Is Facebook evil ?
I guess you’ve heard the negative buzz about Facebook and it’s new policy concerning your data (or their, who knows?). Marc Zuckerberg reacted to the “All your data are belong to us” rumor. You can read the original post here.
In a few words, he says “blah blah blah… it’s complicated”. No surprise! But reading the TechCrunch post about this new explanation to calm down the Facebook generation, I was a bit surprized by the metaphore used:
When you share your data with someone else, whether it be an email or a photo, it becomes their data as well. You cannot normally rescind data you share with other people in an e-mail. So why should a social network be any different
It sounds a bit easy of a comparison to me.
I send a photo to a friend, it’s right that my friend can keep this photo… BUT
- Facebook itself is NOT my friend !
- Facebook is not 1 person I share something, it’s more about a company sharing with third parties.
- A friend is somewhat a local storage of this information. After I publish something on Facebook, who the hell knows where it can be…
IMHO, this is not a question about “let’s be more permissive, because it’s online media“, it is now time to define a basic rules set about online privacy. Facebook already benefited a lot of this ‘empty’ juridical place.
Tough times call for tough measures, and even if I understand Facebook need to secure it’s value, I think we should not tolerate such deviation in the use of personal data shared among friends.
