[hosh]

I have to disclose something. I work for a company for which Facebook is our major customer. The person from FB tells us they want something, and we scramble to make sure it happens.

I'm currently involved with another open-source release of our product, for which there is also an enterprise version. We are required by FB to keep our open source stuff in line with the enterprise product. I personally like the idea of open-source and the open source community has been very kind to my career. But frankly, this requirement has also been a pain in the ass: FB, or at least this part of FB, are uncompromising when it comes to making sure their infrastructure tools are open, and we've had to scramble a lot just to make sure it happens.

Now, if FB want to control the Rift platform, they can do it. What I described is for their infrastructure, not a product one of their portfolio companies is selling. I suspect though, this attitude is baked into their DNA. It isn't even a matter of saying things that the open-source community want to hear; they are more anal about it than we are. As much of a pain in the ass that requirement has been for our work, at least when it comes to infrastructure, they really do mean it when they say they want open standards for their infrastructure.

And yes, it makes the whole history FB has with privacy strange to me.

[bane]

Well, open standards do not mean open data. The U.S. government also prefers open standards and open source for example. Open standards and open source means that they aren't stuck with vendor lock-in. If a vendor supplies them with proprietary tooling and then the vendor goes away, they're sunk.

In other words, just because the NSA builds and uses Accumulo, doesn't mean they've been good actors with what it does.

[hosh]

Yep. Google is pursing an interesting lock-in strategy with Android. Android is an open standard, but many key apps are now put on the proprietary side. That did not stop Samsung from sneaking in the other way and developing what looks like a fork.

There are two issues with the open data.

The first is that our society is still in a transition process where we realize, there is no such thing as a trusted third party. The concept of a trusted third party is the very basis for governance and rule of law. We're seeing an emergance of technology and social constructs built around the idea of untrusted third parties, and this is still an ongoing process. It has not touched issues with privacy, yet.

The other comes from my weird perspective on life. Well, weird with this group of people :-) Spiritually speaking, there is no such thing as privacy. One of the things you quickly learn in meditation, or in psychedelic experiences, is that you cannot hide the things in your subconscious. You can try for a time, but eventually it has to come out. That applies to every individual.

When people talk about privacy, they are not really talking about privacy. Again, it is a power issue. If I know something about you that you are ashamed of, I can use that as psychological leverage to get you to do what I want, to an extent, or at least, influence your thoughts and behavior. This is a form of power. Ordinary people in societies tend to project their personal power to authority figures. Modern societies tend to have this story, this myth that power is vested in the collective, and there is no personal power. Yet, even with this denial, because people yearn for personal power, it manifests in the form for demanding privacy, rights, liberties, guns, etc.

When taken together, the transition to acknowledging that there are no such thing as a trusted third party will mean having to accept developing personal power ... and the responsibilities that come with that. We've already seen several swings and shifts related to that -- p2p filesharing vs. RIAA/MIAA, bitcoins/digital currencies, NSA, etc. So far, what has been happening is another large organization supplants the legacy organization (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon), but my point is that those very organizations are tied to our notions of trusted third parties. It'll be sometime yet before we thrash our way through this, of which, the privacy concerns of FB + Rift is just a small part.