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Guilty By Association
dmf writes "News.com is running a little piece about Microsoft's forays into researching aspects of social computing. With AOL Buddy Lists, Yahoo Messenger, Friendster, and other mappable relationship environments, is it possible the information will soon be used against you? Scenarios such as governments tracking private citizens, investigating terrorist links, political groups finding potential donor lists, marketing departments finding affinity groups, and other easily imagined data mining opportunities could open the doors for information abuse and misinterpretation of individual ties. What implications can it bring in the future of the personal life?"
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/my_doom.html
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
It's bad enough getting friends of friends contacting me on orkut. For some reason the religious right people think it's fair game to email me with all kinds of links to support their causes.
A swift "fuck off" does the job there, but you can't do that with an auto bot that then goes and pumps your details into Yet Another Mass Marketing Tool
I can't wait until 10 (or 2) years from now these companies start buying each other and consolidating the network information, along with everything available publicly from, say, livejournal.
that in the future, more and more people will rely on anonymous handles for their online identities. This is already happening to some extent, for my own purposes, I used bogus information for the yahoo registration when creating my anti-war page... not because I seriously fear repercussions today, but 20, 30 years from now, who knows, we may be living in a very different world, and an anonymous identity (as far as it goes) is the best way to protect yourself.
of course, for true anonymity you need the right tools.
"Is this just useless, or is it expensive as well?"
Services like AOL? I don't know how MSN or anouther online service works, but AOL stores your 'Buddy List' on their servers.
They can also keep track of what sites you're visiting when you browse the WWW. How long do you think it'll be till spam is custom fitted to groups?
Spammer A: This kid here goes to these freaky anime sites, and so do half of the people on his Buddy List. Let's send them all SPAM on learning Japanese and Freaky Bukake Sites!
Think about it.
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
I would not be so worried about the government collecting such information if it were not for the knowledge that they have tried to collect it in the past and used it in less than ethical ways.
Is it any wonder people are paranoid about them doing it again in the future or the people who defend some of the governments actions?
.. when credit cards and clubcards are already so heavily used. A credit card shows where you've been and where you've spent money - for example, someone only need look for a pub that you use your card at regularly to track you down. And the FBI has already shown its willingness to get information from ISPs regards even the vaguest suspicion of a crime - is there any real anonymity left? I doubt it.
If you think that's scary, check out the mission of these people.
Hasn't Microsoft learned from the lessons of Outlook, why should contact information be tied to the File System? It is not enough that personal information can be harvested in a variety of ways now, lets create a new one! So the next generation of worms will not only look at your contact list in your favorite e-mail client, but the file system for anything that could be missed!
And what kind of security controls are going to be placed on this "feature", hopefully it is Mandatory Access Control (yeah, I'm dreaming but what the Hell, it's Friday)!!Oh, and what happens when sites that you *had* to put real info into (say, eBay or PayPal) changes their privacy policy and opens you up to associative data mining, based on your eBay purchases and PayPal records?
This is a specific, simple and very frightening example, because we've seen companies change privacy policies on a whim (Yahoo! for example)
You can't lie online forever. Think about mailing lists with public archives. What if you sign your real name, with a munged email address? Sure, they can't SPAM you but they can still extract your name and cross-reference it, which just might uniquely identify you. Especially if the cross-references are smart enough to stick to the subject of the mailing list.
I use disposable email addresses, try to hide my online identity whenever possible, but I can still punch my favorite online alias or my full name into Google and gets hits back for ME. If Google has my name in it, I'm sure there are other databases with it in there too.
Except that you just provided a link... so everybody that shares your profile will be tied to you ;)
You shoulda posted that AC. Anybody seen my foil?
A co-worker of mine has an MSN messenger account that he keeps getting IM's in Arabic. Aparently someone else had the account and it expired and just by chance he picked the same name. He also is on some kind of Islam mailing list getting Koran verses in his mail every day. I hope that they do some research on this idea before they start handcuffing people.
It wouldn't be too hard to profile me.
The question remains: How can the cat be put back in the bag? Answer: It can't.
The only reasonable solution I see is to not let *anyone* slip through the net of info (yes, I'm talking about you high ranking government officials, and corporate bigwigs...is that redundant?) and making it freely available to all.
Then, at least, the illusion of privacy is lifted, and everyone can get on with their lives, knowing that everything is open.
Apparently, the only ones with privacy are terrorists. Hell, we can't find a guy on a kidney machine in a desert? (I'm thinking of starting a pool for how close to the election good ol' Osama will pop up. Place your bets!)
Just goes to prove that technology in the hands of people will always be misused. We can't handle the responsibillity.
Here's what I think, YOUR HELPING THE PEOPLE (GOVNT) YOU ACCUSE OF INVADING YOUR PRIVACY! Your doing the hard work for them which is thinking up of ways that you can spy on people. I'm sure some government researcher is sitting back in his cubicle reading slashdot thinking to himself.. Damn thats a good idea, we'll have to do it!
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
Child pornography rings.
They busted a guy here at work who was doing it. By they, I mean the FBI and Customs officers. By doing it, I mean trading child pornography.
Investigators have said Jeffs and two mid-Michigan men were members of an Internet club that produced child pornographic photographs, videos and live broadcasts and shared the images with other group members on their buddy lists.
Some of the "buddies" face charges that they performed sex acts with minors. Many of the victims are the suspects' own children.
What happens is, they bust one guy by meeting up with him in real life, posing as a young child. Once they've got him, they can go on his computer and see who he's got on his buddy lists, address books, they just get everyone else.
Well speaking from experience, I can tell you a little something about the Department of Justice and most will probably say i'll sound like disgruntled employee, or someone antigovernment, or something along those lines, but this is my take on them. Having gone to court against the DOJ for a 'cybercrime', I can tell you that they will try to bring out anything and everything you ever did, or that looks bad. If you showed up late to work, and were written up, they'll look for ways to spin the issue into you being an uncooperative work or something along those lines.
If you can find anyone who has fought for their rights in a court of law against the DOJ just ask them what they do to one pretrial. Past 5-10 year history comes on the table tax records, employee records, hell ex girlfriend/boyfriend records if they can get em. Better hope you don't have someone against you with an axe to grind and I mean it. In order to understand why, you have to understand that it's all about money bottom line. Most of the DA's offices are allocated budgets, and more convictions means the crime rate in your district is up which means, your office needs more money. Aside from that, you'd better hope your case (hopefully you won't/don't have one) is not high profile whereas it will lead to promotion, or an entire new 'crime division' being opened up because of you. Remember cases define the prosecutor. "Well I convicted foo foo foo for foo!" and then the book deal. It's sad, but it's what happens.
In Federal Court in the District of Massachusetts in 1998, the conviction rate was nearly 91.7% This closely follows the national trend in which conviction rates in federal court are around 90%. source Some put the rate at like 98% conviction. Either the feds are the best at finding the worse or there are a lot of dirty tricks going on. Now I'll leave it at that and you make your assumptions. I can tell you offhand associations will harm you point blank.
MoFscker
Like with mp3's and copy protected music cd's that you cannot burn or rip, you can get programs that simply "record" any sound that is coming out of your system, and then make it into a file type of your choice. So regardless of how protected the file or disc is, you simply play it, and then bam, you have a copy.
So what if they did the same with text communication? So that your machine picked out and reported back to some organization (MS, the Government, whoever) only the actual text on your screen? That is scary, because you could encryp it however you wanted, but when you open it up to read it, bam, the program captures and interprets all that is shown on the screen and that's that. So unless you actually know some secret type of language, or use "key text" cryptography and then write the intended message down on paper when you decrypt it off of your screen, that would be the only way to do it securely.
Does that idea make sense?
... Sure there are both extremes in ways of thinking with this.
But am I wrong to think that
1)anything i do online *may* be subject to monitoring, storing or somehow intercepted by one or more individuals or agencies that i don't intend?
2) therefore make sure that i don't discuss my cc numbers or that multiple homicide i pulled off last summer freely amongst people
3) consider exactly what it would take in forms of hardware, computing and people resources to collect, organize, interpret and investigate the amount of raw data that would be generated in server-side logs, on a service that is (for all intensive purposes) provided for little to no cost.
4) consider that in the logs above (or email archives, or...) that about 99.9% is going to be completely useless and/or boring drivel about tons of other people you don't know or care about.
???
I dunno.. shoot. I see the whole "invasion of privacy" and "do this today, and here's what it will lead to" argument, and it makes sense, but then i consider the points above and it all seems blown out of proportion.
What do slashbots think?
do() || do_not();
Bought anything with a bank card, credit card, or check? Your bank records are available for investigation. This yields your address, phone number, probably a cell number, Social Security Number, date of birth, and anyone you've ever paid by check or using a bank card (Visa Check card or ATM). Under the same statute, everyone you paid by check or bank card can also have their records for you examined. Library records are also open for scrutiny. I'm not positive, but I also believe that phone records (who you called and when as opposed to actual transcripts of conversations) are also covered under this. Oh, and all of the places that have their records checked are under a gag order so you won't know about it.
Doesn't sound so far fetched now, does it?
.technomancer