Bruce Schneier’s latest essay is about privacy:
To the older generation, privacy is about secrecy. And, as the Supreme Court said, once something is no longer secret, it’s no longer private. But that’s not how privacy works, and it’s not how the younger generation thinks about it. Privacy is about control. When your health records are sold to a pharmaceutical company without your permission; when a social networking site changes your privacy settings to make what used to be visible only to your friends visible to everyone; when the NSA eavesdrops on everyone’s e-mail conversations–your loss of control over that information is the issue. We may not mind sharing our personal lives and thoughts, but we want to control how, where and with whom. A privacy failure is a control failure.
He calls out the social networking sites for declaring privacy to be dead when, in fact, they are the ones who are continually working to kill it in order to make more money.
April 6, 2010 at 12:16 pm
And that is why I will not have a Facebook account. Ever. Elsenet I’ve explicitly stated that it’s a short straight line between “We want to sell your data to people who want to sell you stuff” and “We disapprove of your politics and will not permit their or your existence.”
April 7, 2010 at 12:36 am
I think you mis-linked in your post – there’s no link to Bruce Schneier to be found, just a self-reference.