The creepiness that is Facebook

[norton ash]

Norton likes this thread.

Norton is cutting his toenails.

Norton has decided not to have chicken for dinner tonight.

[Project Willow]

[justdrew]

"Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg famously said that the age of privacy is over. And the government wants to ensure that, it seems. The Electronic Frontier Foundation's FOIA request has revealed government memos encouraging agents to befriend people on a variety of social networks, to take advantage of their readiness to share — and to spy on them. Thanks to this request, the government released a handful of documents, including a May 2008 memo detailing how social-networking sites are exploited by the Office of Fraud Detection and National Security (FDNS), and one revealing how the DHS monitored social media during the Obama inauguration."

New FOIA Documents Reveal DHS Social Media Monitoring During Obama Inauguration
by Jennifer Lynch

As noted in our first post, EFF recently received new documents via our FOIA lawsuit on social network surveillance, filed with the help of UC Berkeley’s Samuelson Clinic, that reveal two ways the government has been tracking people online: Citizenship and Immigration’s surveillance of social networks to investigate citizenship petitions and the DHS’s use of a “Social Networking Monitoring Center” to collect and analyze online public communication during President Obama’s inauguration. This is the second of two posts describing these documents and some of their implications.

In addition to learning about surveillance of citizenship petitioners, EFF also learned that leading up to President Obama’s January 2009 inauguration, DHS established a Social Networking Monitoring Center (SNMC) to monitor social networking sites for “items of interest.” In a set of slides [PDF] outlining the effort, DHS discusses both the massive collection and use of social network information as well as the privacy principles it sought to employ when doing so.

While it is laudable to see DHS discussing the Fair Information Practice Principles [PDF] as part of the design for such a project, the breadth of sites targeted is concerning. For example, among the key “Candidates for Analysis” were general social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and Flickr as well as sites that focus specifically on certain demographic groups such as MiGente and BlackPlanet, news sites such as NPR, and political commentary sites DailyKos. According to the slides, SNMC looks for “‘items of interest’ in the routine of social networking posts on the events, organizations, activities, and environment” of important events. While the slides indicate that DHS scrutinized the information and emphasized the need to look at credible sources, evidence, and corroboration, they also suggest the DHS collected a massive amount of data on individuals and organizations explicitly tied to a political event.

In addition, while the slides do emphasize the minimization and elimination of “Personally Identifiable Information” (PII) from the public data, the slides note that “[o]penly divulged information excluding PII will be used for future corroboration purposes and trend analysis during the Inauguration period.” Thus, it is unclear whether or not the information was deleted permanently after the inauguration proceedings were complete. Moreover, there have been several recent studies and papers showing how, even without PII, comments and information about people online can be “re-identified” through the use of sophisticated computational techniques and thus create privacy concerns.

Finally, while there have been some reports in the past year of similar social network monitoring for large-scale public events, to date the public has not seen such detailed information about the government’s approach to monitoring, especially on its data preservation practices. As our FOIA lawsuit continues, we hope to learn more about such activities and help bring further transparency and accountability to the ways in which government agencies and law enforcement officials collect and analyze information about us online.

[beeline]

.

Not really "Facebook" but I don't remember seeing a creepy-Google thread. Anyway:

Link

Posted on Wed, Nov. 3, 2010

Summary Box: UK says Google violated data laws


THE UK VIEW: Britain's information commissioner says Google violated the country's data protection laws when its Street View mapping service recorded data from private wireless networks.

THE BACKGROUND: Google Inc. drew international outrage after it emerged that its Street View cars, which take street-level photographs to illustrate the company's popular mapping service, had also been scooping up e-mails, Internet addresses and passwords from unencrypted wireless networks.

THE PUNISHMENT: Google will escape any fines, so long as it pledges not to do it again. Scotland Yard recently said it would not launch a criminal inquiry into the breach, which the company has described as inadvertent.

[Wombaticus Rex]

^^Google's claim that it was inadvertent is totally plausible and frankly makes more sense than the alternative explanation that it was deliberate. There's no way to monetize the "private" part of that data and the rest is all publicly accessible in the first place. And, wardriving on the industrial level like they were doing would totally hoover up that info, too.

It really is the fault of the people who didn't take steps to protect information that they wanted to be kept private.

[beeline]

.

I totally had to go look up "wardriving" on the Google

[anothershamus]

I am posting just one of many infographics that come from Tyler over at Zero Hedge:

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/everything-you-need-know-about-faceshnook

[82_28]

Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook named Time's person of 2010

Time magazine has picked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg as its annual Person of the Year, the figure it believes had the most influence on events in 2010.

The 26-year-old billionaire was the subject of a 2010 film, The Social Network, charting Facebook's rise.

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange earlier won a Time readers' poll on 2010's most influential person.

The annual feature has been a fixture since the 1920s, with the winner appearing on the front cover of Time.

Runaway success

Time managing editor Richard Stengel said Mr Zuckerberg's social networking service was "transforming the way we live our lives every day".

Mr Zuckerberg co-founded Facebook while a student at Harvard University in 2004. It now has more than 500 million users worldwide and employs more than 1,700 people.

In a statement, Mr Zuckerberg said the Time award was "a real honour and recognition of how our little team is building something that hundreds of millions of people want to use to make the world more open and connected. I'm happy to be a part of that."

Mr Zuckerberg, estimated to be worth $6.9bn (£4.4bn), is one of the richest people in the US, and earlier this month he became one of the latest billionaires to pledge to give away the majority of his wealth.

He is one of 17 new people to support a group, founded by Bill Gates and his wife along with Warren Buffett, which encourages America's wealthiest to publicly promise to donate to charity.

Controversial winners

The Person of the Year (formerly Man of the Year) title is awarded by the magazine's editors to the figure deemed to have had the most influence on world events that year - not necessarily in a positive way.

Hitler, Stalin and the Ayatollah Khomeini have all won in the past.

In recent years, the title has gone to less controversial figures. In 2009 US Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke won it, while US President Barack Obama won it the year before.

A Time poll showed readers favoured naming WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange this year but the magazine's editors and correspondents chose Zuckerberg.

The conservative Tea Party political movement was Time's second choice, followed by Assange, Afghan President Hamid Karzai and the 33 trapped Chilean miners.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-12001136

[norton ash]

A Time poll showed readers favoured naming WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange this year but the magazine's editors and correspondents chose Zuckerberg.

And I'm sure that's because there was such a good film made about him this year. That must be it!

[lupercal]

Winklevoss Twins - Facebook was our idea - Tyler & Cameron

[Simulist]

A Time poll showed readers favoured naming WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange this year but the magazine's editors and correspondents chose Zuckerberg.

And I'm sure that's because there was such a good film made about him this year. That must be it!

A publication, like Time, which routinely uses misdirection as a cornerstone of its editorial policy, would naturally choose to toss attention to someone other than Assange, especially at this time.

(I used to find Time to be an extremely useful publication — back when I had a bird whose cage was the precise dimensions of the magazine.)

[norton ash]

Zuck's the natural choice of 'editors and correspondents' who've been repeatedly shown up by Assange as craven, compromised and incompetent.

[Plutonia]

A Time poll showed readers favoured naming WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange this year but the magazine's editors and correspondents chose Zuckerberg.

That's an irony.

“The concept that the world will be better if you share more is something that’s pretty foreign to a lot of people – and it runs into all these privacy concerns... Given that the world is moving towards more sharing of information, making sure that it happens in a bottom-up way, with people inputting the information themselves and having control over how their information interacts with the system, as opposed to a centralized way, through it being tracked in some surveillance system... The goal of the company is to help people to share more in order to make the world more open and to help promote understanding between people." Mark Zuckerberg, Wired, Aug 2010

Here

[lupercal]

^ and speaking of surveillance . . .



Looks pretty "bottom-up" to me!

[82_28]

Well, this should get interesting. . .

Facebook's facial recognition knows who your friends are

By Helen A.S. Popkin

The first thing you probably want to know about Facebook's new "tag suggestions" — which uses facial recognition technology to suggest which friend is probably featured in which photo — is that you can turn it off.

Facebook announced "tag suggestions" yesterday, explaining the upcoming feature thusly: "When you or a friend upload new photos, we use face recognition software — similar to that found in many photo editing tools — to match your new photos to other photos you're tagged in. We group similar photos together and, whenever possible, suggest the name of the friend in the photos."

Anticipating the inevitable freakout that accompanies every Facebook change, the world's largest social network is giving users an ample heads up — tag suggestions isn't available now, but will be rolling out across the United States in the following weeks.

The feature is an upgraded version of the facial recognition technology you may already take for granted when you upload and tag images on Facebook. The square that magically finds faces in a photo will now suggest the name of your Facebook friend it's identified through your profile, thus streamlining the process. Anyone who's ever attempted to tag a photo on a slow connection may quickly come to appreciate this feature — especially if you're the type of user who likes to upload huge sets of photos. As Facebook explains:

Now if you upload pictures from your cousin's wedding, we'll group together pictures of the bride and suggest her name. Instead of typing her name 64 times, all you'll need to do is click "Save" to tag all of your cousin's pictures at once. By making tagging easier than before, you're more likely to know right away when friends post photos.

This next part is important, and you really need to pay attention — especially if you're concerned about this new Facebook app tagging your name on potentially embarrassing images. According to Facebook, "for any reason you don't want your name to be suggested, you will be able to disable suggested tags in your Privacy Settings. Just click 'Customize Settings' and 'Suggest photos of me to friends.' Your name will no longer be suggested in photo tags, though friends can still tag you manually."

Currently, you also can prevent your Facebook friends from tagging you manually in photos via your privacy settings, and you also have the option for untagging your name in photos. You just have to do it.

http://technolog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/20 ... iends-are-