At the heart of the furore over Facebook's privacy changes seems to be the assumption that we should have some reasonable expectation of privacy for data posted online. This is a terrible assumption and needs to be broken down.

At the most basic level you are sharing information with other monkeys who almost certainly do not share, or necessarily care about, your particular notions of privacy. At any point they can re-share your post, to whoever they choose, with a simple cut and paste.

It's a tangent, but what's especially interesting to me is that the social dynamics around digital interaction are different then we're used to. If I tell Tim in person that "Amy is being a real bitch today" and he turns around tells her, then Amy will probably treat that as hearsay. However if I send an email to Tim and he forwards it her, then she is much more likely to take it seriously. So despite the fact that email. is no more verifiable then the spoken word, we treat it more seriously.

Back on topic, in addition to the practical issues of sharing private data with other monkeys, there are a few issues with sharing private information with companies. The most obvious is that companies are for-profit organisations whose goals don't necessarily align with your own. Equally obvious, but much less discussed, is the fact that companies will go through financial hardship at some point. During these times good intentions count for less and "hard decisions" will be made about what to do with your data.

The only internet service which has any significant tradition of privacy is email. I think much of that tradition is because email predates the commercialisation of the internet, and that attitudes which made sense in those days have simply carried forward. Additionally most people got their first email address via an organisation who didn't profit from providing the service (a university or employer). Those that didn't, got email from their ISP as part of their paid service. It was only much later when free services like Hotmail became the de facto standard and by then traditions of privacy were already entrenched. However with all that said, the golden rule of email is still: "assume every message you send will end up on the public record."

Please don't think that I'm making excuses for Facebook, I'm not. I think that they are making short sighted decisions from what is essentially a monopolist point of view. It will come back to bite them in the end, the internet routes around damage. What baffles me is that everybody is acting so shocked about it and that everybody thinks that privacy is the problem with Facebook.

The much bigger problem with Facebook is that we are investing large amounts of energy putting data into Facebook and there is currently no way to get that data back out. Facebook is now in the middle of most of the online interactions I have with my friends. I get more personal messages to my Facebook inbox then via email and I have no way of extracting those messages. There are thousands of photos tagged collectively by my friends, with no way to extract the photos or metadata. Status updates, comments, "likes", party invitations ... the list just goes on. All of these are trapped in Facebook's walled garden.

It isn't a matter of if, it's a matter of when. Eventually something will happen and either we'll abandon Facebook or Facebook will abandon us. Unless something happens between now and then, we'll all lose the vast majority of the data we have collectively created. I don't know about you but learning not to care about my data isn't my preferred strategy.