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It’s not a privacy ‘breach’ when information about you is out there already

Posted on November 14, 2010July 3, 2025 by Dissent

Rob Pegoraro writes:

The social network is in the doghouse for the misuse of some users’ data by applications it installed on their pages. The Web-services giant earned itself multiple government investigations – including an inquirylaunched by the Federal Communications Commission on Wednesday – for collecting data from people’s wireless networks as part of its Street View mapping project.

Both of these episodes show that we need to upgrade how we think about privacy online – starting with the vocabulary we use.

The Facebook and Google issues have both been called “breaches.” But they’re not. The information at stake in each case was already public by any meaningful definition. It would have remained public no matter how good or evil the two companies had been.

Read more in the Washington Post.

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