In which Eben Moglen calls out a reporter for having Facebook

Let's look at another example of convenience that isn't being solved very well: my car.

My car is incredibly convenient. Often I'd rather drive than take the bus. And you can't beat it for hauling stuff around. Better than my bike, for sure.

Cars have freed up the world's pedestrians from footwrecking walking!

But there's a lot going on here. Cars, roads, the death of public transport (cf trolly cars in LA http://www.usc.edu/libraries/archives/la/historic/redcars/ ). America, at least, was sold on the car by businesses that had a vested interest in seeing the car succeed. Cities dismantled public transport systems at the behest of these same powerful lobbies.

And today our cities are outgrowths of the personal motor vehicle. (Electric cars don't solve anything here, it's still energy being produced).

While I think that you make a point worth considering, I believe that we should error on the side of suspicion when utility, or less nobly, convenience, comes at an initially small cost and is heavily promoted by... whom, exactly?

I worked in advertising long enough to look squarely to the data-finance industrial complex (tongue only partially in cheek when using that phrase) whenever personal information is involved.

Convenience has costs. Moglen may not have the right to judge but we need noisy people that remind us there is a problem.

• for her and her site, a full-length story of the call, garnering inlinks and traffic

• for him, a detailed description of his views, totally beyond the original 'quote in a box' form-journalism role they wanted him to play

• for us, a discussion thread seeded by an interesting, strong, contrarian opinion

Why be diplomatic if that would result in none of the above?

I think you're missing his point about privacy, that "everything they share is held by someone who is no friend of theirs… whose goal it is to make a profit selling the ability to control human beings by knowing more about themselves than they know." And, "You injure other people today also using social media. You’ve informed on them. You’ve created more records about them. You’ve added to the problems not of yourself but of other people. If it were as simple as just you’re only hurting yourself I wouldn’t bother pointing it out to you."

The collectors would like you to think the data you're sharing is 'innocuous' and 'mundane' but they have algorithms and statistical confidences that say it isn't.

On the other hand, I think Moglen is hopelessly standing athwart history yelling 'stop' on this issue. Technology would make these behaviors trivial to monitor even if most people opted out (instead of cheerfully opting in). So I tend more towards the David Brin/'Transparent Society' view, that the only workable adaptation will be transparency/accountability and new social mores, because privacy is on its deathbed.

They're certainly known as "Facebook revolutions" (or "Twitter uprisings" or whatever) by foreign media organisations looking for a gimmicky hook to hang a story on, but I honestly doubt that regular Tunisians and Egyptians really use that phrase themselves other than as talking heads when dealing with said media organisations.

I think it's a pretty safe bet that most people just call it "last year."