Comments on: The fallacy of privacy settings

By: Privacy Settings are a Crutch. Free Apps Profit from your Data | CloudAve

Privacy Settings are a Crutch. Free Apps Profit from your Data | CloudAve — Tue, 25 May 2010 15:06:38 +0000

[...] William Vambenepe posts a challenging thought piece with a very simple contention – Data too sensitive to leak from Facebook is too sensitive to be on Facebook. [...]

By: William Vambenepe — Integration patterns for social data: the Open Social Data Bus

Thu, 06 May 2010 23:50:42 +0000

[...] open and makes no pretense of (often violated) “privacy [...]

By: William Vambenepe — Don’t tell Facebook what you like, tell Twitter

William Vambenepe — Don’t tell Facebook what you like, tell Twitter — Tue, 04 May 2010 03:48:40 +0000

[...] By which I mean that there is no pretense of privacy and no nasty surprise when trust is violated. Which is going to happen again and again. Especially when it’s not just a matter of displaying data but also of inferring new information based on the raw data collected. At which point it’s almost impossible to segregate access to the derived information based on the privacy settings of the individual data pieces. On Twitter, it’s all public, we all know it from the start, and as such we’re not fooled into sharing more than we should. See the fallacy of privacy settings. [...]

By: Briefly Noted for April 28, 2010 : Found History

Briefly Noted for April 28, 2010 : Found History — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 01:09:00 +0000

[...] companies have handled their users’ supposedly private information of late. But @vambenepe makes a very strong case that the energy directed at shaming Facebook and its peers into shaping up would be better spent on [...]

By: Noons

Noons — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 04:22:31 +0000

With the exception of the 4th item in the list of Facebook flaws, I’d say everything else applies to any other online “social interaction” site. Or any site indeed where one choses to load personal data into! As such, it’s not a problem specific to Facebook. It’s global.

As soon as one puts data online, it’s got no quarantee of privacy. Period.

Anyone who pushes ANY data to the web better be prepared to have that data made public at some stage or another. And the so-called “cloud” is a perfect example of that possibility: let’s not go into examples but they do exist in spades. The notion that it won’t happen because the name has been changed to “cloud computing” only sticks with lunatics and un-informed management.

The true huge problem of all these social sites is what you point out in: “Other data comes from tracking and analyzing your activities and connections, without explicit data upload from you. That’s a lot harder for you to control (you rarely get asked for your privacy preferences on this data)”.

That is indeed an invasion of privacy, as opposed to accessing data that has no privacy by definition. One’s actions in browsing or navigating the net should not be collected without clear declaration of intent, the same way one’s movements in a public area should not be followed without a clear legal statement as to why, or an anonymization of the subject of that following.

But then one gets into legal arenas and that makes things a lot more complex…