But I agree with you about Facebook. I closed my account three years ago. (Heh -- three weeks later they tried to recruit me. I turned them down.)
FB is happy to "destroy privacy" like a child unable to consider the real implications.
How do you apply that seemingly unassailable stance to something like iPhone/iCloud, where photos you take with the only camera you have on you during once-in-a-lifetime-moments are immediately and automatically uploaded to a third party for safekeeping?
The solution to all of this data retention/spying stuff is not "start being meticulously paranoid with all of your data", not the least of which is because that won't scale to the majority of the population (and it must, if we are to retain a free society). Furthermore, communications metadata (such as email envelopes with your residential IP and timestamp, cell tower logs that reveal your location, or call logs that reveal your social graph) can't be kept secret unless you _stop communicating with people_. It's a non-starter.
The solution is to alter the legal environment such that these large troves of centralized data are much harder to exploit for evil, both by service providers and military intelligence organizations.
I apply it equally. The same goes for VPS, EC2, etc., and (especially given recent revelations) it's clear it should apply even to unencrypted communications over the Internet even between nodes you control.
At what point can you actually have a basis for legal recourse?
Once again the problem is that we don't have decentralized technology that would store our data encrypted and serve it only to those who we have granted access. But we will. Actually the new MegaUpload is encrypted.
A: if you want to keep it secret. How often do people find themselves in once in a lifetime moments that they want to keep secret, and want to take photos of, but only have an iphone with them?
B: iphones are not the only phones with built in cameras. If you care about privacy to that extent, you wouldn't own one.
That said, I agree with you. One example is when Service providers unilaterally change their tos by asserting that continued usage implies consent. This puts too much power in the hands of companies like Facebook, where many users are too embedded not to continue.
They agreed to keep your stuff private under their settings, and then they just unilaterally decide that it should be public? Screw that. This could be a winnable class action lawsuit.
There's really nothing you can do about this state of affairs except quit FB. They know you won't so they'll just keep fucking you. FB doesn't respect you like they don't respect their own ToS. Their job is to fuck you, over and over. That's their business plan and purpose of existence. Your job is to get fucked. Recognize your place in this relationship.
If you're uncomfortable about this relationship then leave. Otherwise STFU. Stop telling me that FB did something terrible with your precious personal information again. It's like someone complaining that their car got stolen after they left the keys sitting on top of it in a bad neighborhood. WTF did you expect?
Or actually, it does, but in the sense that your argument is pretty much analogous to the "if you have nothing to hide" argument.
Without your consent, they made private photos public. You didn't do that. You used their privacy settings which they created to prevent this type of situation. To have FB disregard their own privacy settings is 100% on them.
But, instead of blaming FB, you blame yourself. In light of the total collapse of privacy we've experienced recently, it's really sad that that seems perfectly rational.