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ACLU exposes Facebook, Twitter for selling surveillance company user data

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Re: ACLU exposes Facebook, Twitter for selling surveillance company user data

#52
post #5

If 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 same reason ALPRs (with long retention rate) are a bad idea.

"No reasonable expectation of privacy in public" is the US norm today. I'm suggesting that maybe it should be revisited in light of the pervasive surveillance that has come into being.

Re: ACLU exposes Facebook, Twitter for selling surveillance company user data

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. If the data in question were public, Facebook would not need to be the ones selling it. There would be a whole market of third party data aggregators. 2. If this were true, why would we need the Bill of Rights? The entire point of the Fourth Amendment, for example, is to protect citizens against unreasonable searches -- by law enforcement. 3. This would be true if the data were only shared on a need to know basis,…

re 1): as this situation stands now, facebook threatens via C&D or sues other companies that try this invoking us law. However if you incorporate in countries that are actively hostile to companies like facebook/google (i.e. Indonesia, China), you can operate aggregators of such data more effectively. However that barrier is a bit different from jumping over this barrier in the due to Facebook incumbent status.

Can you provide evidence of that? I find this interesting, because a lot of people are saying "it's public data." I would argue that if you get a C&D for scraping/etc, it's no longer public.

Re: ACLU exposes Facebook, Twitter for selling surveillance company user data

#54
post #9

This 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 per…

1. If the data in question were public, Facebook would not need to be the ones selling it. There would be a whole market of third party data aggregators. 2. If this were true, why would we need the Bill of Rights? The entire point of the Fourth Amendment, for example, is to protect citizens against unreasonable searches -- by law enforcement. 3. This would be true if the data were only shared on a need to know basis,…

1. The data is freely viewable to anyone on the internet. There is just no practical means of searching / discovering it without the companies' feeds.

2. They shouldn't call it user data, as if Twitter / Facebook were selling private information they store about users. This tool just searches the public stream of posts.

Re: ACLU exposes Facebook, Twitter for selling surveillance company user data

#56
Shame on Facebook! Shame on Instagram! Shame on Twitter! I consider this a despicable act on the part of these companies. They stopped this data selling only because they were caught. Using data internally to feed to algorithms to show targeted ads is one thing (though privacy wise it's bad). Selling data outright to other companies is a terrible state of affairs. It's sad that this won't make a big dent in the user base or make people flee these platforms in large numbers.

Re: ACLU exposes Facebook, Twitter for selling surveillance company user data

#57
As a non-native speaker this headline took me way too many attempts to parse correctly. For anyone wondering the same, it's meant to be read as:

ACLU exposes Facebook and Twitter for selling user data to a surveillance company

The way I read it the first few times I thought they sold user data of a company, for surveillance.

Re: ACLU exposes Facebook, Twitter for selling surveillance company user data

#58
post #33
post #9

This 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 per…

>Second, it ought to be a person's reasonable expectation that law enforcement is a benevolent actor. I totally disagree. Care to expand on that?

You can tell how bad things are when people are seriously arguing that police can't be expected to be a benevolent actor.

Re: ACLU exposes Facebook, Twitter for selling surveillance company user data

#59
post #42
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worse than that. Some prominent lawyers advise that everyone should never talk to the police.

Which is very good advice, but it's because of the fact that testimony given to a police officer can only ever be used against you (it's hearsay otherwise). Not to mention that if someone slips up and accidentally tells a lie in the middle of a testimony, that instills doubt in the entire testimony ("I didn't kill her, I've never killed anyone, I've never even used a gun, I wasn't in the area that night" sounds fine…

Which is very good advice, but [..]

Wrong conjunction? It seems like you're explaining why it is good advice, not offering an opposing view.

I think you have given a perfect illustration of the GGP's assertion that "if you're afraid to go ask a police officer for help [..] then something is very wrong about police". This is a good example where the law sets up the police as antagonists against the general population.

Re: ACLU exposes Facebook, Twitter for selling surveillance company user data

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

re 1): as this situation stands now, facebook threatens via C&D or sues other companies that try this invoking us law. However if you incorporate in countries that are actively hostile to companies like facebook/google (i.e. Indonesia, China), you can operate aggregators of such data more effectively. However that barrier is a bit different from jumping over this barrier in the due to Facebook incumbent status.

Can you provide evidence of that? I find this interesting, because a lot of people are saying "it's public data." I would argue that if you get a C&D for scraping/etc, it's no longer public.

Facebook's c&d against me and my friend's company we bootstrapped to about $100k annualized before decicing to close stuff down to changes from this: https://lumendatabase.org/notices/2037976

I'm in Indonesia now, and still have everything pretty much ready where I left off (and technically its even easier than before to exfil data from this walled garden sans user account, because of the huge surface of oauth keys out there in the wild as it is for every website with similar protocols and api's) so i'm just doing due diligence now to make sure that like me and my friend handled CNIL[0] from the US, we can effectively send any facebook requests to /dev/null

So I say to anyone else if you think its "public data" try to start a company that builds a derivative product within the US leveraging such "public data" ;)

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_nationale_de_l%27in...

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