facebook may soon be tracking you at all times

[bcbm]

http://www.forbes.com/sites/mattmiller/2013/02/05/facebook-know-where-you-are/

[Regicollis]

Yet another reason to avoid that version of Big Brother...

[A Revolutionary Tool]

The government doesn't need to waste their time getting all our information, they'll just buy all the info from facebook after we give it to them.

[Luc]

haha and i was about to sign up :lol: not anymore

[Mackenzie_Blanc]

It was inevitable that Facebook would do something of this sort, just to get more money. Eventually, Facebook will sell the info to the government, as all companies eventually do. Quite a predictable result actually.

[Ele'ill]

yeah don't sign up for it but if you are already known by cops and intelligence then troll them with endless black bloc montage videos

[Questionable]

Is it safe to have a Facebook if you use it solely for communication with friends and never post any significant personal info?

I have one but I haven't posted a status update or changed my information in about a year or more, but all my friends have Facebook and it's a very convenient way to organize get-togethers and whatnot.

Also I have my profile set to maximum privacy so you can't even find me without going through a friend's profile and finding something with me in it.

[Ele'ill]

Is it safe to have a Facebook if you use it solely for communication with friends and never post any significant personal info?

I have one but I haven't posted a status update or changed my information in about a year or more, but all my friends have Facebook and it's a very convenient way to organize get-togethers and whatnot.

Also I have my profile set to maximum privacy so you can't even find me without going through a friend's profile and finding something with me in it.

What do you mean by 'safe'? and no maximum privacy doesn't really do anything when they subpoena facebook, or just have a deal with facebook that they can browse whoever they want, or when they simply browse facebook with full access regardless of access being granted.

[Questionable]

What do you mean by 'safe'? and no maximum privacy doesn't really do anything when they subpoena facebook, or just have a deal with facebook that they can browse whoever they want, or when they simply browse facebook with full access regardless of access being granted.

Well fuck, does this mean the government probably knows about all my bizarre pornographic habits and will use them to blackmail me?

[Ele'ill]

Well fuck, does this mean the government probably knows about all my bizarre pornographic habits and will use them to blackmail me?

I don't think it works like that but yeah they probably would

[Os Cangaceiros]

Is it safe to have a Facebook if you use it solely for communication with friends and never post any significant personal info?

I have one but I haven't posted a status update or changed my information in about a year or more, but all my friends have Facebook and it's a very convenient way to organize get-togethers and whatnot.

Also I have my profile set to maximum privacy so you can't even find me without going through a friend's profile and finding something with me in it.

Investigators will look at your Facebook page to see who you're friends with, to try and establish links between you and other known extremists/criminals. Kind of like what they do with cell phone contact lists, etc.

Don't be too paranoid about it, though. They only see what you yourself put up there. So just be smart about it. This should go without saying (but unfortunately some people are stupid): don't post anything illegal on Facebook. Don't make threats on Facebook. Don't post photos of your bong or growroom on Facebook.

This particular story regarding the Facebook app doesn't appear to be all that sinister, though, or at least not anymore sinister than advertisers trying to get more of your money.

[Os Cangaceiros]

OR, alternately, you can delete all of your credit card accounts, email accounts, Facebook accounts, and any other trace of you online, melt your hard-drive with thermite, legally change your name & only communicate through encrypted channels on public WiFi connections. Up to you!

[blake 3:17]

I go between cautious and reckless on FB -- I figure my secret police file is fairly thick anyways and probably pretty useless to the forces of capitalist law and order. I sometimes worry about posting some stuff on particularly sensitive (or boring) issues, mostly because they may be upsetting to some people, but then I just block those people from seeing it.

Canada has one of the highest per capita rates of using FB and to not be on it means being left out of a bunch of stuff.

At present the big motivation behind geographic location is driven by market logic. FB is trying to figure out how it can actually make some real money through advertising.

[TheRedAnarchist23]

Peculiar thing about capitalism: you buy your own mind control devices for someone else to use.

[black magick hustla]

also, facebook information is a lot of gazillionteramanyzeroes bytes. i honestly don't think the state has enough staff to go through every single of your relationship statuses. i imagine the state only starts thinking about going through your facebook if you are already suspicious in some way imho

[Let's Get Free]

Im not important or exciting enough for anyone to waste their time tracking my daily whereabouts.

[Klaatu]

I use a fake name and fake info on Facebook. (but my friends there know my real name)

[Bronco]

This "Big Brother" stuff gets blown out of proportion, from what I understand of the article Facebook are just going to release an app which if you choose to download it will allow you to see the locations of those of your friends who have also chosen to download it. Seems fairly obvious that if you didn't want to be tracked you just wouldn't download the app

[bcbm]

Is it safe to have a Facebook if you use it solely for communication with friends and never post any significant personal info?

almost no online communication is really 'safe' but if youre not doing anything sketchy i wouldnt be too worried.


This particular story regarding the Facebook app doesn't appear to be all that sinister, though, or at least not anymore sinister than advertisers trying to get more of your money.

i could see where having it constantly knowing your location could be an issue though this is a general issue with cell phones and you shouldnt have one on you if you dont want to be tracked anyway

[Le Libérer]

Facebook is also about to delete 83 million fake profiles. I have 2, one for my close friends, and one that is a public persona for my 3500 readers. I am downloading all content from both of them, because there is no way of knowing which one they may take out.

[Dennis the 'Bloody Peasant']

Think I need to get off there...it's depressing enougn that everytime I post up any opinion on anything my slightly older sister, who must be connected 24/7, shoots it down and is a condescending ass-biscuit.
So yeah, quite a few reasons not to continue in this 'social' network

[Ele'ill]

Facebook is also about to delete 83 million fake profiles. I have 2, one for my close friends, and one that is a public persona for my 3500 readers. I am downloading all content from both of them, because there is no way of knowing which one they may take out.

lol so will they 'hard delete' these fake profiles instead of leaving all information accessible as is what usually happens when you 'delete' your facebook page/photos? I hope they take mine out so I can never use it again, I'm going to get busy making it look as fake as possible.

[Klaatu]

Facebook is also about to delete 83 million fake profiles.

I will just start up another one. Zuckerberg can kiss my ass. :lol:

[Art Vandelay]

Honestly I'm not too concerned about being known as a radical by the state, its already pretty obvious and will only become more and more obvious as I get increasingly active.

[blake 3:17]

It's about selling ads primarily. But... Sh#t from social media is being used more and more in pursuing criminal cases and in state surveillance.

Since I've been involved in revolutionary politics I have just assumed there was an agent of the state in the room.

I use a pseudonym on here for personal privacy, not privacy against the state.

[Ravachol]

also, facebook information is a lot of gazillionteramanyzeroes bytes. i honestly don't think the state has enough staff to go through every single of your relationship statuses. i imagine the state only starts thinking about going through your facebook if you are already suspicious in some way imho

That's not how all of that stuff works though, datamining geared towards anomaly detection based on pinpointing outliers (on the basis of such varied things as too little/much personal info, densely or sparsely clustered PMs and wall interaction, etc.) or clustering (to discover informal groupings, social structures and interaction patterns between users) as well as extracting tidbits of personal info when profiles match certain associative rules (ie. accumulating a certain amount of likes that are of interest, exceeding a threshold of friends who are 'marked', using your real name if you're a person of interest, etc., etc.) are highly automated an require little to no user interaction while extracting a potential wealth of information. This stuff is regularly applied to mining large amounts of intercepted GSM data, marketing records, inspecting gazillions of financial transactions for signs of fraud, etc. People seriously underestimate the capabilities of large-scale datamining operations.

[Ravachol]

http://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty-national-security/raytheons-riot-social-network-data-mining-software



A video touting software created by Raytheon to mine data from social networks has been attracting an increasing amount of attention in the past few days, since it was uncovered by Ryan Gallagher at the Guardian.

As best as I can tell from the video and Gallagher’s reporting, Raytheon’s “Riot” software gathers up only publicly available information from companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare. In that respect, it appears to be a conceptually unremarkable, fairly unimaginative piece of work. At the same time, by aspiring to carry out “large-scale analytics” on Americans’ social networking data—and to do so, apparently, on behalf of national security and law enforcement agencies—the project raises a number of red flags.

In the video, we see a demonstration of how social networking data—such as Foursquare checkins—is used to predict the schedule of a sample subject, “Nick.” The host of the video concludes,

Six a.m. appears to be the most frequently visited time at the gym. So if you ever did want to try to get ahold of Nick—or maybe get ahold of his laptop—you might want to visit the gym at 6:00 a.m. on Monday.

(The reference to the laptop is certainly jarring. Remember, this is an application apparently targeted at law enforcement and national security agencies, not at ordinary individuals. Given this, it sounds to me like the video is suggesting that Riot could be used as a way to schedule a black-bag job to plant spyware on someone’s laptop.)

[human strike]

I'm always very disturbed by what people use smartphones for. I don't know how anyone can sanely carry that much information about themselves on them like it's no thing. And despite not having a smartphone, it's my problem too because obviously people I know have information about me on their damned phones. And I see them do things like take them to demonstrations and I'm just gobsmacked at the stupidity of it all. If there is a chance I may be arrested, carrying my emails, facebook, twitter and god knows what else on me is the last thing I'm going to do. It's this fetish people have for their gadgets and their digital dependencies, it's scary. Within my social (activisty) milieu someone had their tweets used as evidence against them in court, and yet nobody who knows them (as far as I'm aware) has significantly changed their behaviour in relation to that kind of thing. We make it so easy for the police.

/rant

[Ele'ill]

burn phone

and yeah the conversation recently about the grand jury stuff shows just how much of that stuff (allegedly) is basic beat cop detective work and not even super high-tech stuff.

[Klaatu]

New report: Facebook paid zero tax last year

Facebook Paid No Income Taxes In 2012: Report
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/15/facebook-taxes_n_2694368.html#slide=795161

[skitty]

This is Jacob Applebaum speaking in Germany. It's about an hour; but may be worthwhile:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNsePZj_Yks

[blake 3:17]

And despite not having a smartphone, it's my problem too because obviously people I know have information about me on their damned phones. And I see them do things like take them to demonstrations and I'm just gobsmacked at the stupidity of it all.
/rant

I'm not sure when I realized it -- in the last few years -- but that almost everyone I knew had what us old folks called their phone book in their pocket.

Whenever a demo was happening and folks were planning around it, the two top rules were 1) leave your phone book at home and 2) don't carry anything contraband.

Now everyone has their phonebook in their pocket! Yikes!

I put a pass code on my phone so that it can't be used by anyone else without permission and the cops would have to get a warrant or court order to force me to open my phone for them.

Not sure what else we can do.

[blake 3:17]

New report: Facebook paid zero tax last year

Facebook Paid No Income Taxes In 2012: Report
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/15/facebook-taxes_n_2694368.html#slide=795161

Scum bags.

[Ravachol]

I'm not sure when I realized it -- in the last few years -- but that almost everyone I knew had what us old folks called their phone book in their pocket.

Whenever a demo was happening and folks were planning around it, the two top rules were 1) leave your phone book at home and 2) don't carry anything contraband.

Now everyone has their phonebook in their pocket! Yikes!

I put a pass code on my phone so that it can't be used by anyone else without permission and the cops would have to get a warrant or court order to force me to open my phone for them.

Not sure what else we can do.

Depending on the phone, that's not gonna do much as they'll just read out the memory. Besides, with lawful (and less lawful, such as the case was in Germany with the police intercepting all cellular traffic within a certain radius around a demonstration area, all without warrant/court orders) interception and modern technology (complemented by datamining approaches and so-called link-analysis) its easy as pie to build an overview of someone's immediate network, with incoming and outgoing call frequency being used as a 'weight' to see who is important within the network and cluster analysis betraying informal sub-groupings. In addition, setting out intercepted call logs against spatial (via triangulation) and temporal information, people can be linked to various events, meetings and places, not to mention cell phones act like permanent tracking devices. And this is all without intercepting the actual content of the phonecalls, mind you.

I recall that somewhere following the 2005 shooting of Dutch radical leftist activist Louis Sévèke (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_S%C3%A9v%C3%A8ke) (who had been active in the squatting movement in his youth and investigated police and intelligence services and once exposed the entire regional intelligence services in the Nijmegen area, after which they disbanded for some time) several people were approached and summoned by the police based on their cell phones being in the general area of the murder around that time. This included someone from the neonazi NVU (Dutch People's Union) who had virtually no connection to Sévèke at all but was a person of interest popping up in the cell phone location logs of that evening.

[Yuppie Grinder]

I used a nickname on facebook so employers couldn't be peeking at my shit, but I deleted my account earlier today.
I'm glad facebook finally gives you the option to delete your account rather than just deactivate it.

[human strike]

I used a nickname on facebook so employers couldn't be peeking at my shit, but I deleted my account earlier today.
I'm glad facebook finally gives you the option to delete your account rather than just deactivate it.

Clever people search email addresses on facebook which finds you even in you're using an alias as long as you're still using the same email address.

[human strike]

It just occurred to me that this is classic bio-politics. We are all (at least potentially) - through what we are doing already - police informants and intelligence gatherers.

[MP5]

I already thought that they fully cooperated with the police and backed up all the information you put on your profile as well as anything you say over text or video chat. The golden rule about facebook is don't put anything on there that you don't want other people or law enforcement finding out. It never ceases to amaze me of the stupidity of some people and what they post on facebook. I have seen people post status updates like "man i just made $$$ off selling these E pills and oxys" or "i am getting on the crack and smack tonight who wants to join me?" or even "so so has the most awesome molly caps and brown i have seen in years so go get them before it's all bought". Then they wonder why they get busted :sleep: . They are really intelligent under the radar types right enough. Good work boys on not only bringing heat down on yourselfs but also anyone who has had any dealings with you :thumbup:

I have a fapbook account but i don't put anything on there i don't want anyone to see and i don't say any sensitive information over the chat either. Also i don't have my real email address on there and i don't have my real name on there either. Granted i don't think the police are going to be worried about some radical Communist who likes Motorbikes, ATV's and sports. Also most of my status updates are along the line of "i am giving up smoking for good on monday" "okay i am giving up smoking next monday" "i am going to give up smoking when i am less stressed out" "i am going to stop eating so much junk food and fish n chips take out and not drink anymore stout or ale" :rolleyes: . Not exactly anything that the pigs are going to be interested in.

If you need to talk about sensitive info over the internet your best bet is pidgin messenger with OTR and the proper settings. The encrption is pretty good and with a proxy it atleast gives you plausible deniability. All the same it is best to be on the safe side and not say any sensitive information over the net.

I miss the days of using payphones and all you had to worry about was burning your address book if the cops came down on you.

[PC LOAD LETTER]

Is it safe to have a Facebook if you use it solely for communication with friends and never post any significant personal info?

I have one but I haven't posted a status update or changed my information in about a year or more, but all my friends have Facebook and it's a very convenient way to organize get-togethers and whatnot.

Also I have my profile set to maximum privacy so you can't even find me without going through a friend's profile and finding something with me in it.
Nothing, not even "private messages" or email, should ever ever ever be considering secure or safe from snooping unless you use encryption. Either public key or private key.


Public key, or asymmetric, encryption gives you two keys, one public and one private. You give the public one out to whoever. They encrypt info with that key, then send it to you. Only you can decrypt it with the private key, which you should keep safe. The most famous example is RSA. A 768-bit key was cracked, but it took two fucking years and a dedicated team to do that. So use a 1024-bit key length or greater. 2048-bit if you can. This is convenient because anyone can send you encrypted info using your public key, but only you can decrypt it (with the private key).


Private key, or symmetric, encryption gives you a single key. This should never be transmitted plaintext or anything. In reality, it should only be handed off in person or something like that. Or you could encrypt the key with someone else's public key, then send it to them. I dunno, get creative. But anyways, one key used to both encrypt and decrypt data. Symmetric cryptography is extremely strong. AES was recently decided in a cryptographic smackdown (trademark WWF/WWE), with the three finalists being Rjindael, Twofish, and Serpent. All three are extremely strong, with Rjindael receiving the honor of becoming the US Government's standard encryption, or AES, based on pretty much just its performance (speed) because all three are awesome, extremely strong encryption algorithms.



An excellent free/open-source encryption suite is called GnuPG: http://www.glump.net/howto/gpg_intro

download here: http://www.gnupg.org/

[Klaatu]

--Mark Zuckerberg
Charges: In the backhanded tradition of tech dickery, Zuckerburg brazenly pilfered the idea which allows you to neurotically tend that asshole from high school’s virtual farm while not getting any work done. The Facebook founder’s fortune comes in part from selling your information to third parties via default privacy settings. After vowing to donate half of his some $7 billion to charity, as transparent PR in the wake of The Social Network, he got into bed with the execrable Goldman Sachs and a Russian investment firm run by a convicted extortionist to recoup the loss. Invented “poking.” And he’s actually trying to trademark the word “face.”
Aggravating factor (from his business card): “i’m CEO … *****.”source
30 of the Most Loathsome People in America
http://www.alternet.org/story/149735/30_of_the_most_loathsome_people_in_america?paging= off

[o well this is ok I guess]

I used a nickname on facebook so employers couldn't be peeking at my shit, but I deleted my account earlier today.
I'm glad facebook finally gives you the option to delete your account rather than just deactivate it. I keep putting it up for deletion only to cancel the process like 2 days later.
I dunno I know why facebook is fucking horrible and all that but then I think of being without it and I stop
I'm probably a terrible person.

[Orange Juche]

People have referenced Orwell's 1984 and this looming fear of a future, oncoming "big brother" for years.

The sad irony - big brother is not the ever pervasive state apparatus of Orwell's novel, but an apparatus of capitalist interests, and people will (and already are: Google, Facebook, etc) passively and willingly accept and "love big brother" without a second thought.

I don't know what's more frightening. Big brother, or the fact that people simply don't care all that much and are blissfully marching into the proverbial gas chamber of an all seeing eye of tyranny.