Make sure you read the end, it is the best part of the essay: ''' The more we depend on social networks and other online services to share content with friends

Make sure you read the end, it is the best part of the essay: ''' The more we depend on social networks and other online services to share content with friends and family, the more we risk that our content inadvertently becomes public. The enforceability of intellectual property laws around user-generated content — our photos, videos, and other content — is one of the best protections we have. The media has, in many cases, chosen to broadly construe all content shared via these networks as “public” when in fact much of it is private, and the copyright on that private material belongs to the creator. Sharing photos on Facebook should no more constitute a public license to use those photos than sending them over email. The ubiquitous license agreements and privacy policies that online services force their users to enter into should be scrutinized by the courts around the principle of adhesion, and if the courts are unwilling to reconsider the status quo then congress should intervene with legislation limiting the scope and enforceability of these agreements. We also need to be willing to consider that only Congress can prevent the abuse of governmental power that is used to coerce online services into to turning over data in a wholesale manner. I am certain that social networks, technology companies, and telecommunications companies would prefer not to kowtow to governments around the world, but operating a service on the scale of Facebook or Google puts these companies in the crosshairs of governmental agencies of all kinds. Once a company has reached this scale, only governments pose a meaningful existential threat. It is therefore incumbent upon the legislature to craft appropriate boundaries that strike a balance between the valid needs of governmental authorities and the equally valid privacy demands of Internet users. In the end, the lesson learned from my wedding was something much less obvious than the “parable of excess” that was claimed. Rather, the democratization of the media that I idealized in my youth when it was just a distant, blurry dream, suddenly seems much less worthy of idolatry now that it’s become a stark reality. The lesson for me, felt acutely over the past two weeks, ended up being a familiar moral to a familiar story: “Be careful what you wish for — you might just get it.” '''