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."
Re:Moglen is right (Score:5, Interesting)
Mr. Moglen: Okay, so have you closed your Facebook account and stopped using Twitter?
Reporter: Have...I?
Mr. Moglen: Yes, you!
Reporter: No, I can't!
Yup.
Reporter can't what? Can't keep in touch with people via e-mail and telephone calls? Can't restrict online vanity to anonymous postings? Can't learn lessons they should have learned back in the MySpace and Classmates days? Can't gain reputability with a pseudonym like Jolly Roger or Ethanol-fueled?
the history of the internet (Score:5, Interesting)
proprietary, centralized social networks or no
The entire history of the internet is one of moving from open and decentralized facilities to proprietary and central authorities.
IM: IRC -> a ton of separate proprietary apps
Discussions: usenet -> a ton of separate web-forum fiefdoms
Email: RFC based email -> proprietary solutions on facebook and so on
Personal web pages -> using central proprietary services like facebook
This all seems idiotic and totally the wrong direction to me, but there's no way of denying the fact that for whatever reason, Joe Sixpack prefers a more authoritarian and more proprietary approach to the internet, as opposed to a more equal/peer-to-peer and open-standard approach.
Spy agencies don't respect robots.txt (Score:4, Interesting)
If the data is available from a website, the government can crawl it. robots.txt is a polite request not to search the content of a website, not a physical lock or encryption.
It may be EASIER for the governments to find "miscreants" on social networks because they're all in one database and more easily scanned, but that definitely doesn't mean you're safe from prying eyes ANYWHERE on the internet. If you post it where others can read it, the three-letter agencies can, will, and DO read it.
Privacy on the internet is an illusion, nothing more. It has alway been so, will always be so, and cannot be otherwise if people are to share information.
Re:Moglen is right (Score:5, Interesting)
No, the reporter is the dick. Moglen is just consistently putting forward his point and the reporter is lamely making excuses for his failure to accept the advice. Anyone who asks for advice and then makes lame excuses for not following it it is a dick.
Re:Moglen is right (Score:4, Interesting)
That aspect concerns me more than anything else. I haven't consented to them storing information about me, and it's completely beyond me why the government doesn't put the smackdown on them for tracking people that haven't agreed to it.
p2p Facebook clone (Score:4, Interesting)
Has anyone started a p2p social network that could replace facebook?
Something like, I dunno, Usenet but with Web content and your cached updates are encrypted with your public key?
Re:Moglen wasn't particularly helpful (Score:2, Interesting)
Situation One (Bloggs): There are two companies here, Facebook and Bloggs' employer. Which one is actually the problem, Facebook for hosting an image and indexing it, or Bloggs' employer for being paranoid and abusive? The proximate cause of Bloggs' misfortune is the company that spies on its employees, not the company that facilitated that spying. If Bloggs were to sue someone, it would be the proximate cause of her distress, which is the wrongful termination she has suffered at the hands of a company that lives in fear and refuses to trust its own, likely because, knowing how badly it treats them, it suspects they will never feel loyalty towards them: oderint dum metuant. So, why would you blame Facebook here? If Bloggs is smart, she sees who the real tyrant is here: her employer. She should already have been looking for another job anyway, since she was working for an abusive company. Only a dumb Bloggs blames Facebook for her employer's immoral conduct: that's the kind of Bloggs that facilitates employee abuse and unethical management practices by misdirecting her anger.
Situation Two: Same deal. If your editor is using Facebook to spy on you and is likely to fire you because of your excellent networking skills (which are of paramount importance in journalism), you should move on to a better company. Since your friend is an editor and thus capable of hiring, and being a friend is probably someone you've already judged to be of decent character and who knows your character despite whatever damage your tyrannical former employers might try to do to you, you'll probably be working for a much better and more ethical newsroom shortly. Win.
Don't blame the messenger, or in this case the host and indexer. Blame the abusive management that has turned what used to be a decent company to work for into a fear-driven hellhole. Facebook isn't the bad guy here: your former employer is.
Re:Not even FB can figure it out... (Score:5, Interesting)
I remain skeptical. I'm a regular FB poster, and not even FB can target ads to me that I care about.
I've done it. I worked for an online advertising company in San Francisco. They were all about human-based targeting, done by our placement specialists. I wanted to show them what collaborative filtering could do, so I wrote a running an algorithm similar to what Netflix uses. Ran it in a one month randomized A/B test against ads targeted by our pros using demographics. For every dollar they sold during the run, I sold 3.8 dollars.