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Comment by atacrawl | Hacker News Reader

I guess I sort of see his point, but isn't he overstating things? Take Facebook out of the equation, and it's still incredibly easy for intelligence agencies to find out everything about you. They can still tap your phones, do surveillance, check your bank records, bug your home and read anything you write online that doesn't happen to be on Facebook. Maybe Facebook made some of that easier, but it certainly didn't make possible the impossible.

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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.

But the entity must exist within Facebook's system for it to be tagged, no?

Can you tag photos of people who are not members of Facebook?

You can tag people without linking to an actual profile. You can still manually type a name or any other text.

"facefook" - I'm gonna remember that one.

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.

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.

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