How To Block the NSA From Your Friends List

Atticus Rex writes "The fact that our social networking services are so centralized is a big part of why they fall so easily to government surveillance. It only takes a handful of amoral Zuckerbergs to hand over hundreds of millions of people's data to PRISM. That's why this Slate article makes the case for a mass migration to decentralized, free software social networks, which are much more robust to spying and interference. On top of that, these systems respect your freedom as a software user (or developer), and they're less likely to pepper you with obnoxious advertisements." On a related note, identi.ca is ditching their Twitter clone platform for pump.io which promises an experience closer to the Facebook news feed. Unfortunately, adoption seems slow since Facebook, Google, et al have an interest in preventing interoperability and it can be lonely on the distributed social network.

Comments

Re:Just Block Google

[Anonymous Coward]

I read the article from theatlanticwire, and it did not even suggest that Google was forwarding anything. It stated that the NSA wants a "Google" for emails, not that Google is forwarding emails. It stated that NSA analysts were listening to phone sex from US troops overseas, not the Google was forwarding phone sex calls.

I did not read the first article about the Google employee who monitored chats of teenagers. However as I recall, he was fired and convicted.

Google might be involved in something sinister, but you have not highlighted anything.

You'll get what you pay for

[rasmusbr]

If a service does not charge you money the service will either 1) spy on you and sell your information, 2) bombard you with advertisement or 3) fail (or a combination of the three). When Facebook promises that their service will always be free they're really promising you that they will always either bombard you with ads or spy on you or both. You'll get what you pay for.

Email is failing, albeit slowly. Back in the olden days you used to pay your ISP for email. Now you don't, so you'll get what you pay for. Email is still decentralized and maybe there's a founder effect that keeps it decentralized for now, maybe because the cost of changing it would be too high, but sooner or later email will fade away and be replaced by a small number of walled gardens that are funded by advertisement and/or spying and that communicate with one another by special agreements between the owners of the walled gardens.

If you want ad-free decentralized communication to win, the first thing you need to figure out is how you're going to get people to pay for it. It might be enough for each user to pay a dollar a month, but getting them to do that will not be easy, because the wast majority users will never suffer any adverse effect from the spying, so for them paying for a spy-free social network is basically an insurance plan.

I think that the only way that the decentralized social web and, in the long run, the decentralized web itself could realistically win is if the amount of ads eventually grows so large and annoying and immune to ad-blockers that people become prepared to pay for services just to get rid of the ads.

Secret Agent Man...

[some old guy]

He's giving you a number, and taking away your name.

How can any of us with more database experience than the average five-year-old think that once indentifiable data is in the wild, on any corporate or government server of any kind, all it takes is access to said data for it to be parsed against every other available database and have it filtered to a single common file? Do you really think your credit report, email history, school transcripts, and every bloody thing else can't be centralized once the access door is opened?

Yeah, go ahead with home-baked encrypted email, abandon Facebook, and use prepaid phones. You're still fucked.

The government owns us. And it's our own damned faults.

Re:Duck duck go away NSA

[umundane]

So I've switched to Duck Duck go, because the EFF said it was ok (and I'll change again when a better non-US alternative comes along),

https://startpage.com/ is an anonymizing front-end for Google search, based in the Netherlands.
Details here: https://startpage.com/eng/prism-program-exposed.html

https://www.ixquick.com/ is an independent search engine, apparently by the same company in the Netherlands.

I started using startpage.com yesterday. So far so good, although I'm not used to seeing ads in my search results.

Re:Network externalities

[tlhIngan]

Spoken like a true ignoramus. G+ has 500 million users, nearly half of what Facebook does. It's also only been around for two years, while Facebook has been around for eight. Given its age and the fact that it's had to find its place in a market already dominated by a similar product, I'd say Google+ is a smashing success.

Only if you consider that basically Google turned everyone's account into a G+ account without people really knowing about it.

I'd believe most people on /. have a G+ account because they have/had a Gmail/Picasa/YouTube account at one point in time.

Hell, if we go with that sort of count, we should say IE is the most dominant browser on the planet, being that 90% of all desktop PCs have it installed.

Just because Google has half a billion users (probably more than Facebook - who DOESN'T have any sort of Google account?) though doesn't mean that usage of G+ is comparable to Facebook. Heck, every Android phone sold today basically gives you a G+ account "for free" on setup, yet I'm sure the first app installed for most of them is Facebook. Most don't even realize that their Google account is also a G+ account and don't bother with G+ at all.

Just like how IE may be installed on 90% of desktop PCs, doesn't mean 90% of web users use IE.

Re:Just Block Google

[fast turtle]

Which is why I use Noscript in paranoid mode - Block All by default and for those that I convince to install noscript and firefox or compatible, I setup the same way. Helps but it's not perfect by a long shot. For myself I use a combination that includes a custom hosts file to block much of the tracking done by Google and Others. In fact, I never access facebook or any of their product pages due to this. Google I use but it's reaching the point that I've begun limiting (probably too late) the amount of information they get from me by blocking what I can. It's the same for those who I happen to assist. I've got a subset of the hosts file edited to block most of Google, Amazon and the most annoying advertisers (punch the monkey - win an iphone) shit like that. Some of them have indicated that the host file alone has sped up their internet (a few are still on dial-up) while others are using slow dls (128 - 512) can it even be considered broadband if it's less the 10Mbps?