Wikileaks Founder: Facebook is the most appalling spy machine ever invented

Wasn't Zuckerberg actually quoted in an email he wrote as saying his first users were complete idiots for trusting him?

On the upside, the prevalence of things like Facebook also introduces a lot of noise and weak social links.

Half a century ago you coud make a precision strike and kill half a dozen people to cripple somebody's life. Today you could start clipping off someone's 500+ Facebook friends or Twitter followers, but it gets really impractical really fast and the impact wouldn't be as strong.

Back in the day, you'd find a stash of letters and find your targets. Today Google, Facebook, and Twitter have hundreds of thousands of messages between me and thousands of other people. Where do you start? Especially if you're looking for something very specific like signs of strong relationships, your thesis on this could very well be its own startup or sociology study.

Having more data than you can swallow is cool and all, but pulling something valuable out of it is its own non-trivial task. Throwing raw computing power at it doesn't fix it either.

(Side note: I'm all for private/secure/distributed/federated implementations of... everything.)

Beautiful. Thank you. When discussing privacy issues, I've been trying to find a good response to, "As long as you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about."

This is the best answer I've seen.

It's our responsibility as citizens to keep the gov't in line, though somehow we have been convinced that it is strictly the opposite. The more we share about our lives, the easier it is for various organizations to silence what they don't like.

hmm. someone should write a "virtual poland" application that analyzes a set of facebook pages, and figures out who to "neutralize". i think that might get some attention.

This is pretty interesting. I know casino security is a business where a consultant can develop a technique and sell them as services to casinos (allowing them economies of scale), but it's still pretty crazy how much effort casinos will put out to thwart non-mechanical card counters. I wonder what casinos estimate their annual loss to card counters?

Ok, I'll bite.

Any idea how they go from your photo to your facebook profile?

Presumably they'd need to scrape facebook for all profile photos and names, which isn't that easy? (I could be wrong here, I'm sure some company would sell you that data) Alternatively they'd need to link your picture to a name, which they could do with a loyalty card, but I don't think that's very likely for cheaters (why would they have a way for the casino to easily track them?)

What's with the downvotes? It's related. Just because it's satire doesn't make it cheap and useless. Upvoted.

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And like everything from Wikileaks, it makes me say, "no kidding..."

Owning your data is the only way to keep "other people" from owning your data! A distributed F2F (friend to friend) graph of nodes (people) in which every node (person) has the "software" to connect with the other nodes and share information with their social graph.

The hard part there is securing it. But, with an underlying framework (like http://gnunet.org) that handles anonymized, F2F, and encrypted network topology you can build a "distributed facebook" that can share photos - events - stories - timelines - videos - &c... The cool part about software like that is the individual user is in 100% control (if it's open-source) of their data and what is done with it (want to share that sexy-time video with just your gf?).

GNUnet is a viable solution at this point because the project is building an open-source framework that handles the really hard features of a distributed, secure, and anonymous F2F (or P2P if you want, but that's less securable) stack on-top of the network stack. With GNUnet, all you need is to build the "features" on-top of it - the other cool thing about it too is that it would be a desktop application (not through the browser).

There are other issues to overcome with such an implementation, but, in short that is how you would do Facebook the "alternative" way. It's how Diaspora is "trying" to do it (without much success because the underlying network topology and security is a very difficult problem).

Good question. This is definitely a problem that requires a solid solution. My take on it would be to focus on the source. The web was meant to be a open platform. Given, the discrete requirement of social networks -- it would make sense to move to platforms like iPhone, Android or even the good old desktop. The design of the network needs to be much more smarter, as the entire logic of the app (finding & connecting to people, communicating with them, and exchanging files) would rest on the phone itself.

Surveillance generally requires someone to know ahead of time that you're a person of interest, in order to order phone taps, pull your mail, put a tracker on your car etc. Facebook logs all your data ahead of time. If I want to know about you, I can just check your FB in a few seconds and know months of data about you. FB also includes lists of your contacts, logs of (some) communications, pictures of you, and maybe location data to boot.

Also, all of everyone's information is now available from a single broker. With law-enforcement API's that (I'm assuming) FB provides, it's possible to track thousands of people in real-time for months without leaving the room or investing in lots of equipment. So it's not just that surveillance is "easier" but that it's now accessible to lots of people who couldn't do it before.

I think the other problem is that Facebook makes it more acceptable to use your real name and real information. I remember the old days of the internet where you were wary of marketers and spammers and used as much fake information as was possible in order to use a website/service/whatever. Facebook definitely makes all of that easier mainly because it puts it in one place. Instead of having to do multiple things (talk to bank, phone company, visit your house, monitor all the places where you're writing), it can do just one thing: ask Facebook for all your data.

Centralization and acceptability of personal information being public are the two main problems.

No, it is not.

With facebook they could know about you EVEN when you are not into facefook.

You know , they make people tag their photos with the names on it, with face detection. So the tree letter agencies (NSA..) have registering of events they previously did not have access to: Your friends weeding photos tells them you were there. They do not have to ask anymore. They know everything about anyone with redundancy(multiple people making photos). You are your friends spy.

Once you tag your photos you do their work, instead of having to analyze 5 million pixels x 4 bytes = 20MBytes of data per photo, you reduce it to a 20Bytes name they can plot on a link graph with 1 million more with minimum effort.

Facebook induces people to put a lot of stuff into computers that they didn't put into computers before, and then they store it in a big centralized system. In theory someone could have put bugs in everyone's houses to digitize all of their conversations and radioed them in real-time to a supercomputer to do voice recognition, and also photographed them whenever they were at a party and used face recognition to map out their social relationships. But, in practice, nobody did. Facebook gives you that big, juicy database. Now, all that remains is to data-mine it.

All signs indicate that Julian Assange is correct about Facebook information being completely and easily accessible, without judicial oversight, to US intelligence.

This should not be surprising either, considering laws such as the USA Patriot Act and the long history of illegal wiretapping and illegal surveillance in general conducted by American intelligence agencies, with impunity.

Any skepticism about Facebook's availability to the NSA and CIA is, frankly, completely naive and ignores history among other things.

  > I believe that the benefits of a social network such as Facebook
  > outweigh the risks.

That's a false dichotomy. There are systems for social networks with decent privacy schemes.

On the other hand you don't know shit about the risk. If the US government takes a totalitarian turn, and they start taking away your friends and family under the guise of homeland security then Facebook suddenly becomes your worse nightmare. And don't get me started on Color: Wilhelm Zaisser's corpse is busting a nut about that 50 years posthumous.

I have heard rumors that the NSA and CIA directors have promulgated policies against their employees using Facebook and similar sites.

I find it interesting that the people that founded FB don't do social networking much. Telling, IMO.

Is hiding my friends less creepy than trawling through my friends, friends' friends, friends' friends' friends, and so on?

Consider the hypothetical scenario of trying to organize protests against an illegitimate regime.

Do you see the value of the information for the illegitimate regime to use?

Even if you do not actively register at Facebook yourself, your friends might give them your identity and social group by allowing Facebook to harvest their e-mail accounts.

Many people don't know/understand what they share about themselves when they sign up for Facebook. What's wrong with someone who is known for speaking up to warn people about the 'risks' of social media?