Facebook & the Right to Privacy

Unless there's a legal or regulatory compulsion to ensure privacy, it's unlikely that companies like Facebook will do so

The Internet in all its forms has become a core part of how we communicate, socialize, and handle very personal business every day. But protection of individual privacy is spotty at best, and it seems to be getting worse every day. As we become an increasingly digital nation, do access to, and privacy on, the Internet become civil rights?

Facebook and other social networking sites track our daily lives with increasing levels of detail. But unlike the supermarket savings club card that tracks our purchases in exchange for an occasional discount, these tools can be mined without our explicit permission. That's become the tax we pay in order to participate in the digital community.

But with the power of "deep Internet" search tools and data aggregation mashups, the information freely available on the Internet about each of us is becoming more detailed, more deeply personal, and more troubling every day.