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Government Data Requests To Facebook Up By 24%
davidshenba writes: Facebook has revealed that government requests for user data has increased by 24% to nearly 35,000 during the first six months of the year. Also content restrictions due to local laws increased by 19% in the same period. According to Facebook, they scrutinize every government request for legal sufficiency and "push back hard when we find deficiencies or are served with overly broad requests." Already Facebook is fighting its largest ever legal battle against a U.S. court order to handover 400 users' data.
I care about requests not served with an appropriate judge-signed warrant.
You're "Secure in your effects" unless someone happens to ask a corporation that's too willing to comply. Then oops. There they go.
No sympathy here for anyone who has a Facebook acct.
I will never have Facebook. I have lost friends because of this (they won't call me to invite me to things and insist on using facebook) but I have made more than enough new ones at my local Linux Users Group
Sure. That's fine. I don't have one.
But... um... sympathy isn't the point. Universality of constitutional protections is the point.
So how many of you have written your congress-critter and demanded they work to repeal the bad laws passed that are facilitating this?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Pay attention to your elected officials.
I believe such things should be said before election day. Read the results and weep...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I'd also fight tooth and nail if I was to hand over for free what I usually sell for good money!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
But how long can we still be without one? Suuuure, nobody can force you to have one. But more and more companies rely on FB for more and more things. It used to be that you have to have some FB account to participate in some raffles. Ok, no biggie. I can do without winning something I never needed. But more and more rely on them for authentication. And that's when it starts to become inconvenient.
Or at the very least more expensive. Because companies that can cut corners by "outsourcing" some of their cost to FB will be able to offer their gadgets cheaper. And that in turn will mean that privacy will become more and more a luxury item, for people that can afford it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Tenet. Seriously, the word is tenet.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
That is a point that bothers me. FB is kind enough to allow others to authenticate from them, and they have very good security... but if I were running a business and needed some way to ensure customers were properly authenticated, I'd rather have a commercial entity that could give me some assurance that measures (at least PCI-DSS3 standards) were being followed.
My preference would be smaller social networks with a standard of interlinking, so events, calenders, posts, and private messages could go from social network "A" to social network "B". This way, not all eggs are in one basket.
An even better preference would be to perhaps reuse existing protocols. For private messages, XMPP comes to mind. For longer, async messages, good old fashoned E-mail. Discussions? Web forums, or NNTP. Real-time text conferences? IRC.
Of course, people want a "one stop shop", so even though older Internet protocols might be the best solution, having many social networks interconnected is better than what we have now.