What's the worst thing that can happen? Insurance companies would love to have access to your social network data -- there is already strong research data showing a correlation between your friends and various risk factors. We can assume that governments already have access to the data, but there is a gradual drift to making this available to other corporate entities. We have the most to fear from commercial entities here.
Now, one could argue that through financial records and other online records, anyone from a private investigator on up would be able to determine everything about me given enough time. I grant this is probably true. The downside by sharing is that every large entity will know everything about me, with minimal effort.
I won't agree to share my information merely to gain a convenient service, in return for the data being mined. This sharing lowers the bar required for corporations to intrude into our identities, into who we are. And it's being performed en masse. In a sense, we're merely data points.
Although the Zune was largely a failure in terms of overall market share, it wasn't a bad product offering.
* The Zune Pass was an excellent way to get music for a flat monthly rate, and the selection and price was competitive with Rhapsody and other services.
* Zune hardware was always top-notch, with Zune devices having FM or HD radio. The Zune HD was particularly nice.
* Zune Social was somewhat similar to last.fm and provided useful music recommendations.
* Zune offered DRM-free music, in addition to DRM-locked music for the Zune Pass.
* The (Windows-only) client software was very well designed, and superior in usability to iTunes (IMO).
I would be disappointed to see the Zune name go, but sometimes good products fail in the market.
Several years ago, the WebKit folks added support for web fonts (TrueType fonts, in particular). It seemed harmless enough.
They didn't talk to the core OS X people, who assumed that fonts would largely be trusted entities. The file format for TTF is quite complex, in reality, and allows for a wide variety of attack. At that time, there were dozens of easily exploitable vulnerabilities in how OS X handled TTF fonts.
Most of these have been fixed by now, however. I would assume the Mozilla foundation would have the foresight to avoid a repeat of such situations, and all rendering code would have been fully fuzzed.
Anytime an article hits Hacker News such as this; that is, with explicit references to class and socioeconomic status, I cringe as I read the comments. The comments are both predictable, and utterly devastating.
Psychology is largely at play here, since both the Fundamental attribution error (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error) and cognitive dissonance (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance) have extremely strong effects. For the most part, the readership here often seems to be completely unaware of the daily realities of a very real underclass in western societies. Environment has a profound effect on our individual development.
I've lived a privileged life. I have many close friends who were not so fortunate. I could not possibly imagine my life circumstances today if I had to face what some of my friends did.
Now, one could argue that through financial records and other online records, anyone from a private investigator on up would be able to determine everything about me given enough time. I grant this is probably true. The downside by sharing is that every large entity will know everything about me, with minimal effort.
I won't agree to share my information merely to gain a convenient service, in return for the data being mined. This sharing lowers the bar required for corporations to intrude into our identities, into who we are. And it's being performed en masse. In a sense, we're merely data points.