[no subject]

A is a safety deposit box, B is giving your spouse/lawyer/etc. each a
spare key to the safe (not quite as good, I know), and C is the secret
stash of "naughty" books in the club treehouse.

The second function is, "let's make sure I have my own personal copy
of that data about me that someone else owns."? This is actually a very
strange thing to be doing, and the only metaphor I can think of is that it's
like a freecreditscore.com in the "free software" sense of the word.? In
other words, some entity has my data and uses it to make inferences
about me-- which are beyond my control-- and sells that data to third
parties, so FBX basically gives me the convenience of storing my own
copy of that data (sans inferences) just in case that entity goes under
or tries to change the TOS on me.? Thus, like freecreditscore's _pitch_,
FBX offers the user peace of mind wrt their data.? Here I think of Diaspora's
connect-to-facebook feature, automating a feature to post microblogs
on a wordpress site on Twitter or Facebook, using Thunderbird with
Gmail, etc.

Personally I find the first set of functions the most important, but I do
understand the benefit of temporarily using the second function in order
to bootstrap and maintain existing connections with friends on infrastructure
we all understand to be broken currently.

After some reflection, though, I think it's a bad idea to mix these two functions.
While there's nothing wrong with taking data from the freecreditscore-type function
and putting it in the vault, or taking data out of the vault (if you are certain you
no longer want it to be private) and sending it to some other entity, I don't think
it's wise to try to build a vault inside of the freecreditscore-type infrastructure.

For example, if you
use FBX to send an encrypted message _through_ a gmail account and it doesn't
work, you've wasted time that could have been spent on a more secure solution.
If it actually ends up working reliably, you're encouraging wider adoption of
a strategy which will undoubtedly become a source of its own demise, as there
is little value in Google providing access for email they can't mine.? Either way,
the result is unsustainable.

Anyway, I think there's a sea change occurring on how people look at the trade-off
between convenience and privacy.? Tonight on Real Time with Bill Maher, Bill asked
the guests what the FBI is doing reading the emails of people involved in a sex
scandal.? That's the first time I've ever heard a comedian address online privacy like that;
the Guardian had a pretty detailed piece asking this question, too:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/nov/13/petraeus-surveillance-state-fbi

-Jonathan