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Facebook Will Shut Down Beacon To Settle Lawsuit

Posted by Soulskill on from the strategic-retreats dept.

alphadogg writes "Facebook has agreed to shut down its much-maligned Beacon advertising system in order to settle a class-action lawsuit. The lawsuit, filed in August of last year, alleged that Facebook and its Beacon affiliates like Blockbuster and Overstock.com violated a series of laws, including the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the Video Privacy Protection Act, the California Consumer Legal Remedies Act and the California Computer Crime Law. The proposed settlement, announced late on Friday, calls not only for Facebook to discontinue Beacon, but also back the creation of an independent foundation devoted to promoting online privacy, safety and security. The money for the foundation will come from a US$9.5 million settlement fund."

34 of 101 comments (clear)

  1. What a great fiction! by schmidt349 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The idea that "privacy" continues to exist in any shape, way, or form in a world where an NSA text-mining system reads every email, text message, blog post, and Slashdot comment you ever write is laughable. Why don't these jokers go after the people who flagrantly violate your privacy every minute of every day?

    1. Re:What a great fiction! by glitch23 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The idea that "privacy" continues to exist in any shape, way, or form in a world where an NSA text-mining system reads every email, text message, blog post, and Slashdot comment you ever write is laughable.

      I'd like to see the article providing proof of that level of monitoring by the NSA (or any other government agency for that matter).

      --
      this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
    2. Re:What a great fiction! by CRCulver · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I'd like to see the article providing proof of that level of monitoring by the NSA (or any other government agency for that matter).

      Not only is there an article, there was a major governmental investigation. The European Parliament's ECHELON report provoked an enormous scandal in nerd circles when it appear. Bamford's Body of Secrets provided fuller details, many based on inside contacts.

      Sadly, things like PGP and interest in ECHELON reports seem to have become less popular among geeks. I wonder why. Sure, one might trust PGP less when there are ways to get around it or compel you personally to give up the key, but it's odd that people suddenly have zero passion for the technology.

    3. Re:What a great fiction! by schmidt349 · · Score: 5, Informative
      NSA's Domestic Spying Grows As Agency Sweeps Up Data (WSJ)

      Report: Obama to use NSA to monitor Net (USA Today)

      NSA Must Examine All Internet Traffic to Prevent Cyber Nine-Eleven, Top Spy Says (Wired)

      In short, the NSA has been reading everything sent in plaintext since Bush II, and yet the EFF spends untold millions on lawsuits to make sure that my friends on Facebook don't know what kind of pizza I order from Domino's. What a great allocation of scarce pro-privacy resources.

      I know exactly why this is: if you sue Facebook or Twitter or whatever, you get your name in the papers. If you go after the NSA you get called "soft on terror" and your campaign bid for governor of East Nowhere is sunk.

    4. Re:What a great fiction! by ledow · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I think there's a major difference between "*potentially could monitor any* unencrypted email, text message, blog post" and "*always monitors every*..."

      Lots of people are hugely, sadly confused by this difference and to be honest, I doubt even the first exists all the time so much as "can be put into place if we suspect something". But then, if I was the NSA, I'd love my countrymen to think it was possible just to scare them off doing it and make it look like I was busy. Especially if the reality was that even the simplest of modern encryption and/or obfuscation is enough to defeat years of analysis by experts and supercomputers and could turn out to be you sending some spam over an SSL-encrypted connection to an email server.

    5. Re:What a great fiction! by schmidt349 · · Score: 4, Informative

      The sad truth is that the NSA is actually reading everything via data mining. There are pictures of the "tap rooms" inside data centers of every major ISP in the US where they set up their equipment and dip into the petabytes of data that get transferred in plaintext every day. So human beings aren't reading all of your sexy letters to your girlfriend/Linux box/dog, but I'm sure the system is set up to flag "interesting" correspondence for human analysis.

      The net result for the life of the average nerd: probably not much unless you have hobbies the NSA doesn't like, such as developing cryptographic software or Islamic studies. But then killing Beacon was even less pointless privacy-wise, because it was only ever going to be used to generate data for targeting ads (which Google already does) and plastering your face on them (which Google doesn't).

      I maintain that lawyers are suing the social networking services right now because it's hip and sexy and gets you on the cover of Time. There are much more effective ways to benefit the privacy of the American people but as I said above they will likely kill the political careers these 1-800-scumbags are trying to kickstart.

    6. Re:What a great fiction! by Riachu_11 · · Score: 3, Informative

      I don't really think this is a concern. AES, for example, was vetted by a lot of very smart independent mathematicians and cryptologists who didn't find a secret back door. And brute-forcing it is impractical even if they have computers 10 Moore's law jumps ahead of ours. You should be much more concerned about being forced to give up your key.

    7. Re:What a great fiction! by FatdogHaiku · · Score: 2

      Sadly, things like PGP and interest in ECHELON reports seem to have become less popular among geeks. I wonder why. Sure, one might trust PGP less when there are ways to get around it or compel you personally to give up the key, but it's odd that people suddenly have zero passion for the technology.

      It's not that there is no passion for it, it's that many people feel (correctly or not) that they have nothing to hide... and some of them sometimes think that the people that espouse encrypting everything would like to not stand out so much in their own activities (like encrypting everything). If there are twelve pink cows in a herd of a thousand, it's pretty easy to see them, and you just HAVE to wonder why in the hell they are pink.

      Many of us understand that there is no real anonymity, only an escalating race of people that need to hide things against (a lot of well funded) people that want to know what they have to hide...
      If you have time for that more power to you, I don't.

      --
      You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
    8. Re:What a great fiction! by Anders · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Why do you believe that nuclear decay is random?

    9. Re:What a great fiction! by ledow · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Sorry, but it's just not enough to "prove" anything.

      A photo of a room in a major ISP? So what? And a LOT of people work in ISP's - are you telling me there's a fully-functional, virtually unmaintained (or regularly visited/updated/upgraded by "secret admins" on the ISP's premises?), supercomputer analysing every packet going through every major ISP, when *connectivity*, *latency*, *packet-moving* is their main performance factor? There might be *something* that *might* be able to, say, pump a new route for IP's that are known to be "interesting" and thus reroute particular parts of traffic through a closed system stored at an ISP.

      I know people who work in some of the largest datacentres / hosting facilities in the world. Such rooms may well *exist* but you don't just have random "secret joes" that only the datacentre manager knows the purpose of wandering into them all the time, and you certainly *never* have a problem which traces back to those rooms (the damning fact if they were actually monitoring 24/7 and had to actually intercept traffic - things go wrong in even the smallest of networks and causes back-scatter along the networking infrastructure), you never have latency issues, etc. from a supposed room full of *supercomputers* (which are the only things that could ever have the necessary I/O) that are basically sitting there quietly sapping power and working perfectly and presumably remote-admined and which every member of staff turns a blind eye to. Even just read-only tapping at those sorts of speeds is stupid to consider on a large scale, and on a small scale it doesn't exist at all. And for what? To do only plain-text analysis and catch basically no-one because anyone with half a brain knows how to use something that has encryption that's virtually unbreakable with months of analysis?

      Most of the major Internet points are actually universities still - a hangover from when they *were* the Internet. They don't have such things and would be strictly opposed to them. Most of the small ISP's do *not* have this. It's conceivable that most of the major international links are monitored in some fashion but it's an *off-line* analysis - not sitting there analysing every packet in real-time... again, it's a *request* based system - "We know this IP is interesting, reroute it through this box so we can capture the full stream" and they find out the IP is interesting not by reading everyone's Facebook posts but by what they've been doing for hundreds of years - real espionage. Basically the I/O required to do constant analysis of *anything* just does not exist on those sorts of scales and certainly not in a closed, secret room in every ISP.

      Please don't propagate bullshit rumours without first providing one tiny ounce of proof of *WHAT* is happening rather than "oh, super-secret room, they must be doing...". The rooms, computers, blackboxes may well exist - I give you that. Past that, given the state of any modern government and the technology and the military intelligence communities, I seriously doubt they do more than use it to reroute a tiny number of already chosen IP ranges to their remote systems for analysis. Wikileaks would jump at the chance to host a couple of photos showing the tech's arriving to maintain those things and if you think it'd be impossible to get an illicit photo of someone entering a datacentre when you work in one, you're wrong.

    10. Re:What a great fiction! by ssintercept · · Score: 4, Informative

      while i do not know if slashdot posts are monitored, NOVA (PBS) had an interesting documentary called -> 'The Spy Factory'.
      for the truly lazy -> http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/spyfactory/program.html
      here is a short synopsis -> http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/spyfactory/about.html
      the most telling part is:
      "NOVA follows the trail of just one typical e-mail sent from Asia to the U.S. Streaming as pulses of light into a fiber-optic cable, it travels across the Pacific Ocean, coming ashore in California, and finally reaching an AT&T facility in San Francisco, where the cable is split and the data sent to a secret NSA monitoring room on the floor below. This enables the NSA to intercept not only most Asian e-mail messages but also the entire U.S. internal Internet traffic."

      --
      "You can kill the revolutionary, but you can't kill the revolution."-- Fred Hampton
    11. Re:What a great fiction! by hairyfeet · · Score: 2, Informative

      And what would you have them do against the NSA? Like it or not, short of armed revolution there ain't a damned thing you can do about the NSA. Politicians come, politicians go, the NSA remains. Hell the elections have become so worthless that it isn't even funny anymore, with BOTH sides being so power hungry it is scary, and the only difference being which particular corporate booty they smooch, so what exactly would you have them do about a spook factory like the NSA?

      Hell with their kind of power I have no doubt that anyone who stirs up too much shit for them and pisses them off will be made to go bye bye REAL quick, probably by having an anonymous tipster point out they have child pron (which wouldn't be hard at all for a bunch like that to plant, complete with logs, and which nowadays is guilty until proven innocent) if they didn't just go for a "classic" like suicide or a Silkwood style car wreck. Sorry Charlie but bunches like the NSA are NOT the ones that you want to be fucking with. Don't forget the old sayings "knowledge is power" and "power corrupts" and right now it would be hard to find anybody with more juice than the NSA. Are you sure the guys at the EFF haven't said or done ANYTHING that the NSA could use against them?

      The second we ended up with secret courts like FISA that can rubber stamp anything spooks want is the second that challenging them went right out the fucking window. Sad I know, but true.

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
    12. Re:What a great fiction! by msimm · · Score: 2

      The technology was too cumbersome for use in casually and had a negative connotation because of its use in DRM. Being technically geeky does not make us immune to laziness or inconvenience, hence the bad-man argument (why bother hiding something if the thing is not worth hiding).

      --
      Quack, quack.
    13. Re:What a great fiction! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      Google told nerds they are "Not Evil(tm)", and nerds (who view technology companies with religious reverence) now take it as an article of faith.

    14. Re:What a great fiction! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I maintain that lawyers are suing the social networking services right now because it's hip and sexy and gets you on the cover of Time. There are much more effective ways to benefit the privacy of the American people but as I said above they will likely kill the political careers these 1-800-scumbags are trying to kickstart.

      Not to defend lawyers, but the lawyers are suing the social networking services because they're hired to sue the social networking services. The lawyers are lining up because it's profittable for them. The cases aren't very difficult, don't take very long, and have huge payouts.

      On the other hand, there's nothing stopping you, or anybody else for that matter, from hiring a lawyer and filing a lawsuit against the NSA. Fact of the matter is, you probably don't care enough to put up your own money for it, and nobody else does either. The case would be long, difficult, expensive, and the chances of winning are a lot lower than in the social network lawsuits.

      If you really care, but don't have the money, you could try setting up a non-profit or something like that to collect donations to hire lawyers and pay for it that way. But you probably don't care that much either.

      It's depressing, but it's not the lawer's fault.

    15. Re:What a great fiction! by schmidt349 · · Score: 3, Informative

      More than a dozen people with positions everywhere from the NSA itself to AT&T have admitted roles in the construction and operation of the tap rooms. The fed has repeatedly invoked the state secrets exception to kill lawsuits that even tangentially involve the tap program. News agencies on every bar of the political rainbow have run reports confirming its existence and the New York Times at least was asked by the government not to go with its story. Now I could write a research paper meticulously documenting the outing of the spy program in the press but anyone with access to Google could do the same thing in five minutes. It exists. The only question remaining is how much data the NSA sifts through and whose, and the whistleblowers have been pretty clear on the point that the spooks aren't very discriminating. I'm sorry, but one guy on Slashdot saying "no, it isn't" can't undo three years of meticulous investigative journalism by the newspapers of record of both the left and right wings and the bravery of those involved who have admitted their involvement.

      I am thankful every day for the fact that we live in the world's leakiest democracy, so we at least know about these wanton violations of our civil rights. But after a couple of token lawsuits the EFF essentially gave up and now wastes its time keeping my pizza orders out of the hands of my Facebook pals. It's a sad day when the only outfit I can count on to fight the government out of my private life is the government.

    16. Re:What a great fiction! by Xest · · Score: 4, Interesting

      It's part of a bigger retreat I've noticed in the last decade or so in the geek community.

      Another example is DRM, in the 90s I recall there being uproar from many geeks if a company would use your CPU cycles and your memory/disk space for their commercial interest like DRM does. Nowadays whilst DRM is still complained about, the argument seems to be based on what it stops you doing or how it can go wrong, there seems to have been a retreat from the fundamental argument that they are using your property for their interests.

      Of course it sounds petty to argue about a company using a few kb on your system for some copy protection scheme or for their DRM on each of your music tracks because we have so much memory free, but that misses the point- if you retreat from your original point, you become forced to further and further give concessions where you shouldn't have to on privacy, on DRM, on whatever.

      It's that slippery slope thing, if you give them an inch they'll take a mile, and that's what's happened on many issues. Things that used to be entirely unacceptable have become accepted and the frontline in the fight for our rights has been pushed back. I don't exactly know why this is but I suspect it's because when the geeks said "Don't you dare do that" and they did it anyway, not an awful lot actually happened in response. Perhaps it's just that we had successes like the iPod which were horribly locked down and DRM'd rising to popularity and nullifying the argument that anyone other than geeks gave a shit in the first place? Bluray becoming the winning HD format despite being far more DRM laden due to BD+ and so on? Coupled on a political level with the likes of George Bush and Tony Blair winning the elections in 2004 and 2005 respectively despite having proven themselves as being willing to take away our fundamental right to freedom in the name of preventing terrorists, er, taking away our fundamental right to freedom?

      Either way it's quite sad. It amuses me now to see things like the anarchists cookbook being brought up in court trials and so on as a terrorist handbook- I don't think I knew anyone on the internet in the 90s who didn't have a copy of it, now it's being classed as basically "illegal literature".

      Something definitely went wrong somewhere in the geek movement for privacy, freedom and rights.

    17. Re:What a great fiction! by Imrik · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Is it really retreating from your point when another point becomes more important? Using up our computer resources is a relatively small annoyance compared to interfering with fair use.

    18. Re:What a great fiction! by Xest · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Well yes, that's kind of my point- they're taking more and more liberties with people's rights so the issues being defended are bigger and bigger problems. Realistically we should be fighting on all fronts, and ideally they'd have been stopped at that first step - using our resources, for their purposes so that we wouldn't even be at this step.

      There's another point though of course, in that when we let them use our resources for DRM, and started concentrating purely on fair use, they also assumed it okay to start using our resources, including our bandwidth, to insert advertising into games which we've already paid for to increase profits, at the expense of our resources. This is even more of an issue for me nowadays personally, in an era of stricter bandwidth caps, where I have a 20gb allowance per month and if I break it (which I do) I have to pay extra per gb- I'm paying so that they can send me advertising in games and profit from it, do I see a discount on the price of the game? do I get a cut of the ad revenue? In letting that battle slip in favour of a bigger one, we've already lost that battle and it's seeped into other areas.

    19. Re:What a great fiction! by Steve+Franklin · · Score: 2, Funny

      "You seem upset."

      Not having a clue will do that to you....

      --
      Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.
    20. Re:What a great fiction! by Tynin · · Score: 2, Insightful

      This enables the NSA to intercept not only most Asian e-mail messages but also the entire U.S. internal Internet traffic.

      I'm going to call BS on that. Their is more tier 1 back bones going through USA than just AT&T. NSA would need to have monitoring setup on all tier 1's in order to really see the entire U.S. internal Internet traffic. Even then there would be fringe cases as not all email/traffic would go through these monitoring points, unless they are setup on the geographical border routes of the country.

    21. Re:What a great fiction! by ledow · · Score: 3, Insightful

      "More than a dozen people with positions everywhere"

      More than a dozen people in the high reaches of government have later gone on to claim that UFO's stole their washing. Astronauts claim they invented Free Energy, high-level scientists say they've cracked Fermat's Theorems without even understanding what they are. That means *nothing*. A dozen isn't a lot of people compared to the *thousands* (not even including actual government employees of any kind) that took part in or witnessed any such operation, and you can get a dozen people to admit *anything*, especially if, say, you were a large government that wanted its populous to believe it was being monitored - hell, you could even MAKE the people in question believe they've actually set up a program just by getting them to insert equipment into a room and telling them its purpose is "top secret".

      And I've never said that they weren't BUILT. I just claim that their purpose/capabilities are different to what you are assuming they are.

      "from the NSA itself to AT&T have admitted roles in the construction and operation of the tap rooms."

      Construction. Operation. Where do they mention actual real-time processing (not "if we were interested in subject X" but "finding subject X to be interested in") capabilities? That's what I'm challenging here. Not that they could monitor anyone, but that they do monitor everyone. One is easy, the other is fantasy-land even for 1984-style-governments (even China can only intercept, clumsily and publicly, some DNS and maybe search for plaintext strings of, say, "democracy" on websites and block them... and even that's got so many holes in it, it's basically worthless even on the bits it's supposed to work on).

      "The fed has repeatedly invoked the state secrets exception to kill lawsuits that even tangentially involve the tap program."
      "News agencies on every bar of the political rainbow have run reports confirming its existence and the New York Times at least was asked by the government not to go with its story."

      Standard operating procedure for anything, I should imagine, especially if the NSA are involved. That doesn't mean they have the *capability* that you're assigning to them - it just means they don't *want* you to know what they are (or more importantly, are not) capable of. Military and national-defence secrets stay secret, even if perfect knowledge of them can't help in any way (e.g. encryption techniques) purely because you don't want people to find out what you're NOT capable of.

      "Now I could write a research paper meticulously documenting the outing of the spy program in the press but anyone with access to Google could do the same thing in five minutes."

      No-one with a brain writes research papers based on stuff discovered by the press. The press are your LAST source of hard evidence in anything serious, which to me is just another pointer - if the press "know" about this stuff, it's because they are scaremongering themselves or inadvertently being used as a puppet for your government to scare you. It scares *me* that you think that only the press would be a good source or that five minutes on Google is your research - in five minutes on Google, I can "prove" the moon landings didn't happen, aliens run the planet and that Elvis is alive and has dinner with Michael Jackson on every alternate Tuesday. If "only the press" know, then the press don't know.

      "It exists."

      I don't doubt that the rooms exist. Or the equipment in those rooms exist. Or the program exists. Or even that a plan to *have* real-time analysis of the whole net exists. I doubt that the *capability* to implement it as you seem to think it works even exists anywhere, let alone inside a back room of every ISP.

      "The only question remaining is how much data the NSA sifts through and whose,"

      And what time machine they invented to cram it all into a reasonable window.

      "and the whistleblowers have been pretty clear on the point that the spooks aren't very discriminating."

    22. Re:What a great fiction! by RockDoctor · · Score: 2, Funny

      What has the NSA done for me lately? what do the know about me? What are their intentions for that information? Sorry I will take Google over the NSA any time.

      I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you.

      Ah, so it's a low security secret then. Medium security being where you're told as you're being killed (this may make it prolonged and painful to be told complex medium security secrets, and begs the question of what happens if you die with the secret only partly told). High security obviously entails being killed before you're told what the secret is.

      The question is not "Am I paranoid?" ; the question is "Am I paranoid enough?"

      --
      Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
    23. Re:What a great fiction! by Ihmhi · · Score: 2, Informative

      Sadly, things like PGP and interest in ECHELON reports seem to have become less popular among geeks. I wonder why. Sure, one might trust PGP less when there are ways to get around it or compel you personally to give up the key, but it's odd that people suddenly have zero passion for the technology.

      Because I don't think most of us think the NSA gives a shit about reading our Battlestar Galactica fanfiction or listening to our Vent sessions for WoW raids.

      If it's serious enough that the NSA would get involved, I think most geeks nowadays wouldn't even communicate about it over a transmission protocol that could be intercepted - which is pretty much any save for talking in person (unless you believe the nutjobs who say stuff like the CIA has microphones hidden in traffic lights).

      --
      Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
    24. Re:What a great fiction! by drinkypoo · · Score: 2, Informative

      Even then there would be fringe cases as not all email/traffic would go through these monitoring points, unless they are setup on the geographical border routes of the country.

      Those who do not remember the lessons of history are doomed, yo. Remember how we had a big flap recently about telecoms immunity? About how every provider but Qwest caved immediately? Guess what, the phone network is the internetwork. They've got everyone tapped. They are going to see any email that travels any significant distance, period.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    25. Re:What a great fiction! by lennier · · Score: 2, Funny

      "This enables the NSA to intercept not only most Asian e-mail messages but also the entire U.S. internal Internet traffic.":

      I pity the poor NSA grunt who's assigned to 4chan.

      It's probably a punishment post.

      --
      You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
  2. Hmmm if only something like that existed already by ifwm · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The proposed settlement, announced late on Friday, calls not only for Facebook to discontinue Beacon, but also back the creation of an independent foundation devoted to promoting online privacy, safety and security.

    That's great, if only something like that existed already, they could avoid the cost of starting a whole new organization.

    http://www.eff.org/

  3. mixed feelings by binaryseraph · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I am pleased that there are those who are fighting to preserve internet privacy in the face of a very aggressive marketing world. That being said, it is very hard for me to support a lawsuit against a social networking site, that 1.users have to sign up to use 2.no one pays to be a member of. 3.is not a financial/medical/etc company or something that contains what one may deem as sensitive data. While I dont know enough about the ad system they put in place, i am willing to bet one could defeat their "beacon system" by using some fairly basic practices and principals of online use. i.e. disabling cookies, monitoring what 'active-x' apps are being run and not using facebook as a means for any important communiation (or hey, just dont use facebook at all). But hey, i'm just another web user. what do i know?

    1. Re:mixed feelings by Lemmy+Caution · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The thing is, Facebook, like Google, has become the Way that Lots of Things are Just Done. Too many of my family members use it to stay in touch: if I eschewed it, it would be like not participating in the extended family. Circles of friends work the same way.

      When a social platform gets big enough, becoming a de facto standard, the choice to participate or not participate is somewhat weightier than the choice to ïbuy or not buy other types of goods.

    2. Re:mixed feelings by ArsenneLupin · · Score: 2

      1.users have to sign up to use

      Users did sign up to Facebook, but did they also agree to Facebook and Amazon (for example...) sharing any data? Users signed up to LinkedIn, but they agree to LinkedIn and TripIt sharing any data?

      2.no one pays to be a member of.

      How is that relevant?

      3.is not a financial/medical/etc company or something that contains what one may deem as sensitive data.

      Try "book purchases". Or travel arrangments. While maybe not legally protected, they can be pretty embarrassing depending on what book you bought or where you went to at what specific date.

      While I dont know enough about the ad system they put in place, i am willing to bet one could defeat their "beacon system" by using some fairly basic practices and principals of online use. i.e. disabling cookies, monitoring what 'active-x' apps are being run

      Geeks know about this stuff. But most other users probably won't. And even geeks tend to get lazy and not purge their cookies as often, especially when they don't yet suspect that something nefarious might be going on. It's not exactly as if Facebook were sending mails to users, warning them about this upcoming great new service.

  4. More importantly than anything, this sets a tone by StreetStealth · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The fact that Beacon is being shut down, the $9.5mil settlement, or even this nebulous new "independent foundation" are all secondary to one thing:

    This delivers the message, unequivocally, that you don't sell out your users' private actions. Sure, plenty of other businesses engage in this sort of thing all the time in much more subtle ways than broadcasting what you thought was a private transaction, but in its own way, this is a coup. It's not going to change anything, even Facebook, overnight, but it's a loud and clear warning to any business thinking of pushing its luck.

    --
    Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
  5. There is more to privacy then that by KlaasVaak · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Availability of data is way more important than data not being 100% private. Your private data in a super secret NSA database somewhere vs your private data going to people you know. I know what I'd pick thank you.

    --
    Dyslexics are teople poo
  6. Re:This is Unamerican by BitZtream · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Yeah opt-in medical care without getting raped by health insurers, fuck me that's soooo unamerican!

    I have opt-in medical care, living in america, and no one pays for my health insurance.

    Its really not that hard to do.

    Expecting someone else to take care of your lazy ass because you're too stupid to read the fine print or spend some of your own time figuring out what you're signing up for is rather unamerican.

    You can change the medical situation in america without government intervention. Truth be told however, you'd rather sit there and do nothing and not make any effort yourself directly to change anything, which will result in everyone getting another shitty government ran mess.

    I know people from other countries that have come to get american health care. I know of no one who has left to get health care. Just my own personal experience of course, but you'll have to pardon me if I take my real world experiences rather than that of someone on slashdot who is just whining about something they want someone else to do something about. Feel free to do the same yourself.

    --
    Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
  7. Facebook blocked the link by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Facebook blocked the link to TFA. I tried a tinyurl link to the fine article and that is blocked too. Shows up on my wall, but not in the news feed.

    I knew they were evil, but I didn't know they were THIS evil.