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Comment on Facebook Removing Option To Be Unsearchable By Nameparent

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It would be really awkward not to be able to talk about your friends (online or otherwise) without their explicit permission.

Would this concept of ownership of information be particularly stronger than our existing concept of ownership of creative works? If I tell a friend a story then I and he consider myself to be the "owner" of that story, but I certainly don't tend to mind if he retells the story as his own in a noncommercial context, so long as I am not present. However if he gets my story published, then I am going to be rather upset.

If a friend wants to talk about me with other people at a bar, that is fine I guess. If he writes a book about me, I would absolutely consider that a considerable breach of trust. I have no problem with being on the receiving end of this notion of privacy.

While the bar is a noncommercial setting to tell stories, it's hardly a private one. The analogy seems to suggest that the distinguishing feature that triggers the more is on one side commercialism and on the other side publicness, but then it doesn't quite keep it consistent. So I guess I don't quite get it: why, under this reasoning, is it OK for him to tell the story about you at the bar?

There is no physical record of the bar story.

Not at the moment of the conversation, but there's nothing stopping one of the people there from blogging about it once they get home (think Silicon Valley "overheard" product leaks).

The fact that a piece of information passes through a volatile medium before ending up in a more permanent form doesn't change the value or ownership of the information.

On a tangent, Google Glass passive audio and video recordings will be much more damaging to one's privacy than photos shared intentionally by friends.

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