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

Other mappable relationship environments?

[nokilli]

You mean like this? Won't be long before /. is mined for this data, regardless of what the robots.txt file says about it.

Re:Other mappable relationship environments?

[WorkEmail]

As we progress further and further into the digital age, consumers will have to resort to their own cryptography to ensure that their communication stays private.

PGP was a good start, it is basically an uncrackable form of cryptography based on public keys, that a very brave guy almost spent his life in prison for posting on a BS back ni the day. Click here for info on it.

Many Slashdot'ers probably are already familiar with this, but hey, you never know. We will all be fighting for privacy in the coming years it seems, best to know what tools are available to you. :)

PGP is available on almost every OS, Windows 95/98/NT/2000, MacOS, AIX, HPUX, Linux, Solaris, and DOS. And can be easily configured to work with most popular email programs as well.

Privacy means that only the intended recipient of a message can read it. By providing the ability to encrypt messages, PGP provides protection against anyone eavesdropping on the network. Even if the information is intercepted, it is completely unreadable to the snooper. Authentication identifies the origin of the information, certainty that it is authentic, and that it has not been altered. Authentication also provides an extremely valuable tool in network security: verification of the identity of an individual. In addition to secure messaging, PGP also provides secure data storage, enabling you to encrypt files stored on your computer. Version 6.5.8 also includes PGPnet - a powerful VPN client which enables secure peer-to-peer IP-based network connections - and Self-Decrypting Archives (SDAs) which allow you to exchange information securely even with those who do not have PGP.

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?

[RailGunner]

You know, I'm really not sure WordOfMouthResearch.com is legit..

I received a notice that my personal email address got listed on their site from someone apparently looking for information on me. So, I used my anonymous email address and registered as having information about the person who owns my personal address. So far, my anonymous alter-ego has not been contacted, though BOTH addresses have seen a marked increase of spam. When I started bouncing emails to my personal address from WordOfMouthResearch.com, I received the same "Someone is searching for information on you" message from a different source email address. After about 5 or 6 of these, I bounced the entire domain.

Anyone else have information on these guys? Again, I think they're just harvesting email addresses for spammers under the guise of providing a service (that no one seems to be using - again, if my "alter-ego / evil twin" email is the only address that has information on me, which when I checked last it was, these "people" looking for information on me would have contacted my alternate email by now.

And as far as using AOL IM and Friendster and all that to data mine, I suspect that the spammers will be the first to use this data, since they can't reliably harvest email addresses with web spiders anymore since people are trying to actively avoid them - however, there is a valid email address associated with an AOL IM login, and also with Yahoo IM, and with MSN Messenger, so there's some major sources that the spammers can get email addresses from, and they'll also cross reference the information, and you'll get more, and more targetted spam. Do you like guitars, for example? Here comes spam offering Guitar Strings cheap, along with the 50 others promising natural male enhancement.

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?

Security

[Ctrl-Z]

All I can say is that if you transmit private information over an insecure channel, you should not be surprised at the results.

RMS wrote about this recently

[H4x0r Jim Duggan]

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

No problem

[Orien]

That is why you don't put REAL personal info in your $CHAT_PROGRAM profile. As long as it thinks that I was born on 1/1/1900 and live on 123 main st. Beverly Hills 90210, I'm not worried about data mining. :)

Easy Solution

[2MuchC0ffeeMan]

have everyone add 'Link' to their buddy list... now everyone is everyone's 'second cousin' through link.

if you can beat em, flood them with false data.

Guilty by Association?

[The Beezer]

Absolutely.

Motion Picture Association of America

Recording Industry Association of America

Feel free to contribute...

ACHTUNG!!!

[Dark Lord Seth]

OSAMA BIN LADEN wants to MURDER the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, a certain chap named GEORGE W BUSH by hitting him repeatedly over the head with a ROCKET PROPELLED GRENADE LAUNCHER shaped sausage while dreaming of using TACTICAL NUCLEAR WEAPONS and drive his fave Type-R sport ZSU-23 SHILKA with BIOLOGICAL, CHEMICAL and NUCLEAR AAA rounds.

There, Eris knows wether US intelligence is tracking this or not but if they are, this is sure to mess up someone's day, hehehe... Ooo, look at that pretty black helicopter!

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.

Bin Laden is no buddy

[Jonboy X]

"...governments tracking private citizens, investigating terrorist links..."

So, you're saying that I should take Osama off of my buddy list if I don't want trouble from the feds?

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.

Ohhh

[savagedome]

Kevin Bacon is surely going to be in a lot of trouble.

If it can be used at all, ...

[burgburgburg]

information always will be used against you when convenient.

That's why there should be privacy laws saying that information is non-usable unless explicitly permitted. Right now, it's bass-ackwards.

Being watched is inevitable

[clacour]

Being watched and tracked (and having "privacy" essentially disappear) is pretty near inevitable, for the same reasons that patents (both hard and soft) are increasingly a bad idea, and open-source software is inevitable.

Technology has marched on, and the world has changed (again).

All the trends in technology over the last 10 years say that privacy as we have known it, is headed for extinction. Cameras that get smaller and smaller, remote controlled robots, hacking into wireless LANs, PLUS all the electronic interactions (like RFID) that are coming, PLUS computers getting cheaper by the day... This all adds up to privacy basically being impossible.

Proprietary software is doomed, because the Internet made the level of interactivity that open-source software needs possible. For exactly the same reasons that the medieval guilds (with their proprietary methods for things like ironsmithing and glassblowing) were doomed once the movable-type printing press was invented, proprietary software cannot compete. In the near term (5-10 years), it will still have a solid space in niche markets, but I'm not even sure that will last. It certainly isn't going to last in mainstream software arenas like OSes and databases.

But that same increase in processing power and decrease in communication delay means that doing things like examining every electronic transaction that someone performs (and building a detailed profile of their life from it), is not only beginning to be possible, it's very nearly inevitable. Even the most paranoid of you out there (and on Slashdot, the percentage of paranoids is a good bit higher than average) would not want the sort of draconian methods that would be required to prevent it. (No computers and no networks, for instance.)

The proper solution, I think, is to change our culture, so that it doesn't matter that someone knows the kinks in my soul.

I am mostly connected to reality, so I'm not holding my breath on this cultural shift, but I really only see three possibilities:

We turn Luddite and roll back the clock technologically. (Not likely to happen voluntarily by most of this audience, but some of the non-technical types turning Luddite IS all too possible.)

Privacy gets moved to the same status as apprenticeship - it's something that existed historically, and it's occasionally useful for analogies, but it's not part of anybody's life anymore. This could either go the Japanese route (I believe the usual phrase is something like "Nakedness is frequently seen and never noticed." In other words, commenting on someone's quirks is far more shameful than having said quirks to begin with.), or simply an open acceptance that other people do things differently than you.

The third possibility is the one that worries me. That's a totalitarian society (probably theocratic) that uses this information to control people to a degree that has heretofore been unbelievable. I don't think such a state would last very long at all, but the creation and destruction of it would get really, really ugly.

The US is the only culture I have extensive first-hand experience with. I would strongly prefer to see us go to option 2B (taking the attitude that you can live your life any way you want as long as you don't hurt me).

That fits wonderfully with our stated national beliefs. It's an absolutely lousy fit with what our behavior says we believe. The behavior (IMO) says we urgently want #3.

That's the big reason the 3rd option worries me. I can very easily see a theocratic state as an intermediate step to the live-and-let-live one. If anyone has any practical, pragmatic suggestions for how to create such a cultural shift (one suitable for a total absence of privacy), speak up now, because the situation could get critical within 10 years, and is almost guaranteed to get critcal in 20.