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Facebook's tentacles reach further than people think

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Facebook's tentacles reach further than people think

#181

Post by patkai »

hueving wrote: post #103
thr0waway1239 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unethical: lacking moral principles. Moral: of, relating to, or concerned with the principles or rules of right conduct or the distinction between right and wrong I think it is "clearly wrong" that Facebook creates shadow profiles, because it is violating the freedom of people who have not signed up for their service, in the same way that it is clearly wrong for me to take away your favorite pet for ritualistic sacri…

I think the commenter was looking for an explanation of why you think shadow profiles are unethical. In your argument you state that it violates peoples' freedom, but you need to define how their freedom is being violated.

Basically if FB creates a - shadow - profile of someone _not_ on FB they don't gibe her the chance to accept or reject their terms.

Re: Facebook's tentacles reach further than people think

#182

Post by [deleted] »

hueving wrote: post #103
thr0waway1239 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unethical: lacking moral principles. Moral: of, relating to, or concerned with the principles or rules of right conduct or the distinction between right and wrong I think it is "clearly wrong" that Facebook creates shadow profiles, because it is violating the freedom of people who have not signed up for their service, in the same way that it is clearly wrong for me to take away your favorite pet for ritualistic sacri…

I think the commenter was looking for an explanation of why you think shadow profiles are unethical. In your argument you state that it violates peoples' freedom, but you need to define how their freedom is being violated.

[deleted]

Re: Facebook's tentacles reach further than people think

#183

Post by bjelkeman-again »

Msurrow wrote: post #174
linkregister wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do European Union users have a recourse against this? Or do they have to create an account, then request a deletion?

With the new EU Data Protection Directive[1], I think they do, since the DPD covers not only EU based companies, but also any company that provides services for EU citizens in the EU (so, Facebook, LinkedIn etc. are covered by this..but also e.g. your little weather app). The new DPD is very strict, but there are two parts of the directive that a particularly interesting: - The Data Portability concept: A company cov…

I foresee a long drawn out nasty international legal fight about this. In the same way the EU authorities have been very weak dealing with the car companies and emissions e.g. dieselgate, the US authorities refuse to see the problem with privacy and data. The governments are going to blame each other for stifling competition (companies from their country) etc.

I think the practices of online tracking joined up with offline tracking, as Google is now doing is going to be forbidden unless you consent.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/05/23...

Re: Facebook's tentacles reach further than people think

#184

Post by amelius »

ghughes wrote: post #144
ihm wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love if someone made a Chrome extension that encrypted all the posts and messages you put on Facebook. That is, any post you made would be made as a ciphertext, the extension would swap keys with all your friends in the background, and would decrypt their posts when displaying them to you. Sure Marky Mark still sees when you post, who you send messages to, etc. but it's a much better situation than what's goi…

You're so close to what I am currently building that I feel like I have to chime in. I left Apple's security team a few months ago to go solo and build an app that is similar to Facebook/Instagram and Snapchat in terms of functionality and UX but uses the Olm protocol (similar to Signal) to protect all content. So, fear not - something is being done, and I'm sure I'm not the only one working in this problem space. I…

Very interesting.

> the trick is to do it in a way that doesn't require a PhD in computers to operate the damn thing, as was the issue with previous attempts

This sounds similar to the story of PGP. Many attempts have been made to get people to use it, but it just didn't catch on (on a big scale). So I'm curious: how will it be different this time?

Re: Facebook's tentacles reach further than people think

#185

Post by jacquesm »

Mosi1 wrote: post #85
jacquesm wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can build up a graph and they'll see your emails when sent to a gmail recipient or from a gmail originator to you. With a very large fraction of all email now passing through Google's servers you can expect them to be able to piece together the missing bits with high fidelity.

How come we have clowns getting elected, terrorism and financial meltdowns then? There are so many interesting things one can do with this power beyond monitoring what the plebs are upto. No great evidence exists that the power is being used despite the data and computing power having existed for 15 years now.

It can be used in many ways that do not stop clowns from being elected, from terrorists to be able to carry out their act and to protect you against financial meltdowns.

The clowns are being elected by the voters, not by companies, terrorists will always be able to do their deeds in an open society, if some fail just throw more bodies at the problem, and financial meltdowns can be prevented by banking oversight (and a lot of that oversight just got canceled by the stroke of some clowns pen so you can brace for the next round in ~5 to 10 years from now).

Re: Facebook's tentacles reach further than people think

#186

Post by jacquesm »

curun1r wrote: post #129
jacquesm wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, what's the last time you checked the recipients domain MX record before sending an email? That's just nonsense, nobody does this, people just send mail through some client and never ever check MX records by hand unless they are trying to debug some kind of problem, in fact, the vast majority of people have no clue that something like an MX record even exists. To them email is roughly equivalent to magic.

Perhaps its just the ex-sysadmin in me, but I've done it pretty frequently over the years. Pop open a terminal, host -t mx example.com, done. Mostly I do this when I think there's any chance that my email will get routed to a server in China (pipe the result of the host query through nslookup and eventually to a whois against ARIN to see whether the IP is allocated by APNIC), since I'd prefer to avoid that. I get tha…

> Perhaps its just the ex-sysadmin in me

That's your problem right there. The general population has no way of knowing this, you do, but that's only because of your professional background.

So, for lay people there is absolutely no way and that's the vast majority of them, for us internet techies there are ways but they are moderately involved and too impractical for everyday use. And even then, you've established that you will send your email through google, what are you going to do now? Ah yes, send it anyway.

Re: Facebook's tentacles reach further than people think

#187

Post by jacquesm »

anigbrowl wrote: post #110
jacquesm wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no way I will go down that route. That's defeat and it simply will not happen with me being an enabler. If that means I'll miss out on the occasional party then so be it.

How is that defeat? I have no desire to waste my precious time in an unwinnable arms race. My freedom of action and self-expression are my primary operational need, and I don't want to spend my life creeping around trying to conceal every fact about myself that might be employed as an attack vector. That's not liberty.

You are now officially part of the problem.

Re: Facebook's tentacles reach further than people think

#188

Post by gaius »

nine_k wrote: post #122
jngreenlee wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Security breaches are bad for one party's capital, good for another party's capital. It's interesting to contemplate WHY is there a difference between the two. Security and Private both nasciently have something to do with "info I'd like to keep to myself", but I'm not sure I can come up with a hard delineation between the two, at least when you try to go above "A/S/L" and below "user/pass".

A security breach allows to use the victim's resources: from CPU and bandwidth to money directly on your bank account. A privacy breach allows... what? Where's a direct threat? A privacy breach can be a first step to a security breach, though. Social engineering is all about it. Social networks can be, too.

A privacy breach allows... what? Where's a direct threat?

Any means of authentication that relies on personal data. SSN, mother's maiden name, postal address, date of birth, etc.

Re: Facebook's tentacles reach further than people think

#189

Post by stevenhuang »

sandov wrote: post #146
ihm wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love if someone made a Chrome extension that encrypted all the posts and messages you put on Facebook. That is, any post you made would be made as a ciphertext, the extension would swap keys with all your friends in the background, and would decrypt their posts when displaying them to you. Sure Marky Mark still sees when you post, who you send messages to, etc. but it's a much better situation than what's goi…

I had thought something similar, but with Google drive instead of Facebook. To create a rogue client that encrypts my files, uploads them to Drive encrypted, but presents them nicely unencrypted in my local machine. That way I get the free (as in beer) cloud storage, but google doesn't spy on my files.

Arq Backup is a popular tool that does just that.

Re: Facebook's tentacles reach further than people think

#190

Post by thr0waway1239 »

bjelkeman-again wrote: post #183
Msurrow wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the new EU Data Protection Directive[1], I think they do, since the DPD covers not only EU based companies, but also any company that provides services for EU citizens in the EU (so, Facebook, LinkedIn etc. are covered by this..but also e.g. your little weather app). The new DPD is very strict, but there are two parts of the directive that a particularly interesting: - The Data Portability concept: A company cov…

I foresee a long drawn out nasty international legal fight about this. In the same way the EU authorities have been very weak dealing with the car companies and emissions e.g. dieselgate, the US authorities refuse to see the problem with privacy and data. The governments are going to blame each other for stifling competition (companies from their country) etc. I think the practices of online tracking joined up with o…

>> going to be forbidden unless you consent

This was exactly my point a while back. That the default option should be to get explicit permission for each piece of data you collect AND infer, even if the inference is being done in situ as the code executes (otherwise it will become another out clause). Of course, the geeks who get all delirious by seeing a mountain of data to analyze would not want that kind of friction in the process.

I wonder what would happen if someone would spend the time to completely dissect and reverse engineer exactly how lookalike profiles are being generated. My guess is that it will expose data collection practices which will confirm our worst fears.

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