Years ago I worked with a guy who used to sell computer equipment to businesses.
He told me that when he went to different divisions in each company, they all had org/structure charts somewhere around the office. And in every one of them, their section was in the middle and everybody else was serviced by them. No matter what you did, you were the center of the universe to you.
Likewise, I've had experience building and working on many computer systems for businesses. Each of them, if successful, wants to handle not just their thing but everything for their customers. No matter what they did, they wanted to be the center of the universe for their customers.
You can laugh at these examples, and we all know most software companies have much great ambition than they do traction, but Facebook and Google are actually doing this. They are becoming the center of the information universe to their customers.
Its also not a good thing that we don't know who Facebook or Google is selling this or giving this information to. The advertising agencies, meh kinda. The organisations with acronyms, they are more worrisome. I also wonder, to what extent the amount of information they have about the average user.
This is certainly not everything they know about you. This is part of their initiative to be not-evil, it’s called Data Liberation Front[1]. In their own words:
> Loyalty, not lock-in. We firmly believe you control your data, so we have a team of engineers whose only goal is to help you take your information with you. [2]
It’s absolutely terrific that they have something like this. Many others had to be dragged there kicking and screaming.
However, this is just not relevant to the topic at hand. This is “your data”, the data that you deliberately created, rather than revealed accidentally. The point of the project is to avoid vendor lock-in, rather than to protect your privacy.
If you’re EU resident, you should be able to just write to them and they have to reveal everything they have on you. And that list will be entirely different from this.
I believe the argument is that having all your information in one service (Google, Facebook,..) is like having all your eggs in one basket.
Then, if the company decides to sell your information, lose it, etc., it's too easy, and you're left empty-handed.
However, I think that if that 1 service makes it possible for you to backup all your information and allows you to remove all the information from their service if you want to, then it shouldn't be a problem... but I might be underplaying their argument...
> However, I think that if that 1 service makes it possible for you to backup all your information and allows you to remove all the information from their service if you want to, then it shouldn't be a problem...
I put all my eggs in one basket every time I take the family to the grocery store. It's unclear to me why storing all my information with Google is any worse than piling my wife and kids into the Odyssey.
When you drive, your goals and the goals of everyone else on the road are roughly aligned insofar as you all want to travel from one place to another place quickly and safely. There are pretty rough consequences for those whose goals aren't similarly aligned. So yes, you could be killed by someone else driving drunk, but it's relatively unlikely.
Google's goals and mine aren't aligned at all, except instrumentally. So Google cares about my privacy up to and until it costs them less to not care than to care.
I'm fully in the Google camp, but let's be honest about the fact that we've made a deal with some supernatural being. We just hope it turns out not to be the devil.
Imagine if google died. You have your email with them. Now you can't login to any other service that you have forgotten your login and password to, because you don't have access to email.
Say you use Google Apps For Domains. Thinking it is safer because you own your own domain. Arguments that you don't really own that domain aside, if google dies, you won't be able to transfer that domain away from google.
Email is the backbone of an approval system for just about everything.
I think you can pretty safely put all your eggs in one basket, as long as you take one egg out, that being your email access. At the very least, forward all inbound emails to some other service so you have access to those in an emergency.
Ideally, we would all have our own mini email servers that we control and manage. However, managing an email server is perhaps one of the harder chunks of tech to manage. From anti-spam to just configuring all the pieces, it is much more than most are willing to do.
Google allows you to download your data, which includes the emails of your contacts, your icals etc. In Facebook you get your list of contacts consisting in a list of full names in pure text, no emails. The only way to get in contact with them is to connect with them on facebook, making the data completely useless. With Google, you can export everything and use it somewhere else and still be in touch with your contacts, calendars etc _without_ ever using google again. Big difference.
Google gives you the email addresses because you provided them with that data, it's yours to begin with. Facebook will give you the email addresses, but only for the users that allowed it to share that data with you.
Will Google give you the email addresses of your Google+ contacts, if they decided not to share their address with you? I doubt it, and rightly so.
“Data Liberation” means that you own your data, not that using some social network gives you the right to be able to communicate with people outside of that service. If you want to contact them outside of Facebook, ask them their email. It's your problem, not Facebook's.
Your argument is like saying that Google should give me my Gmail contacts' phone numbers, so I can contact them without using email.
How long has this existed? I don't recall seeing such an option when I deactivated my account almost a year ago, and it might be worth trying to reactivate my account just to get this data.
i can't manage fb to share location information from friend accounts. if 2 accounts upload an (similar) image including one active check-in fb only suggests locations based on the check-ins of that active account. this is even true for public images.
until someone provides a POC that states the opposite it's just YOUR data that YOU freely give to fb. no magic behind, just FUD.
I've been working for some time (solo) on a concept that could manage to alleviate some of your concerns. There are ways around them today (API), but who knows if they'll be foreclosed upon in the future.
Like many old farts, I imagine, I see your post in terms of the thick-client/thin-client battles of years past. I don't think FB will ever see it in their interests to completely close their garden, which would really be remaking the mistakes of the past, but stranger things have happened.
He told me that when he went to different divisions in each company, they all had org/structure charts somewhere around the office. And in every one of them, their section was in the middle and everybody else was serviced by them. No matter what you did, you were the center of the universe to you.
Likewise, I've had experience building and working on many computer systems for businesses. Each of them, if successful, wants to handle not just their thing but everything for their customers. No matter what they did, they wanted to be the center of the universe for their customers.
You can laugh at these examples, and we all know most software companies have much great ambition than they do traction, but Facebook and Google are actually doing this. They are becoming the center of the information universe to their customers.
This is not a good thing.