David Berkowitz writes:
Gather around for a story, boys and girls. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
Once upon a time, there was a boy tending his social flocks of friends and followers. He would continually go up to the social embankments and shout, “Help, there’s a privacy breach!” The bloggers and reporters would all come running, making his cries travel much further. Masses of people changed their privacy settings, even though their privacy wasn’t violated at all. Then one day, there really was a serious privacy breach, but when the bloggers and reporters and tweeters and plussers and tumblrers all came along to convey the cries out unto the world, no one believed it was a big deal. The evil privacy breacher then stole all their identities, sold them to a Moldovan spam syndicate, and last was seen in Dubai skiing in an indoor mall.
Aesop it’s not; the version at mythfolklore.net reads better. Yet this story is painfully relevant today. In the past week, there have been two such baseless privacy scares involving LinkedIn and Facebook, and they’re unfortunate red herrings.
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