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?"

Comments

RMS wrote about this recently

[H4x0r Jim Duggan]

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/my_doom.html

Not to mention unraveling the military hierarchy

[ertdredge]

I began to get concerned about things like this when I realized how easy it would be for someone to start piecing together parts of the U.S. military hierarchy from classmates.com's "who did X serve with?" information collection.

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.

this is the reason

[blue_adept]

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.

New McCarthyism?

[Johnny_Law]

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?

Isn't this a bit late..

[Channard]

.. 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.

Re:Other mappable relationship environments?

[segment]

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.

Re:Other mappable relationship environments?

[WorkEmail]

The other idea that popped into my head was this...

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?