Aside from all the interesting ways of defining privacy I never thought of before, the implications of the presenter's goal (making everyone happy to use social networking for almost all of their life) struck me the hardest.
Let's say some radical changes came about so that almost any reasonable person would feel free to post all their personal data on facebook, knowing that sensitive parts would be kept to specific groups. That still wouldn't take care of what I see as the biggest lurking concern; how our data will be handled in the future.
It's certainly paranoia, but we've all seen good companies turn to shit, and people have even seen stable countries turn bad. If a database of everyone's un-self-censored private data existed, it would have untold implications. Even now, it's staggering to think about. I don't know, I guess it's getting late and I'm sleepy. But I think about FB's extremely high valuation and wonder if something like that could be a seed of instability that would allow for decision makers from unknown vectors to influence how FB uses its data and stuff like that.
I don't think it's paranoia at all. It doesn't even take bad motives, just a lapse of judgment or faulty assumption to ruin privacy -- like Google Buzz integration into GMail.
I think the solution requires more than feel-good policy statements and trust building. And God forbid someone mention legislation.
Ultimately the users need full localized control (hosting, or decrypting) over their private identities, content and social connections. Private groups should be darknets. And it should be as easy as automatic to set up and use. Zooko's Triangle be damned.
Aside from all the interesting ways of defining privacy I never thought of before, the implications of the presenter's goal (making everyone happy to use social networking for almost all of their life) struck me the hardest.
Let's say some radical changes came about so that almost any reasonable person would feel free to post all their personal data on facebook, knowing that sensitive parts would be kept to specific groups. That still wouldn't take care of what I see as the biggest lurking concern; how our data will be handled in the future.
It's certainly paranoia, but we've all seen good companies turn to shit, and people have even seen stable countries turn bad. If a database of everyone's un-self-censored private data existed, it would have untold implications. Even now, it's staggering to think about. I don't know, I guess it's getting late and I'm sleepy. But I think about FB's extremely high valuation and wonder if something like that could be a seed of instability that would allow for decision makers from unknown vectors to influence how FB uses its data and stuff like that.