Privacy theate of the absurd

Useful article on TechCrunch about Privacy (or lack of it) in social networks:

At least those Terms of Service (ToS) that force us to copy addresses and phone numbers one-by-one also prevent scoundrels from stealing our identity; reselling our friends to marketers; and linking our life online to the real world. Right?

Wrong. When RockYou can stash 32 million passwords in the clear; when RapLeaf can index 600 million email accounts; and when Intelius can go public by buying 100 million profile pages; then our social networks have traded away our privacy for mere “privacy theater.”

With apologies to Bruce Schneier’s brilliant coinage, “security theater” (e.g. the magical thinking behind forcing passengers to sit down and shut up for the last hour of international flights), social networks have been dogged by one disaster after another in 2009 because they pursue policies that provide the “feeling of improved privacy while doing little or nothing to actually improve privacy.”

As long as the same information that social networks piously prohibit their own customers from using is being bought and sold on the open market by giant marketing companies, social networks are only pretending protect your privacy.

There's not a lot new here (we covered the economics of all this in 2008 with one of the papers on Freeconomics, "Why your data is Free but everywhere in chains", but nice top see it in a big article on TechCrunch. To be honest, I genuinely thought the post Beacon 2009 was the year the Privacy stuff would hit the fan, but it didn't - its only really the real digerati who understand what is being done in and to your name. The rank and file still seem not to know or care.

Maybe 2010 will be different? I hope so.....