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theatlantic:

On Facebook, Your Privacy Is Your Friends’ Privacy

We tend to think about privacy in personal terms: my data, my personal information, my relationship with Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/Pinterest. As our social networks grow and normalize, though, it’s increasingly more accurate to think about privacy as a communal affair, something heavily contextual and owned, collectively, by networks. Which means that privacy is something that all of us, as individuals and as a group, are responsible for.

Take Facebook. Aside from the standard, personalized privacy concerns — algorithms guessing your social security number, say, based on your profile information — there are also the concerns that expand with network effects. Photos, in particular, can reveal not only a user’s favorite places, vacation spots, and closest friends and family members, but also that same information for the other members of the user’s network. For those who have an interest, commercial or otherwise, in figuring out users’ identities and interests and overall persona on Facebook,  your data can reveal your friends’ data — and vice versa. 

Read more. [Image: João Paulo Pesce, Gustavo Rauber, Diego Las Casas, Virgílio Almeida]