The Facebook of the Future Has Privacy Implications Today
It’s well established that joining a social network means trading privacy for information. Your Facebook friends, for example, get to see that picture of you looking like you might be stoned, and you get to “like” their posts celebrating the legalization of marijuana in Washington and Colorado. Or, perhaps you simply post about your 50th birthday party or celebrating Ramadan. Potential employers get to see all that stuff too, depending on your privacy settings, and there is evidence that some of them discriminate on the basis of age and against Muslims. Facebook, meanwhile, gets to target ads at you.
What’s not as well appreciated, but becoming increasingly clear, is that users of social networks in general, and of social networking kingpin Facebook in particular, are ill-equipped to evaluate the price they’re paying in this trade — to determine just how much privacy they’ll lose over time in exchange for status updates from their friends, and what that loss will eventually mean for themselves and their loved ones.
Part of the reason it’s hard to think clearly about privacy tradeoffs is that data collection now occurs at a staggering scale. Facebook earlier this year announced that it had figured out how to store a billion gigabytes, known as an “exabyte,” in each “data hall” room in its data centers. As people upload two billion pictures a day to the social network, older photos are moved to these “cold storage” exabyte systems.
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