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In which Eben Moglen calls out a reporter for having Facebook

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Re: In which Eben Moglen calls out a reporter for having Facebook

#71

Post by billybob »

Best quote: "The problem is caused by people who would like a little help spying on their friends. And in a genteel way, that’s what the social media offers. They get to surveil other people. In return for a little bit of the product, they assist the growth of these immense commercial spying operations."

This has become the crux of my objection to social networks: they exist to gather data on you. Whatever benefit you get from it, their purpose of existence is data mining.

As the Pinboard Blog puts it, that's ANTI-social.

"We're used to talking about how disturbing this in the context of privacy, but it's worth pointing out how weirdly unsocial it is, too. How are you supposed to feel at home when you know a place is full of one-way mirrors?"

http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/11/the_social_graph_is_neither/

Re: In which Eben Moglen calls out a reporter for having Facebook

#72

Post by cookiecaper »

napoleoncomplex wrote: post #8
cookiecaper wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use Facebook in a way that doesn't endanger your personal privacy, it can be primarily a consumption platform for the endangered privacy of all of your associates. :)

The article author attempted to weasel himself out with that defence as well, but the nonsense of that argument was one of Moglen's main points. It's not just about you, it's about everyone in your network. To quote it exactly: "You injure other people today also using social media. You’ve informed on them. You’ve created more records about them. You’ve added to the problems not of yourself but of other people. If it…

Right, but I disagree. "Everyone in my network" agrees to accept the "information" that I put out as them as a consumer, which is just making known that a relationship between us exists. If I'm not posting any personal information about anyone (including myself) and not tagging anyone in anything, this is the only information one gives to Facebook. I use an alias on Facebook so I am not even directly exposing my identity in their databases and the relationship they record is false, though clearly IP addresses could be used to link the alias to my real identity if a person were interested.

I have long been worried about the implications of friending everyone you know. If you have to go on the run, and everyone you've ever talked to for more than 15 minutes is listed on Facebook, you're not going to have many places to hide. I am "friends" with only a handful of people, mostly close family, which doesn't really expose any new relationships.

Re: In which Eben Moglen calls out a reporter for having Facebook

#73

Post by pgroves »

Facebook now acknowledges what we said for a long time and they didnt acknowledge, that every single photograph uploaded to Facebook is put through facial recognition software they call PhotoDNA which is used to find people for whom any law enforcement agency in the world is looking.

How true is this?

Re: In which Eben Moglen calls out a reporter for having Facebook

#74

Post by Confusion »

nl wrote: post #11

This article makes me angry, and the groupthink of most the replies I read here supporting Moglen make me angry too. You know what causes a real ecological disaster? Washing Machines. Yes, FUCKING washing machines. They use too much of one of the worlds rarest resources (clean water), contribute to global warming and pollute the waste water with phosphates. On the other hand, they have freed up half the worlds workfo…

Clean water is not fundamentally a scarce resource. Almost nothing is. The only actually scarce resource, and the one everything depends on, is energy. Given enough energy, we can clean all the water we want and distribute it anywhere we want. Given enough energy, we could recycle everything down to the smallest granule of rare earth metals. We would only get into trouble once we would be using all of the stuff at the same time, but then, given enough energy, we could mine the moon, asteroids, other planets. Given enough energy, everyone would be warm and fed, without any ecological problems, because we could clean all waste and recycle everything.

In the end, it all comes down to energy. If some countries would spend even a fraction of their defense budgets on solar, water, wind or fusion power research, we would be there in a jiffy. We could have had more energy than we could ever use by now. Our progress is much slower than it could be, because energy is kept scarce.

Re: In which Eben Moglen calls out a reporter for having Facebook

#76

Post by scott_s »

nkoren wrote: post #27

Moglen is of course correct about the problems of privacy and corporate ownership of social networks -- but then goes on to take an absolutist position which is both strategically indefensible and ethically bankrupt. First, a key concept: there is no such thing as absolute freedom. Freedom can exist at many different levels, some of which are mutually exclusive; sometimes abrogations of lower-order freedoms are requi…

Thank you for a clear explanation of the same problems I had with Moglen's position, and an equally clear explanation of the problem I have with Stallman's positions on what I feel is his limited view of "freedom."

I've read many people, particularly on HN, say they are glad such extremes exist as a counter-balance. I disagree. I think that they muddy the discourse by presenting yet more things to argue with. I would rather see people advocating for privacy and software freedoms while advocating stances that I also think are reasonable and defensible. The difficulty with that, though, is that people who hold such views tend not to be professional advocates.

Re: In which Eben Moglen calls out a reporter for having Facebook

#77

Post by jaipilot747 »

Sorpigal wrote: post #64
knowtheory wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is actually entirely untrue given the way that Facebook is set up. The most insidious thing that Facebook has done, is litter the web with their "Like" buttons. Oh sure, they're not the ones who have put up "Like" buttons around the web, all they've done is insist that websites who do want a "Like" button have to use file assets & scripts from their webserver. Well, by tracking where the "Like" button gets loade…

This is why it is essential for people who are concerned about privacy to use run Firefox and install the RequestPolicy extension. I simply don't whitelist facebook's domains and thus couldn't be tracked even if I had a Facebook account.

Thanks for mentioning RequestPolicy. Exactly what I was looking for.

Re: In which Eben Moglen calls out a reporter for having Facebook

#78

Post by dhugiaskmak »

bigiain wrote: post #2

"Banks aren’t the problem, he said; the users tempting banks with their Twitter and Facebook postings are the problem. As are reporters who write about privacy issues with social media without first closing their Facebook accounts." You know he's right, don't you?

You know he's right, don't you?

He's half right. Banks are also the problem.

Re: In which Eben Moglen calls out a reporter for having Facebook

#79

Post by bh42222 »

anon1385 wrote: post #43

Changing Threats To Privacy From Tia To Google (Blackhat 2010) by Moxie Marlinspike http://www.securitytube.net/video/1084 How many people here would be excited about a law that required everyone to carry a government mandated tracking device with them at all times? Probably very few people right, no-one's really excited about that. How many people here have a cell phone? Right, probably everybody in this room has a…

So yes, I made a choice to have a mobile phone, but what kind of choice did I make? I think this is sort of an interesting phenomenon. What happens is a choice is introduced; it starts as a very simple choice: the choice of whether or not to have a mobile phone, a simple piece of technology. But slowly things happen to expand the scope of that choice until eventually it's so big as to encompass not just whether you have a mobile phone or not but whether you want to be a part of society.

That is it right there.

The only answer is the same technology without the bad side of it.

Mobile phones that do not track you, that governments can not track.

A Facebook alternative like Diaspora, except much better and as popular as Facebook.

We are not going to quit mobile phones and social media, but we have to strip their bad side from them. That may involve non-profit mobile phone manufactures, open source social media, who knows exactly what. But I know that technologically it is possible, now we have implement it and use it.

Re: In which Eben Moglen calls out a reporter for having Facebook

#80

Post by bproper »

billybob wrote: post #71

Best quote: "The problem is caused by people who would like a little help spying on their friends. And in a genteel way, that’s what the social media offers. They get to surveil other people. In return for a little bit of the product, they assist the growth of these immense commercial spying operations." This has become the crux of my objection to social networks: they exist to gather data on you. Whatever benefit yo…

Too bad we can't exchange that for a system where social networks let you own the data and charge a monthly subscription fee.
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