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Report: Facebook Monitors Your Chats for Criminal Activity

mashable.com

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Re: Report: Facebook Monitors Your Chats for Criminal Activity

#61

Post by olliesaunders »

malandrew wrote: post #40

I'm of the opinion that once enough people get fed up with a surveillance state, or even a surveillance society since private entities are involved, that the best way to "fix" the problem is by collectively generating noise that makes it too expensive and time consuming to find a needle in a haystack. Right now they probably generate very few false positives, however if many people went out of their way to actively g…

If this privacy-invading-data-miners are using computers and mathematics they’ll surely find better and better ways of filtering the false positives. But before it even comes to that they’ll probably just scare people into submission by making examples of people who create false positives--probably by treating them as true positives.

Re: Report: Facebook Monitors Your Chats for Criminal Activity

#62

Post by icambron »

It seems like the correct approach is for Facebook to do only what's legally required of it, and nothing more. That would allow society to have a transparent debate about what, exactly, should be required, leaving FB policy out of it.

As I understand it, FB is currently only required to respond to appropriately specific subpoenas and warrants. If the cops want more, they should petition for laws to require that and we can all argue about it like responsible citizens. And we could equally demand more protection.

But this thing where sometimes FB voluntarily sends law enforcement bits of information and sometimes they don't based on poorly defined criteria is just creepy. And why does FB even want this responsibility? Isn't the simplest, most obvious model to say no by default?

Re: Report: Facebook Monitors Your Chats for Criminal Activity

#63

Post by dredmorbius »

mahyarm wrote: post #30
sp332 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I consider FB chats to be much less private because they actually get stored on a server somewhere by default. Also I can access them anywhere with an internet account. Neither of these things are true of SMS.

There is nothing preventing your SMSs being saved in a telco DB. I'm fairly certain they are.

AT&T cops to saving SMS messages, not just "pen trace" (sender/recipient data), for up to 72 hours. For "delivery purposes" only. Though the release I read doesn't specify to whom.

http://gizmodo.com/349308/verizon-att-respect-your-sms-priva...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jdawg/93928749/

Re: Report: Facebook Monitors Your Chats for Criminal Activity

#64

Post by yk »

cwe wrote: post #15
marshray wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a sincere question: Why would you think Facebook chat would be "private communication"?

Do you consider SMS private communications? Your cellphone carrier is just as likely to eavesdrop on your SMS history as FB does your chats.

Yes. On one hand there are quite strong laws about privacy for phone companies and second I pay them. By contrast, I would not pay FB even if I had an account. Their entire business model is, that they are selling private data. ( Technically it is unfortunately neither for FB nor for telcos a problem to eavesdrop.)

Re: Report: Facebook Monitors Your Chats for Criminal Activity

#65

Post by dredmorbius »

malandrew wrote: post #40

I'm of the opinion that once enough people get fed up with a surveillance state, or even a surveillance society since private entities are involved, that the best way to "fix" the problem is by collectively generating noise that makes it too expensive and time consuming to find a needle in a haystack. Right now they probably generate very few false positives, however if many people went out of their way to actively g…

There are three problems with this I can see straight off the bat:

- The noise itself may be interpreted as incriminating. If someone wants to make trouble for you, they can, based on the noise. Yes, you have plausible deniability, but this costs time and money.

- Fuzzing signals is tricky. If someone's snooping for unspecified suspicious behavior, noise may cloud things. If they're looking for specific data to tie you to people, places, times, events, etc., there are very powerful tools to cut through the things you're not interested to just the stuff that's relevant. Methods of masking printer identification marks suffer a similar problem.

- Even if you're generating pure random white noise, under a regime compelling decryption on request, you've now got to make the case that noise is in fact noise, and not very securely encrypted data. Again at a cost of time/money in the face of someone who wants to make trouble for you.

Re: Report: Facebook Monitors Your Chats for Criminal Activity

#66

Post by dredmorbius »

christoph wrote: post #35
lignuist wrote: post #18

Someone should monitor Facebook for criminal activity.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

That's what checks and balances are all about.

In a fair system, there's no one custodian. It's not perfect, but it's reasonably workable. There are some prerequisites, however.

Re: Report: Facebook Monitors Your Chats for Criminal Activity

#67

Post by Jach »

sp332 wrote: post #48
adventureful wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FB chat messages don't have to be saved either.

If I log in and click the Messages button I can see all my messages. To do that they have to be on their server. There isn't an off-the-record button I missed is there?

Ideally Facebook would use public-key encryption for chats and allow each user to individually save the history with their own passphrase they input encrypting it client-side.

But hey, auto-saving history without prompting you is worth it, right? (Also figuring out what to advertise to a user.)

Re: Report: Facebook Monitors Your Chats for Criminal Activity

#68

Post by sp332 »

Jach wrote: post #67
sp332 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I log in and click the Messages button I can see all my messages. To do that they have to be on their server. There isn't an off-the-record button I missed is there?

Ideally Facebook would use public-key encryption for chats and allow each user to individually save the history with their own passphrase they input encrypting it client-side. But hey, auto-saving history without prompting you is worth it, right? (Also figuring out what to advertise to a user.)

It seems like you're describing something completely different from FB chat. anyway you could just encrypt the text, base64-encode it, and paste it into the chat box. still more convenient than email.

Re: Report: Facebook Monitors Your Chats for Criminal Activity

#70

Post by falcolas »

Jach wrote: post #52
samstave wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never had a facebook account. Never have - never will. I distrust everything they do. And while we like to think that other sites are not as bad, I was recently censored on Quora for asking about why a post was censored on Reddit. They threw some "against policy" bullshit at me, and Marc Bodnick attempted to appear sympathetic and that his hands were tied and he didnt like the policy either - but it was a BS r…

> EVERY single thing you type online is viewed by the NSAs terrorbots. Evidence? Did you program these NSA bots or something? > Anyone that thinks anything is private online is fooling themselves. No, they just don't know any better. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy If you want your messages to be heard by limited parties, make it so. "My friends are too stupid to know how to use any form of encryptio…

I would say this is close enough to warrant the hyperbolie.

https://www.eff.org/cases/jewel

Encryption is great, as long as the people you don't want to hear it can't decrypt it. Given the NSA's recent moves to build up computing power, and the way Moore's law works, your encrypted communications today are fodder for review tomorrow.

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