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24-Year-Old Asks Facebook For His Data, Gets 1,200 PDFs
chicksdaddy writes "Be careful of what you ask for. That's a lesson Max Schrems of Vienna, Austria learned the hard way when he sent a formal request to Facebook for a copy of every piece of personal information that the social network had collected on him, as required under European law. After a wait, the 24-year-old law student got what he was seeking: a CD with all his data stored on it — 1,222 files in all. The collection of PDFs was roughly the length of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, but told a more mundane story: a record of Schrems' years-long relationship with the world's largest social network, including reams of data he had deleted. Now Schrems is pushing Facebook to disclose even more of what it knows."
Origin of discussion:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?&t=1890619
@querent:
"First, I want to use TOR to download .pdf files"
First, how have you setup Tor? (it's not TOR btw, it's Tor)
Have you installed the Tor Browser Bundle? (TBB) It contains a (limited) preconfigured Tor environment (you need to reconfigure the included Noscript properly as by default it is set to allow everything, which is bad) and includes Vidalia, a Tor GUI front-end. If you have, you can right click on most .PDF file download links and select your local destination for the PDF to download to and it runs through Tor without leaping outside of the Tor client. Some PDF file downloads are caught by Tor button for unknown reasons, it thinks you're trying to load it directly and not download it when you're trying to download it. This may be a bug which appears at random. TBB's preconfigued Tor environment does not modify files like wgetrc (more on this later) or other application's files outside of the applications it provides.
My preferred method of handing PDF files when using Tor is to load them remotely via this free web service:
http://view.samurajdata.se/
I don't see that website as having any ads, but I block ads anyway, nor are there any posts begging for money, nor do they push an application to download in order to view the PDFs. It's the most simplistic layout I've seen for loading PDFs remotely and safely so they don't touch your system (your web cache should be disabled and is disabled if you use TBB, your swap and home partitions, if not your whole system should be encrypted). But does the admin track PDFs and IPs? Simple, always use Tor with that site with nothing personal.
It should be noted the moment you begin using your real name and playing about on Facebook with your friends or acquaintances via Tor, you've lost the plot. Do not mingle your personal Internet use with your Tor Internet use. Do not use Tor while at the same time accessing your personal e-mail outside of Tor (you shouldn't load it inside Tor, for that matter, either). Don't boast through Tor to one of your chums that you're using Tor.
The PDF files (at view.samurajdata.se) are transformed into single paged graphics which you may navigate through easily. 99% of the time it works, some PDFs it chooses not to load and spits out an error. It doesn't
require Flash and works without cookies or javascript enabled. I don't know who runs the site or their privacy and data retention habits, but I recommend it above all other sites offering to convert PDFs on-line. I have not tested uploading local PDF files to that service so I cannot suggest others do so, I don't know whether or not there would be any privacy leaks in doing so, so just copy/paste urls into that service.
In using that free PDF converter website, I can preview the document to determine beforehand whether it is worth the time, space, and effort in manually downloading the PDF and storing it for future access. Should you access PDF files on your system, I would recommend burning them to a CD or DVD, a read only medium, and accessing them from a non-networked environment such as a Linux LiveCD with the network cable unplugged, using an open source PDF reader, never use the proprietary PDF reader from Adobe, unless you're reading off-line from read only media, in addition to pulling the network cable prior to booting from a fresh and verified LiveCD and pulling the cable and power plugs from any hard drives (before you turn your system ON), to eliminate any possible contamination. Remember, you're downloading PDF files through Tor, and unless you verify each file through checksum verification (like MD5 or GPG) there's a chance they could've been trojaned by a rogue exit node, or contain phoning home instructions or any other type of malicious "feature". No amount of open or closed source virus/tro