

Price of Facebook Privacy? Start Clicking - bjonathan
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/13/technology/personaltech/13basics.html?src=tptw

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philwelch
The US Constitution is unusually short because it's written on the principle
of English common law. In traditional common law, the written law is very
short and very general. Then, as complications come up, the courts interpret
it and precedent is applied. This is opposed to more statutory systems where
you try to write a law as specifically as possible and the courts don't have
as much power to decide "case law".

Another famous example of common law is "The Laws of the Game", the official
rulebook of association football (soccer):
[http://www.fifa.com/mm/document/affederation/federation/81/4...](http://www.fifa.com/mm/document/affederation/federation/81/42/36/lawsofthegameen.pdf)

44 pages of the document are the rules themselves (17 rules), there's about 3
pages of addendum, and then over 50 pages of summarized interpretation (the
equivalent of case law). The pages themselves are not very dense.

~~~
known
more laws = more corruption

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brk
My right arm is longer than my left foot.

I'm really not sure how this is a logical comparison in anything other than a
link-bait case.

The click-through licenses on some freemium apps I've used are also longer
than than the Constitution, yet shorter than War and Peace.

I would expect most modern legal-ese documents that define restrictions and
allowances related to privacy to be longer than 200 year old documents
designed to grant basic freedoms and allowances to society. Especially when
you consider that the US Constitution holds the distinction of being the
shortest such document of any modern nation with a Constitution.

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jacoblyles
For a relevant comparison: every bill Congress passes is hundreds of times
longer than the Constitution. How does that make you feel?

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YogSothoth
Like the current folks in congress aren't nearly as smart as the folks who
wrote the constitution.

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apike
Don't miss the article's infographic, "A Bewildering Tangle of Options" on the
complexity of the privacy options panels.
[http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/05/12/business/faceb...](http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/05/12/business/facebook-
privacy.html)

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mhartl
There was a bit this week on "The Daily Show" that chided the British for not
writing down their Constitution. But the British version is lower-case: their
government has a constitution, not a Constitution. And that's the original
meaning, _constitution_ being an English word meaning "the composition of
something".

Clearly, the U.S. Constitution bears little resemblance to the U.S.
Government's constitution. How long would USG's actual constitution be if you
wrote it down? Let's just say it would be a _wee_ bit longer than Facebook's
privacy policy.

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jaxn
I find it interesting how short Flickr's policy is in relation to the others.
Especially since Flickr would seem to have more intellectual property.

I assume that is because of their use of existing copyleft license options for
photos.

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tokenadult
And it is considerably more subject to amendment.

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aneth
It also hopefully will not require 220+ and counting years of jurisprudence
for its true meaning to be divined.

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pmccool
I expect there's enough case law relating to Facebook's privacy policy to keep
things interesting. That's the common ground as far as I can see: neither can
be read in isolation.

