FaceBook is preparing an advertising model where advertisers can target users based on demographics and interests harvested from their profiles. This raises a lot of ethical questions, the biggest of which is how private user data is protected and handled by FaceBook, and by extension their advertisers.
What people don't realize, I think, is that there really is guideline for who owns their data. It's a fuzzy line that starts with servers and database licenses and ends with the "right to privacy". The more time goes on, and data mining becomes more sophisticated, companies and governments will become more and more interested in the personal data that people put out on the Internet (EVEN if that data is not supposed to be public). It provides a window into the mass public's mind that's never been available before--it makes polling and market analysis superfluous. There's nothing stopping companies like Google and Facebook from using, mining, and analyzing private user data except for the threat of the act being made public, which would cause (some) people to stop using them.
This is just one more reason why the data needs to be pushed out to the edges of the network, to the people who actually create and own it. That is, it needs to be pushed back to the humans.




Originally Published by Jason Kolb