
Taking Privacy Seriously - pclark
https://everyme.com/blog/taking_privacy_seriously
======
tzs
> So I give Mark Zuckerberg credit where credit is due: he was right to make
> public the default in 2009. Whether you intend to keep things private or not
> on Facebook, you are just delaying the inevitable.

Indeed. Society seems to be undergoing a shift toward not really caring about
privacy. This has profound implications, even for those who do care about
their privacy and wish to guard at.

There was an excellent essay last week in the Stanford Law Review by Judge
Kozinski of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on this topic:
[http://www.stanfordlawreview.org/online/privacy-
paradox/dead...](http://www.stanfordlawreview.org/online/privacy-paradox/dead-
past)

Anyone who cares about privacy should read that. One of the excellent points
Kozinski makes is that the 4th Amendment limits on government are determined
by what is a reasonable expectation of privacy, and so even if you
scrupulously try to protect your privacy, if everyone else doesn't care that
shifts the line for a reasonable expectation and that can screw you.

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ttt_
The author fails to abord the issue of how will the service treat user data in
regard to third parties.

Isn't that worth mentioning when you claim that you are taking privacy
seriously?

~~~
vnorby
I can answer that for you here. This article is more about privacy as our
product although it is also our policy. Our Privacy Policy and TOS outline
things in legalese, but in human language, we take it seriously on the backend
as well. We even put our legal documents on GitHub so you can track changes to
them. We abide by all TOS provided by other APIs. We don't store your address
book or your friends data; we don't want that liability. All connections are
made through SSL. We will never share your data with anyone else (outside of
legal obligations, I suppose - but please read our Privacy Policy and TOS for
the final word as I am not our lawyer).

~~~
schiffern
>We will never share your data with anyone else.

If that 'someone else' carries a court-ordered subpoena you will have a hard
time adhering to that promise.

~~~
vnorby
Updated my comment to be a little more clear on that, thanks :)

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saraid216
I'm kinda confused what this post is saying. "Everything is going public," it
says, "it's inevitable, and privacy controls are just delaying the
inevitable." And then between paragraphs, there's a sudden non-sequitur: "So
we're making it so that you can keep private things private in an intuitive
way."

I... where did that come from? I laud the effort to take privacy seriously.
That's good and something people care about. But how does that follow at all
from everything else they said?

(By the way, I have several people who I can't find any data about by casual
googling. They're mostly people I went to college with who I failed to keep in
contact with. I'm sure if I started digging into govt data, I could get
somewhere, but that's a depth I don't feel comfortable plumbing.)

~~~
vnorby
Sorry that wasn't more clear. I think privacy controls on a product like
Facebook, designed and redesigned ad infinitum to make you share things in
public, fail at doing so in the long run. Everyme was designed from the
ground-up for private sharing.

