Copyright and data "onwenship" are not actually useful frames for establishing practical privacy rights. Too many philosophical minefields. Instead in places like Europe and Australia, privacy rights are created by setting controls on how businesses and governments are permitted to handle Personal Information. The resulting laws are admittedly incomplete; they don't for example have anything to say about inter-personal privacy, and they only apply to information in recorded forms. But the laws are relatively simple, very objective, easily applied, and they dispel many of the imprecise analogies (like letter writing, letter ownership and whispering).
See also http://lockstep.com.au/blog/2011/01/26/public-yet-still-private.
It's a strange thing. When the Internet goes right, it's a disruptive, radical medium utterly unlike anything that anyone has ever seen before ever. But when it goes wrong, well, the Internet is just like a letter.
Posting to an OSN is not closely like writing a letter. This particular OSN has led people to believe that when they post to a circle, their comms will remain in that circle. To break an undertaking as to how teh OSN will handle the personal information of a user is a privacy breach, regardless of whether or not that user is perhaps a bit naive, or whether there might be umpteen other ways for information to leak.
Ok, so I am not going to argue that e-mails can't be fowarded. Of course people should assume that anything they write to the Net can be let loose (and so I have a personal e-mail policy to never write anything, ever, that I couldn't live with being splashed on a billboard, and that habit has saved my bacon several times).
But ...
The privacy issue highlighted here is not totally bogus. I continue to be shocked by the barely disguised loathing that so many netizens have for privacy advocates. Please, think about the issue for a few minutes before flaming anyone who feels that perhaps Google hasn't lived up to its privacy promises (and please allow for people's skepticism in these early days of 'plus' given Google's troubled and two faced history).
Privacy is fundamantally about control. Information privacy laws and principles (in places that legislate them) are concerned with protecting individuals against intrusions by government and businesses. The principles call for minimising the collection of Personal Information (collecting no more than is necessary), telling users what is being collected, from where and for what purpose, and undertaking to safeguard information once collected, in particular promising to not put it to unforseen secondary uses.
In the Google+ case, it's great that they are making the circle GUI so clear and overt. It's terrific that they provide for limits on how information put into one circle can be disclosed to other circles. But if the system allows those limits to be circumvented, in effect misleading people about the limits that have actuallu been put on their information, then that's a breach of privacy.
It's obviously not for Google to make absolute promises about disclosure. Clearly information can be cut & paste from a Google+ account by a disrespectful account holder and sent on by e-mail or whatever. So I don't say the Google+ weakness identified here represents a grievous privacy breach. But nevetheless, it should be taken seriously, because privacy is about control and promising to provide controls.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: My concern is
Copyright and data "onwenship" are not actually useful frames for establishing practical privacy rights. Too many philosophical minefields. Instead in places like Europe and Australia, privacy rights are created by setting controls on how businesses and governments are permitted to handle Personal Information. The resulting laws are admittedly incomplete; they don't for example have anything to say about inter-personal privacy, and they only apply to information in recorded forms. But the laws are relatively simple, very objective, easily applied, and they dispel many of the imprecise analogies (like letter writing, letter ownership and whispering).
See also http://lockstep.com.au/blog/2011/01/26/public-yet-still-private.
Re: Re:
It's a strange thing. When the Internet goes right, it's a disruptive, radical medium utterly unlike anything that anyone has ever seen before ever. But when it goes wrong, well, the Internet is just like a letter.
Posting to an OSN is not closely like writing a letter. This particular OSN has led people to believe that when they post to a circle, their comms will remain in that circle. To break an undertaking as to how teh OSN will handle the personal information of a user is a privacy breach, regardless of whether or not that user is perhaps a bit naive, or whether there might be umpteen other ways for information to leak.
Taking privacy seriously
Ok, so I am not going to argue that e-mails can't be fowarded. Of course people should assume that anything they write to the Net can be let loose (and so I have a personal e-mail policy to never write anything, ever, that I couldn't live with being splashed on a billboard, and that habit has saved my bacon several times).
But ...
The privacy issue highlighted here is not totally bogus. I continue to be shocked by the barely disguised loathing that so many netizens have for privacy advocates. Please, think about the issue for a few minutes before flaming anyone who feels that perhaps Google hasn't lived up to its privacy promises (and please allow for people's skepticism in these early days of 'plus' given Google's troubled and two faced history).
Privacy is fundamantally about control. Information privacy laws and principles (in places that legislate them) are concerned with protecting individuals against intrusions by government and businesses. The principles call for minimising the collection of Personal Information (collecting no more than is necessary), telling users what is being collected, from where and for what purpose, and undertaking to safeguard information once collected, in particular promising to not put it to unforseen secondary uses.
In the Google+ case, it's great that they are making the circle GUI so clear and overt. It's terrific that they provide for limits on how information put into one circle can be disclosed to other circles. But if the system allows those limits to be circumvented, in effect misleading people about the limits that have actuallu been put on their information, then that's a breach of privacy.
It's obviously not for Google to make absolute promises about disclosure. Clearly information can be cut & paste from a Google+ account by a disrespectful account holder and sent on by e-mail or whatever. So I don't say the Google+ weakness identified here represents a grievous privacy breach. But nevetheless, it should be taken seriously, because privacy is about control and promising to provide controls.