I was referring to the fact that when one has an FB account (I killed mine a couple of years ago) and isn’t critical or aware of what’s happening, that it’s very easy to “upload your life” or “walk naked down the street”. Every photo uploaded, every event is commented on and gone to, every like is liked, every photo in which you are tagged, every song you have listened to, every status update – all of these add up to walking down the street naked if you are doing it with great enough frequency. 

To be honest, I’m a little ashamed that my greatest hope – apart from the fighting that ppl like Cory (and I to a lesser impact, and you I’d imagine) do  - is that websites die. Beebo, MySpace, Friendster etc – the web moves on. It wont happen overnight, but it might happen.

I certainly don’t think the conversation should stop at any level – but I think it needs to encompass an education focus as well – to call out the emperor (my friends) for being naked. People sometimes need to be shocked out of the groove they are in. 

To say nothing of the fact that it’s really easy to say it when you came late to the game. When I first joined facebook? I was 20 and in college.  It was called “thefacebook” and it was some nifty new website for college students a few of my friends (all frequent early adopters) bugged me to try.  The privacy policy was fairly standard. “We won’t share your info with anyone else, except anyone we may choose to, like advertisers, and we can change these terms at any time and they apply retroactively.”  And once they were noticeably evil, it was much too late, and you were opted in whether you liked it or not.

So yeah, the whole “if you want privacy don’t walk down the street naked” is a bullshit answer, and a bullshit analogy, because it’s not just one website, it’s a whole system geared towards stripping away privacy rights.  There’s something wrong with the system when normal, every day tasks  (e.g. work and social communications, commerce, transportation, etc etc) require waiving all right to privacy. And it’s an important discussion to have.

I already use TextSecure for my SMS messages.  My wife is the only other user I know – but that’s alright because (1) it was free (a modest one-time cost would have been OK too), and (2) it communicates transparently with others who don’t use it.

But this service – I’m not going to pay $20/month for it until many of the people I regularly phone also use it; and nor are many of the people I regularly phone.  Who wants to be an early adopter of a program that may evaporate ($20/month gets you nothing) or that may eventually get widespread traction ($20/month gets you nothing more than the people who adopted much later)

Seriously?  You think there’s actually a difference between being tracked by a corporation and being tracked by a government?

Since corporations are mostly just small governments themselves that require the cooperation of larger governements to even exist, much less do business, I don’t think that you can make a case that there’s much of a difference.  If the government in question demands access to the data that a corporation has on you, they’re going to get it.

The majority of the users who stay clear of Facebook don’t even know that they can and do get tracked nonetheless.

You take that prescriptivist “Webster is God” attitude to any serious linguist and you’ll get laughed right out of their office. Words change. Languages vary and evolve. If there’s a linguistic niche open — and I think Hegelian at least made it quite clear that there is — something will surely fill it.

And I guess Lynne Truss and her million tedious larvae will surely be there, just like the Latin-obsessed Victorian pedants of old, to tell us we’re “communicating wrongly” (in precisely those stuffily and awkwardly correct terms no doubt), even when everybody of sense and imagination can discern quite clearly what we’re saying. 

In short: git yer rascally pedant hide on the next carriage return outta Dodge, Mister Jake. The things y’all’re sayin’ don’t matter no-how.

 Until “they” change the definition, unique means ONE of a kind.  There is no possible way to be pretty unique, sort of unique, very unique, or any other modifier of unique. 

The English language:  love it or leave it.