EFF - Six Things to Know About Facebook Connections

Each time Facebook makes a change to their privacy practices, it pisses me off a little bit more.

So you can guess how infuriated I was when I learned about "Connections", and I immediately deleted several sections of my information.

But was it enough?

According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, probably not.

1. Facebook will not let you share any of this information without using Connections.
2. Facebook will not respect your old privacy settings in this transition.
3. Facebook has removed your ability to restrict its use of this information.
4. Facebook will continue store and use your Connections even after you delete them.
5. Facebook sometimes creates a Connection when you "Like" something
6. Facebook sometimes creates a Connection when you post to your wall.

Facebook, I've given it a shot, but the truth is, I'm just not that into you.

Full disclosure - I'm an EFF member and contributor.

Image via Wikimedia Commons

Social Networking Sites and Law Enforcement

Regular readers of this site are familiar with my thoughts on social networking sites - their limited benefits, and more important, the significant risks they introduce as people struggle to understand how much sharing is too much.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (full disclosure: I'm a member of EFF) has released documents detailing how law enforcement is mining data from social networking sites for them to use during their investigations.

Not only are agencies using this freely-available information, but formal training is occurring to teach investigators how to better use the tools that exist on the Internet.

It's not only the things that you share that could trip you up or provide critical investigative elements. Your online "friends" could post things about you - items that you might never post yourself - and agencies could piece together these nuggets in an attempt to get a better overall view of your activities, behaviors, and lifestyle.

No worries though, right? The government has no history of over-reaching or misusing intelligence data, either foreign or domestic.

Due to the potential for misuse and abuse, training that includes clearly-articulated codes of conduct requirements for social networking investigations should be mandatory. Can an investigator set up a fake profile or misrepresent themselves in the quest to obtain information? What sort of evidence would be considered acceptable? These are just two specific areas that need to be considered and monitored for violations.

As a new generation of Internet users moves online with a completely different attitude about sharing their lives as they unfold, it will become much easier to build huge repositories of intelligence that can be mined by investigative agencies.

It's imperative that we have an understanding what's being done, the controls in place to limit and identify misuse of social networking data, and clearly-defined policies and procedures for agencies to follow and for citizens to leverage in the event disagreements arise about allowable uses of the data collected.

If it's not a flag, it must be a terrorist

Via the Electronic Frontier Foundation, some disturbing, but not surprising information about the wanton abuse of telco data by law enforcement.

At a recent conference known as "ISS World" - where ISS is an acronym for the otherwise Orwellian "Intelligence Support Systems for Lawful Interception, Criminal Investigations and Intelligence Gathering" - Sprint's Manager of Electronic Surveillance commented that in the past 13 months, the communications conglomerate had received 8 million requests from law enforcement for precise GPS location data revealing the location and movement of Sprint customers.

8 million. In 13 months.

Full disclosure: I'm a member of EFF.

More full disclosure: I'm really pissed about this. And you should be, too.

As noted in the EFF story:

Sprint received over 8 million requests for its customers' information in the past 13 months. That doesn't count requests for basic identification and billing information, or wiretapping requests, or requests to monitor who is calling who, or even requests for less-precise location data based on which cell phone towers a cell phone was in contact with. That's just GPS. And, that's not including legal requests from civil litigants, or from foreign intelligence investigators. That's just law enforcement. And, that's not counting the few other major cell phone carriers like AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile. That's just Sprint.

The surveillance society under which we live is simply staggering. There's absolutely no activity in which you're engaged that isn't being tracked, logged, recorded, or captured in some manner.

This used to be the kind of scenario reserved for the big screen. Who needs a Tom Cruise movie that's based on the premise of police being able to pinpoint future crimes, empowered to arrest the prospective perp before the crime occurs, when reality is far more frightening?

EFF poses the following question: Is this type of behavior consistent with a free society and American values?

The answer is no. And since this type of surveillance continues, unchecked, the logical conclusion is that we no longer live in a free society, and that American values have been tossed aside like week-old bread under the guise of protecting America.

Freedom was nice while it lasted.

Image via Wikimedia Commons

The Book vs. The Kindle

h/t to Electronic Frontier Foundation