Nani huyu?

When Facebook released the News Feed they didn’t decrease anyone’s privacy.  They simply showed everyone exactly what they were revealing.  Facebook made sharing data so easy that people didn’t realize what they were sharing.  But micromanaging data online makes people less likely to share.  So where’s the balance?

Flickr uses a term called ‘privacy through obscurity’ where they make data easy to share privately, but it’s not actually private.  It’s the idea of emailing a random URL to a friend.  That friend could, in turn, email the link to the world, but they probably won’t, cuz you wouldn’t have send them the link if you thought they would.  And you can always change the URL.

Oauth kind of falls into this bucket.  You can give a third party website a token to access to your data.  In turn, they could share that token with the world.  But they probably won’t, and you could always change the token.

But how do we define what data is shared?  Let say I have some data, a photo for example.  It has a static amount of value to me living on my computer.  I add that photo to a social network and it accrues new value and new meaning as people comment on the photo.  I can take my photo back, or move it to a new social network, but I can’t take the comments with me.   And even if I could, should I be able to?  Who owns those comments?  Do I have the right to share those comments with the world?