The past few days have seen a renewal of the conversation about privacy on Facebook. Articles of note include Privacy Advocates Slam Facebook Change and How Facebook is Making Friending Obsolete.
Protecting privacy isn’t a challenge unique to Facebook. It was around long before the invention of HTML and Web sites 15 years ago, but those developments made the challenge acute. The pre-Web Internet was about connecting people directly, but the Web caused a reversion to publishing and broadcasting models. The Web and HTML have contributed to the growth of the Internet, but their main side effect has been to force us into silos to connect with each other. Facebook, with 350 million users, is one impressive silo, but more than 1.7 billion Internet users are spread among millions of other silos.
So, what does this mean for privacy? Read the rest of this entry »
