We can of course wait and hope that within 5 or 10 years the average Internet user is more educated and most will think twice about unconstrained disclosure of personal details to global public, companies, or governments, but with the rate at which technology develops and remaining privacy is being eradicated there is not much to hope for. Apart from that, studies in psychology and sociology have repeatedly pointed out that we tend to bother less as long as something does not affect our immediate environment or ourselves directly, so opening people’s eyes (before it is really too late and massive datasets of thoroughly profiled individuals are widely available to be used and misused by anybody) is of utmost importance.

Reducing ignorance by education is essential, but unfortunately we too often need things to go terribly wrong and get personally involved to get painfully aware of how important things are that we often take for granted. A combination of education and thoughtful confrontation to increase awareness and a sense of importance would therefore be the most effective. With a open, free, safe society and our civil liberties at stake, there is no time to waste.

However, once a document is public on the web, one can no longer make presumptions about how it will be used. Even if Pete Warden does not release his dataset, others have already collected this data and are using it for unknown purposes. In fact, it’s probably on sale here. If Pete Warden releases the Facebook data, he will just be bringing attention to the fact that this kind of automated collection is already happening, which in my mind is better than allowing people to remain ignorant of this possibility.

You could argue that this argument is based on the premise that one wrong justifies another, which is in part true. If no bots crawled this data, then your argument against releasing the data would be stronger. However, there’s no way of enforcing this kind of control, so this is a moot point in my mind.