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Moglen: Facebook Is a Man-In-The-Middle Attack
jfruh writes "In an email exchange with privacy blogger Dan Tynan, Columbia law professor Eben Moglen referred to Facebook as a 'man in the middle attack' — that is, a service that intercepts communication between two parties and uses it for its own nefarious purposes. He said, 'The point is that by sharing with our actual friends through a web intermediary who can store and mine everything, we harm people by destroying their privacy for them. It's not the sharing that's bad, it's the technological design of giving it all to someone in the middle. That is at once outstandingly stupid and overwhelmingly dangerous.' Tynan is a critic of Facebook, but he thinks Moglen is overstating the case."
I do think it's a widespread ethical view that these utility-like services shouldn't use the information for their own gain. In the phone era, that was formalized with fairly detailed rules; AT&T couldn't just randomly listen in on your phone calls and use it to sell advertising profiles to mail-order catalogues. In the internet era technology is moving faster than people/law can keep up with.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
fB is also worming their way into other sites via scripting. I play some games at an EA owned site and suddenly you can not select a game room, or even see a game room list, unless you allow scripting by facebook.net. In the interests of allowing fB members more interaction EA has in fact forced everyone using the game to send data to faceBook. Anyone not blocking scripts is totally unaware of the issue, but most of them probably think fB is a good thing anyway.
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
Sorry, but I attended an FBI presentation last week, and the SA told us point-blank that Facebook was the greatest investigative aid ever. It used to take a warrant and months of hard work to figure out who someone was, what they did, who they hung out with, what kinds of things they talk about over drinks, and who supplies the dope to the party. Now it's a browser away and they don't even need a warrant.
Harvesting a million individual sites is more expensive and time consuming, and can be tracked and tampered with by the site owner. You could set up your own blog on your own server that spits out a red, white, and blue "Happy 4th of July, fellow patriots!" when viewed by an uninvited visitor, while spewing forth whatever brand of hatred you like when visited by your fellow clansmen. Breaking into this circle requires expensive undercover work. But Facebook will cooperatively deliver a full and faithful copy of whatever you dropped on their system.
By the FBI's own words, Moglen is exactly correct.
John
You don't get to 500 million users without understanding the contents of every message. Text data mining is actually one of the simplest things to implement and can provide a wealth of attitudinal data about products and services.
My Facebook rep has gone into some of their programs for targeted display of ads. I haven't asked her too much about how it would work, but the message she keeps driving home with me is that they can target ads based on how much someone likes something. She says this is based on more than what someone clicks on.