Belgium Tells Facebook to Stop Storing Personal Data from Non-Users

range, permanence and ease of distribution are much diferent but, take for example, a picture.

if 2 people are in a picture taken by a third party, to what extent can any person excert ownership over that "data".

the photographer, or either of the subjects. I am all for privacy, but I would find it hard to make a compelling case for the above scenario that could be absolute, and applied uniformly.

We have learned to deal with it. In Europe, we have for the most part decided that allowing large organisations to compile personal data without either the data subject's consent or some other acceptable reason is not a good thing, and we have passed laws that forbid it.

I have the right to a little black book.

Sure you do, but in Europe you don't have the automatic right to keep personal data about me and millions of other people in it, and if you do then we might punish you for it.

I have a right to free speech, and sometimes your name is on my lips.

Not in Europe, you don't. In fact, legally speaking you don't have that absolute right anywhere else in the world that I know about either.

To some extent, that means recognising that some actions enabled by new technology may be reasonable even if they involve personal data being collected, used, or passed on.

In other cases, that means recognising that new technologies pose new threats to privacy and things we could let by before because they posed no real threat are no longer as harmless and therefore potentially no longer as socially acceptable.

For example, I find the idea that you lose any expectation of any sort of privacy the moment you step outside your front door naive and dangerous, but people often claim this is reasonable in privacy debates based on an argument along the lines that anyone could see you walking down the street and it's always been that way.

Personally, I do see a few small differences between walking past someone who doesn't know you from Adam and will forget you within seconds and going for a walk in the view of a comprehensive network of cameras and microphones that allow unknown parties to remotely and systematically observe your every move and sound while you're out, along with those of everyone else nearby, subject you all to gait and voice analysis to identify you and infer information about your mood, interests and relationships, correlate that data with data about you from other sources, record everything permanently, and make it easy to search for information about you and everyone else who went out that day in order to make decisions about arbitrary and unknown criteria from what to offer you as an insurance premium next year to how to embarrass you out of running for office at the next election.

Clearly there is going to be a scale with many of these issues and we will need to find a socially acceptable balance and set reasonable expectations accordingly. It's also pretty clear that damage is being done by the dramatic erosion of privacy in the digital age because so far the capabilities of new technologies have far out-stripped the social and regulatory debates around it. Unfortunately, a big part of the problem is that many people have little idea of what is happening with personal data about them and even less understanding of the potential consequences unless they've been the unlucky one who really was a victim of, say, identity theft. Consequently the opinion polls tend to show most people not being that bothered by organisations like Facebook, even though when fully informed or after widely reported leaks with many victims potentially affected you tend to see quite different opinions being expressed.