Dear Julian Assange: The Internet is the Most Appalling Spy Machine

Silly. The internet has plenty of potential for government abuse, but Facebook gives governments a single entity to talk to whose sole purpose is to centralize your personal information.

If you're paranoid, the Internet at large can be pretty anonymous: proxies, encrypted communications, etc. It's just a communications network and you can make it nearly as secure as you want.

It's a heck of a lot easier to be anonymous on the Internet than it is in the real world. Being anonymous on Facebook doesn't even compute, and any privacy options you select are at their discretion to provide and honor.

The Internet isn't blatantly selling your data or giving it away to just anyone because. Believe it or not there are actually safe places/protocols in which your data can't/shouldn't ever be recovered. Assange was right to point out Facebook, because it's literally the best example of what he was trying to say about how everyone is quickly helping the Government build a database of everyone and everything about them..

Maybe we need less people trying to re-create social networks with lies about privacy, and more people helping users create their own safe/secure cloud. Hosting your own e-mail is an amazing place to start.

Wrong title. A more accurate one would be "Big Centralized Services are the Most Appalling Spy Machine".

Unless of course you estimate that the internet is a place where you have to use big centralized services very often. We do use them very often, but as billybob¹ said, we don't actually have to.

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2510133

Oh come on. This is a long bow to draw. Nice try, Facebook apologist, but the Internet does not have an easy to access interface for any US intelligence agent to find out what any person in the world is up to.

The Internet is a communications network and a collection of accessible data (that is, facts and information). Facebook is a site on the Internet which aggregates and makes available relationships between people and organizations. If you want to spy, relationships and dependencies are at least as significant as facts. The Social Graph has information that is hard to deduce from documents using a search engine.

It goes both ways - I've spied on government organizations using the Internet, more than once. Without threatening national security, of course.

Dear luigionline: Facebook is the Internet.