An interesting TED talk from Sherry Turkle. The pace of change in certain social behaviours, from taboo to norm, has fascinated me for the last number of years.
As a bonus, here’s a very succinct summary by Turkle of why privacy is important and a rebuttal of the “you must have something to hide” argument.
I recently rediscovered this video from the American Civil Liberties Union, via Wired UK. It illustrates very quickly and simply why privacy is important. It was produced in 2006, when Facebook was limited to college and high school students and before Google acquired YouTube. Amazing how much has changed since then, and not all of it particularly benign if you have any concern over how these and other private entities may potentially share your information.
I believe that the people’s lack of awareness of how much personal information they may be passively broadcasting into the cloud has been accelerated by the growth of the mobile web. Whilst everyone can understand the (probably minimal) risks associated with location-based check-in services such as FourSquare and Gowalla, there seem to be a number of apps sharing information without providing full disclosure to users that they are doing so.
The real problem here is the ease with which users can install mobile apps and rapidly click through the data permissions. We’ve all been doing this for many years with software EULAs. Of interest would be how much of this is due to developer carelessness, and how much of it is deliberate.
Here are a few sensible pieces on the whole Facebook privacy brouhaha.
The thing is, Facebook needs to generate some revenue from its user’s data soon. It seems that advertisers may be reconsidering their spend on Facebook, since by all accounts the conversion rates are quite poor. Walled gardens don’t last indefinitely.
