willfully trade off our privacy for sociability. Should we just accept that it is ok for corporat

The world seems to be turning into a messed up place where we willfully trade off our privacy for sociability. Should we just accept that it is ok for corporations to trade our info willy-nilly while all we want to do is be social on the web? How long and how far will this go on? Until every other bit of our digital life is tracked, profiled and sold? When did we stop being consumers and became products? Will there ever be a B2B transaction with our faces next to a barcode? I think we need to get a grip before we start finding this all too normal.

viscanti 15y ago
Privacy rights will be respected when people are actually willing to pay social online. Social networking sites (and almost every website in general) is designed to make money. This is especially true at large scales, like Facebook and Twitter. They aren't charities designed to enhance our lives, they're businesses. Users aren't willing to pay to use the sites, so they have to monazite differently. Part of that is collecting lots of information about you. It's really pretty easy to not share private things. You aren't required to share anything private, and you can still get the full value out of being social online.
- gldalmaso 15y ago
  >> They aren't charities designed to enhance our lives, they're businesses. Yes, but how many of their users are actually aware of that? How are these business advertise to attract users? Does that reflect it's business model? Could it be misleading?
sp332 15y ago
You signed up for a twitter account and sent all of your "tweets" to their servers, with the expectation that they will make those tweets publicly available to everyone on the internet, from their servers. You're getting free microblogging hosting for information you intend to make public. What about this is private? And what exactly does Twitter owe you?
personlurking 15y ago
The future is obviously personalized (and very likely gamified) and that means services will "know" you and will act for you. Personalization comes at a price...and that price is our privacy. It's all about incremental change. Two relevant points to the bigger picture (IMHO) - "For to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill." Sun Tzu - Also, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabian_strategy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabian_strategy
- jamesbritt 15y ago
  Personalization comes at a price...and that price is our privacy. There are degrees of privacy. Gmail can look through all of my mail and stat to figure out what's important and what's not for me. Technically Google can read all my mail, but the presumption is they do not, and need not (aside from programmatic parsing) in order to provide personalization. Even if I give up some degree of privacy to Google via Gmail that should not mean I'm giving up the privacy of my E-mail to the whole world. My mail should still be effectively private. My problem with sites like Facebook is that they begin with some assurances abut privacy and limited access, get people to enter personal info, then gradually change the ground rules. And they're not doing it to offer personalization for the benefit of users, they're doing it for the benefit of their customers, the advertisers.
yummyfajitas 15y ago
I've found a solution to the problem of people finding information I want to keep private. It's actually fairly simple. Stuff I want to make public goes here: https://github.com/stucchio https://github.com/stucchio http://crazybear.posterous.com/ http://crazybear.posterous.com/ http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=yummyfajitas http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=yummyfajitas If I had a twitter/facebook/etc, it would fall into this category. Stuff I want to keep private goes here: file:///home/stucchio/ The general rule of thumb (ignoring exceptions like gmail): "http" = public, [ "file", "ssh"] = private.
- phaylon 15y ago
  Well, you can connect to webspace via SSH. Which reminded me of a phenomenon I almost forgot: Back before facebook, I can remember multiple situations where people made the mistake to think that things on their public webspace are private just because they weren't linked.

viscanti 15y ago

Privacy rights will be respected when people are actually willing to pay social online. Social networking sites (and almost every website in general) is designed to make money. This is especially true at large scales, like Facebook and Twitter. They aren't charities designed to enhance our lives, they're businesses. Users aren't willing to pay to use the sites, so they have to monazite differently. Part of that is collecting lots of information about you. It's really pretty easy to not share private things. You aren't required to share anything private, and you can still get the full value out of being social online.

gldalmaso 15y ago
>> They aren't charities designed to enhance our lives, they're businesses. Yes, but how many of their users are actually aware of that? How are these business advertise to attract users? Does that reflect it's business model? Could it be misleading?

sp332 15y ago

You signed up for a twitter account and sent all of your "tweets" to their servers, with the expectation that they will make those tweets publicly available to everyone on the internet, from their servers. You're getting free microblogging hosting for information you intend to make public. What about this is private? And what exactly does Twitter owe you?

personlurking 15y ago

The future is obviously personalized (and very likely gamified) and that means services will "know" you and will act for you. Personalization comes at a price...and that price is our privacy. It's all about incremental change. Two relevant points to the bigger picture (IMHO) - "For to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill." Sun Tzu - Also, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabian_strategy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabian_strategy

jamesbritt 15y ago
Personalization comes at a price...and that price is our privacy. There are degrees of privacy. Gmail can look through all of my mail and stat to figure out what's important and what's not for me. Technically Google can read all my mail, but the presumption is they do not, and need not (aside from programmatic parsing) in order to provide personalization. Even if I give up some degree of privacy to Google via Gmail that should not mean I'm giving up the privacy of my E-mail to the whole world. My mail should still be effectively private. My problem with sites like Facebook is that they begin with some assurances abut privacy and limited access, get people to enter personal info, then gradually change the ground rules. And they're not doing it to offer personalization for the benefit of users, they're doing it for the benefit of their customers, the advertisers.

yummyfajitas 15y ago

I've found a solution to the problem of people finding information I want to keep private. It's actually fairly simple. Stuff I want to make public goes here: https://github.com/stucchio https://github.com/stucchio http://crazybear.posterous.com/ http://crazybear.posterous.com/ http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=yummyfajitas http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=yummyfajitas If I had a twitter/facebook/etc, it would fall into this category. Stuff I want to keep private goes here: file:///home/stucchio/ The general rule of thumb (ignoring exceptions like gmail): "http" = public, [ "file", "ssh"] = private.

phaylon 15y ago
Well, you can connect to webspace via SSH. Which reminded me of a phenomenon I almost forgot: Back before facebook, I can remember multiple situations where people made the mistake to think that things on their public webspace are private just because they weren't linked.