Here we go again:

“Tag Suggestions are only made to people when they add new photos to the site, and only friends are suggested.

“If for any reason someone doesn’t want their name to be suggested, they can disable the feature in their privacy settings.”

Me, last year:

Perhaps it’s time to accept a new set of base assumptions about online privacy: that coders set the rules, whether they know it or not; that most users accept the defaults, whether they ought to or not; that transgressions become norms, whether checked or not; and that those who research and advocate and educate will continue to fight the last battle, while those with the power to implement their advice most directly will ignore it until shamed into acting.

And as I said in reply to danah boyd six years ago: tagging carries a power dynamic.

In the wake of the Apple location-data retention furore, and the staged concern of the subsequent Senate hearing, I wondered whether we might actually see a more concerted resistance to the weaselry that is ‘well, you can just disable it.’ (On more cynical days, I wonder whether Facebook and its non-privacy policy is actually a front for a grand scheme to conquer the web through ‘how do I turn off…?’ content farming.) But that’s not likely to happen, and so the countdown begins for another flackish faux-apology when the tagging defaults receive another little tweak.

Ages ago, long lost to bitrot, I had a discussion over at Danny’s place about the logical direction of file/P2P storage towards a model that’s based upon file comparisons — hashes and diffs — and the underlying problems that might be encountered along the way.

We were talking about the distinction between what you might call ‘commodity data’ — downloaded media, shared documents, applications, core OS files — and personal data, and how that distinction is meditated through different licensing models, but also by a different sense of personal attachment, even if, at heart, data is data, and your most treasured photos can, for all their uniqueness, be diffed against somebody else’s.

Break down the contents of most hard drives, and you’ll find that it’s commodity data, for the most part, that has grown to fill the space now available, a new version of the push-pull that once existed between OS and hardware. A thousand hours of decently-compressed music fills around 100GB; the same in HD video takes you up to a terabyte.

Dropbox attempts to deal with the profusion of commodity data — whether obtained through purchase or P2P — through its segmented binary diffs, and it’s this model that makes most sense for generic cloud storage, even if it raises potential questions of legality and security.

Apple has decided to do things a little differently. What makes iTunes Match clever isn’t simply that it finally has the corporate clout to deliver an authorised version of Michael Robertson’s My.MP3.com ; it’s that while charging a tacit $25 amnesty fee (call it ‘iLaunder’), Apple can surreptitiously sidestep the question of how to deal with fifteen years of MP3 hoarding. While upload-based music storage services presumably have to deal with a multitude of digital versions in different bitrates, laden with the quirks of optical drives and encoding software, Apple offers a trade-in for a canonical, cloud-based version deliverable to all authorised devices.

However much Apple paid out to the record labels, it’s a model that’s intended to save them a huge amount in storage and bandwidth costs, and it sets a new precedent in how to approach commodity data online.

Still, I’m not getting rid of my FLAC archives.