The government doesn't need Facebook to get your data (they go straight to the ISPs, anyway). There's 10,000 companies that buy and sell your personal data already (and has been for 30 years - you can buy lists for direct mail of people's name, full addresses, numbers, marriage status, estimated income, etc.)
The government doesn't need Facebook to get your data
You're only thinking of the federal level. There are many levels of government, and local governments from states and counties all the way down to companies contracted by the local dog catcher buy the data mined by advertising companies.
and has been for 30 years - you can buy lists for direct mail of people's name, full addresses, numbers, marriage status, estimated income, etc
But for 30 years you haven't been able to track someone's location on a minute-by-minute basis. Or in real-time in the case of buying data from a cell phone carrier. Plus a lot of other invasive information that hasn't been available until FB, G, and others weaponized the avertising industry.
We're not talking about public data. We're talking about companies selling private data.
They didn't. FB used have a more open API (Which HN and other developer communities clamored for), that meant if you you had an app you could see your users contact lists through FB. They shut this off in 2008.
> Okay. So what's the evil end game of FB privacy?
Apart from the evil of "making people buy shit they wouldn't have otherwise" that applies to all advertising the end game is to do price discrimination based on profiles of the individual. If they know you're friends are raving about a holiday somewhere then you'll see a higher price than a casual browser. This way you can extract the maximum amount possible from your customers.
>>Okay. So what's the evil end game of FB privacy?
You are looking at it the wrong way. It's not about Facebook's evil end game today. It's about what their current collection of data enables a future Facebook (or a company that may buy Facebook one day) to do. It's also about what malicious actors, government or otherwise, may do with the data if they get their hands on it, as they have, multiple times, in the recent past.
Today the data is used to show you ads. There is no guarantee that it will be used for just that purpose in the future.
But that's actually a tenant of privacy: You are free to care about it only when it matters, and you chose who and on what terms enter into your privacy sphere. Privacy is the inherent understood baseline. Everything else needs to justify it's existence, with explicit consent, and that consent can be removed whenever the individual feels like their individual liberty is now being violated.
I really like this definition of privacy on the Wikipedia page about the subject:
> The right to privacy is our right to keep a domain around us, which includes all those things that are part of us, such as our body, home, property, thoughts, feelings, secrets and identity. The right to privacy gives us the ability to choose which parts in this domain can be accessed by others, and to control the extent, manner and timing of the use of those parts we choose to disclose
This individualist or spacial definition of privacy doesn't make much sense in a world where the effects of privacy loss have macro effects and aren't limited to 'domains'. If you whip out your smartphone while I have a conversation next to you, even in a private or semi-public space, and my records get send somewhere without my knowledge, did you just violate my privacy?
If my boss has a speaker on his desk and I can't reasonably expect to be listened to, but he records me anyway, how do I prevent this?
Privacy needs to be understood as a social good, not as an individual right. Privacy is being destroyed in the same way pollution diminishes air quality, if you have privacy only locked into your home with the blinds shut you might as well not have privacy at all.
Privacy needs to be drastically expanded to have meaning for connected people in a social environment. It should mean I can use the train without being tracked, state a political opinion without forever having it pinned to my name, and without having to feel supervised every time I eat something unhealthy or say something that resembles dissent.
> If you whip out your smartphone while I have a conversation next to you, even in a private or semi-public space, and my records get send somewhere without my knowledge, did you just violate my privacy?
Yes. Privacy is everyone's responsibility. And I say this working in the digital marketing space.
> If my boss has a speaker on his desk and I can't reasonably expect to be listened to, but he records me anyway, how do I prevent this?
You have many options, the most extreme is by not working for people who put you in situations like that. But maybe having a talk would suffice. "Hey sorry I feel like my personal liberty is being violated here, I would prefer not to be recorded without my consent" If your boss insists, then you have the choice of not revealing anything you are not comfortable with being recorded all the way again to the extreme case of replying to everything your boss says with some same crafted response, as an example, "I would love to reply/answer, but not while being recorded".
> Privacy needs to be understood as a social good, not as an individual right.
100% emphatically absolutely not if not for the simple reason that this is contrary to American liberty and where our rights come from, and once you go down that hole, there is no going back.
> Privacy needs to be drastically expanded to have meaning for connected people in a social environment.
One of my favorite writers on this exact topic is Daniel J Solove. (He's the author of one of my favorite papers of all time "I've got nothing to hide and other misunderstandings of privacy" which is now subsequently a book called "Nothing to Hide")
