"I might not even mind that Facebook monetizes my user data, my friends, and my interactions. But right now, I don’t know how Facebook uses that data.We might think that our online lives are not connected to our real lives. We might even think that privacy is dead. But the problem is not that privacy is dead, but that it is distributed unevenly. In other words, the user is forced into total transparency when signing up for services like Facebook. But the service itself lacks transparency. There is no way we are going to find out what Facebook does with us. And it is this unbalanced relationship that we should be worried about. " - ivanandersson

So many good discussions taking place across different media that it is hard to follow it all ;-) - Alexander van Elsas

Hutch comments " Alexander - I’m less worried about Facebook’s intentions and actions. The fact that they are so public, and that user trust is so critical to their growth and engagement, is an important moral lever there. Facebook is huge, across the world. They are scrutinized continuously. They want to go public one day. These factors are why I’m less concerned about their policies. Here’s a question. My attitude may come across as typically American, in that I have this market orientation toward the issue. Fair to say that privacy concerns have more of regulatory philosophy in Europe? - Alexander van Elsas

My response: @Hutch there are many companies that are follwed critically by the public but this recent financial and now economic crisis has shown that this is no guarantee to do the right thing. I wonder why Facebook needs such a far-stretching TOS. Mark’s response talking about users sharing stuff doesn’t provide any insight in why this is needed. Read this post by Amanda French who compared different TOSses ike the one from MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, and Facebook. Bottom line: you get screwed. http://bit.ly/tJJBK Wrt to your question about the attitude of the US versus Europe. I do not believe it has anything at all to do with regulatory. I do believe that in Europe the individual rights of human beings are given higher priority in the area of privacy. Maybe because of history (WW 1 and 2). At the same time the US recently has experienced a terrorist attack that is unprecedented, which has lead to far-stretching consequences for individual privacy. It is hard to say what causes these possible differenc - Alexander van Elsas

Good comment by Jack Wilson: "Alexander,I think you are spot on for pointing this out. This is something that each of us as social media devotees should be asking the people that provide our social media experience. There is a struggle between copyright and freedom of information, but that does not diminish the responsibility of the companies to explain to us exactly how they are using our information and to give us a option to opt-out and keep our information private if we should choose. Like you, I don’t see this as a U.S./Europe thing at all. This is something that concerns all of us using social media. @mellyreed I tend to agree with you. It seems to be a “Wild West” environment out there as far as social media is concerned, but I don’t see that as a stumbling block to keeping users informed and companies to be transparent with what they are doing with our data. In fact the fact that there is not a lot of case law at this point on Internet Law, I would think companies would fall all over themselves to - Alexander van Elsas