I wish there was a name for this fallacy because it comes up so often. When you have a systemic problem, you do not have a viable solution if your solution requires the conscientious choices of every affected individual.
If that worked, we would have already solved car accidents (obey all the traffic laws!), suicide (don't kill yourself!), obesity (don't eat too much unhealthy food), debt (don't spend more than you make), and basically every other social ill.
Effective solutions are ones that can be enacted by humans while fully taking human fallibility into account. It's poor engineering to design a system that requires every part to function perfectly with zero tolerances.
> I wish there was a name for this fallacy because it comes up so often. When you have a systemic problem, you do not have a viable solution if your solution requires the conscientious choices of every affected individual.
I think that's true of the general problem of data privacy, but I don't think it's exactly true of the particular "Facebook" instance of that problem.
Social networks have withered and died before, and there's no reason to think that Facebook can't be nudged in that direction, one user at a time, until the snowball starts. This seems like a pretty opportune time to get that ball rolling.
I don't mean to say that we shouldn't regulate Facebook, as a society; sure we should, and let's try to do it. But that will take years, if not decades.
But as individuals, there is something we can do today: not use it. Why dismiss this very simple solution?
I'm definitely not arguing that we shouldn't take individual steps that helps. But the parent comment says:
> if convenience trumps everything and you can't accept to make any sacrifice whatsoever then maybe you deserve to be taken advantage of.
Which basically sounds to me like, "If every fallible human on Earth can't individually decide to solve this problem, they don't deserve any solution."
If that worked, we would have already solved car accidents (obey all the traffic laws!), suicide (don't kill yourself!), obesity (don't eat too much unhealthy food), debt (don't spend more than you make), and basically every other social ill.
Effective solutions are ones that can be enacted by humans while fully taking human fallibility into account. It's poor engineering to design a system that requires every part to function perfectly with zero tolerances.