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."
Moglen is right (Score:5, Insightful)
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Well, he was being a bit of an ass about it, but he is completely right. I've resisted the urge to make a FB page or on any other site and I had been reconsidering it lately. Not to put much information up, but to coordinate things, but it's been a couple months and I can't get over the what Moglen is on about in this article. I just can't stand the idea of being a part of the problem.
I've contemplated in the past creating a FB account with no personal information just so that I can like random things for p
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Personally I think if people want social media and don't want it "mined" then they're sh
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.
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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.
How exactly are you going to stop it? Your friends and family - well actually anyone - can say you were somewhere doing something, that doesn't make it true.
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"That aspect concerns me more than anything else. I haven't consented to them storing information about me..."
Yes, you did. If you signed up, then you consented (according to currently accepted definitions of "consent", with which I personally disagree).
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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.
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"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."
Thank you for that. If that is so, then I had indeed lost the context.
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> Not to mention their web bugs that will track which websites you visit just in case
> you decide to create a FB account later. Even if you've never visited Facebook in your life.
Here are the CIDRs for Fecesbook that I block in my iptables ruleset, coming+going so they get no response from my browser.
66.220.144.0/20
69.63.176.0/20
69.171.224.0/19
74.119.76.0/22
173.252.64.0/18
204.15.20.0/22
If you're using a Windows firewall that requires address ranges, the corresponding ranges are...
66.220.144.0 - 66.220
Come on now (Score:2)
You cannot be serious. Well, if you are, the reason is: the government gets cc'd on every scrap of data they have.
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it's also kind of nice of them.
You know, give us all your land nice, not the other kind.
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?
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Moglen is right, and that reporter is a moron.
The reporter is actually a troll.
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Moglen is right, and that reporter is a moron.
So is the submitter with the description "has taken to yelling at journalists reporting about social networks". What are we? 12? We can no longer use the word 'criticizing' instead of 'yelling at'??? Was he speaking too loudly in the lecture?
Not all social networkers are idiots. Many if not most know they're trading privacy for the privilege of connecting with their friends. Most even know there are possible unintended consequences, and most moderate what they say on a social network.
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So is the submitter with the description "has taken to yelling at journalists reporting about social networks". What are we? 12? We can no longer use the word 'criticizing' instead of 'yelling at'??? Was he speaking too loudly in the lecture?
You should read instead of just looking at the pictures. "Yelling" was the reporter's own description, and there was no lecture involved; he called Moglen on the phone.
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Someday, people will wonder why we ever felt compelled to hide so much of our lives from each other.
Re:Moglen is right (Score:4)
I'm guessing you don't live in a society that believes the right to be private is important. Like Germany...I wonder why they believe that to be true there? But Canada has similar laws. So do many other European countries, based on the similar idea.
Re:Moglen is right (Score:4, Insightful)
Not so, it is well known that facebook compiles information on people who do not have facebook accounts, sometimes referred to as "shadow profiles". Between your friends pictures of you and related informations, your family's pictures of you and related information, your coworker's pictures of you and related information, and easily crawlable information about yourself (contact information on employer's website?), I think facebook can provide fairly comprehensive surveillance. Don't get out much? Facebook can ascertain that, depending on the posting habits of your friends, family and coworkers. Sure, some information will undoubtedly be missed, but I suspect sufficient information can be gathered about you even without a facebook account. And even if they cannot trace it back to you, the "like" buttons are always gathering your browsing habits. I think I even see some here on slashdot...
They are watching, and this time, no tinfoil hat can save you.
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"like" buttons are never gathering information on my browsing habits.
Facebook Beacon gathered information about what FB users did on sites other than Facebook. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Beacon#Privacy_concerns [wikipedia.org]
Ghostery is still blocking it on /. though it is no longer supposed to exist. What FB gathers about non-FB users would be interesting to know. Is this a good citation for this?
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But: when anyone tries to explain to Jane and Joe Normal Intelligence just why it is not a good idea to have a Facebook account, Jane and Joe (a) look at the explainer like he or she is nuts ("where's the tin foil hat?") and/or (b) assume the explainer has something to hide.
Being on Facebook is increasingly just the expected norm and not being on Facebook is regarded as antisocial/eccentric/suspicious/paranoid. I don't know what could turn this around. Even when Facebook commits egregious privacy violation
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.
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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.
Uhhh, I'm sorry, but since when do reporters phone sources to "ask for advice"? What he wanted was a quote for the story he was working on, about banks potentially using Facebook to judge loan application. Moglen could have just politely declined to answer the question, or even to accept the call. Instead, he came off like someone's drunk uncle and launched into a rant about how the reporter is a bad citizen for having a Facebook account. Thanks for the "advice," uncle Eben... maybe you should go lie down a
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.
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Think about location check-ins. If someone else checks you in, Facebook now knows where you were.
No, facebook knows where that person says you were.
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In the case of twitter, which is mentioned alongside FB in the article, you are pretty explicitly just shouting stuff to the world.
This is true, but no reason to say everyone using FB or twitter is part of the problem of r
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Yes, Twitter is very clearly public.
But maybe he added it to the list because of:
1. it is still stored centrally
and:
2. most people think if Y uses Twitter, I can use Facebook. So in that sense you are contributing to the problem. Then again, Identi.ca/status.net would be the same.
Do public website of identi.ca uses Gravatar, that is probably also not such a great idea. Still something logged centrally. ( Gravatar is from the same people as wordpress.com They might be OK people, but they too make mistakes)
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Why do you want to make it public? Why do you want to report to the world that you just shopped at X boutique, or just got ice cream at Y confectionery? Why do you think other people care, such that you tell the whole world about it? Did YOU independently decide that you wanted to do so, or are you just doing it because "it's just what you do"? If it serves no worthwhile purpose, why make that information known?
The issue Moglen is describing is let's say you're with a friend who actually does care to ma
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Why do you want to make it public? Why do you want to report to the world that you just shopped at X boutique, or just got ice cream at Y confectionery? Why do you think other people care, such that you tell the whole world about it?
Most people don't "tell the whole world about it." Most people tell their friends, the idea being that they like to go to the same places or do similar things. Personally, I'll post that I'm sitting at XYZ bar right now so anyone who feels like can come down and have a few drinks with me.
Also, as you get older and it gets harder and harder to see your friends face-to-face, because of jobs/school/kids/distance/etc., you may start to see how Facebook can be a useful and fun way to keep in touch. Facebook post
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The issue is not sharing information, it's using a massive single entity as an intermediate for sharing information. If I send on of my friends an email, it goes to my mail server and then to their mail server and then to their computer. I run my own mail server, so the only person who can easily aggregate information about me is me. They often use university or work provided email accounts, so their employers can aggregate information about their employees, but generally don't bother because they're not
Re:Moglen is right (Score:4, Insightful)
Then for many Gmail is a far greater privacy threat than facebook.
Moglen wasn't particularly helpful (Score:4, Insightful)
It seems to me the most germane question the reporter asked was, "What's the damage?" And Moglen failed spectacularly to answer it in anything approaching a coherent way.
Gotcha: If I happen to upload pictures of a couple of my friends (I generally don't) and those friends, unbeknownst to me, happen to be on the run from the Myanmar secret police (who are "evil"), then I've informed on them and they're going straight to the Ministry of Love.
Coulda used a slightly more concrete, real-world example, myself, by hey, I'll keep the warning in mind.
Re:Moglen wasn't particularly helpful (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with privacy loss is that you don't know what the damage is until it's too late. I don't personally have a FB account or account on other social networking sites because I value my privacy. But, that doesn't mean that there aren't photos of me online that other people posted, I personally have no control over that and by the time I find out that I've been harmed it's too late to do anything about it.
Re:Moglen wasn't particularly helpful (Score:5, Insightful)
You're being obtuse, the point of privacy rights is that you don't know why you need them until it's too late. He answered the question quite well by having my information being spread by other people there are any number of bad things which can result.
There have been many people harmed by an unexpected loss of privacy over the years from politicians that had to resign in disgrace to people that were later blackmailed to the many celebrities that now have their sex lives on the internet because somebody else released the footage.
And don't forget about that teacher that was fired because of a picture of her online drinking out of a red plastic cup, lord knows what she was actually drinking, but she was ultimately fired because of the picture.
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The problem here is assholes, not social media.
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No, but you can work around them, and sue for wrongful dismissal.
I'm not for a moment advocating total transparency, but I think that if these judgemental killjoys *could* see everything that was going on in the world, just how many people do actually drink, take drugs, stay out late, sleep around etc etc, without society falling down around them, they might have to confront their own small mindedness and hypocrisy.
This is just wishful thinking on my part though, it's more likely the idiot moral crusaders
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And don't forget what the article, for which the reporter asked Moglen help, was all about: banks investigating using Facebook for loan/credit applications.
When you post a drunken photo of a friend and tag this with their name, you might be causing them all sorts of harm, which may start with failed job applications and may include failure to get a mortgage, or your medical insurance company refusing to pay out, because they claim you drink to much.
And I am saying this as a Facebook user who is starting to
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Urging people to be conservative with their content is all well and good, but at some point we should look around and say "You know what, the real problem is that people aren't handling all this new information in a sane manner." We should be attacking with equal fervor people who use the information in extreme and/or inappropriate ways.
But we don't, do we. The FTC just slaps Facebook on the wrist for lying to use about its so-called privacy policy. That's it. No criminal charges, no massive crippling fines. The Europeans may be our last hope.
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You don't know how it's going to harm you, and finding out... is half the fun!
He's not saying don't put your photos online for you and your friends to see. He's saying put them on your own website, or on your own server. Only tell people you want the name. Put up a 'robots.txt' so at least most spiders that do happen across your site won't trawl it for index-able text and media. Don't put it on a giant social media collecting pot that collects and catalogs all that information for anyone who cares, in e
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The guy that pissed off Anonymous, Aaron Barr, claimed to having identified some Anon "members" by matching facebook and other activity (timing and context, mostly).
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If I happen to upload pictures of a couple of my friends (I generally don't) and those friends, unbeknownst to me, happen to be on the run from the Myanmar secret police (who are "evil"), then I've informed on them and they're going straight to the Ministry of Love.
Coulda used a slightly more concrete, real-world example, myself, by hey, I'll keep the warning in mind.
The probability that your friends are, unbeknownst to you, on the run from the Myanmar secret police, or that they are secret freedom fighters waging an important campaign to end the tyranny of some evil regime, is approximately as great as the probability that your friends are terrorists/bank robbers/criminal masterminds and in some way deserving of arrest. Neither of these greatly exceeds the probability that they are also race car drivers or test pilots with sixteen inch pleasure tools. The latter is a
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Something like:
You post a happy snap taken at a cafe on Facebook. In the background someone you don't know, call her Bloggs, is seen talking to a known head hunter. Bloggs' employer has paid in to the facial recognition service, sees that Bloggs is talking to the "enemy", decides that loyalty is lacking in Bloggs, and terminates her employment. Bloggs can no longer support her family and ultimately her mortgage is foreclosed. Bloggs has no idea how they found out, and was only having an innocent coffee with a lifelong friend anyway. Your privacy has not been violated but you have supported the destruction of someone else's life. Now imagine if I took the photo and you were having a coffee with a rival newspaper editor...
might have prompted more thought
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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 t
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Nope, sorry. Facebook (and careless use of Facebook) empowers these abusive jerks. Actually doing the legwork to figure out why you were fired and getting damages out of the ultimately responsible party is hard work and far from likely to succeed. In a world of infinite free time and free legal services, sure, Facebook's not to blame, but we don't live in that world.
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Might have prompted more thought, yes -- for example, my first thought was, "Wrongful termination lawsuit, ka-chiiing!"
So far, you're really not helping make the case here. Your example scenario is just more paranoid fantasy thinking based on a world that does not resemble the one we actually live in. You can say, "Yeah, but what if?" -- but I don't even see any evidence of a slippery slope toward what you describe. It just does not sound plausible to me.
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Better example: you post a picture taken at a cafe on Flickr. In the background is the cute girl you just met. Your camera silently geotags the photo with GPS coordinates, showing the bar where you and this girl regularly hang out, and with a date telling when the photo was taken, hinting at when she would likely be in the bar next.
You find out the next week that the girl was in the witness protection program because of her abusive ex-boyfriend. Somehow, he managed to figure out what city she was in, and
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In my opinion it boils down to asking yourself a few questions like "Are you proud of EVERYTHING you did from your early teen years till now?" "Did you ever do anything that could be misinterpreted?" "Is there anything in my past I wouldn't want my boss, mum, mother in law, neighbor, employees etc. to see?"
No one will ask questions or give the benefit of doubt if the story is more interesting
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xkcd 137 - fuck that shit [xkcd.com]
Not a very grown up way of expressing it perhaps, but I couldn't agree more with the feeling behind it.
I'm in no going to claim I'm way proud of everything I've ever done, but neither am I going to live my life pretending to be someone else.
I've probably ruled myself out of politics by now, but I did that through my actions (I had the damned cheek to enjoy myself when I was young, law and social/sexual mores be damned) not through social media. What's going to be really interesting
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But on the other hand, WTF was Anthony Weiner thinking?
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There's a difference somewhere between having some fun in your youth and being a total (47 year old, public-office holding) sleazeball!
I may have done some things in my time, but sending pictures of my cock to women 20 years my junior wasn't one of them....
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Let's say that you get into an argument with the IRS. To make double-triple sure that they're figuring out the whole situation, they decide to use social media searches to determine everyone who is or might be a business partner of yours, and investigate them as well. After being investigated, one of your business partners notes on FB that because YOU were being investigated, HE got investigated. And that's on your wall, or whatever.
Good luck running your business now!!
Spectacular! (Score:5, Insightful)
I teach different college level IT courses and Moglen's sentiments are always part of "Intro" courses.
RMS and Moglen, who would've guessed, 10 years ago, they'd be right?
Paranoia, it's not just for the fringe anymore.
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RMS and Moglen, who would've guessed, 10 years ago, they'd be right?
Paranoia, it's not just for the fringe anymore.
Too late now, as it no longer matters if you are paranoid or not.... they are after you anyway.
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.
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Yes 'they' are after you. However, you don't have to give your consent to them hoovering up every last piece of info about you (which you pretty much do with Facebook, since FB can be compelled to spill the beans to anyone who needs the information under subpeona, or any of the dodgy laws that have recently been enacted).
What many posters have not grokked is something that is wrong with the pervasive surv
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Too late now, as it no longer matters if you are paranoid or not.... they are after you anyway.
Wisdom from a bathroom wall, read many years ago:
"The fact that you're paranoid doesn't mean that they're not out to get you."
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Paranoia, it's not just for the fringe anymore.
Why it makes for a nice soundbite, I think that people who call it paranoia have it wrong. Remember, RMS started GNU and the FSF _after_ They came after him: http://poynder.blogspot.com/2006/03/interview-with-richard-stallman.html [blogspot.com]
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.
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Freedom Box is his latest project. He gave a (quite bad, actually) talk about it at FOSDEM last year and it's been on Slashdot a couple of times. The idea is to produce a cheap plug computer that can run email, chat, and so on services and provides hosting for picture and movie sharing - basically, provide all of the useful features of social networking, but provide them with completely distributed user-controlled implementations in an off-the-shelf package that people with can just buy, take home, plug i
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Problem is, I don't necessarily trust that little box. Nothing is really important except the FOSS package. The rest can be solved by any integrator[s].
It was the height of folly (Score:4, Insightful)
Nothing I've seen in the intervening years has changed my opinion about that.
Re:It was the height of folly (Score:4, Funny)
But, this is web 2.0 now. Completely safe.
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> But, this is web 2.0 now. Completely safe.
Twice as safe even! :-P
disinformation (Score:3, Informative)
Not even FB can figure it out... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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I remain skeptical. I'm a regular FB poster, and not even FB can target ads to me that I care about.
You have the risk model backwards. Targeted advertising is not much of a risk to the people viewing the advertising. Maybe they are suckered out of a few more dollars, and that's shitty but not anything new.
The problem comes when the goal is to pull information on a specific individual - someone who, for whatever reason, has become a person of interest. At that point every single piece of data that has ever been associated with that person will be examined in excruciating detail in order to gain some sor
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not even FB can target ads to me that I care about. I'm a married man so I get ads about meeting women and ovulation tests.
You clearly have more faith in your own behavior than Facebook does. What exactly have you been clicking on?
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.
Joe is a not a geek. (Score:2)
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.
The proprietary product designed for the masses replaced jany number of argon-filled apps with clumsy UIs that only the techie ever found easy to use.
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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.
What's amusing is that these are the companies that are speaking out against SOPA, because "it will destroy the internet as we know it".
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Instant messaging began with Quantum Link, which eventually became AOL Instant Messenger. ICQ was big, then MSN and Yahoo joined the party. Then there was XMPP, an open, federated, protocol (used, among other things, by Google Talk). IRC and IM don't really fit in the same category - IM is for one-to-one communication, IRC is one-to-many. And I've not seen anything replacing IRC - it's still very actively used.
Email began with BBS email, where each server
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Web pages, I'm not so sure about. Things like Facebook and MySpace grew quickly, but they still account for a tiny fraction of the total web.
Tiny is arguable. Facebook, with over 800 million users, has succeeded in walling off a significant chunk of the web where AOL and MSN failed.
didn't get the answers he wanted... (Score:3)
moglen: the users are the victims and even the stuff you write which purports to be critical will do everything except telling people the central fact, which is they have to stop using.
reporter: I think that’s totally relevant and will definitely put it in. (N.B.: In the end, I did not put this in the story for several reasons, not the least of it was the fact that it was late and over word limit.)
Moglen's tactics are dumb (Score:2)
Alienating reporters is a sure-fire way of getting your cause, no matter how good, totally disrespected. Even if they understand you, they never forgive.
In the long run, there are softer vectors to attack than social networking. A lot of these fears would apply equally well to private social platforms which were not encrypted, just the NSA etc. would have to scrape the data off the wires rather than having nice databases to mine. But the paydirt is still VISA and tax records and face recognition tied to pas
The social networking conundrum (Score:3)
The good thing about social networking is being able to share. Unfortunately, the bad thing about social networking is also being able to share: what is shared will always inevitably include "actionable" details about either you or people with whom you have relationships.
What does Moglen propose to this woman and reporter as a solution to the problem? Why, that she and by extension everyone else simply not network, not share, perhaps not even have relationships... because the logical conclusion of those relationships is always the sharing of information that might prove useful to someone else for control or profit.
While I'm enough of an outcast that I can almost vaguely begin to follow Moglen's directive, most of the people in my life network couldn't. They don't want to exist in a social vacuum, nor could they even psychologically survive in a such a fashion.
The real conundrum here, which Moglen seems to ignore for convenience, is that when information is set free then that information is now free for everyone, for any purpose or intent, good or bad. I wonder... is what Moglen proposes, in terms of attempting to control and censor one's own information, really that different from a copyright regime? The only difference is who is doing the controlling. Ultimately it's all about self-interest, whether it's using information to do harm to others or concealing information in order to avoid harm from others. Why, isn't that precisely the reason that people and corporations and governments keep secrets, to avoid that information being used to their detriment by others? What a coincidence! So Moglen, in a paroxysm of epiphany, declares that rather than doing away with all secrets we should instead be keeping more of them? Genius!
Perhaps the solution is to live such a virtuous life that no skeletons, no actionable information, exists? Social networking is the small-town paradigm applied to the Internet: there's no point in trying to hide what you know or what you've done, because *everyone* will know about it soon enough.
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The good thing about social networking is being able to share .... Why, that she and by extension everyone else simply not network, not share, perhaps not even have relationships...
The entire nature of the internet allows sharing. This does not require proprietary social networking sites. It does not require letting somebody else sell your privacy for profit.
News flash for the younger sorts: back in the 80's before there was even the *web* let alone facebook, we were communicating online with our friends and family. Today, there are much more sophisticated means available, but still which do not have anything to do with facebook.
Where did this massive worldwide brainwashing come fr
Your ideas (Score:4, Funny)
Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your facebook group.
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Was that intended to be a rebuttal? You seem to think it was, but....
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What does Moglen propose to this woman and reporter as a solution to the problem? Why, that she and by extension everyone else simply not network, not share, perhaps not even have relationships... because the logical conclusion of those relationships is always the sharing of information that might prove useful to someone else for control or profit.
Actually, Eben did not propose that she not network. He proposed that she not network using Facebook or Twitter.
The real conundrum here, which Moglen seems to ign
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It seems you don't understand the difference between private and public communication. There's no such thing as real private communication on Facebook, it's always a three way conversation between you, the other person and Facebook. And possibly identity thieves, snoopers, hackers, three letter agencies and whatever lurks the Internets. Private communication should be point-to-point between the parties I want to network with, okay so it's not entirely true since I do need phone companies and ISPs and email
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Oh nonsense. Not everyone has 7 billion facebook friends. Some of us have 20 or 30, and see them all as often as possible given they're now spread all over the planet.
It's a great way to stay relevant to each others lives and keep friendships up to date.
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.
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That's not to say customer data can't or shouldn't be protected. I'm talking about SHARED CONTENT, not data security.
In theory you could encrypt everyone's posts in a secure forum, hash their logins, hide their names, and "protect" them from surveillance. I'm surprised no one has done it yet.
But it goes against the original core design goal of DARPA, who created the internet: a tool for exchanging and sharing information.
Not hiding it.
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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.
Using Facebook and pals, even the stuff you set "private" may end up being crawled and mined by commercial interests or governments.
If you build a decentralised social network by connecting to your friends over encrypted connections, the stuff meant for friends can't be seen by anyone else. (Your friends may, of course, further distribute any information about you they have been given access to, even if you haven't made it completely public.)
If you host your totally private (as in not even accessible by fr
Obligatory Onion Story (Score:3)
PhotoDNA (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been using Picassa on my PC, which includes facial recognition, the interesting part is the hundreds of people who I have know knowledge of who appear large enough to be recognized and grouped together, merely because they happened to be near someone or something I was photographing.
The news that Facebook is scanning all photo uploads with similar technology really makes me cringe.
Eben is right, and he's NOT paranoid... just ahead of the curve.
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?
Anything, really anything... (Score:2)
Well, he doesn't TwitFace (Score:2)
So the only way he can tell people to get off of them is by going around yelling it.
He's right, but he's also a crazy neckbeard who shares RMS's talent for alienating anyone who doesn't already agree with him in every particular. With friends like that, the FSF hardly needs enemies.
Anonymous Coward: The sky is blue (Score:3)
To state that he is stating the obvious would be stating the obvious so much so that the title of your post should be the same as mine.
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The obvious.
Re:/sarc (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, at least Diaspora wasn't designed from the ground up to facilitate this sort of spying, and has as one of its design goals attempting to prevent such unwanted breaches of privacy. They may not always be successful, but such efforts I consider a fair sight better than Facebook, which was on the other hand designed from the ground up to convert its users' privacy into revenue.
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Diaspora wasn't designed
This bit, at least, appears to be true.
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Too bad I will have to share their faith.
I think you mean: share their *fate*?
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> > Too bad I will have to share their faith.
> I think you mean: share their *fate*?
Well, he'd have to share the 'faith' first, before presumably being assigned/led to believe in being assigned a 'fate' by 'faith's' $DEITY.
My interpretation. Take it on faith. :-P