Facebook Retroactively Makes More User Data Public 287
mjn writes "In yet another backtrack from their privacy policy, Facebook has decided to retroactively move more information into the public, indexable part of profiles. The new profile parts made public are: a list of things users have become 'fans' of (now renamed to 'likes'), their education and work histories, and what they list under 'interests.' Apparently there is neither any opt-out nor even notice to users, despite the fact that some of this information was entered by users at a time when Facebook's privacy policy explicitly promised that it wouldn't be part of the public profile."
Opt-in/out message (Score:3, Interesting)
I saw an opt-in/opt-out notice last night on Facebook for this change. I'm not sure why others have not. Perhaps they are rolling it out in waves or perhaps it depends on country (I'm in Canada).
Re:Don't worry (Score:3, Interesting)
419 Scammers? No, it's really employers. (Score:5, Interesting)
How long until identity thieves, 419 scammers & spammers create software that can
trawl sites like facebook for useful info?
Seriously, what are they going to find that will be so useful? "Hello, sir -- I note that you went to the University of Nebraska and worked for a while at Cargill. Because of this, I am interested in repatriating my family's fortune to your bank account, for which you will get a fee." Get real...
The realistic threat of facebook vis a vis privacy is that of your youthful indiscretions being on wide display for coworkers and bosses to see.
Re:419 Scammers? No, it's really employers. (Score:3, Interesting)
It's a lot more than employers and coworkers. Insurance companies could see if you hang out with people who are into dangerous sports, drink too much or are otherwise exposed to increased risks. Banks could draw conclusions about your credit worthiness by looking at the credit history of your friends. Merchants could see what your friends like or bought and at what price. Then they can avoid lowballing an offer to you (i.e. get you to pay the most you're willing to pay). The social graph is powerful economic information.
Re:Don't worry (Score:2, Interesting)
Wrong. Don't tell him ANYTHING. Facebook, MySpace and all the other "social networking" crap is utterly useless, except for those people trolling through the data (advertisers, identity thieves, etc). You would be surprised how just a tiny bit of seemly unimportant information can be added together with hundreds of bits of other seemingly unimportant information to reveal a whole lot more than you want to be revealed.
Re:Don't worry (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:419 Scammers? No, it's really employers. (Score:3, Interesting)
Ditto here. But.....
"We must all hang together, or we will surely hang separately." - Benjamin Franklin. They proudly scrawled their names across that document. Sometimes it's more important to stand-up for what is right, than to be anonymous.
BTW I prefer the word "liberal". I want people to have the right to carry guns for self-defense, to marry whomever they please, worship whatever deity they desire, eliminate income tax for everyone below $100,000 (as was the case in the 1920s), and amend the constitution to give Member States the power to nullify the central government's acts (via a 25 majority vote). There is nothing "conservative" about these ideas, so it makes little sense to keep using that label on me.
Re:419 Scammers? No, it's really employers. (Score:3, Interesting)
And who tells you that it will not get better? An advanced spamming software might determine common interest between and the person from whom the mail claims to come (now easy, with all the data public on facebook), match them against a database of plausible content, maybe even automatically analyze (in a rudimentary way) the writing style on his facebook profile, and then use that information to compose a mail which doesn't look suspicious.
For example, if both you and your friend like a certain artist, then they could e.g. send a mail claiming to be from him which says "Hey, did you see the new site about $ARTIST? It's at http://malwareinfectedsite.com/ and it's better than $ARTIST's own page!"
Re:Why (Score:2, Interesting)
If I delete my account, I miss out on invitations to do stuff. For many of my friends, Facebook is now the ONLY way they communicate. As much as I dislike these latest policy changes, I think you can still use Facebook 'safely'. For instance, there's no information about me on my profile at all - not even gender. I haven't allowed any apps. I haven't uploaded any photos. I don't 'like' any pages. I delete all Facebook's cookies as soon as I log out. I've unchecked all the boxes and opted out of everything that can be opted out of. My profile picture is a landscape. Yeah, other people upload pictures of me from time to time, but that would happen anyway - at least by being on Facebook I can vet them and ask for anything too incriminating to be taken down. I have no illusions about what they're up, but I still think it's a useful way to stay in touch with people you don't see as much as you'd like.
Facebook Deepens Ties with Intelligence Agencies (Score:5, Interesting)
The "real danger" isn't youthful indiscretion. It's profiling in a giant model by Government AND commercial interests in ways that will forever affect your ability to get a job, find insurance or even your ability to freely travel.
How do you build a panopticon, a prison for a society in which real power lies outside of government, in the hands of private commercial and financial interests? Honeypots. Google and Facebook and whatnot. Everyone is so anti-Government, like the stupid Reaganites. That's like being against a small-town cop. He's got the gun, alright - but he works for the man in the big house, at the edge of town. Hired. The enemy isn't Barney Fife - It's Old Man Potter.
How does this relate to Facebook?
You present a real, but minor threat, versus the real evil Facebook represent - along with the darkest nightmare of Google.
Remember, Watson, at IBM supplied tabulation equipment for improving the German Census in the 1930's. Technology was welcomed, and was going to modernize, to improve every German life. Except for a minority or two, of 11 million...
Cypher: "All I see now is blonde, brunette, redhead."
Facebook has been gradually boosting its profile in Washington D.C. [venturebeat.com] over the past year and is on the hunt for a second senior lobbyist to add to its office of four. Disclosures released a few days ago show that, on top of lobbying the usual suspects Internet companies reach out to like the Federal Trade Commission and the U.S. senators and representatives, the fast-growing social network has also been busy deepening ties to government intelligence and homeland security agencies. ...
What's interesting about Facebook's lobbying in D.C. is what it spends money on despite its small size. It was the only consumer Internet company out of Google, Amazon, eBay, Microsoft, Yahoo and Apple to reach out to intelligence agencies last year, according to lobbying disclosure forms. It has lobbied the Office of the Director of National Intelligence -- an umbrella office founded in the wake of Sept. 11 that synthesizes intelligence from 17 agencies including the CIA and advises the President -- for the last three quarters on privacy and federal cyber-security policy. It has reached out to the Defense Intelligence Agency too.
Well, Facebook has always been an "op" http://cryptogon.com/?p=13749 [cryptogon.com]
Now, combine those observations with the next two pieces of information:
Virginia Tech Is Building an Artificial America in a Supercomputer [ieee.org]
As many as 163 variables, mostly drawn from the U.S. Census, come into play for each synthetic American. Called EpiSimdemics, the model almost perfectly matches the demographic attributes of groups with at least 1500 people, according to Keith Bisset, a senior research associate who works on the simulation's software. The software generates fake people to populate real communities and assigns each person characteristics such as age, education level, and occupation to mirror local statistics derived from the most recent national census. In accordance with the data, some individuals are clustered into families, while others live alone.
Every synthetic household is assigned a real street address, based on land-use information from Navteq, a digital-mapping company. Using data from a business directory, each employed individual is matched to a specific job within a reasonable commute from the person's home. Similarly, actual schools, supermarkets, and shopping centers identified through Navteq's database are also linked to households based on their proximity to the home. When an artificial American goes grocery shopping, the simulation algorithm assigns probabilities that
Re:Facebook Sucks...time, intelligence, health (Score:1, Interesting)
Being long-term unemployed, barely making ends meet, and living far from any friends, Facebook has been the entirety of my social interaction for some time now. My love-hate lifeline with the world. I do write letters, and I called back when I still had a phone, but for now, Facebook is what keeps me from being suicidal. Flawed, but useful.
Re:Don't worry (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course, the trouble is that Facebook knows how important it has become, and now can essentially do whatever it wants knowing that very few people will ever leave due to the reasons I expressed above.
Re:419 Scammers? No, it's really employers. (Score:3, Interesting)
You put real information in there? I don't even put real info in there for my on-line banking.
It is astonishing how many here 'get it wrong' (Score:4, Interesting)
Eben Moglen:
We have a kind of social dilemma which comes from architectural creep. We had an Internet that was designed around the notion of peerage - machines with no hierarchical relationship to one another, and no guarantee about their internal architectures or behaviours, communicating through a series of rules which allowed disparate, heterogeneous networks to be networked together around the assumption that everybody's equal.
In the Web the social harm done by the client-server model arises from the fact that logs of Web servers become the trails left by all of the activities of human beings, and the logs can be centralised in servers under hierarchical control. Web logs become power. With the exception of search, which is a service that nobody knows how to decentralise efficiently, most of these services do not actually rely upon a hierarchical model. They really rely upon the Web - that is, the non-hierarchical peerage model created by Tim Berners-Lee, and which is now the dominant data structure in our world.
The services are centralised for commercial purposes. The power that the Web log holds is monetisable, because it provides a form of surveillance which is attractive to both commercial and governmental social control. So the Web, with services equipped in a basically client-server architecture, becomes a device for surveillance as well as providing additional services. And surveillance becomes the hidden service wrapped inside everything we get for free.
The cloud is a vernacular name which we give to a significant improvement in the server-side of the web - the server, decentralised. It becomes, instead of a lump of iron, a digital appliance, which can be running anywhere. This means that for all practical purposes servers cease to be subject to significant legal control. They no longer operate in a policy-directed manner, because they are no longer iron, subject to territorial orientation of law. In a world of virtualised service provision, the server which provides the service, and therefore the log which is the result of the hidden service of surveillance, can be projected into any domain at any moment and can be stripped of any legal obligation pretty much equally freely.
This is a pessimal result.
read the rest here [h-online.com].
if you're too lazy to read watch it here [youtube.com].
Re:Facebook Deepens Ties with Intelligence Agencie (Score:3, Interesting)
Implication, triangulation and extrapolation.
Where will this be in 5-7 years?
Additional tidbit: Google is off and running to be the network and intelligence for your US "Smart Power Grid". A google tap on the meter outside your house. Did you see Brazil?
Re:Facebook Deepens Ties with Intelligence Agencie (Score:4, Interesting)
In light of the above, I'd recommend the following article (and series) at Global Research: The Transnational Homeland Security State and the Decline of Democracy
( http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=18676 [globalresearch.ca] )
There are two bits here, relevant to the "Super Simulation" being built by NSA - and the role of ordinary Internet activity and Social Networks in functioning as data-sources:
In November of 2007, Keith Olbermann interviewed Mark Klein on MSNBC, where Klein elaborated on the secret program, saying that virtually all internet traffic in the entire country was handed over to the NSA. He appeared on MSNBC at a time when Congress was debating whether or not to grant the telecom companies legal immunity for participating in the NSA program, which would thus shut down all pending legal action being taken against the companies for their involvement in the illegal program. Klein reflected on his job, saying that, "Here I am, being forced to connect the Big Brother machine."
and:
In September of 2003, Congress ended funding for the program. The media then hailed the TIA program as "dead and gone." Yet, the funding was cut for the specific program as envisaged under the umbrella of TIA. The various programs within TIA could continue as separate projects, with the full funding and support of Congress. ...
In 2006, it was revealed that TIA stopped "in name only" and in fact does live on, and it "was moved from the Pentagon's research-and-development agency to another group, which builds technologies primarily for the National Security Agency." Interestingly, "Two of the most important components of the TIA program were moved to the Advanced Research and Development Activity, housed at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Md." The program has heavy involvement from private defense and intelligence contractors, highly secretive corporations that get major contracts from US intelligence agencies to be able to undertake intelligence activities that aren't subjected to Congressional oversight.
An infallible method of conciliating a tiger is to allow oneself to be devoured.
-- Konrad Adenauer
Re:An old adage about the Internet... (Score:3, Interesting)
addendum: never allow a friend to say anything on facebook you wouldn't want shouted from the mountaintops. More seriously, I think there is a different kind of privacy concern that comes from mass data-mining ... it's not the "will I be scammed/blackmailed" but more of a "will I be blacklisted". Will potential employers, governments or other organizations begin to define a sort of "social credit score" that impacts my career, the rate at which I am "randomly" picked out for an audit, etc. I don't have any secrets worth hiding, but I have a terrible fear of "death by random red tape".
This is already going on. I've already had one place mention my postings on an online forum when I went in for the interview. They claimed not to take it against me, but I never got the job.
Re:Life requires labor. (Score:3, Interesting)
This is why 'wealth' isn't (or shouldn't be) measured in anything so abstract as 'money' but in actual indexes of commodities and societies.
How many children are born and not dying in infancy? That's wealth.
How many people are educated? That's wealth.
How well maintained is your infrastructure? That's wealth.
How healthy is your population? That's wealth.
How many crops do you have? That's wealth.
How resilient is your ecosystem? That's wealth.
How many murders aren't happening in your cities? That's wealth.
What's your GDP? Dunno, who cares? It's not measuring wealth except at several removes, and it might actually be measuring active destruction of wealth if you're counting money being transferred from the majority of the population to a minority in your transactions.
Indexing the dollar against a basket of actual life-supporting commodities and social/ecological indexes would be a good start toward a stable monetary system that relates money to wealth.