Society - Written Monday, May 31, 2010 by Jeff DeChambeau - 6 Comments

The privacy discussion we need to have

I’ve written previously about gleaning insight into consumer habits by looking at log files, and profiled the so-called “bot mediated reality” of security consultant turned fiction author Daniel Suarez. So, when facebook’s latest privacy debacle happened, the idea of my wall-posts and liked-pages being shared with the world was secondary in my mind to the sheer amount of information that facebook collects about how we use the internet–both on and off the site (off-site tracking being done now with the embeddable “like” buttons that are cropping up all over the internet–this sort of thing is something that Google also can do/does with the analytics code that it makes available to webmasters, you can opt out of that here). The idea of one organization having that much information about what each of us is up to all over the internet and in our social networks, an organization that is repeatedly being showcased as ‘actively against privacy’ or technically incompetent, is very scary. Continue…