« What happens in the Facebook... | Main | Maximum Potential » More on Facebook and privacyThomas Leavitt writes (via Dave Farber's Interesting People email list) a sane response on the Facebook privacy question. (However, if you're a full-blown conspiracy theorist, you might want to note that Thomas Leavitt is a Mason.) The macro issue here is the potential for our government (or any other) to abuse their access to this information for repressive purposes, or, in the worst case, to simply round up people of a particular political persuasion and summarily execute them.... and in reference to that, it seems that the information available in a social networking site about someone's political affiliations would be insignificant, in relation to the trail left online via other mechanisms... such as, say, postings to Dave Farber's IP list. :) The reality is that the Internet is the new town square, and if you've got even the slightest inclination to express a political opinion, in all likelihood, you're going to do it online, and leave a record that a repressive government would have no problem finding. In point of fact, it would be interesting to do a study of a hundred random individuals picked out of the phone book, and find out how many of them have enough of a corpus of identifiable online postings to enable a reasonable guess as to their political affiliation - and then cross check that guess against voter registration records and direct inquiries. I'd bet the success rate for those folks where a reasonable guess could be made would be very high. jon posted this at 8:35 AM |
read weblogsky! latest posts: |
