Amazon, Facebook and the evolution of privacy - Ideas@Innovations - The Washington Post

Excerpt from a critically important reality check

Privacy advocates have been busy this past week.

Facebook’s announced changes, including the Facebook “Timeline” and Amazon’s Silk browser, which is slated to be offered on its new Kindle Fire when it’s released in November, have raised a number of privacy concerns. The objections raise the question of whether we can continue to innovate digitally without releasing more of our personal information. Should the Web be an inherently private or public place — or should we refrain from entering further into the cloud until each of us is guaranteed a padlock for our personal information? (Full disclosure: The Washington Post Co.’s chairman and chief executive, Donald E. Graham, is a member of Facebook’s board of directors.)

Tangent: I first ran across this article in the new Facebook Washington Post Social Reader (if you’re one of my Facebook friends, or subscribe to my activity in Facebook, perhaps you already noticed that in your Facebook ticker…), but I was unable to excerpt-and-post to Blogger using Windows Live Writer (WLW), from the Facebook Social Reader app: the default source link wasn’t helpful; readers would probably need to link their Facebook accounts to the Washington Post Social Reader app, in order to access the source article (as is the case for the Yahoo News app in Facebook, at least as of a week ago); WLW crashed (very unusual, in my years of using WLW), when I tried to copy/paste from the source Facebook page (which I needed to do because WLW didn’t pick up my content selection, as it normally does)…

Amazon, Facebook and the evolution of privacy - Ideas@Innovations - The Washington Post