The problem with Facebook is not that government has access to it -- at least, that's not a problem unique to FB (Gmail, as one commenter says, is probably worse in terms of raw access to personal details). The problem with Facebook is that it is personal details specifically organized into a dossier-like format. It's one thing for the NSA, for instance, to be able to tap into the hose of undifferentiated data streaming through the network. It's quite another thing for that data to be specifically organized for the purposes of quickly discovering key information about somebody, such as their social network, their political interests, their latest photos, etc. all indexed and searchable. Think about the cost of taking Gmail's data and turning it into something useable by intelligence organizations -- work that FB "empowers" us to do for them!
What we need are tools that allow us to connect in ways that are difficult not only to detect but also to make sense of (not necessarily encryption, but an ad-hoc format that can't be easily parsed and aggregated). We need the ability to use the network for our own particular, peculiar interests rather than having to fit our interactions into some other authority's template for their interests. The idea that social networking never occurred before Friendster, FB, MySpace is ridiculous -- it just happened more informally before.
I'd like to see a return to this informal mode of using TCP/IP, where the internet itself is the social network rather than merely a transport layer for some centralized system. This may make it harder for everyday people to benefit, but it also means they learn how to drive before they use the roads. Social networking's hyped-up promise has always been to passively connect people, but the promise of the internet has always been to allow people to actively connect (or not connect). Once we have a broader suite of tools for this latter purpose, we'll see people reject centralized dossier services like FB.
> What we need are tools that allow us to connect in ways that are difficult not only to detect but also to make sense of (not necessarily encryption, but an ad-hoc format that can't be easily parsed and aggregated).
Which would also make it much more difficult to use and less useful. We've organized our info this way because we like it and it makes sense, it's no surprise that it's useful to the government as well. In other words, I think the value to us and the value to them are very tightly coupled.
And the thing is, outside of the hardcore techie bubble, most people don't care. So what if the government can see their friends and pictures, even track them to some degree? Why should they care? They're not going to migrate to some convoluted unstructured system just for the abstract and esoteric benefit of privacy.
This is interesting, and I had the same thought reading the article. One approach might be for the user to store the information on their own computer, and only when they enter (login) the social network, does their information become available, and only to those that they specifically give access to.
I've been following these discussions the past couple of days on HN, and there are a few calm minds who are very knowledgeable of the law, who's comments have been enlightening and reassuring ('rayiner and others).
But we now live in a completely online world, where nearly all communication and files are conveyed and hosted by third parties, and soon it will take several minutes for even a geek to mentally count up the number of internet-connected computers in their house.
I am comforted by the idea that Jack Bauer and Chloe have timely access to information to stop the bad guys, and that US secret agencies have little motivation or bandwidth to use this information for anything but national security threats (and hopefully kidnapping and such). Bad actors in these agencies can obviously do a lot of harm to individuals, but those cases will probably be personal and few, widespread malicious use of this data by agency employees would be easier to uncover.
What I find most troubling is the ease with which the government can view my information and how I've steadily made it easier for them over the past five years by getting that iPhone, using Dropbox and Gmail. But, my life has seemed safe, prosperous and peaceful over that time and these services I use have had a profound impact on the efficiency and convenience with which I perform my daily routine.
Brilliant, you get comfort from a murdering, torturing, loose cannon nut job, who takes no notice of his superiors. Not to mention making mistakes that kill others. Amazing. Its a live cartoon. Might as well have faith in Batman.
Yeah, I loved 24, but thank god its a wonderful fantasy and not real.
Oh, forgive me, but what was the episode where Jack and co got the bad guys by looking at facebook?
"Those who do not move, do not notice their chains." - Rosa Luxemburg
Of course you don't care about privacy, why should you? You're just a peaceful flock member. never acting against the power of the status quo. But look around and see what happens to the people that actually do confront power and you'll see why privacy is important.
I would now consider paying for services that offer real private email, social networking and file sharing / cloud backups, where none of those services were controlled by an US controlled entity and where the NSA couldn't snoop around in my private life. However boring my private life is, it is still mine.
I wonder if anyone else would part with cold hard cash though, or is it just me? There maybe a niche there.
Paying with your credit card? That's being tracked. Your back account transactions are being indexed and collated.
They're probably in all of our computers already. I've been operating a windows7 honeypot as my "main" computer for several years, generating what appears to be legit "personal" traffic. You wouldn't believe the shit I've found, and it doesn't appear to be your garden variety cyber criminals or foreign state actors. And I'm not even that smart.
Unfortunately such a social network would probably be so dominated by tinfoil-hat crazies that it would be unusable. The thing about social networks is of course that the people you want to socially network with need to be there.
On the other hand you would be fully up to date at all times on the evils of vaccines and water fluoridation.
"Big Data" is the buzzword of the day but I think "Big Privacy" will be a bigger trend in the very near future. Right now it's technically possible to put together the resources to give your self a fairly good bit of privacy, just as it's always been possible to write a cron job to do remote backup before Dropbox. However this takes both a bit of technical skill, a good chunk of time and planning, and there's still a chance you'll miss something.
So I believe there's a lot of money to be made in providing instant privacy the same way dropbox provides instant backups. Likewise as statistics + programming = data scientist,
statistics + programming + security = privacy scientist
Sadly this also means that privacy will become a commodity and I can easily imagine a tiered system of privacy based on cost (eg 19.99/mo get's you a secure network + encrypted files, 99.99/mo get's you text re-structuring to avoid stylometeric identification.)
I would also consider paying for this. However, as pointed out in the comments below, a social network like Facebook only works because a majority of the majority of people's friends are there.
But, I think the more interesting point is that even if the system were hosted outside of US jurisdiction, or anyone's for that matter, they'll just find a way to make it difficult for you to access, as they do with thepiratebay - by blocking access through the ISPs. The inconvenience/complication of working around these ISP level filters, means that a lot of people won't know how or can't be bothered to work around them. The same would apply to a social network.
As I understand it, the US has no controls over the NSA spying out side of the US. So, you'd have less protection. Even if they did, as a result of this, and knowing how other governments bend to US will, I wouldn't trust anything connected to the internet at all.
Privacy wise, the internet is dead. Just, forget it. The war is lost. They can, there for, they will. And that's that.
I mean, does any one seriously think these abilities and powers will be go, or be given up?
I'm curious if my friends, family, and co-workers that rolled their eyes at me or laughed at me when I explained why I deleted my facebook account years ago even remember the conversation, or what their response was, when they read the latest revelations about the government having access to their databases.
Deleting your Facebook account isn't a solution to this problem. Gmail may contain even more personal information. Dropbox contains your files and is essentially giving them access to documents you would have stored offline 10 years ago. The problem is that none of these services are safe anymore and we need specific legislation detailing what the government can and can't do with the information we have stored on them.
The bigger problem for me is that as my data is being stored in the US by US companies and my countries laws don't apply - and the safeguards provided by the US constitution also don't apply. The NSA/FBI can do whatever they want with my data and have said as much[1]:
"He said reports about Prism contained "numerous inaccuracies". While admitting the government collected communications from internet firms, he said the policy only targets "non-US persons"."
I think we might start to see companies having data centres in multiple countries and allowing you to store your data in the one you choose or the one that follows your countries laws. Otherwise there will be an exodus of users from US internet companies.
Going back even further, there used to be a time when "Internet Citizens" were primarily weird geeks. Us weird geeks used to tell people "eventually, this will be everywhere, connecting everything and everyone" and in exchange, we received ridicule by "ordinary" people. Those weird geeks and their technology - They would sure like if everybody was on their tech mumbo jumbo thing.
Fast forward ten years and an increasing number of people vomit their entire life online, constantly.
First it was the iMac era, then the iPhone era, now the iPad era. With every era, a new demographic is being pushed into this new data reality and our calls from the beginnings go unheard.
The thing is - we would really like to say "told you so", but it seems overly cynical by now. Especially considering that it's not just our wildest dreams, but also our worst nightmares coming true at an exponential pace.
And even more than that - we really like people getting onto "our thing", so calling for caution now has a whiff of asking for exclusivity after our nice little in-crowd thing was blown out of proportion.
No. They didn't care then and they don't care now. The government can data mine my facebook page as much as they want - it's my library lending record I'm worried about...
Will these NSA spy revelations hurt US internet companies? If I am German or Russian or Brazilian... do I really want to go out of my way to feed the U.S. intelligence beast?
Being Brazilian, I am not so worried if the US government has access to my data, my main concern is about the Brazilian government having access to it.
The average German, Russian, or Brazilian probably thinks about the importance of their relative privacy with respect to their government even less than the average US citizen does. And the average US citizen does not really care. (This NSA thing is essentially an "inside the beltway" issue, not a ballot box thing.)
Government spying on my Facebook account is bothersome in regards to privacy limits of power but it is Facebook and anything I put there I should expect to be public at some point.
Are there public databases that collect information on officers/ agents?
If not what kinds of information would be valuable (to the public) to collect/ what kind of processes would be good to use(crowd-sourcing, web-scraping, .gov apis, etc)?
Lets be honest. Most people scream about privacy violations but in turn are more than willing, hell you cannot shut them up, to tell you all about themselves, their stuff, their friends, and such.
Even with legislation do you expect it not to be easy for any agency to just gather the information? At worst we will get an "Online Users Bill of Rights" which will only codify their rights to our privacy.
Assange is an exemplary case of how secret services operate. Containment plan is generally to discredit an inconvenient person via a character attack, which directs attention to a single person (and boy do the crowd loves gossip and celebrities), overshadowing whatever sensitive information there is to disclose. Make this person an unreliable source before they have anything to say.
He's been labeled a rapist, a crackpot, or even an agent of the evil, with little regard to atrocities exposed by the Wikileaks.
Yet like our beloved RMS, if you read the early texts, it is clear that they had seen it coming way before us - sane, normal people.
I wonder whether the time has come to build some better tools for protecting privacy. Looking at the common implementations of encryption the publicly available free stuff has some fairly awful interfaces. It's especially a mess if you're looking at securely communicating with a website - I can't think of a single browser that supports anything like a decent standard of encryption for that.
+ We haven't committed any crime — then there's nothing to worry! And so spying on certain accounts is fine, if they need to investigate, track and analyze data for Intelligence.
+ I'm perfectly fine if they take my data — till its serving in the good interests of my family and people's safety.
+ It should only be in the good interests of our system and society.
+ But such credible data, should not be misused by the govt bodies or elected representatives!
Who is to decide what is in the "interest" of your family and people's safety? This is subjective and cedes power to whoever is in control of the surveillance mechanism. The surveyor may have motives that are not as benevolent as you would like to think.
[+] [-] jeremy6d|12 years ago|reply
What we need are tools that allow us to connect in ways that are difficult not only to detect but also to make sense of (not necessarily encryption, but an ad-hoc format that can't be easily parsed and aggregated). We need the ability to use the network for our own particular, peculiar interests rather than having to fit our interactions into some other authority's template for their interests. The idea that social networking never occurred before Friendster, FB, MySpace is ridiculous -- it just happened more informally before.
I'd like to see a return to this informal mode of using TCP/IP, where the internet itself is the social network rather than merely a transport layer for some centralized system. This may make it harder for everyday people to benefit, but it also means they learn how to drive before they use the roads. Social networking's hyped-up promise has always been to passively connect people, but the promise of the internet has always been to allow people to actively connect (or not connect). Once we have a broader suite of tools for this latter purpose, we'll see people reject centralized dossier services like FB.
[+] [-] resu_nimda|12 years ago|reply
Which would also make it much more difficult to use and less useful. We've organized our info this way because we like it and it makes sense, it's no surprise that it's useful to the government as well. In other words, I think the value to us and the value to them are very tightly coupled.
And the thing is, outside of the hardcore techie bubble, most people don't care. So what if the government can see their friends and pictures, even track them to some degree? Why should they care? They're not going to migrate to some convoluted unstructured system just for the abstract and esoteric benefit of privacy.
[+] [-] deanclatworthy|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] euroclydon|12 years ago|reply
But we now live in a completely online world, where nearly all communication and files are conveyed and hosted by third parties, and soon it will take several minutes for even a geek to mentally count up the number of internet-connected computers in their house.
I am comforted by the idea that Jack Bauer and Chloe have timely access to information to stop the bad guys, and that US secret agencies have little motivation or bandwidth to use this information for anything but national security threats (and hopefully kidnapping and such). Bad actors in these agencies can obviously do a lot of harm to individuals, but those cases will probably be personal and few, widespread malicious use of this data by agency employees would be easier to uncover.
What I find most troubling is the ease with which the government can view my information and how I've steadily made it easier for them over the past five years by getting that iPhone, using Dropbox and Gmail. But, my life has seemed safe, prosperous and peaceful over that time and these services I use have had a profound impact on the efficiency and convenience with which I perform my daily routine.
[+] [-] alan_cx|12 years ago|reply
Yeah, I loved 24, but thank god its a wonderful fantasy and not real.
Oh, forgive me, but what was the episode where Jack and co got the bad guys by looking at facebook?
[+] [-] rpgmaker|12 years ago|reply
Of course you don't care about privacy, why should you? You're just a peaceful flock member. never acting against the power of the status quo. But look around and see what happens to the people that actually do confront power and you'll see why privacy is important.
[+] [-] _k|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] junto|12 years ago|reply
I wonder if anyone else would part with cold hard cash though, or is it just me? There maybe a niche there.
[+] [-] wavefunction|12 years ago|reply
They're probably in all of our computers already. I've been operating a windows7 honeypot as my "main" computer for several years, generating what appears to be legit "personal" traffic. You wouldn't believe the shit I've found, and it doesn't appear to be your garden variety cyber criminals or foreign state actors. And I'm not even that smart.
[+] [-] JamisonM|12 years ago|reply
On the other hand you would be fully up to date at all times on the evils of vaccines and water fluoridation.
[+] [-] Homunculiheaded|12 years ago|reply
So I believe there's a lot of money to be made in providing instant privacy the same way dropbox provides instant backups. Likewise as statistics + programming = data scientist, statistics + programming + security = privacy scientist
Sadly this also means that privacy will become a commodity and I can easily imagine a tiered system of privacy based on cost (eg 19.99/mo get's you a secure network + encrypted files, 99.99/mo get's you text re-structuring to avoid stylometeric identification.)
[+] [-] deanclatworthy|12 years ago|reply
But, I think the more interesting point is that even if the system were hosted outside of US jurisdiction, or anyone's for that matter, they'll just find a way to make it difficult for you to access, as they do with thepiratebay - by blocking access through the ISPs. The inconvenience/complication of working around these ISP level filters, means that a lot of people won't know how or can't be bothered to work around them. The same would apply to a social network.
[+] [-] alan_cx|12 years ago|reply
Privacy wise, the internet is dead. Just, forget it. The war is lost. They can, there for, they will. And that's that.
I mean, does any one seriously think these abilities and powers will be go, or be given up?
[+] [-] tlrobinson|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tshile|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] k-mcgrady|12 years ago|reply
The bigger problem for me is that as my data is being stored in the US by US companies and my countries laws don't apply - and the safeguards provided by the US constitution also don't apply. The NSA/FBI can do whatever they want with my data and have said as much[1]:
"He said reports about Prism contained "numerous inaccuracies". While admitting the government collected communications from internet firms, he said the policy only targets "non-US persons"."
I think we might start to see companies having data centres in multiple countries and allowing you to store your data in the one you choose or the one that follows your countries laws. Otherwise there will be an exodus of users from US internet companies.
[1]http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-22809541
[+] [-] skore|12 years ago|reply
Fast forward ten years and an increasing number of people vomit their entire life online, constantly.
First it was the iMac era, then the iPhone era, now the iPad era. With every era, a new demographic is being pushed into this new data reality and our calls from the beginnings go unheard.
The thing is - we would really like to say "told you so", but it seems overly cynical by now. Especially considering that it's not just our wildest dreams, but also our worst nightmares coming true at an exponential pace.
And even more than that - we really like people getting onto "our thing", so calling for caution now has a whiff of asking for exclusivity after our nice little in-crowd thing was blown out of proportion.
[+] [-] lotsofcows|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nursie|12 years ago|reply
I guess I should be more concerned with gmail...
[+] [-] dsleno|12 years ago|reply
Will these NSA spy revelations hurt US internet companies? If I am German or Russian or Brazilian... do I really want to go out of my way to feed the U.S. intelligence beast?
[+] [-] pointernil|12 years ago|reply
Second: that kind of thinking could be a nice way to "motivate" the creation of alternative products out side of the us of a.
Third: but how realistic are such endeavors in today's world?
[+] [-] greiskul|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JamisonM|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevinbluer|12 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.theonion.com/video/cias-facebook-program-dramatic...;
[+] [-] pstuart|12 years ago|reply
We need more public spying on the government....
[+] [-] cinquemb|12 years ago|reply
Are there public databases that collect information on officers/ agents?
If not what kinds of information would be valuable (to the public) to collect/ what kind of processes would be good to use(crowd-sourcing, web-scraping, .gov apis, etc)?
[+] [-] minimize_me|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Shivetya|12 years ago|reply
Even with legislation do you expect it not to be easy for any agency to just gather the information? At worst we will get an "Online Users Bill of Rights" which will only codify their rights to our privacy.
[+] [-] pvnick|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] znowi|12 years ago|reply
He's been labeled a rapist, a crackpot, or even an agent of the evil, with little regard to atrocities exposed by the Wikileaks.
Yet like our beloved RMS, if you read the early texts, it is clear that they had seen it coming way before us - sane, normal people.
[+] [-] 6d0debc071|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pajju|12 years ago|reply
+ I'm perfectly fine if they take my data — till its serving in the good interests of my family and people's safety.
+ It should only be in the good interests of our system and society.
+ But such credible data, should not be misused by the govt bodies or elected representatives!
[+] [-] smoorman1024|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] twistedpair|12 years ago|reply