The threat is that Facebook has become too big to fail. A major leak of private data and messages of its users would be devastating to society given the scale.
What happens if/when Facebook fails as a company? What happens to the data then? It gets sold off. That's a scary prospect.
Facebook is in the fickle game of Internet advertising. When the noise overcomes the signal in what Facebook shows, when the content of the users' connections gets drowned out to advertising, people will leave in droves. When advertisers fail to see the return on their investment, the money will dry up.
> A major leak of private data and messages of its users
What's to say this isn't already happening in real-time? You don't even need to tap the trunk lines (to use a Matrix reference), you simply need to have enough "fakebook" contacts and some Persona Management Software [1].
If a major leak will be that devastating to society, we need a major leak even more urgently, so that the illusion of privacy is dispelled and people can properly calibrate to the costs and/or risks of their behavior. Otherwise we only continue to raise the stakes.
I really don't think the best deterrent to getting into a fatal car accident is to get into a fatal car accident. Also, I don't wish to experience losing a limb but surviving a car accident in order to prime myself to avoid a fatal accident.
What data can facebook possible have that would "devastating" in a leak scenario? Facebook has only what users have put on the site to share, and all data present is at least semipublic. There are no addresses, no bank accounts, no SSNs. The valuable part of facebook is already freely available: your list of "liked" pages and your social graph.
It's very reductive to claim that only addresses, bank account [numbers], and SSNs could be dangerous if leaked.
What about people who discuss private matters in chat? (e.g. sexuality, medical history, drug use, etc.) Yes, we know that's a bad idea, but most people aren't HN readers.
What about state actors using Facebook's metadata alone to quash democratic movements before they get off the ground?[1] To advertisers, most of the social graph is available only in a semi-abstracted form (e.g. target X, Y, and Z qualities and degrees of connection). A leak or sale could make that information available directly.
What about criminals using a public leak of location data and some predictive algorithms to strategically rob homes? (and maybe also using patterns of likes and connections to predict whose home is worth burgling?)
Really, to say that the valuable part of Facebook is already freely available brings to mind the words "limited imagination." Facebook keeps the valuable part to itself and meters even limited access to it. And there is extensive danger with the possibility of a leak or sale of the raw data.
That's what I'm saying... Actually, it reminds me of when Wikileaks first came out, and I'd been reading the book of Revelations (as literature, it's an epic poem). There is this part where there is a scroll with 7 seals. An angel asks "who is worthy to break these seals?" People are weeping about it.
What kind of society can handle a full disclosure of information on this magnitude, now or even in the future, looking back? Imagine living 40 years from now, and your parent's full social media records have just been leaked in a mass dump of some data collection company. Could you handle that?
Okay and without appealing to apocalyptic literature, just think about the potentially devastating consequences of mass numbers of people getting access to their enemies' private data all at once. Good for you if you survive that kind of dump personally, but what about your community, your family?
But back to the metaphysical level, shit's about to get real wild if scientific knowledge keeps growing like it has been, especially as "ai" comes more able to translate and interpret these masses of digital data... Plus the vast stores of biological information waiting to be tapped.
Really, a history of likes, a corpus of chat messages, a corpus of public status, and some corpus of potential location data/ usage data depending on the devices used; that's what you liken to an apocalyptic event? Your family, your community, everyone will be just fine. Potentially some population already living in oppressive situations will be impacted (your religious family learns you're gay, etc) but the vast majority will just stop using Facebook and move to the next social media site. What kind of data do you imagine people storing on facebook (remember nothing is there you, the user, hasn't explicitly decided to share with someone aside from whatever they track internally interms of usage and location).
By default a person's friends list is visible from their public profile so if you want to go put together a graph you're welcome to.
First off, yes, I also think people will make it through this and be better in the long run. But I think this stuff is inevitably going to be a major source of heat, and it's going to take some processing. There is a lot of 'potential energy' stored up in private information (I'm not just talking about Facebook). People keep secrets, and the amount being held behind cryptographic algorithms is only growing by the year.
I'm mostly talking about private messages, browsing history, stuff that people would prefer not to be known widely because of pervasive judgements and stigmas in our society.
"What kind of data do you imagine people storing on facebook..."
Nude photos and videos, secrets, accusations, candid personal details, private plans, irrational fears, fantasies, love notes to people who aren't their spouses, etc.
The human web is thickly interwoven. You say "Potentially some population already living in oppressive situations will be impacted". Well, their experiences would not be trivial, and your experience is not disconnected from "those people" either for that matter. I'd imagine they are your friends, your neighbors, your community too. People around us are having secretive relationships ("affairs"), while others hide domestic or sexual abuse. People have skeletons in the digital server closets, things they'd rather forget about and move past, but which are lingering on redundant backups somewhere.
Uh, it's widely known that fb buys tons of data from many 3rd party brokers. It's not hard for them to get whatever they need, including ssn's I'm sure. And they definitely do have addresses from 3rd parties.
>" Facebook has only what users have put on the site to share, and all data present is at least semipublic. There are no addresses, no bank accounts, no SSNs."
No FB buys third party/offline data about its users, I don't we know what they have:
What happens if/when Facebook fails as a company? What happens to the data then? It gets sold off. That's a scary prospect.
Facebook is in the fickle game of Internet advertising. When the noise overcomes the signal in what Facebook shows, when the content of the users' connections gets drowned out to advertising, people will leave in droves. When advertisers fail to see the return on their investment, the money will dry up.