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Comment by beckman466 | Hacker News Reader

> It arrived one morning in March, bearing news that Facebook had received an order from the Federal Bureau of Investigation to turn over data from personal accounts Lackey uses to chat with friends and exchange cat photos.

> the email said Facebook had been forced to keep this intrusion secret

This is some scary shit. Seriously, social media companies are sociopathic friends who record everything you say and then throw it into the public in a mangled mess if you don't obey.

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Yep, I'm old enough to remember when the general advice was to never use your real name on the internet. Then social media came along and suddenly that changed.

And now we're seeing the results of the naive trust we placed in these platforms as well as our fellow human beings. As a people we need to get back to drawing a hard line between our Private and Public selves.

I've begun to think that our private and public selves should be legally distinct entities using a corporation with a screen name and keep your personal identity for offline use only.

You are 10 years too late. Remember when Google plus was arguing that you had to use your "real name", endless arguments about that, very few for why this was a good thing. There were some naive claims that it would lead to some mysterious social pressure for people to behave if their real name was used.

In today's world, the ever more ubiquitous tracking should give everyone pause. Using tor, different email addresses and separate identifies for social accounts should be ordinary. Do you want to have any privacy? Then you need to do that. I don't hold any hope for the legislative bodies to succeed in blocking this. Not at the US federal level at least - there may be hope for California.

> Using tor, different email addresses and separate identifies for social accounts should be ordinary.

Is this even enough at this point? I wouldn't be surprised if it was possible to somehow deanonymize these people.

And even if it is enough, is it worth doing if it makes you look like a suspicious person and attracts NSA attention?

Yeah, that's a good point. Anonymity relies on everyone using Tor as well so they all look the same. If there's just one weird guy using Tor it's easy to single him out.

First thing I told my kids when they were old enough to start communicating with friends over the internet: don't use your real name, don't tell anyone your last name, don't tell anyone your address.

It's probably time to reiterate this...

Most important: don't give your phone number to companies! It is used to link your activity across sites and apps.

You of course can't get an Apple ID, a Google Account, a Twitter username, a Discord account, et c without giving a phone number. There are several good reasons for that but the biggest one is for identification.

Discord does not require a phone number, just verifying an email address.

Try it from a VPN. It requires a phone number. If you do it from Tor, it requires a phone number and like 27 captchas.

I just discovered yesterday that while the Discord itself does not require it in all cases, certain servers with the highest restrictions can require that you have a phone number verified with Discord in order to post.

When companies like Discord or Google seem to let you create an account without a phone number, what that really means is that they already figured out your phone number based on your IP, HTTP ETAGs, or browser fingerprint.

Try it again using TorBrowser, or Tails on a VPN.

That was the benefit of early account creation with several of those companies. Spam email address is the only link. Twitter and Facebook keep harassing me for a phone number but nah, I’d rather not use it.

Of course it would be trivial to link to my IP, but I’m not going to make it easy for them.

And then they go to school. School makes then use their full legal names to create an account and Google or Microsoft or Apple, store all their school activity under that. Then you explain to the school why it's not a good idea, but they say, they have to because, etc.

Indeed.

Unfortunately there are huge moves to decreasing privacy going through the legislatures and via ad/social technologies.

You'd basically have to leave everything behind and start over, change your name, move and leave no forwarding address and forget your friends; thats a non-starter for most people.

It's surprising how many sites don't even let you edit your name after you've input the data. I've seen this on a lot of them as I slog through my password manager to scrub and delete every account that I can.

Oh, this is simply the tip of the iceberg. Most people have absolutely no idea how compromised the information system is.

Nothing to hide, nothing to fear, am I right? Unless people in government want to have you murdered for standing up against corruption, or for being an activist. Very, very deeply disturbing, actually.

Here's a good song that brings together a lot of what you're pointing to: Pet Shop Boys - Integral (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSKSTvzuPr0)

What do you expect Facebook to do in this situation? Disobey the order?

Not to record the conversation in a form that they can turn it over in a useful fashion in the first place. Eg mine your data from it and then delete it or encrypt it with only the user being able to decrypt it.

They already have end to end encryption available in WhatsApp. Facebook chats are not encrypted and users are aware of it and the risks.

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