> Right now the global perception of trust is declining in nearly every major institution, and in the eyes of many who do not live in code, Silicon Valley is just one more group of rich elites
I'd argue that people who are not intimately familiar with the tech world see the tech as just a set of products that does things for them, with the additional filter of the mainstream media and their friends/family on top of it.
Most people don't know what kind of data is being gathered about them, and they don't care about the implications of that data. To be fair, it is a difficult thing to conceptualize and quantify. Facebook provides a great service to connect with friends and family. The question is - what's the price?
I am familiar with the tech world and I keep asking myself this question too. From what I see now, all the data that Facebook collects can hurt me in two ways: more insidious ads, and when used by a superhuman-level AI to infer pretty much anything about me. The AI doesn't seem on the horizon, and the ads don't seem to be that harmful, they're only annoying. There's of course an angle of a dystopian totalitarian government, but in that case we're all screwed anyway; data collected by Facebook or Google will make little difference.
Then there's an insurance angle, but here I have mixed feelings - it seems to me that it's better for an insurer to know more (I for one would like car insurance companies to have real-time centimeter precision location data about every driver, that could restore some sanity on the roads), but not too much. I don't know where I stand on this yet.
Anyway; the way I see it, this whole data-selling business model works mostly because advertisers are stupid enough (or rather, in so tight a competition) to pay for data that won't give them much edge anyway. In a way, it's not users that are the victims here, it's the advertisers.
The data-selling business model is just one aspect of what could be considered harmful, another aspect is the privacy aspect. For example, potential employers looking through your Facebook posts to see what your personal views and social life are like. It's possible to argue that it's possible to limit access to Facebook content, though there are often changes made to Facebook that make such privacy harder to obtain.
So when working out the price of a service like Facebook, it's important to include the cost of privacy (even if this is effectively impossible to put a numerical value on).
Right. I agree parts of this can be put on the "costs" side of Facebook use.
But this aspect isn't basically the issue of publishing? If you post your Facebook status/photos and mark them publicly visible, you're a publisher. Other people can see it. If, however, you limit it to your friends only, then if your non-friend boss sees them it means someone screwed up - which doesn't seem any different than someone gossiping about you in real life.
Anyway, this aspect is something where I think we need to grow up as a society. Your boss probably did (or still does) the same stupid shit that you do, so him making an issue out of that drunk photo of yours is utterly hypocritical. Looking at some things posted by people with status I'm beginning to believe that Facebook is actually helping here - people are getting used to the concept that they're no different than anyone else wrt. weirdness, and that they can be judged by others just like they themselves judge other people. In the face of this, I hope everyone will finally agree to chill out and stop judging one another entirely :).
> "But this aspect isn't basically the issue of publishing? If you post your Facebook status/photos and mark them publicly visible, you're a publisher."
Sure, that's part of it. However, the issue is that Facebook have tried to increase what constitutes public Facebook content over time.
I'm sure I could find other privacy issues with Facebook. Can you opt-out of all of this? Probably, but it certainly requires vigilance by its users, especially when new features are rolled out.
I'd argue that people who are not intimately familiar with the tech world see the tech as just a set of products that does things for them, with the additional filter of the mainstream media and their friends/family on top of it.
Most people don't know what kind of data is being gathered about them, and they don't care about the implications of that data. To be fair, it is a difficult thing to conceptualize and quantify. Facebook provides a great service to connect with friends and family. The question is - what's the price?