Slashdot Mirror
Facebook Retroactively Makes More User Data Public
mjn writes "In yet another backtrack from their privacy policy, Facebook has decided to retroactively move more information into the public, indexable part of profiles. The new profile parts made public are: a list of things users have become 'fans' of (now renamed to 'likes'), their education and work histories, and what they list under 'interests.' Apparently there is neither any opt-out nor even notice to users, despite the fact that some of this information was entered by users at a time when Facebook's privacy policy explicitly promised that it wouldn't be part of the public profile."
..that I left that sinking ship (Facebook) a long time ago. It wasn't easy (litterally), but worth it.
Anyone who ever had even a passing interest in personal data security and privacy has left Facebook months ago (or, like me, never considered it a great idea to put your life online for public review). Everyone left will probably think it's a great feature.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I saw an opt-in/opt-out notice last night on Facebook for this change. I'm not sure why others have not. Perhaps they are rolling it out in waves or perhaps it depends on country (I'm in Canada).
So if it's not even close to true, instead of standing on the mountain going "THIS ISN'T TRUE! YOU ALL ARE IDIOTS!" whu don't you provide some concrete information about WHY it's not true? I too am skeptical of the hysteria about the article, and I always look for collaborating information (more than everyone re-posting status updates "Facebook is at it again!") To quote an old friend of mine. "Don't flame, inform!" So? Where is your info?
Event Management Solutions : http://www.stonekeep.com/
Uncheck any Page you don't want to link to. Linking to education and work Pages may also create additional Pages, such as for your major or job title. If you don't link to any Pages, these sections on your profile will be empty. By linking your profile to Pages, you will be making these connections public. [emphasis mine]
You are about to remove this information
If you don't link to any Pages, the following sections on your profile will be empty:
So your options are all or nothing.
Why be on Facebook at all? They don't run it for warm fuzzy feelings. The bulk of the $$$$ is contained in its user data so they'll tap that well more and more as time goes on, not less.
This terms of use agreement is subject to change at any time without notice. It is your responsibility to check the license page periodically for changes.
Lots of 'agreements' have terms like that. In a lot of jurisdictions they carry no weight at all.
How long until identity thieves, 419 scammers & spammers create software that can
trawl sites like facebook for useful info?
Seriously, what are they going to find that will be so useful? "Hello, sir -- I note that you went to the University of Nebraska and worked for a while at Cargill. Because of this, I am interested in repatriating my family's fortune to your bank account, for which you will get a fee." Get real...
The realistic threat of facebook vis a vis privacy is that of your youthful indiscretions being on wide display for coworkers and bosses to see.
Is there something like Facebook but which doesn't suck so much? It shouldn't be impossible to have something which users like, and which the owners can make a profit from. Actually, I don't even care about the profit part. Seems like something Google would be interested in. I guess they have Orkut, but that never really went anywhere. Perhaps Wave?
You still use Facebook? Call me a troll, but think. Are you being intelligent if you still use Facebook after all this?
After my last Slashdot comment, I deleted my profile. One of the sub-comments explains how to delete it instead of just disabling it.
Banu
I have to be amused that the first two lines of the page for me currently read:
Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook
Your Rights Online: Facebook Retroactively Makes More User Data Public
I suppose that since Slashdot is on the internet, and nothing on the internet is private, I shouldn't mind anyone knowing, right?
Girls, where are you going? Oh, come back, it's not that bad, really! I just do it for the karma!
People need to understand once something hits the internet its out there, no privacy promise by a huge corporation (that probably owns the data once it hits its servers and gave it self the right to change policy whenever they want in the wall of text) is going to protect it.
The Cloud sound nice and all but the hype often forgets (intentionally ?) to make the dumb user aware of the consequences and dangers of putting something in a hard drive they cannot control
just choose to be 10 and your personal information will be 'more' protected; according to ... another news
The "real danger" isn't youthful indiscretion. It's profiling in a giant model by Government AND commercial interests in ways that will forever affect your ability to get a job, find insurance or even your ability to freely travel.
How do you build a panopticon, a prison for a society in which real power lies outside of government, in the hands of private commercial and financial interests? Honeypots. Google and Facebook and whatnot. Everyone is so anti-Government, like the stupid Reaganites. That's like being against a small-town cop. He's got the gun, alright - but he works for the man in the big house, at the edge of town. Hired. The enemy isn't Barney Fife - It's Old Man Potter.
How does this relate to Facebook?
You present a real, but minor threat, versus the real evil Facebook represent - along with the darkest nightmare of Google.
Remember, Watson, at IBM supplied tabulation equipment for improving the German Census in the 1930's. Technology was welcomed, and was going to modernize, to improve every German life. Except for a minority or two, of 11 million...
Cypher: "All I see now is blonde, brunette, redhead."
Facebook has been gradually boosting its profile in Washington D.C. over the past year and is on the hunt for a second senior lobbyist to add to its office of four. Disclosures released a few days ago show that, on top of lobbying the usual suspects Internet companies reach out to like the Federal Trade Commission and the U.S. senators and representatives, the fast-growing social network has also been busy deepening ties to government intelligence and homeland security agencies. ...
What's interesting about Facebook's lobbying in D.C. is what it spends money on despite its small size. It was the only consumer Internet company out of Google, Amazon, eBay, Microsoft, Yahoo and Apple to reach out to intelligence agencies last year, according to lobbying disclosure forms. It has lobbied the Office of the Director of National Intelligence -- an umbrella office founded in the wake of Sept. 11 that synthesizes intelligence from 17 agencies including the CIA and advises the President -- for the last three quarters on privacy and federal cyber-security policy. It has reached out to the Defense Intelligence Agency too.
Well, Facebook has always been an "op" http://cryptogon.com/?p=13749
Now, combine those observations with the next two pieces of information:
Virginia Tech Is Building an Artificial America in a Supercomputer
As many as 163 variables, mostly drawn from the U.S. Census, come into play for each synthetic American. Called EpiSimdemics, the model almost perfectly matches the demographic attributes of groups with at least 1500 people, according to Keith Bisset, a senior research associate who works on the simulation's software. The software generates fake people to populate real communities and assigns each person characteristics such as age, education level, and occupation to mirror local statistics derived from the most recent national census. In accordance with the data, some individuals are clustered into families, while others live alone.
Every synthetic household is assigned a real street address, based on land-use information from Navteq, a digital-mapping company. Using data from a business directory, each employed individual is matched to a specific job within a reasonable commute from the person's home. Similarly, actual schools, supermarkets, and shopping centers identified through Navteq's database are also linked to households based on their proximity to the home. When an artificial American goes grocery shopping, the simulation algorithm assigns probabilities that
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
I'm amused by the constant uproars people make every time facebook changes something. what the hell do they think the whole point of facebook is? that they are just providing this service for free? this is a classic case of people wanting their cake and eating it too.
meanwhile, government already has complete access to everyone's communication. you don't hear nearly so much about that anymore. I'm a lot more worried about law enforcement abuse than marketing products I might actually want at some point.
In this case, particular bits of data were disclosed to Facebook with the written understanding that they would remain private. That was according to Facebook's own privacy policy. Later, Facebook reneged on this understanding and unilaterally decided to made them retroactively public. They did this without giving anyone a chance to opt-out and there was no period of notice (between announcing this and actually doing it) to give users a chance to remove or edit that data. This is your classic bait-and-switch. They said one thing, got people to accept what they said on good faith, and then they did another thing.
I understand that Facebook wants to make money. Every for-profit corporation wants to make money. However, that doesn't give them the right to use deception and that's what happened here. Reputable companies manage to make profit without making promises they refuse to keep to their users or customers. What Facebook did is like moving the goalposts or changing the rules while the game is being played. Can you understand now why saying "did you think they were providing you a free service" is a strawman and fails to address the actual issue here?
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
addendum: never allow a friend to say anything on facebook you wouldn't want shouted from the mountaintops.
... it's not the "will I be scammed/blackmailed" but more of a "will I be blacklisted". Will potential employers, governments or other organizations begin to define a sort of "social credit score" that imapacts my career, the rate at which I am "randomly" picked out for an audit, etc. I don't have any secrets worth hiding, but I have a terrible fear of "death by random red tape".
More seriously, I think there is a different kind of privacy concern that comes from mass data-mining
Its possible the retroactive parts of these changes are in breach of UK/EU data protection laws. The issue is that a holder of personal data may only use information for the purposes for which it was provided. If the person supplying the data wished to keep it relatively private and Facebook then later make it public without the informed prior consent of the user then there is a probable breach of the regulations.
Of course Facebook will say that they are not based in the EU but they probably do have servers and interests there and gain revenue from EU based advertisers.
Just as I saw GFP and was so aghast that someone who more than likely is a /. regular could even be so naive, I started figuring out how to refute him/her. Thanks for doing such a good job for me. I, being former military, and having plenty of contacts in DIA, State Department, Interpol and other intel agencies have been the guy crying wolf to my family and friends about facebook. Who really doesn't think that something so popular (usage of facebook surpassed usage of google recently) is going to get jumped on by at least a couple of agencies? It is quite sad that even people on /. fall for this. I recently had a similar argument with a friend. She asked, "I don't do anything bad over the phone, and though I might have personal conversations there really isn't anything you could find out about me that would be worth it.", I replied, assuming I have the ability to tap all your phone calls for a month, I probably have the following information, where and who you call, and how often, would probably also tell me the places you do business and where you are at certain times of the day. What kind of travel and what airlines you use. Called your bank? I know you last 4 and your credit card number, and its security code and expiration date. Starting to get the picture? I call it the google effect, where one little piece of information seems innocuous, so people keep throwing it out there, but it all adds up into one giant pile of knowledge about you, and anybody who values privacy should run, not walk, away from at least two services, google and facebook.
"It's ok, I'm completely secure as long as my iron is off"
Why is this so difficult? Repeat after me "I will not post anything to the Internet that I do not want the whole world to know". And also "I will not trust a third party company to keep my data private ever even if they pinky swear to it". Then if you don't post things you do not want revealed then when the company (facebook in this case) makes the data public or gets hacked then nothing of value will be lost.
I also don't understand people who have facebook pages set all to private. What is the point of that. If you want to send information to a small group of people then set up a mailing list. Why you would use facebook for that purpose is completely beyond me. Instead tap into the fantastic intrinsic value that facebook has in building a brand identity and value for YOUR name. Post things that will make future employers, future lovers and your parents proud. Then you'll have nothing to hide because what you want hidden you never posted in the first place.
You literally have to be an Internet Olympic hero to delete or remove your Facebook account after these changes. But I found this story/guide, by Mathew Ingram very useful when I removed my facebook presence.
http://gigaom.com/2010/04/22/your-moms-guide-to-those-facebook-changes-and-how-to-block-them/
Even if you are not logged into facebook, due to instant personalization, many websites that partner with fb can track you.
Eben Moglen:
We have a kind of social dilemma which comes from architectural creep. We had an Internet that was designed around the notion of peerage - machines with no hierarchical relationship to one another, and no guarantee about their internal architectures or behaviours, communicating through a series of rules which allowed disparate, heterogeneous networks to be networked together around the assumption that everybody's equal.
In the Web the social harm done by the client-server model arises from the fact that logs of Web servers become the trails left by all of the activities of human beings, and the logs can be centralised in servers under hierarchical control. Web logs become power. With the exception of search, which is a service that nobody knows how to decentralise efficiently, most of these services do not actually rely upon a hierarchical model. They really rely upon the Web - that is, the non-hierarchical peerage model created by Tim Berners-Lee, and which is now the dominant data structure in our world.
The services are centralised for commercial purposes. The power that the Web log holds is monetisable, because it provides a form of surveillance which is attractive to both commercial and governmental social control. So the Web, with services equipped in a basically client-server architecture, becomes a device for surveillance as well as providing additional services. And surveillance becomes the hidden service wrapped inside everything we get for free.
The cloud is a vernacular name which we give to a significant improvement in the server-side of the web - the server, decentralised. It becomes, instead of a lump of iron, a digital appliance, which can be running anywhere. This means that for all practical purposes servers cease to be subject to significant legal control. They no longer operate in a policy-directed manner, because they are no longer iron, subject to territorial orientation of law. In a world of virtualised service provision, the server which provides the service, and therefore the log which is the result of the hidden service of surveillance, can be projected into any domain at any moment and can be stripped of any legal obligation pretty much equally freely.
This is a pessimal result.
read the rest here.
if you're too lazy to read watch it here.
"It's because they're stupid, that's why. That's why everybody does everything." -Homer Simpson
Implication, triangulation and extrapolation.
Where will this be in 5-7 years?
Additional tidbit: Google is off and running to be the network and intelligence for your US "Smart Power Grid". A google tap on the meter outside your house. Did you see Brazil?
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
Maybe you should retake that class?
In light of the above, I'd recommend the following article (and series) at Global Research: The Transnational Homeland Security State and the Decline of Democracy
( http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=18676 )
There are two bits here, relevant to the "Super Simulation" being built by NSA - and the role of ordinary Internet activity and Social Networks in functioning as data-sources:
In November of 2007, Keith Olbermann interviewed Mark Klein on MSNBC, where Klein elaborated on the secret program, saying that virtually all internet traffic in the entire country was handed over to the NSA. He appeared on MSNBC at a time when Congress was debating whether or not to grant the telecom companies legal immunity for participating in the NSA program, which would thus shut down all pending legal action being taken against the companies for their involvement in the illegal program. Klein reflected on his job, saying that, "Here I am, being forced to connect the Big Brother machine."
and:
In September of 2003, Congress ended funding for the program. The media then hailed the TIA program as "dead and gone." Yet, the funding was cut for the specific program as envisaged under the umbrella of TIA. The various programs within TIA could continue as separate projects, with the full funding and support of Congress. ...
In 2006, it was revealed that TIA stopped "in name only" and in fact does live on, and it "was moved from the Pentagon's research-and-development agency to another group, which builds technologies primarily for the National Security Agency." Interestingly, "Two of the most important components of the TIA program were moved to the Advanced Research and Development Activity, housed at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Md." The program has heavy involvement from private defense and intelligence contractors, highly secretive corporations that get major contracts from US intelligence agencies to be able to undertake intelligence activities that aren't subjected to Congressional oversight.
An infallible method of conciliating a tiger is to allow oneself to be devoured.
-- Konrad Adenauer
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
One of the defining features of arm-chair socialists is that they think that.
"You know what else does that? A phone. A letter. Walking to their house and knocking on the door."
Yes, writing the same letter to 50+ people is certainly a good use of my time.
We are the product. We're what Facebook sells to advertisers in order to bring in their business. Facebook needs to offer just enough privacy and control to keep most of us, but not so much as to ruin the value of the product.
I'm glad some attention is finally being brought to this. I edited my profile a couple of days ago, and hit the new interests-to-fan page conversion. It did not do a great job at all; I ended up a fan of some really off-the-wall, incorrect things (because the same word or title can have multiple meanings or belong to multiple organizations). My immediate concern was that there is still no way to make membership to a fan page private. So I immediately checked the privacy settings, and while I had been opted in (without consent) to display my likes and interests, there is a privacy option to make them private. The *HUGE* catch in the fine print is that people can still check to see if you are the member of any fan page simply by looking through the group's members, where you'll be visible. Unless I am mistaken, only reliable option for people with legitimate concerns about human rights violations, nosy employers, angry exes, or nosy family members is now to enter absolutely no interests, things to do, music, movie, or books on Facebook, as all of this data is now at least partially public, regardless of how security settings are configured. I just read an article that discussed identifying intimate details, such as a person's sexuality, using only this publicly available data and statistical data. While things like that are generally protected in the US, consider Facebook members abroad - people who practice a religion or philosophy in countries where there is religious persecution could be at tremendous risk now, and not even know it. All their government would have to do is start scanning certain fan pages. Obviously, Facebook's income does not come from members, it comes from advertisers, who are its real customers. However, for the last couple years, they have made Buzz-worthy privacy moves that its millions of members really need to stand up to, before somebody gets hurt.
addendum: never allow a friend to say anything on facebook you wouldn't want shouted from the mountaintops. More seriously, I think there is a different kind of privacy concern that comes from mass data-mining ... it's not the "will I be scammed/blackmailed" but more of a "will I be blacklisted". Will potential employers, governments or other organizations begin to define a sort of "social credit score" that impacts my career, the rate at which I am "randomly" picked out for an audit, etc. I don't have any secrets worth hiding, but I have a terrible fear of "death by random red tape".
This is already going on. I've already had one place mention my postings on an online forum when I went in for the interview. They claimed not to take it against me, but I never got the job.
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
The value of gold is that it is relatively rare, cannot be manufactured, and is finite. A gold standard isn't about gold being inherently valuable - it's about governments being able to issue more wealth than they have available to back it.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
This is why 'wealth' isn't (or shouldn't be) measured in anything so abstract as 'money' but in actual indexes of commodities and societies.
How many children are born and not dying in infancy? That's wealth.
How many people are educated? That's wealth.
How well maintained is your infrastructure? That's wealth.
How healthy is your population? That's wealth.
How many crops do you have? That's wealth.
How resilient is your ecosystem? That's wealth.
How many murders aren't happening in your cities? That's wealth.
What's your GDP? Dunno, who cares? It's not measuring wealth except at several removes, and it might actually be measuring active destruction of wealth if you're counting money being transferred from the majority of the population to a minority in your transactions.
Indexing the dollar against a basket of actual life-supporting commodities and social/ecological indexes would be a good start toward a stable monetary system that relates money to wealth.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC