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People believe that Facebook and the web in general should be able to protect the information we post online. This goes against the fundamental design of Facebook, social media, and the web itself. We should be relying on ourselves for our privacy, and not turning Facebook into our scapegoat.

Privacy is dead. Facebook, social media, and the web itself are designed to share information. While you can be angry about Facebook’s lack of communication over the privacy issue, to believe that information on Facebook or other social networks is inherently private or “yours” is just wrong.

Protecting our privacy starts with us, not Facebook. The privacy wall did not exist in the first place. The web makes the transmission of information easier than ever. Social media makes spreading that information even simpler. The web is a network of information, and information has no walls.

http://mashable.com/2010/05/16/in-defense-of-facebook/

Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard.
Mark Zuckerberg: Just ask.
Mark Zuckerberg: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS.
[Redacted Friend]: What? How'd you manage that one?
Mark Zuckerberg: People just submitted it.
Mark Zuckerberg: I don't know why.
Mark Zuckerberg: They "trust me".
Mark Zuckerberg: Dumb fucks.

Facebook has gone rogue, drunk on founder Mark Zuckerberg's dreams of world domination. It is time the rest of the web ecosystem recognizes this and works to replace it with something open and distributed.

It is time to find a way to let people control what and how they would like to share. Facebook’s basic functions can be turned into protocols, and a whole set of interoperating software and services can flourish.

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/05/facebook-rogue/

Back in January 2009, David Bond packed a rucksack, kissed his pregnant wife Katie and toddler Ivy, climbed into his Toyota Prius and drove away from home. Nobody knew where he was going -- he didn’t even know himself. One thing he was sure about was this: "I'm going to leave my life behind and disappear," he said.  In the days that followed, he was being followed by detectives.

It was Bond himself who persuaded the detectives to follow him. "I told them I was making a film about privacy and surveillance, and wanted to be hunted." He wondered if it was possible, in surveillance Britain, to keep himself to himself for a month. "I promised I wouldn't sue them, whatever they did, as long as they didn't cause my family any distress. 'We'll have you in four days,' they laughed."

Bond spent a long time finding the right detectives for his project, talking to countless retired coppers before he found Duncan Mee and Cameron Gowlett of Cerberus. Ordinarily, they work as investigators for major companies and law firms, scrupulously following the letter of the law as they trail organised gangs, often in unstable parts of the world. How hard could it be to find Bond?

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/the_way_we_live/article7096105.ece

Since its incorporation just over five years ago, Facebook has undergone a remarkable transformation. When it started, it was a private space for communication with a group of your choice. Soon, it transformed into a platform where much of your information is public by default. Today, it has become a platform where you have no choice but to make certain information public, and this public information may be shared by Facebook with its partner websites and used to target ads.

Next week a startup is launching that is effectively Yelp for people. If someone has something good or bad to say about you, they will be able to do it anonymously and with very little potential legal or social fallout.

We have lots of experience publishing random opinions about people on Twitter, Yelp and Facebook. It is time for a centralized place for anonymous mass defamation on the internet. Scary? Yes. But it is coming nonetheless.

This has been on my mind for a long time. We are in a world where gossip is completely public, there are few repercussions to those spreading it, and it is easily searchable. No wonder people freak out. We are fish out of water.

But it is much harder to get that stuff off of services that exist to publish that information. Imagine how you will feel when the top result for your name is a site that includes “reviews” of you by anonymous people who know you.

Piss someone off at work and you will have “Sketchy and unethical in the workplace” pop up about you. And it will be there forever. Heck, your great-great-grandchildren will be reading it long after you are gone.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/28/reputation-is-dead-its-time-to-overlook-our-indiscretions/

Laptops issued to high-school students in the well-off Lower Merion School District of Philadelphia have webcams that can be covertly activated by the schools' administrators, who have used this facility to spy on students and even their families.

The spying was revealed when a pupil was disciplined for "improper behavior in his home", and the Vice Principal used a photo taken by the webcam as evidence. The class action suit was brought on behalf of all students issued with the laptops.

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/02/17/school-used-student.html

As the Web becomes more social, privacy becomes harder and harder to come by. People are over-sharing on Facebook and Twitter, broadcasting their whereabouts every ten steps on Foursquare and Gowalla, and uploading photos and videos of their most private moments to the Web for all to see. It’s easy to say that privacy is dead, we all live in public now, and just deal with it.

But things are a bit more complicated. It used to be that we lived in private and chose to make parts of our lives public. Now that is being turned on its head. We live in public, like the movie says (except via micro-signals not 24-7 video self-surveillance), and choose what parts of our lives to keep private. Public is the new default. Stowe Boyd calls this new state of exposure "publicy."

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/30/we-all-live-in-public/