It's not about what data is on Facebook or a public web site. It's about the so-called "social graph" sites like Facebook create. That is, the relationships between people indicated directly between people (friends) and the inferred relationships worked out by mining data.
The point is on his website, he chooses what photograph of himself is put there. On Facebook, you have no control when others are sharing photographs with you in them. On your own website you would presumably not post photographs of yourself that compromises your privacy, but when others do so on social networks, there is no guarantee like that (unless every single one of your friends on Facebook explicitly gets permission from you for every photo they post to Facebook that contains you before sharing, which never happens).
> On a public web site you could simply copy a photo and put it on another web site.
On your own public website you can choose what photos you want to put there. If you put a photo on a public website, clearly you have no issue with the photo being seen by other people. This is not true for photos that others share with you in them. Your real life friends take photographs of you and publishes them on Facebook without your consent, some of which you may not want to be public.
> Differing how from if they just posted it on a public web site other than Facebook?
Most public websites do not index user photographs by time/event and are easily searchable by name. But yes, it is not that different in general fundamentally. Facebook just allows the information to be much more easily aggregated and browsed
Yes it is true for the Internet in general. But Facebook is a bit special in that you can easily search for a person by name and have all photographs of him/her in one big organized pile, which is not possible on the Internet in general.
Only the people of Facebook, or external entities who are explicitly granted permission, can perform that search though. It's not like I can just hop on Facebook and find all the picture of you, unless you have already permitted me to.
If you are an entity like the aforementioned NSA, searching the entire Internet for your photo isn't really any more challenging than using Facebook. The computing resources necessary are considerably larger, but that is a relatively small barrier.
I see at least two ways that having data in Facebook has the potential to help governments learn more about people: things (relationships, events, biographical data) are pre-structured in a single clear ontology, and Facebook has direct access to all of the facts in the system.
If we imagine a more decentralized system, people might well still adopt a single ontology for events and relationships, but much "private" information might actually never be revealed to third parties, as opposed to disclosing all of it to Facebook and asking Facebook to limit whom they show it to.
Well, there is the case of that douchebag who was running isanyoneup - this was on HN recently - that is a counter example. I could take pictures of you and associate them with your name so google would link to them when someone looks for you.
I agree that it's much easier through facebook, though.
It is in a way. However it is much harder to aggregate all these pictures and data when you need to scrape everybody's personal blogs. Facebook makes it very easy to gather and use this data (they even make you organize it for them by putting photos into different collections). Fundamentally though there is no difference between posting it on your blog vs Facebook.
I can see how the searching can be an issue, but if someone is motivated enough, they can just use Google right?
I dunno, I have issues with facebook but I actually like how photos and tagging automatically fill my timeline so I don't have to actually write to my family.
Besides, most of the things you (if you were the NSA) could find through Facebook could almost trivially be found through looking through the guy's e-mail, or other sources. Nobody thinks Facebook to be private anyways, since its main purpose is for stuff to be published (to friends, but considering I have 300 on FB, it might as well be public)
It's always a balance between the value you get out of FB vs your privacy concerns. For most people, they value the features of FB (e.g. photo tagging) more than they value their own privacy, so they continue to share and use FB. For Stallman obviously the opposite is true.
Agreed. In fact, I have no control over photos of me that anyone can post anywhere on the web, where Google indexes them and makes them searchable. At least with Facebook I can untag them and in some cases get them removed....
