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Hardly. Google could simply ask the children to fax in signed permission statements from their parents, as websites that actually make an effort to support child users do. Neopets had this figured out 15 years ago. Google chooses not to do that despite having the resources, and they are responsible for the consequences of that decision.

Most people aren't worried about being secure from the CIA, we're worried about being secure from random criminals at the airport or the cafe. If the CIA wants you, they can just kidnap you and lock you away anyway.

Actually, the lesson is that people don't WANT a "solution".

It's not as if AWS has never gone down (http://aws.amazon.com/message/65648/). It just hasn't had a major outage in the last 30 days.

It does happen to be a positive interpretation, but there's no reason to think that's why it was chosen, since it's also the simplest explanation.

How to dismantle a tyrannical regime if you have the support of an omnipresent computer system they trust with absolutely everything.

Do you always follow the suggested resolution 100%?

What users? If Geocities had users to piss off, they wouldn't have needed to shit it down.

Your government wants them to have that option. Why should MS listen to you and not your government?

There's no "sky" in "skype" but we still call it skype because that's its name.

Or maybe we should accept that security ultimately doesn't matter.

But how much of that is due to nearly two decades of experience and how much is due to having kids?

What is wrong with those scenarios? It sounds like you are proposing that instead of using this information, people should ignore it and make bad decisions.

The point is that it's not as private as you think it is.

Conquest? Isn't it Pestilence?

No, that's where the metaphor breaks down. I don't think there's a good equivalent of "public" in the facebook tracking situation. Instead, I would say that you are on someone else's virtual property, and that they are perfectly within their rights to watch and record whatever you do there and share that information with whoever they like.

It does happen without the knowledge of many people today, and the surprise when they find out what's really going on has led to a lot of backlash, but the solution to that is to educate people better about technology and what it can do, not to limit technology so that it can only do things the average person can conceive of.

This may not be a realistic expectation now, but I think that as the general population becomes more technologically literate, for the average person, the presence of such a button should indicate "this website has some kind of relationship with facebook/reddit/google - if I care about what data they are sharing, I should probably check their privacy policy." And I think that 99% of people won't care. My admittedly idealistic belief is that the solution to this "controversy" is for everyone to recognize that we shouldn't try to apply pre-internet expectations and beliefs about privacy to the modern world.

Not really, no. Please correct me if I'm misunderstanding facebook's tracking system, but I don't think your browser history is being captured here. You are viewing pages that have a facebook widget on them, and if you have a facebook cookie that says "pingswept", this tells facebook that pingswept visited a page with a specific widget on it (and thus, which page). Facebook is not taking anything from you that you are not sending them - the issue is that a website that is not facebook is passing your information on to facebook. Aren't they the ones that deceived you, not facebook?

Why would you be uncomfortable in that case? How do the potential drawbacks of such an oracle existing outweigh the potential positives?

That's not an argument against keeping that history. It could just as well be presented in court as evidence for me, or be presented as evidence against people I don't like. I'm in favor of the legal system having better evidence that they can use to reach more correct verdicts.

I see this as something that could potentially lead to abuse, but I don't see how it is abusive by itself, and I don't agree with trying to limit technology because it could potentially be abused unless there's a clear case that the danger of such abuse outweighs the potential benefits. Like the writer of the original article, I haven't seen anyone make that case - it's mostly just people saying "but privacy!"

In your example, those people breaking into your home is wrong. Watching you when you are in public or on their property would not be.

I met your friend yesterday and he was showing me some pictures from a camping trip he took last week. I asked "who's that guy standing to your left" and he told me it was you. Now I know what you look like, forever, and you can't ask me to forget or delete that either. I don't see the problem here.

It's not obvious to me. How were you harmed by facebook logging this data?

Actually, Nintendo's old cartridge-based games already did this to some extent. You were simply plugging in a circuit board, which could, and often did have additional processors, memory, etc on it.

If people cared about "we did x first" as a reason why some software is better, everyone would be browsing with Opera. What matters is how well they do something now.

- It's hard to drop ten dollars cash on the other side of the country.

- You don't need a smartphone to use ten dollars you found on the ground.

- Cash can be spent somewhere other than Starbucks.

- There's no twitter account broadcasting the amount of money dropped on the ground.

- If you find money on the ground, chances are not good that it was dropped by someone from HN.

- If you tweet about money you found on the ground, you are just a jerk.

Even so, implementing EHRs in a way that qualifies as meaningful use still improves patient care for the worst institutions.

If they truly aim to teach math and not, say, engineering, then they should not be teaching students to assume constraints that aren't given in the problem.

Some do. Epic Systems, for example, is quite well known for this attitude.

"Not responding with another illegal action" is not the same as "idly standing by."