Government Requests For Facebook User Data Up 27 Percent in First Half of 2016 (techcrunch.com) 19
Facebook said Wednesday that government requests for user account data rose 27 percent in the first half of 2016, compared to the second half of last year, with U.S. law enforcement agencies topping the list. From a report on TechCrunch: According to the report, government requests for account data increased by 27 percent globally as compared with the last half of 2015. The number of requests grew from 46,710 to 59,229, Facebook said. The majority of the requests (56 percent) received from U.S. law enforcement contained a non-disclosure clause that prevented Facebook from notifying the user in question, the company noted. As with prior transparency reports, Facebook also detailed the number of content restriction requests -- that is, the requests from governments in response to postings that violate local laws. These actually decreased by 83 percent from 55,827 to 9,663. However, those figures don't point to a general decline in these sorts of requests from governments. Instead, the last cycle's numbers were elevated more than usual due to a sharp increase in requests related to a single image from the terrorist attacks in Paris last November.
Good (Score:1)
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Sounds like there'll be lots of government jobs, especially for 'is Yugeness' version of Operation Wetback.
But the GOP is supposed to be the small government party so I anticipate they'll struggle with than conundrum for a whole day before deciding on the font size of their rubber stamp.
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I thought Facebook was InQTel anyway?
Beating a dead horse, I think at this point... (Score:5, Insightful)
The people who use facebook don't care and the people who do care don't use it.
Policy (Score:2)
The people who use facebook don't care and the people who do care don't use it.
Policy matters affect more than the people who care about them. Most people may not care about monetary policy unless you spend years educating them about it. Monetary policy decisions are still important and still affect them and their lives in profound ways that people who understand monetary policy should care about.
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I'll just leave this here... It's nearly 5 years old now, but still perfect.
http://www.theonion.com/video/... [theonion.com]
Congress today reauthorized funding for Facebook, the massive online surveillance program run by the CIA,â said Onion Factzone anchor Brooke Alvarez.
The sheer mass of data that people willingly display about themselves publicly is very, very likely being used by both the US government and foreign governments around the world to gather information about people of interest as well as to understand
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The people who use facebook don't care and the people who do care don't use it.
I'm not sure I agree with that. FB users have largely surrendered to having everything they've shared being passed along to advertisers, but the government is a whole different beast.
I say that as a FB user who has accepted that my FB info will be used to focus ads, but would appreciate a notification if I'm being surveilled by the fed.
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This is such a ridiculous argument, what stops the government from buying your stats from ad companies (a 3rd party dev shop most likely)? What are you going to do? Tell the government they can't buy information anyone else can buy?
I just don't understand the logic of FB users.....you can't have it both ways.
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...what stops the government from buying your stats from ad companies (a 3rd party dev shop most likely)?
Absolutely nothing. Saying I'd "appreciate a notification if I'm being surveilled" in no way implies that I expect one. We have to assume that the information that advertisers have is a subset of the information the government has. The difference comes in when the government starts requesting (demanding?) information beyond what the user has willingly shared. I assume that everything I tell FB is visible to everyone. It would just be nice if government requests for information on citizens was a little more
What about Facebook's info on non-members??? (Score:3)
Facebook collects info on everybody, members and non-members alike. https://yro.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org] Police love this. They legally can't maintain large databases on people "just in case". However, Facebook does it legally, and the police can always subpeona them for that info, members and non-members alike.