[LINK] Google's WiFi bungle

[Stephen Wilson]

Kim Holburn wrote:
> [The Google wifi case] highlights how people with old ideas of privacy and the  
> internet, facebook, google and modern realities of privacy are stuck  
> in separate worlds.  I am constantly amazed by what people put on  
> facebook.  Of their own volition.
Inhibition on social networking sites is certainly very interesting, but 
it's a separate issue from inadvertently leaving one's network open (for 
starters, we may be referencing disparate types of users). 

At any rate, it's simply too early to extrapolate (as Zuckerberg does, 
self-servingly) from a few years experience with OSN to say anything 
certain about changes to social mores.  The uninhibited subset of the 
Facebook community, carried away with the sheer novelty of it, is a 
special cohort, which we all view through the biased prisms of anecdote 
and media reports.  Teens posting drunken pictures of themselves are 
unlikely to be representative of FB users in general, let alone of 
society at large. So why does anyone attribute any long lived policy 
significance at all to their fun-loving excesses?

Cheers,

Steve Wilson
Lockstep.