4 ms·
I agree that privacy is important, but whenever I hear people talk about how hard it is to abandon Facebook or similar services, it seems to me that there's a m
by ewzimm 12y ago
I agree that privacy is important, but whenever I hear people talk about how hard it is to abandon Facebook or similar services, it seems to me that there's a missing middle ground.
Posting to Facebook, even messaging, is publishing. People just need to remember that. There's nothing wrong with publishing. It's something that people used to work hard to achieve and only a few could afford. Now anyone can publish. This is great progress. Publishing has never been private and doesn't need to be. There's a place in society for public tools and a place for private ones as well. The problem occurs when people try to use publishing platforms as private communication. Of course that causes problems. It's a matter of using the wrong tool for the job. I think what we need is to continue to develop private communication technologies side-by-side with the public ones.
I am fine with living with tools like Facebook outside my control when they serve a purpose. We control what information we give them. There's a big problem with relying on them for all of our communication.
- xenophonf 12y agoThere's a distinct (I'd say moral or intentional) difference between publishing/performing in public and sharing with friends/family. Even Friendster or Diaspora* conflate the two. What I would like to see is the P2P equivalent of something like Snapchat, completely decentralized and fully under control of the person sharing a datum (text, picture, video, like, etc.) Unfortunately, that's not something easily engineered (likely impossible given our experience with software-only DRM systems), let alone sold or monetized.
- ewzimm 12y agoThis is the expectation I think people need to get over. If you are sending your data to a third party unencrypted, even if that third party is Facebook, you have just published your data, no matter what expectation they might have set. Even encrypted data will likely become public at some point if it is stored indefinitely as computing power increases and quantum computing and further advances become common. As long as we use the Internet with the expectation that everything we send is only temporarily private at best, we will be fine. The idea that we can share privately with a select group on a public network is really something like a delusion, even if you are the NSA! We still can and should develop private and secure communication protocols like DIME, but nobody should ever expect a hosted communication service out of their control to be private.
- sanderjd 12y agoYou just effected a fundamental change in my perspective without even telling me anything I didn't know already. Thank you!
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- jcbrand 12y agoMessaging between friends is not publishing and it's normal to want and expect conversations between friends to be private. With Facebook, there's always a middle man, listening in on and recording the conversation.