Taking Privacy Seriously | Hacker News Reader

Taking Privacy Seriously

everyme.com

17 pointspclark7 comments

> So I give Mark Zuckerberg credit where credit is due: he was right to make public the default in 2009. Whether you intend to keep things private or not on Facebook, you are just delaying the inevitable.

Indeed. Society seems to be undergoing a shift toward not really caring about privacy. This has profound implications, even for those who do care about their privacy and wish to guard at.

There was an excellent essay last week in the Stanford Law Review by Judge Kozinski of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on this topic: http://www.stanfordlawreview.org/online/privacy-paradox/dead...

Anyone who cares about privacy should read that. One of the excellent points Kozinski makes is that the 4th Amendment limits on government are determined by what is a reasonable expectation of privacy, and so even if you scrupulously try to protect your privacy, if everyone else doesn't care that shifts the line for a reasonable expectation and that can screw you.

The author fails to abord the issue of how will the service treat user data in regard to third parties.

Isn't that worth mentioning when you claim that you are taking privacy seriously?

I can answer that for you here. This article is more about privacy as our product although it is also our policy. Our Privacy Policy and TOS outline things in legalese, but in human language, we take it seriously on the backend as well. We even put our legal documents on GitHub so you can track changes to them. We abide by all TOS provided by other APIs. We don't store your address book or your friends data; we don't want that liability. All connections are made through SSL. We will never share your data with anyone else (outside of legal obligations, I suppose - but please read our Privacy Policy and TOS for the final word as I am not our lawyer).

>We will never share your data with anyone else.

If that 'someone else' carries a court-ordered subpoena you will have a hard time adhering to that promise.

Updated my comment to be a little more clear on that, thanks :)

I'm kinda confused what this post is saying. "Everything is going public," it says, "it's inevitable, and privacy controls are just delaying the inevitable." And then between paragraphs, there's a sudden non-sequitur: "So we're making it so that you can keep private things private in an intuitive way."

I... where did that come from? I laud the effort to take privacy seriously. That's good and something people care about. But how does that follow at all from everything else they said?

(By the way, I have several people who I can't find any data about by casual googling. They're mostly people I went to college with who I failed to keep in contact with. I'm sure if I started digging into govt data, I could get somewhere, but that's a depth I don't feel comfortable plumbing.)

Sorry that wasn't more clear. I think privacy controls on a product like Facebook, designed and redesigned ad infinitum to make you share things in public, fail at doing so in the long run. Everyme was designed from the ground-up for private sharing.

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