 BlackbirdBuilt for SpeedPremium
join:2005-01-14
Fort Wayne, IN
kudos:3
 ·Frontier Communi..
| reply to ashrc4
Re: The joys of making your data public;Facebook Graph Searches. He makes a couple of really good points...
quote:
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The people showing up here (his embarrassing Facebook graph example searches) aren’t stupid: they just don’t have the knowledge required to be safe. If I took my car to a garage for a tune-up, a disreputable mechanic could fleece me for unwanted repairs and I’d never know it: that doesn’t make me stupid, it just means my knowledge is in other areas.
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Most of the danger online comes not from strangers making half-assed joke searches: it comes from people who know you. A lot of the public data fails what I call the ‘bitter ex test’: can someone who hates you ruin your life with that information?...
What he fails to note in his summary is that there are other folks seriously watching, besides the curious and the marketers. One of his example searches was for "Islamic men interested in men who live in Tehran, Iran". Similar searches with purported social/political overtones made by the wrong "interested" people could have fatal consequences for at least some of those showing up in the results. I believe most people don't even remotely grasp the harming power available to complete strangers through data analysis and correlation of personal available information those people are putting into online social networks... even if (or especially if) the analyses turn out to be wrong.
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“The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.” A. de Tocqueville |
