Eben Moglen: Social Networking "Creating Systems of Comprehensive Surveillance" 236
An anonymous reader writes "Eben Moglen, founder of the Freedombox project, has taken to yelling at journalists reporting about social networks. One wonders if this messaging will work to end proprietary, centralized social networks or not."
Eben Moglen (Score:5, Informative)
Really, Freedombox? I'd never heard of that project before now, but I have most definitely heard of Professor Eben Moglen. I know him as the Chairman of the Software Freedom Law Center, providing legal assistance to non-profit Free/Open Source Software developers, including among its clients the FSF (Moglen worked on drafting the GPLv3 for one), Wine, BusyBox, and Plone among others. I do think that this is a much more significant thing to mention about him.
And yes, he is absolutely right about Facebook and modern social media. All of the things he's said are obvious to anyone.
disinformation (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Spectacular! (Score:5, Informative)
"learn relationships between people and organizations through websites and social networks."
i.e. hunt weblogs, chat sites, news reports, and social networking sites create automatic dossiers on individuals.
Re:Moglen is right (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, people sharing information and thoughts freely is a terrible threat to privacy.
Straw man. He's not arguing against the act of sharing of information. Read, then understand, then formulate your counter-argument.
Oh wait, no, the other thing - they (I should say 'we' as a facebook user) deliberately share this info and WANT to make it public.
That's an assumption that doesn't hold in practice. People deliberately share information. Who they intended to share it with and who it is actually shared with are not necessarily the same. A Facebook user may not realize the implications of posting something to a public page or a public profile, and in the process share more about themselves or their actions than they intended. You also fail to realize that the "big-brother fetish" is in fact a legitimate concern. Think about location check-ins. If someone else checks you in, Facebook now knows where you were. Did you want it to know that? Did you know that you can disable others' ability to check you in? Did you know that that gives Facebook one more piece of data to target advertising towards you? Maybe you do...but it's unreasonable of you to expect the masses to know all of the possible ways a simple click on Facebook can be used against you.
Re:Moglen is right (Score:2, Informative)
You've lost the context - the discussion was about the fact that people can post things on facebook ("tag") about people who aren't registered members and therefore haven't consented.