A plea for more privacy functions built into online services such as Twitter, Rdio and Pinterest:
Every service needs the equivalent of stomping upstairs to your room, slamming the door shut and burying your head under a pillow — watching, reading or listening to whatever you want, without broadcasting it to anybody else. Or, more directly, just like Google Chrome's Incognito mode. You press the button, and for the duration of a session — whether you're watching a shitty Troma movie, playing "Super Bass" at the gym, reading a sleazy article in the Post — nobody sees what you're doing.
… Some services have this already, but it's often difficult to get to, because they want you to share as often as possible. And the services lose very little — they still know that you watched this or listened to that — you're just telling them not to put that on your permanent record or tell the whole world. The only things I'm ever tempted to steal anymore are terrible things I don't want people to see me consuming.
On a more technical front, Alexis Madrigal invokes privacy theorist Helen Nissenbaum:
She wants to import the norms from the offline world into the online world. When you go to a bank, she says, you have expectations of what might happen to your communications with that bank. That should be true whether you're online, on the phone, or at the teller. Companies can use your data to do bank stuff, but they can't sell your data to car dealers looking for people with a lot of cash on hand. The answer, as applied by the FTC in their new framework, is to let companies do standard data collection but require them to tell people when they are doing things with data that are inconsistent with the "context of the interaction" between a company and a person.
The Dish 