Facebook reportedly argues there's no 'expectation of privacy' on social media

We'll put. Unfortunately in this case, iur legal and often social reasoning works exactly this way.

I think you've put your finger on the metaphor at the heart of this problem: the public square. I've had this thought several times when hearing/reading Jack Dorsey's response to all sorts of issues. We can't have a private owner and rulemaker for our public squares, without losing some of that metaphor's more meaningful implications.

I think there are two big issues at play. One is that public square issue. If that is appropriate to think of FB that way, I think the implication is exactly opposite of what FB execs want: you can't exclusively exploit it for private gain. A (metaphorical) public square is a political (literal) forum. The types of problems that come with a private public forum are exactly those demonstrated by the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The public forum gets auctioned off secretly to political bidders.

The second issue is another (possibly) metaphor broken by a shift in the underlying reality. "Expectation of privacy" means something totally different online. There's no expectation of privacy when you get in your car and drive to the store. But, if a new technology happens to give a company the ability to log your car's whereabouts at all times.

Not just that. Also selling the ability to remote control boom mics and remote control telephoto cameras, so they can send you an advertisement based on what you were looking at.

If you stand in the section of the public square next to Facebook and they listen in, then it's no different than standing by any other website. It's true FB is popular and present in a large portion of the square, but they're not entirely unavoidable in the public square.

It's also true that others can talk about you and share your information in the public square and Facebook will pick it up, but now we're dealing with control over your own information in the public square, which is a different topic altogether.

At least that's the German interpretation, afaik in the US, it's interpreted a bit differently where everything "in the public" has no reasonable expectation of being "private"?

Here is another one: social media is like a livley party where people can mingle in large and not do large rooms with different degrees of interaction with the totality of the guests. One can see that this is not a metaphor that FB would choose to discuss.

You mean like a mall? There's no expectation of privacy at the mall.

It is not a metaphor. It is an analogy. It was used as comparison to the living room.

Knowing that, it is hard to follow your point.

The problem I see with your suggestion is then society must pro-actively make some sort of decision for each and every domain in advance, which isn’t possible. The goal of expectation of privacy is as a test to determine when privacy would be or has been violated on a case by case basis. In that sense it’s already somewhat doing what you’re talking about; it is a way to determine whether society deems privacy beneficial in a given domain.

Whether privacy is achievable does not make a good criteria at all, because it’s always possible to compromise privacy. The entire point of the “expectation of privacy” test is to determine whether someone who did violate another’s privacy should be allowed to, it’s a pre-cursor to determining right to privacy.

But even though people use many parts of Facebook less often, it's really hard to quit Facebook entirely because a lot of social activity revolves around it. In my circle, people tend to plan events using Facebook and often use Messenger to communicate. In university, people would ask questions in various FB groups. So while no one's really happy with Facebook, it still provides several conveniences that we don't want to live without.

Also, Instagram is still very popular - much of the activity that used to be on Facebook seems to have moved there.

Apart from that, when meeting people and continuing to meet them, I usually use the good old phone to communicate with them. The people I interact the most with on Facebook are at the same time mostly those I meet the least in the real world.

Shaving off an additional layer of complexity...

I also fear what FB and Zuck are capable of if they realise they're on a dead-end business model, and what abuses of personal data we might see as they attempt to cash out before everything dries up...

If you've read the article, the context here is the cambridge analytica scandal, not someone posting on their public timeline.

So you actually are conceding the point. You agree that "most participants" actually do have an expectation of privacy.

That's an individuals own risk, and not the same as whether Facebook should treat them as private, and don't sell them, expose them, etc.

Sure, I should be cautious of what I say in social media, because e.g. the other side could leak it, the servers could be hacked and the contents exposed, etc.

The same holds for my snail mail or what I type in my laptop. But I still expect those to be kept private (and even more importantly, want them to be kept so, and want the law to enforce that).

Just because there's no "perpetual guarantee" doesn't mean there shouldn't be company closing fines for selling your data, or showing negligence in making them private (e.g. unencrypted passwords come to mind) etc.

Is it ok for Amazon to sell or use them? How about using them to blackmail me ? Would that be ok?