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EFF Wants To Know If the Feds Are Cyberstalking
rossendryv writes "The Electronic Frontier Foundation and UC Berkeley's Samuelson Center filed suit in California's Northern District, asking the court to force a number of government agencies to hand over any documents they have concerning the use of social networking sites as part of investigative procedures."
Many companies also perform such searches whilst screening potential employees. They often get junior (junior as in position, not necessarily age) employees to befriend said candidates in order to dig up any "dirt" they can on you. (Hence a warning to those of you looking for a job: beware what you post online.) The feds would be foolish not to do so as well.
(((dB)))
Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean the feds aren't following you on facebook/twitter...
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
To try and demonstrate this:
Person X on facebook has a private profile enabled but have allowed for their friends to be visible.
Say 80% of their friends have public profiles on facebook. You'd then go through the process of mapping percentages for:
- Their hometown
- employment
- common venues
- level of facebook activity
- interests, hobbies
- participation in local events, clubs, universities etc
Repeat for a couple of iterations down the friends of friends chain and guaranteed you could learn a massive amount about the individual regardless of profile status (eg, their employment, lifestyle, hobbies, timetable etc).
Scale this up to properly managed automated engines for the task and multiple data sources and there's not much you couldn't pinpoint about an individual, even if for example they didn't use facebook but had a majority of associated who did. Replace facebook with anything, perhaps linked in because of its more "professional" sales pitch. FB is just an easy example.
I see this as no different from "the Feds" looking at your webpage to see what you post there, or your "personal" blog.
You're joking, right? I'm pretty sure it's very different, if I set facebook to let only my friends see my stuff. I never saw a friend request from the FBI, so why should they be allowed to probe my facebook stuff? That seems like a digital analogue to the feds just storming someone's house without first getting the owner's permission to enter the home.
In other words, they better have a darn good reason and a written warrant with that reason if they want to see my facebook without first being my facebook friend.
If you want to put personal information on the web for "the public" to see, I don't see how you think "the Feds" can't look at it ... just like everyone else.
And if I set up my settings such that only certain people have explicit permission to view such information, then it ain't exactly "for the public to see", is it?
Let q be a radix > 1. I am in ur base-q, killing 10 d00ds.
Why is this modded troll? He has a good point. The difference between your public webpage and your facebook page is that only your friends are meant to be able to see your facebook page whereas your webpage is on the public web for anyone.
True. Now we have the question about "friends."
I submit a request to be your Facebook friend as "CuteBlonde362436" and you accept, thinking that I might be a cute blonde with measurements 36-24-36. At this point, I have access to your information including the fact that you like to molest small woodland creatures. Of course, I'm neither cute, blonde, nor do I have those measurements. However, I am part of an FBI task force charged with protecting small woodland creatures from molestation and the reason I approached you on Facebook is due to an anonymous tip that said you were into that sort of thing.
I now have all the evidence I need to have you locked up for a very long time.
Entrapment?
Why would he want a cute blond when he is into small woodland creatures :)