Should Facebook have all the info your bank has for instance? Or auto mechanic, your realtor? This is a slippery slope of logic of shared data for all leads to.

Some of these "social graph" features will do things like link two people as friend suggestions if they both have your phone number in their contacts book, even if you haven't consented to Facebook building up some information about you.

This doesn't sound like willing access & knowledge of what information you provide to Facebook.

PS by fighting this point you’re merely pointing out that giving more businesses this data isn’t a good idea

It doesn't have to run on companies spying on their users either.

Sam Walton of Walmart would record everything about his competitors legally and illegally as well as clients yet you never see that in the news, why? Because it’s not sexy, it’s not about the internet.

This is why Equifax which was a much more horrible data breach isn’t thought about, yet everyone gets their panties in a bunch about Facebook

The ironic beauty in that would be awesome. Also, I'd kind of like to get it about myself for similar reasons :)

They had no real idea what else it would or is being used for.

Facebook builds shadow profiles on non-users and then fills them out with, amongst other things, data it gets from their actual users that they didn't no they were sharing.

This is particularly sneaky when Facebook has used dark patterns to trick app users into granting them permissions they don't strictly need for service.

The difference is that Disney grants license to its content after (potentially drawn out) negotiations and payments, while the typical Facebook users "Agrees and accepts to grant Facebook a worldwide license"

BTW it doesn't confer a license (mostly) to anybody else but normal users do not sue.

They have to monetize and I approve.

Hell I’m willing to bet if Facebook puts into their agreement that every photo you upload to their platform is partially owned by them then people will still upload photos.

It’s not the data that we find valuable, it’s the connections they make or will make, and to this company. Next time you take a photo and find it’s shared with not just Facebook but a whole slew of other companies you tell me if that’s the right thing to do.

The person above said “do you trust all Facebook employees” well you can make that blanket argument for every company in existence and giving more companies our data isn’t a good solution

I mean Facebook might perform facial recognition on your photos and infer connections to other people you didn’t explicitly tell them about.

I mean that facebook might track your location and app launches and identify where you go on vacation and when you shop.

These are the kinds of thing nobody gave consent for.

The consent thing can both be good and bad, just like the invention of the internet and electricity before that. I’m trying to make that point that giving away your data is gonna be a commodity once everyone realizes they’re not a special snowflake

Check out LiveRamp for example; they literally scan in physical documents like car mechanic paperwork (seriously) and dropship them into S3 buckets to huge data brokers every day.

Take that and merge it with facebook’s social graph, how many ms you look at a photo on Instagram and how long you take to reply to someone on WeChat, and you have an awful lot to work with.

What difference does that make? Facebook almost certainly knows my banking information, without me giving it directly to them

Privacy is in the process of becoming antiquated. It is sad, but I think it is inevitable. Surveillance technology advances with technology in general, and counter-surveillance becomes more and more cumbersome. Eventually, we will reach a point where anyone can afford tiny stealth drones to watch what is happening in their neighbors' houses. The counter-measures necessary - hermetically sealed living space, faraday cage enclosure - are so burdensome that only people who currently live in bunkers will implement them for their living spaces.

If we accept that premise, let's think about what we are losing. In my understanding, there are two main reasons why privacy is so important:

1) Allowing individuals to avoid becoming targets of persecution for having some attribute. Targeting by oppressive governments for holding idea X, targeting by an evil megacorp for threatening to disrupt industry Y, etc.

2) Allowing individuals to avoid social stigmatization and shame for having some attribute. Getting caught eating one's boogers, viewing porn of people dressed up as pieces of furniture, etc.

For point 1, I think the real issue is imbalance of information. Schemes to abuse access to someones previously private information mostly wouldn't stand up to public scrutiny themselves. Unless, of course, you have some ultra-powerful organization like a well run totalitarian regime, in which case individuals by definition have no privacy rights anyways.

For point 2, I think shrinking privacy will seriously reduce the social response to this kind of information. "So what if I watch porn of people dressed up as furniture; you masturbate while dipping your toes in peanut butter! That's way weirder!" Sure, there are plenty of painfully normal people out there, but I think most shameful weirdness would become commonplace when the full extent of weirdness is out in the open.

All that being said, I do think anonymity is important, and can probably be preserved, as it is distinct from privately acting in physical space, or online while tied to some form of identity. Also, I don't want to argue against efforts to preserve and advance privacy for individuals for as long as possible. I just think that per point 1, we might want to devote effort to reducing the privacy of organizations to try to maintain parity of information access as our individual privacy slips away.

> The counter-measures necessary - hermetically sealed living space, faraday cage enclosure - are so burdensome that only people who currently live in bunkers will implement them for their living spaces.

There are a lot of situations we forbid activity that is difficult to prevent (and sometimes difficult to detect).

Whether trying to use the law to deter here is worthwhile, meaningless, or harmful isn't necessarily clear - but it deserves consideration in addition to outright prevention.

It definitely somehow limits their use, but anybody really interested is able to obtain them illegally, or produce them themselves.

I'm afraid the same will be true about micro-drones or whatever else the post suggests.

It's different from drugs in that one of the participants is unwilling, though I don't know whether that's a big enough difference - particularly given that that participant is also unwitting.

You can only briefly see which friends have also already signed up.

I'd say it's not ok, but people keep on giving Facebook all that information (and it's very tempting to do so). There are technical solutions which anonymize/privatize social network information, and then no entity has such access.