My current view on things posted on the web
With the Facebook data drama getting mainstream media attention and people dropping their Facebook accounts out of protest it got me thinking… people don’t understand the web do they? If you have ever had a conversation with a person insisting you change the results in a Google search as it points to an old page or out of date content in the summary you know how hard it seems to be for people to get what happens to things once they are posted on the web.
The data is crawled, it is stored, it is copied and pasted, etc. It might get locked away in archive.org or on someone’s screen shot. Whatever happens to it you only have control over the source but once you drop those keystrokes onto something accessible by a web browser or by someone else on the network you don’t have control over what happens to it. Facebook might have tried to simply write it is as it is but people don’t seem ready to understand it.
Worry about accessing your data not where it may be copied.
The real battle over your data in my mind is whether you can access it if Facebook decides you can’t. If you can’t export it or access your content (like say with Twitter past whatever number of tweets they let you get at) then we have a problem.