Rob Pegoraro of The Washington Post, reports in an article dated November 14, 2010, that recent developments regarding Facebook's "misuse of some user's data by applications it installed on their pages," and Google's "collecting data from people's wireless networks," are in the "doghouse" for the wrong reasons.
According to the Post, "[b]oth of these episodes show that we need to upgrade how we thing about privacy online-starting with the vocabulary we use." Facebook and Google's missteps have been called "breaches," which according to the article, they most certainly were not. "The information at stake in each case was already public by any meaningful definition. It would have remained public no matter how good or evil the two companies had been."
In Facebook's case, "the data consisted of the basic parameters of people's accounts . . . name, picture, gender and networks, all of which Facebook already makes public to all of the 500-million-plus users on the site" (emphasis added).
In Google's case, "the problem began with people leaving their wireless networks unencrypted. People have been neglecting to take this simple step since the arrival of consumer-grade WiFi routers" for a variety of reasons. "The Street View engineers – who wanted to build a database of WiFi hot spots for Google's location-based mobile services . . . forgot to scrub data collected by the Mountain View, California firm's Street View Cars of anything beyond wireless networks' names and hardware addresses."
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"A real breach exposes private information you tried to keep confidential." It doesn't "involve a remix or collection of data that's already out there for anybody to see – even if suing the words 'hack' or 'breach' in a headline makes the story that much juicier."
The full article can be found above, or here.
Here is the link to Facebook's fiasco.
Here is the link to Google's fiasco.
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