I guess the problem isn't targeted advertising per se. It's that you don't know what your personal information will be used for in the future. Maybe it will give you better, more targeted advertising. Maybe it will be used to deny you an insurance policy or be sold to a recruiting firm that will reject your job application. I guess Facebooks terms don't allow that, but those terms can change at any time.
Maybe not next year, but what about 30-40 years from now? Facebook or Google might not even exist then, but you can be pretty sure that your data will exist, along with your social graph. That's a tangible asset that can be sold, no matter what happens to these companies. Or seized by some government, for that matter.
Is this just being paranoid and obsessed with privacy? Lets hope so.
A german friend put it this way: Most jews in pre-nazi Germany didn't mind having their religious affiliation listed in their passport. Many were indeed proud to be jews.
Would anyone of them have been able to imagine what this information would be used for just a few years down the line? Wouldn't anyone worrying about this collection of data have been laughed at and called paranoid?
There is a very important distinction between the Nazi Germany example and Facebook selling your data.
In the Nazi Germany example, it was a government entity that was using the information. In that case no amount of privacy controls will protect you - if the information is available they can use the law to retrieve it. Even if Jews didn't have their religion listed on their passport, a government can retrieve that information in other ways (not least compulsory questioning).
In Facebook's case they are selling information to other companies. If the government wants they information they can legislate to get it from anywhere at all (including active surveillance), and so the fact you have shared it on Facebook merely minimises friction for them.
Friction is the only shield we have ever had to protect against invasion of privacy.
YES!!
Far from downplaying it, I was wondering if anyone would pick up on that! It's a really important point - many "privacy invasions" are things that were possible before, but inconvenient.
The truth is, though, that complaining about it is roughly as useful as the RIAA suing Napster. The internet reduces friction, and aren't privacy controls just another form of censorship that the internet will route around?
I do understand concerns over what happens to your data moving forward (changing laws, organizational/management changes etc.). But again, I can't think of any of the information on a social networking site being all that damning. The information that I share on say Facebook or Google+ (at least for me) never really consists of ultra-private information.
Nazi Germany has been such a commonplace rhetorical device on the Internet for so long [1] that we end up easily dismissing it when it's indeed a useful comparisson. This, for many reasons, would be one such case (we can debate that through email if you want), but let's dismiss it anyway.
The important fact here is that bucket loads of (your) personal data are being processed, correlated with each other and stored into centralized server clusters — which have become very tangible assets.
If someone ill-intentioned — a government, an interest group, a company — gets a hold of these assets — through power, through craft, through acquisition — they can use it to target you for whatever their purpose.
In a warfare scenario, that could mean targeted, granular misinformation; targeted terrorism through AI-generated blackmailing, tailored on an infividual level; mass identity hijacking. It could make war a personal matter like it has never been before.
(And on the other side, there's the Nazi Germany scenario where, unbeknownst to you, you are being blacklisted for a genocide to come — after all, the first step is classification. [2])
The fact that we're living rather peaceful times doesn't mean that a potential weapon like these databases should go unregulated; and the fact that we see no storm in the horizon doesn't mean we shouldn't care about the possibility.
As long as you can imagine what sorts of bad things could be done with that personal data, the argument is: you should care because you don't know for a fact what tomorrow will look like.
[1] If Wikipedia is to be believed, it's been 20 years now since Godwin's Law was first formulated!
> But again, I can't think of any of the information on a social networking site being all that damning.
Then you don't understand the concerns. What is perfectly routine today may be damning tomorrow. Yes, Nazi Germany was an extreme event, but it happened, and there's no reason something like it couldn't happen again. It might not even be anything you posted, maybe you are friends with a lot of people that have radical political ideas. Maybe something you posted could be taken out of context. If you think that all people would be able to get out of this data is "lol, had eggs for breakfast today", then you are seriously underestimating the value of this data.
Maybe not next year, but what about 30-40 years from now? Facebook or Google might not even exist then, but you can be pretty sure that your data will exist, along with your social graph. That's a tangible asset that can be sold, no matter what happens to these companies. Or seized by some government, for that matter.
Is this just being paranoid and obsessed with privacy? Lets hope so.
A german friend put it this way: Most jews in pre-nazi Germany didn't mind having their religious affiliation listed in their passport. Many were indeed proud to be jews.
Would anyone of them have been able to imagine what this information would be used for just a few years down the line? Wouldn't anyone worrying about this collection of data have been laughed at and called paranoid?