Re: [Social-discuss] On Data Privacy

[Story Henry]

On 11 Apr 2010, at 20:57, Max Shinn wrote:

>  So while I'm not saying we shouldn't think about privacy, I
> just want to suggest that attempting to reach the impossible goal of
> complete privacy,

agree

> or even that of privacy significantly better than that
> of Facebook, is a waste of time.

A decentralised system will in itself have significantly better privacy 
than Facebook, even by using equivalent security mechanism.

1. Many centralised services serve over http, so it is easy for
an agency to put itself in the middle

2. On a centralised social network, one entity can see everything done
by everyone on the network. In the case of FB that is the information
of 200 million users, how they connect, what they are thinking or 
speaking about, who they are going to vote for, what the cool startup 
company of the day may be, .... This is really not that different
from living in a panopticon. 

The above is clearly not a problem the people on these networks are having
but that leaves the rest of the world that may have that problem.

Henry