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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."
Or better said, if you're not the farmer, you're the pig.
Free food, water and a place to live?!? What could possibly go wrong?
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Unix is very user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are.
... we all depend on companies every day and trust them with our personal info. There really isn't an alternative.
I wonder why?
When I arrived to the US and received my SSN, I tried to take the message that was next to it seriously : "Keep this number safe and secret" / not word by word citation/.
Then I went to get bank account, set up account for gas / electricity, driver's licence, cell phone contract, everywhere I was asked for my SSN. Seriously, why can PEPCO, GEICO, WASHGAS, AT&T oblige me to reveal this information?
My guess is that people in the US have been slowly but surely trained to surrender sensitive personal information to third parties.
I've been "online" since '93, and have hosted my own sites and DNS, etc; Whats funny is when people who didn't even use email until the early 2000's found out I'm not on FB they act like I'm some kind of luddite. Thats how many people view the whole web 2.0 experience. They can't be bothered with email and websites when the warm and cozy FB gives them everything they want. It's the Walmart of the net. Zuckerberg's fantasy of an "all seeing eye" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sauron is coming to fruition.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
If you send encrypted information through your ISP, they can't read it.
If you send encrypted information THROUGH Facebook, they'll remove it calling it "spam". I tried this and, supposedly, they censor all encrypted messages, only allowing clear text, unencrypted messages on Facebook. It's like they say "Don't distribute encrypted information through our service. Since we can't read it, there's no profit in it for us."
Eben Moglen is absolutely correct that Facebook is a man-in-the-middle service attempting to fool dumb people into disclosing their personal information and secrets.