Eben Moglen: Social Networking "Creating Systems of Comprehensive Surveillance"

An anonymous reader writes "Eben Moglen, founder of the Freedombox project, has taken to yelling at journalists reporting about social networks. One wonders if this messaging will work to end proprietary, centralized social networks or not."

Comments

Moglen is right

[jhoegl]

Moglen is right, and that reporter is a moron.

Re:Moglen is right

[Ethanol-fueled]

Mr. Moglen: Okay, so have you closed your Facebook account and stopped using Twitter?
Reporter: Have...I?
Mr. Moglen: Yes, you!
Reporter: No, I can't!

Yup.

Reporter can't what? Can't keep in touch with people via e-mail and telephone calls? Can't restrict online vanity to anonymous postings? Can't learn lessons they should have learned back in the MySpace and Classmates days? Can't gain reputability with a pseudonym like Jolly Roger or Ethanol-fueled?

Re:Moglen is right

[Mashiki]

I'm guessing you don't live in a society that believes the right to be private is important. Like Germany...I wonder why they believe that to be true there? But Canada has similar laws. So do many other European countries, based on the similar idea.

Re:Moglen is right

[genkernel]

Not so, it is well known that facebook compiles information on people who do not have facebook accounts, sometimes referred to as "shadow profiles". Between your friends pictures of you and related informations, your family's pictures of you and related information, your coworker's pictures of you and related information, and easily crawlable information about yourself (contact information on employer's website?), I think facebook can provide fairly comprehensive surveillance. Don't get out much? Facebook can ascertain that, depending on the posting habits of your friends, family and coworkers. Sure, some information will undoubtedly be missed, but I suspect sufficient information can be gathered about you even without a facebook account. And even if they cannot trace it back to you, the "like" buttons are always gathering your browsing habits. I think I even see some here on slashdot...

They are watching, and this time, no tinfoil hat can save you.

Re:Moglen is right

[whoever57]

Moglen comes across as a complete dick in that interview, and quite hysterical, with a bit of a big-brother fetish. Much like Doctorow (also mentioned in TFA) who seems to revel in his little-brother fantasies entirely too much.

No, the reporter is the dick. Moglen is just consistently putting forward his point and the reporter is lamely making excuses for his failure to accept the advice. Anyone who asks for advice and then makes lame excuses for not following it it is a dick.

Re:Moglen is right

[hedwards]

That aspect concerns me more than anything else. I haven't consented to them storing information about me, and it's completely beyond me why the government doesn't put the smackdown on them for tracking people that haven't agreed to it.

Re:Moglen is right

[Okomokochoko]

Yes, people sharing information and thoughts freely is a terrible threat to privacy.

Straw man. He's not arguing against the act of sharing of information. Read, then understand, then formulate your counter-argument.

Oh wait, no, the other thing - they (I should say 'we' as a facebook user) deliberately share this info and WANT to make it public.

That's an assumption that doesn't hold in practice. People deliberately share information. Who they intended to share it with and who it is actually shared with are not necessarily the same. A Facebook user may not realize the implications of posting something to a public page or a public profile, and in the process share more about themselves or their actions than they intended. You also fail to realize that the "big-brother fetish" is in fact a legitimate concern. Think about location check-ins. If someone else checks you in, Facebook now knows where you were. Did you want it to know that? Did you know that you can disable others' ability to check you in? Did you know that that gives Facebook one more piece of data to target advertising towards you? Maybe you do...but it's unreasonable of you to expect the masses to know all of the possible ways a simple click on Facebook can be used against you.

Re:Moglen is right

[Nursie]

Then for many Gmail is a far greater privacy threat than facebook.

Moglen wasn't particularly helpful

[PCM2]

It seems to me the most germane question the reporter asked was, "What's the damage?" And Moglen failed spectacularly to answer it in anything approaching a coherent way.

Gotcha: If I happen to upload pictures of a couple of my friends (I generally don't) and those friends, unbeknownst to me, happen to be on the run from the Myanmar secret police (who are "evil"), then I've informed on them and they're going straight to the Ministry of Love.

Coulda used a slightly more concrete, real-world example, myself, by hey, I'll keep the warning in mind.

Re:Moglen wasn't particularly helpful

[hedwards]

The problem with privacy loss is that you don't know what the damage is until it's too late. I don't personally have a FB account or account on other social networking sites because I value my privacy. But, that doesn't mean that there aren't photos of me online that other people posted, I personally have no control over that and by the time I find out that I've been harmed it's too late to do anything about it.

Re:Moglen wasn't particularly helpful

[hedwards]

You're being obtuse, the point of privacy rights is that you don't know why you need them until it's too late. He answered the question quite well by having my information being spread by other people there are any number of bad things which can result.

There have been many people harmed by an unexpected loss of privacy over the years from politicians that had to resign in disgrace to people that were later blackmailed to the many celebrities that now have their sex lives on the internet because somebody else released the footage.

And don't forget about that teacher that was fired because of a picture of her online drinking out of a red plastic cup, lord knows what she was actually drinking, but she was ultimately fired because of the picture.

Spectacular!

[killfixx]

I teach different college level IT courses and Moglen's sentiments are always part of "Intro" courses.

RMS and Moglen, who would've guessed, 10 years ago, they'd be right?

Paranoia, it's not just for the fringe anymore.

Re:Spectacular!

[AHuxley]

Yes http://wikileaks.org/wiki/EU_social_network_spy_system_brief,_INDECT_Work_Package_4,_2009
"learn relationships between people and organizations through websites and social networks."
i.e. hunt weblogs, chat sites, news reports, and social networking sites create automatic dossiers on individuals.

Eben Moglen

[dido]

Really, Freedombox? I'd never heard of that project before now, but I have most definitely heard of Professor Eben Moglen. I know him as the Chairman of the Software Freedom Law Center, providing legal assistance to non-profit Free/Open Source Software developers, including among its clients the FSF (Moglen worked on drafting the GPLv3 for one), Wine, BusyBox, and Plone among others. I do think that this is a much more significant thing to mention about him.

And yes, he is absolutely right about Facebook and modern social media. All of the things he's said are obvious to anyone.

It was the height of folly

[Beeftopia]

When I first got on the Internet in the early 90s, it was the height of folly to put your personal information online.

Nothing I've seen in the intervening years has changed my opinion about that.

Re:It was the height of folly

[hedwards]

But, this is web 2.0 now. Completely safe.

disinformation

[rot26]

The solution is simple; lower the signal-to-noise ratio. During the early cold war years, they did that by radio jamming. Nowadays spam serves that purpose (intentionally or not). Instead of closing your FB account, create 5 fake ones, and stuff them full of crap.

Re:/sarc

[dido]

Well, at least Diaspora wasn't designed from the ground up to facilitate this sort of spying, and has as one of its design goals attempting to prevent such unwanted breaches of privacy. They may not always be successful, but such efforts I consider a fair sight better than Facebook, which was on the other hand designed from the ground up to convert its users' privacy into revenue.

Not even FB can figure it out...

[CohibaVancouver]

I remain skeptical. I'm a regular FB poster, and not even FB can target ads to me that I care about. I'm a married man so I get ads about meeting women and ovulation tests. I live in Vancouver and I've just finished a big house renovation, so I get ads for extended-stay suites IN Vancouver. Where's this big 'tracking' conspiracy if not even the mothership can get it right?

Re:Not even FB can figure it out...

[Bob9113]

I remain skeptical. I'm a regular FB poster, and not even FB can target ads to me that I care about.

I've done it. I worked for an online advertising company in San Francisco. They were all about human-based targeting, done by our placement specialists. I wanted to show them what collaborative filtering could do, so I wrote a running an algorithm similar to what Netflix uses. Ran it in a one month randomized A/B test against ads targeted by our pros using demographics. For every dollar they sold during the run, I sold 3.8 dollars.

the history of the internet

[Anonymous Coward]

proprietary, centralized social networks or no

The entire history of the internet is one of moving from open and decentralized facilities to proprietary and central authorities.

IM: IRC -> a ton of separate proprietary apps
Discussions: usenet -> a ton of separate web-forum fiefdoms
Email: RFC based email -> proprietary solutions on facebook and so on
Personal web pages -> using central proprietary services like facebook

This all seems idiotic and totally the wrong direction to me, but there's no way of denying the fact that for whatever reason, Joe Sixpack prefers a more authoritarian and more proprietary approach to the internet, as opposed to a more equal/peer-to-peer and open-standard approach.

Spy agencies don't respect robots.txt

[msobkow]

If the data is available from a website, the government can crawl it. robots.txt is a polite request not to search the content of a website, not a physical lock or encryption.

It may be EASIER for the governments to find "miscreants" on social networks because they're all in one database and more easily scanned, but that definitely doesn't mean you're safe from prying eyes ANYWHERE on the internet. If you post it where others can read it, the three-letter agencies can, will, and DO read it.

Privacy on the internet is an illusion, nothing more. It has alway been so, will always be so, and cannot be otherwise if people are to share information.

PhotoDNA

[ka9dgx]

I've been using Picassa on my PC, which includes facial recognition, the interesting part is the hundreds of people who I have know knowledge of who appear large enough to be recognized and grouped together, merely because they happened to be near someone or something I was photographing.

The news that Facebook is scanning all photo uploads with similar technology really makes me cringe.

Eben is right, and he's NOT paranoid... just ahead of the curve.

Your ideas

[sakdoctor]

Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your facebook group.

p2p Facebook clone

[mfnickster]

Has anyone started a p2p social network that could replace facebook?

Something like, I dunno, Usenet but with Web content and your cached updates are encrypted with your public key?