ACLU exposes Facebook, Twitter for selling surveillance company user data
1–10 of 67 posts
Re: ACLU exposes Facebook, Twitter for selling surveillance company user data
#2It's interesting to note that in some cases the data was being fed through an intermediary... who's to say there aren't other integrations doing the same thing?
Re: ACLU exposes Facebook, Twitter for selling surveillance company user data
#3[deleted]
Re: ACLU exposes Facebook, Twitter for selling surveillance company user data
#4I love that "user data sales" has become such a normal thing that when someone stops selling it to ONE company out of like several thousand, it's considered newsworthy.
Re: ACLU exposes Facebook, Twitter for selling surveillance company user data
#5If the data is public, why is it a problem? If they're sending private info to cops, that's different, but a reasonable person expects all public info to be visible to the last person you want to see it. Theyre just feeding the customers the same data users can see in a more condensed form aren't they?
Re: ACLU exposes Facebook, Twitter for selling surveillance company user data
#6If the data is public, why is it a problem? If they're sending private info to cops, that's different, but a reasonable person expects all public info to be visible to the last person you want to see it. Theyre just feeding the customers the same data users can see in a more condensed form aren't they?
Probably, because it violates the terms of services of the data access agreement, which I would imagine prohibits the use that was being made because it's the kind of use which discourages people from using the service from which the data is sourced, and it is therefore in the interest of the service provider to officially prohibit the use and to take action to deal with misuse at a minimum when it has become public.
The chilling effect of surveillance has commercial as well as liberty implications, and commercial entities have rather strong reasons to care about the former even if they aren't concerned with the latter.
Re: ACLU exposes Facebook, Twitter for selling surveillance company user data
#7If the data is public, why is it a problem? If they're sending private info to cops, that's different, but a reasonable person expects all public info to be visible to the last person you want to see it. Theyre just feeding the customers the same data users can see in a more condensed form aren't they?
The firehose isn't public.
Re: ACLU exposes Facebook, Twitter for selling surveillance company user data
#8If the data is public, why is it a problem? If they're sending private info to cops, that's different, but a reasonable person expects all public info to be visible to the last person you want to see it. Theyre just feeding the customers the same data users can see in a more condensed form aren't they?
If something is public then it does not follow directly that you can collect it or share it with a third-party. It all depends on relying legal framework. Especially when it depends on additional spacial and temporal parameters.
Re: ACLU exposes Facebook, Twitter for selling surveillance company user data
#9This is a very messy, multi-layered issue.
First of all, a large part of a social network's utility is derived from sharing data about oneself. This data is public, for the benefit of other participants of the social network. Some of those participants may have agendas that are contrary to one's own: stalkers, adversaries, data aggregators -- it's impossible to know all of them ahead of time, and a granularity of permissions that satisfies these competing goals is... tough.
Second, it ought to be a person's reasonable expectation that law enforcement is a benevolent actor. Actions such as this, which amount to targeted crowd surveillance, don't instill much faith in this assumption. This is a very serious issue that merits more discussion than my terse comment.
Lastly, this data aggregator should not be the target of the outrage. They're an intermediary in a system where we willingly share data with private companies to get some value-add, who then sell that data to fund their operations, and some of the purchasers of our data happen to be law enforcement. Anger directed at any particular intermediary -- like anger at reposessors or ambulance chasers or debt relief counselors -- is woefully misdirected; we should instead be asking why corporations feel the need to sell our data in the first place, and why we have law enforcement that feels the need to employ mass surveillance. If we ponder these questions, we'll have accomplished something more than drive an inconsequential company out business while leaving the systemic faults in place.
Re: ACLU exposes Facebook, Twitter for selling surveillance company user data
#10If the data is public, why is it a problem? If they're sending private info to cops, that's different, but a reasonable person expects all public info to be visible to the last person you want to see it. Theyre just feeding the customers the same data users can see in a more condensed form aren't they?
Mass databases, in a format that can be read and cross-referenced by computer, are an example where a difference in degree really makes for a difference in kind.