Privacy And Data On Social Nets

There's a whole lot of bloviating going on about who owns your data on social nets, a conversation that dovetails into other issues, such as privacy. I'm one to get real hyper about privacy issues, but that's not really the point. Over at Techdirt Julian Sanchez makes an excellent point that a lot of folks are ignoring:

It's true that a script can only sweep up information that would already have been visible to a particular user anyway. But privacy is not just a function of the publicity of your personal information, but of the searchability and aggregability of that information. Public closed-circuit surveillance cameras, for instance, typically capture the same information that a casual observer on the street is already privy to. But we recognize that being spotted by diverse random pedestrians, or even being captured on diffuse and disconnected private security cameras, is not intrusive in the same way as being captured on a citywide surveillance system that is searchable from a centralized location. By the same token, I may be unhappy with the possibility of someone forming an external public database full of data I've freely shared with more narrow communities—personal, regional, or whatever.

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