As are reporters who write about privacy issues with social media without first closing their Facebook accounts."

You know he's right, don't you?

You know what causes a real ecological disaster?

Washing Machines.

Yes, FUCKING washing machines.

They use too much of one of the worlds rarest resources (clean water), contribute to global warming and pollute the waste water with phosphates.

On the other hand, they have freed up half the worlds workforce from backbreaking manual labor and contributed to society enough that no less than Hans Rosling calls them the greatest invention of the industrial revolution[1]

Facebook allows companies to sell advertising and allows law enforcement to track you.

On the other hand, it allows quicker and easier communication than ever before, and contributed to the Arab Spring to the point where the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt are known as "the Facebook revolutions" [2][3]

Convenience has costs, but who is Moglen to judge if those costs are worthwhile for everyone?

[1] http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_and_the_magic_washing_... (watch this video - it's really good)

[2] http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/09/so-was...

[3] http://www.technologyreview.com/web/38379/

Edit: To all those claiming this is a strawman - it's not. Moglen failed to point out the benefits of social networking, and I'm using an analogy to show that most things have costs and benefits. Please don't get distracted into an argument about that.

I'd love to see people try and explain how Moglen is right about Twitter (which has much lower privacy costs than Facebook).

I also think his premise is a bit extreme... Social Media can be used recklessly, but so can many things. Suddenly people are saying that if your friends are on Facebook then you should get new friends... I must admit this sentiment sounds extremely reactionary and way over the top. We seem to be operating under the assumption that all information shared about another human being is potentially dangerous... Really? I'm pretty sure that most of what gets shared on Facebook is fairly innocuous, if not utterly mundane.

So what ARE the reasons?!?!

I'd like to hear why Adrianne Jeffries didn't include any of Moglen's points in the final article.

Does Adrianne Jeffries really think Moglen's ideas are "totally relevant"? The tone of her article suggests otherwise. She introduces him as a "militant" professor, and the title of her post appears to mock the entire situation.

The telephone exchange is certainly entertaining, but Moglen's points are relevant and I'm disappointed the author didn't include her reasons for omitting them from her article.

What did he ever expect? I think Moglen is right in his expectations that any article resulting from that will be bullshit. And really: "N.B.: In the end, I did not put this in the story for several reasons, not the least of it was the fact that it was late and over word limit". Really, the word limit is his excuse? Sorry, but I think the journalist is the jerk here.

How many people here would be excited about a law that required everyone to carry a government mandated tracking device with them at all times? Probably very few people right, no-one's really excited about that. How many people here have a cell phone? Right, probably everybody in this room has a mobile phone. And so what is the difference really? A mobile phone is a tracking device that reports its position over an insecure protocol to a few telecommunications companies that are required by law to reveal that information to eavesdroppers and governments worldwide. So what's the difference? Choice. This is the difference. You choose to carry a cell phone, whereas you would be forced to carry a tracking device.

Well I have a mobile phone. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would have a mobile phone, why would I want one: it's a mobile tracking device, it communicates over an insecure protocol, it's potentially a mobile bug. And yet I have one. So did I choose to have a mobile phone? Maybe.

I think if you look at the way that people tend to organise in groups and communities, there are often informal communications networks that bind them together, that allow them to communicate, make plans, coordinate activities. If you introduce something like the GSM cellular network to this group, and if I start using it, I am subject to something that is very well known called the No Network Effect. If I am the only one with a cell phone it's really not worth very much. The value of the network is in the number of people that are connected to it and that if I'm the only one I can't really communicate with anyone.

However if I somehow manage to get everyone to start using my communications network it becomes very effective and very valuable. But there is an interesting side effect, which is that the old informal mechanisms people use to communicate and to collaborate disappear, that they are destroyed by the introduction of technology. The technology actually changes the social fabric of how people communicate and coordinate. Mobile phones, there are many obvious examples. People used to make plans, they would say: "I'll meet you on this street corner at this time on this day and, you know, we'll do something" and now people say "I'll call you when I'm getting off work" or "I'll text you" and if you don't have a mobile phone you can't really participate in this type of organisation and you begin to find yourself kind of alone. Because if I now make a choice not to be a part of this cellular network, there is sort of an interesting thing where once again I am subject to the no network effect. The network that used to exist, the informal communications channels, has been destroyed.

So yes, I made a choice to have a mobile phone, but what kind of choice did I make? I think this is sort of an interesting phenomenon. What happens is a choice is introduced; it starts as a very simple choice: the choice of whether or not to have a mobile phone, a simple piece of technology. But slowly things happen to expand the scope of that choice until eventually it's so big as to encompass not just whether you have a mobile phone or not but whether you want to be a part of society. In some ways the choice to have a mobile phone today has become not necessarily just whether you have a piece of consumer electronics in your pocket but whether or not you are even a part of society, and that's a much bigger choice. Maybe not one that we should have to make, or at least maybe one that isn't really a choice at all.

First, a key concept: there is no such thing as absolute freedom. Freedom can exist at many different levels, some of which are mutually exclusive; sometimes abrogations of lower-order freedoms are required to create higher-order freedoms. The archetypal example of this is the law which arbitrarily restricts you from driving on one side of the road. This is a small loss of freedom, but when applied universally, it creates the far greater freedom to drive for long distances without substantial risk of a head-on collision.

Now, with social networks and the like, freedoms are created and freedoms are taken away. The problem which Moglen identifies -- and is absolutely correct to call out -- is that there is absolutely no legitimate reason to abrogate the freedoms that are being abrogated. Where he goes wrong is in denying the reality of the freedoms that are being created: namely the most powerful one-to-many communications platforms in history. The citizens of Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya are categorically not less free because they used Facebook to organise their revolutions. Whatever freedoms they lose on account of Facebook, pale in significance to the freedoms Facebook has allowed them to create.

Whether this calculation holds true in other societies is a perfectly legitimate subject for debate; where Moglen goes wrong is in denying that it's a debatable subject whatsoever.

I had the same problem with Richard Stallman, when I recently attended one of his boilerplate talks. While I greatly respect what he has accomplished and agree with the majority of his opinions, he had absolutely no concept that there could possibly be greater freedoms outside of his narrow domain. It was all too easy to picture him castigating, say, Syrian activists for distributing videos of atrocities using non-free codecs, captured by camera phones with non-free firmware. Stallman's position would seem to be that if you can't document an atrocity with fully free software and hardware, then you shouldn't document it at all. This is where he -- and Moglen -- take a swan dive from the moral high ground into the swamp of ethical bankruptcy in which all true zealots swim.

The bottom line is that there are greater freedoms and lessor freedoms. The world has collectively decided that the freedoms created by one-to-many communications networks are greater than the freedoms that are (unnecessarily) being lost in the process. Sometimes this decision is clearly correct (Tunisia, Egypt, etc.); other times it probably isn't. What's certain is that asking people to forego what they (often correctly) perceive as the greater freedom, in order to fix an unnecessary abrogation of the lesser freedom, is not an ethically defensible position to take.

Please don't get me wrong: unlike road-direction restrictions, there's no reason why social networks need to be compromising our freedoms the way that they are. I'd much rather see social networks created by open-standard distributed protocols rather than centralised corporate systems, just as I'd much rather see mobile phones with fully free firmware that encode video with free codecs. I think it's absolutely worth trying to create all of those things. But simply ignoring the genuine freedoms that are created despite the faults of these platforms is not ethically legitimate.

Ethics aside, it's also bad strategy, and just won't work. If you're obligated to give up your car before writing about global warming, or obligated to become a vegan before writing about animal cruelty, or obligated to take monastic vows before writing about conflict in domestic relationships -- then you'll probably never write about any of these issues. And that won't help anybody, will it?

This has become the crux of my objection to social networks: they exist to gather data on you. Whatever benefit you get from it, their purpose of existence is data mining.

As the Pinboard Blog puts it, that's ANTI-social.

"We're used to talking about how disturbing this in the context of privacy, but it's worth pointing out how weirdly unsocial it is, too. How are you supposed to feel at home when you know a place is full of one-way mirrors?"

http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/11/the_social_graph_is_neither/

How true is this?

Reporter: Like, bye?

Could someone elaborate upon these? I am not aware of these incidents. (In particular, the first two.)

None the less it seems like every time you publish on the net with an association to your identity in any form you do willingly degrade some aspect of your own privacy. Truthfully just from analyzing a couple sentences you probably have a pretty good shot at guessing all kinds of things about the person.

I don't want to live in a world where I have to not do things to avoid privacy invasion, I want to live in one which doesn't allow privacy invasion.

Obviously it's not a simple issue, you can't just sign up to twitter and tick the "no privacy invasion please" checkbox, but if we're going to aim for something, how about we reach for the stars not the dogshit.

I know it's "just" betabeat, a blog, etc, but imagine if Leslie Stahl or even Katie Couric made the emphasis of a story how they were "legit yelled at" by an expert source who gave some thought provoking ideas on a silver platter that could have been developed into much more.

I just cant describe how awesome Moglen is.

A "journalist" wants a story, a complete article, so she doesnt have to think - get this she says " I was hoping you might be ableto help me think about this particular" - she wants him to think for her! She could as well have told him to please write the article for her in full, but she will take the credit and money. Then he still serves her an idea and a very fruitful thesis which she could write several articles about if she would pull her finger out of her ass for once.

Washing machines are tools. Facebook is a platform. If Mr. Moglen was attacking the postal service or mobile phones, you'd have a point. But he is talking about a centralized service that gives unprecedented power to the ones in control of the service and the jurisdictions it falls under.

I can stand in front of my washing machine and say, with total clarity, that I'm the only one in charge of it at that time. If I had a facebook account, there would be no such thing. And that doesn't even get to Mr. Moglens deeper point - that usage of facebook spreads the problem into your social graph.

As for the "facebook revolutions" you cite - that's quite a rosy picture you paint there. In reality, those services were used to track protesters and there have been coordinating handouts urging participants not to use social media for that reason. Furthermore, after these 'revolutions' have cooled down, it's still unclear what we will end up with. I would conclude that at most, those services served as catalysts and their convenience came at quite a cost indeed. But it's not Arab Youth + Facebook = Functioning Democracy.

Let's look at another example of convenience that isn't being solved very well: my car.

My car is incredibly convenient. Often I'd rather drive than take the bus. And you can't beat it for hauling stuff around. Better than my bike, for sure.

Cars have freed up the world's pedestrians from footwrecking walking!

But there's a lot going on here. Cars, roads, the death of public transport (cf trolly cars in LA http://www.usc.edu/libraries/archives/la/historic/redcars/ ). America, at least, was sold on the car by businesses that had a vested interest in seeing the car succeed. Cities dismantled public transport systems at the behest of these same powerful lobbies.

And today our cities are outgrowths of the personal motor vehicle. (Electric cars don't solve anything here, it's still energy being produced).

While I think that you make a point worth considering, I believe that we should error on the side of suspicion when utility, or less nobly, convenience, comes at an initially small cost and is heavily promoted by... whom, exactly?

I worked in advertising long enough to look squarely to the data-finance industrial complex (tongue only partially in cheek when using that phrase) whenever personal information is involved.

Convenience has costs. Moglen may not have the right to judge but we need noisy people that remind us there is a problem.

Secondly, the idea of wasting the "worlds rarest resources" is completely dependent on where you live. I, for example, live in a part of the world with a huge excess of clean water, and there is absolutely no sustainable way to export our water to those parts of the world that have a shortage of clean water. Building pipe lines to those parts of the world would be ridiculous expensive. Transporting it by truck would pollute excessively.

So if we didn't use this clean water all of it would just be transported by nature to ground water reservoirs, out in the ocean and get mixed with the salt water or evaporate into the atmosphere.

I won't go into the points about washing machines adding to global warming and pollution of the water, that could very well be true.

They're certainly known as "Facebook revolutions" (or "Twitter uprisings" or whatever) by foreign media organisations looking for a gimmicky hook to hang a story on, but I honestly doubt that regular Tunisians and Egyptians really use that phrase themselves other than as talking heads when dealing with said media organisations.

I think it's a pretty safe bet that most people just call it "last year."

In the end, it all comes down to energy. If some countries would spend even a fraction of their defense budgets on solar, water, wind or fusion power research, we would be there in a jiffy. We could have had more energy than we could ever use by now. Our progress is much slower than it could be, because energy is kept scarce.

From an interview by an 17 year old Tunisian protester when asked how did social media influence the protesters actions:

"Only after we organized and burned down a third of the police stations in less than a day, foreign media asked us about these social media networks. By then it was already to late to use them, they where shut down. We kept burning the remaining police stations."

• for her and her site, a full-length story of the call, garnering inlinks and traffic

• for him, a detailed description of his views, totally beyond the original 'quote in a box' form-journalism role they wanted him to play

• for us, a discussion thread seeded by an interesting, strong, contrarian opinion

Why be diplomatic if that would result in none of the above?

I think you're missing his point about privacy, that "everything they share is held by someone who is no friend of theirs… whose goal it is to make a profit selling the ability to control human beings by knowing more about themselves than they know." And, "You injure other people today also using social media. You’ve informed on them. You’ve created more records about them. You’ve added to the problems not of yourself but of other people. If it were as simple as just you’re only hurting yourself I wouldn’t bother pointing it out to you."

The collectors would like you to think the data you're sharing is 'innocuous' and 'mundane' but they have algorithms and statistical confidences that say it isn't.

On the other hand, I think Moglen is hopelessly standing athwart history yelling 'stop' on this issue. Technology would make these behaviors trivial to monitor even if most people opted out (instead of cheerfully opting in). So I tend more towards the David Brin/'Transparent Society' view, that the only workable adaptation will be transparency/accountability and new social mores, because privacy is on its deathbed.

It usually is, until it isn't. By then, it's too late.

That is it right there.

The only answer is the same technology without the bad side of it.

Mobile phones that do not track you, that governments can not track.

A Facebook alternative like Diaspora, except much better and as popular as Facebook.

We are not going to quit mobile phones and social media, but we have to strip their bad side from them. That may involve non-profit mobile phone manufactures, open source social media, who knows exactly what. But I know that technologically it is possible, now we have implement it and use it.

I suspect that long string of italicized text is to blame. Please remove the italics (which also make the words hard to read).

I find Moglen's absolutist point of view on this issue refreshing.

You're not obligated to give up your car or go vegan to write about certain issues, but you're a hypocrite if you don't acknowledge your own contribution to a problem.

Two examples:

Al Gore did a great job spreading the word about global warming, but he still has a larger carbon footprint than most Americans (it's well-documented).

Jonathan Safran Foer became vegan when he researched and wrote his book "Eating Animals" about animal cruelty.

We need more people like Foer, do we not?

I've read many people, particularly on HN, say they are glad such extremes exist as a counter-balance. I disagree. I think that they muddy the discourse by presenting yet more things to argue with. I would rather see people advocating for privacy and software freedoms while advocating stances that I also think are reasonable and defensible. The difficulty with that, though, is that people who hold such views tend not to be professional advocates.

It's entirely possible this was a one time event. I wouldn't trust these services (especially facebook) not to cooperate fully with whoever is in power for censorship/identification purposes. If they don't cooperate they'll just be blocked anyway.

Surely the newness of this type of communication created these one-to-many communication freedoms, but I doubt it's accurate that these freedoms were/are anything but temporary.

That's not even counting the disagreement over how much of the communication was actually done on american social platforms vs existing text message infrastructure.

I agree that Moglen at least gets close to a absolutist position on this kind of thing (and Stallman is a good example of a similar position) but I don't accept that the positives of any contribution to Arab Spring style protests outweigh the negatives of literally informing on yourself and your friends to a private commercial surveillance network (which is indeed the literal truth even if I used Moglen's inflammatory language).