5 ms·

Doctors, lawyers and priests have legal, financial & spiritual repercussions for not keeping these details private. Giving your details to Facebook is the pre-

by dfxm12 13y ago

Doctors, lawyers and priests have legal, financial & spiritual repercussions for not keeping these details private. Giving your details to Facebook is the pre-Facebook equivalent of putting an ad in the paper with your details. You're not just giving your details to Facebook, you're giving them to everyone who has access to your page.

antsar 13y ago
Perhaps, then, one move in the right direction would be to start adopting similar legal policies for online services? Of course, this won't prevent the NSA from doing what it has always done: "We're snooping. No, you can't tell the user. No, you can't do anything about it." but that is another issue, one that we can hopefully resolve with a bit of legislature and oversight.
devx 13y ago
Then we should "fix" that. Instead, we've been letting the government give these companies immunities for letting them gather the data in bulk from them. I think people just want to communicate with each other, and the Internet is the best way to do that right now. If we can build an Internet where we can easily do that without giving all this data to 3rd parties, people would use that, but until then they don't have much choice. As Schneier says, advising people to "quit Google" or Facebook, is not really a choice in today's Internet. But if developers and the architects of the Internet realize what a problem this is, then maybe we can come up with other more secure alternative solutions.
- chris_mahan 13y ago
  it would have to be one where the NSA armed goons can't walk into a room full of servers and tell the admin: "Do what we tell you or else." Essentially, we're going back to computers in the house doing everything, since the network can't be trusted, and encryption can't be trusted.
jiggy2011 13y ago
Perhaps facebook should have a responsibility similar to that of other professionals? Granted some data you put on facebook you obviously intend to make public or semi-public but not necessarily all of it.
hannibal5 13y ago
In many EU countries insurance companies and banks can't do social network analysis of your public Facebook profile or buy your private data from Facebook. Some countries have laws that limit the use of the information in public records. Even if some party is allowed to collect the information, like phone company, they are not automatically allowed to use the data in any way they please. There is also huge difference of having access to data you need and keeping and collecting records of people using publicly available data. US has very backwards privacy laws. Basically once your data is out there anyone can do anything they please with it. This does not mean that this should be the case or that rest of the world acts like this.

by dfxm12 13y ago

antsar 13y ago

Perhaps, then, one move in the right direction would be to start adopting similar legal policies for online services? Of course, this won't prevent the NSA from doing what it has always done: "We're snooping. No, you can't tell the user. No, you can't do anything about it." but that is another issue, one that we can hopefully resolve with a bit of legislature and oversight.

devx 13y ago

Then we should "fix" that. Instead, we've been letting the government give these companies immunities for letting them gather the data in bulk from them. I think people just want to communicate with each other, and the Internet is the best way to do that right now. If we can build an Internet where we can easily do that without giving all this data to 3rd parties, people would use that, but until then they don't have much choice. As Schneier says, advising people to "quit Google" or Facebook, is not really a choice in today's Internet. But if developers and the architects of the Internet realize what a problem this is, then maybe we can come up with other more secure alternative solutions.

chris_mahan 13y ago
it would have to be one where the NSA armed goons can't walk into a room full of servers and tell the admin: "Do what we tell you or else." Essentially, we're going back to computers in the house doing everything, since the network can't be trusted, and encryption can't be trusted.

jiggy2011 13y ago

Perhaps facebook should have a responsibility similar to that of other professionals? Granted some data you put on facebook you obviously intend to make public or semi-public but not necessarily all of it.

hannibal5 13y ago

In many EU countries insurance companies and banks can't do social network analysis of your public Facebook profile or buy your private data from Facebook. Some countries have laws that limit the use of the information in public records. Even if some party is allowed to collect the information, like phone company, they are not automatically allowed to use the data in any way they please. There is also huge difference of having access to data you need and keeping and collecting records of people using publicly available data. US has very backwards privacy laws. Basically once your data is out there anyone can do anything they please with it. This does not mean that this should be the case or that rest of the world acts like this.