Good post. Cheers!

You can build up a fairly good picture of me from various sources online, but you have to work at it somewhat as a lot of it has to be derived from, for example, trawling through my blog postings. Something a human could do – but probably not something automated.

The thing about Facebook is that it effectively pre-packages and structures a lot of stuff straight off – check out the sections in the MIT paper containing the code to automatically trawl the Facebook database for information.

I’m concerned both with the extraordinary powers that Facebook grants itself over its users data – and with the affiliations with global intelligence services that Facebook appears to have. However, I have to question whether anything is really being lost with Facebook.

You captured the point nicely when you said “I don’t really see the point in duplicating in Facebook a whole load of information that is elsewhere.” If you bundle all your personal information into a Facebook profile, are you really allowing access to anything new? Yes, you are making it dead easy for anyone who has access to Facebook’s databases to compile information on you – but perhaps all you are giving “them” is a bit of convenience: I’m sure you are well aware of the power (and pervasiveness) of data-mining techniques. Ask yourself exactly what can be found out about you already. Your place of work, your political and religious leanings, the kind of car you drive, who you’re married to (what she does professionally, where, her country of origin), the name of your household pet, your holiday destinations, a myriad of personal photos, your friends, (at one point which I warned you about and you have thankfully since removed) the exact GPS location of your home, and enough clues that someone might put together a reasonable estimate of your socio-economic status. This is all information you have voluntarily given up on the Internet. All it takes is a little reading and a little attention.

Don’t get me wrong, Facebook is a scary example of the loss of privacy on the internet. I am rabidly against the abuse of information by corporations and governments. I like my privacy, and I don’t see why anyone should know the particulars of my life.

I think that for the most part, however, that particular horse left the barn some time ago.