approve:sigmanu Facebook smackdown

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Thomas Leavitt <thomas () thomasleavitt org>
Date: May 5, 2007 2:42:20 AM EDT
To: dave () farber net
Subject: Re: Facebook smackdown

Dave,

What's new here? You could play six degrees of Kevin Bacon with  
almost any venture capitalist, professional angel investor or tech  
company board member, and wind up with (probably multiple)  
connections to the military industrial complex. The suspect part of  
Facebook's TOS is standard boilerplate. Surely no one is naive enough  
to think these issues are unique to Facebook (or even social  
networking as a whole)? The trade off between privacy and  
functionality inherent in social networking is simply more visible -  
dating sites, any sort of site where more than cursory profile  
information is gathered has this same issue.

... and if anyone is naive enough to think that a change to  
Facebook's "privacy" policy would be anything more than cosmetic in  
terms of protection from the OIA/CIA, I have just three words for  
them: National Security Letter.

Not to mention the fact that a TOS can be revised at any time, and  
that an acquiring company is under no obligation to honor it.

Ultimately, the golden rule of online privacy is simple: if you want  
a piece of information to remain private, then don't share it online.  
Anywhere. With anyone. In any medium. Period.

The macro issue here is the potential for our government (or any  
other) to abuse their access to this information for repressive  
purposes, or, in the worst case, to simply round up people of a  
particular political persuasion and summarily execute them.

... and in reference to that, it seems that the information available  
in a social networking site about someone's political affiliations  
would be insignificant, in relation to the trail left online via  
other mechanisms... such as, say, postings to Dave Farber's IP  
list. :) The reality is that the Internet is the new town square, and  
if you've got even the slightest inclination to express a political  
opinion, in all likelihood, you're going to do it online, and leave a  
record that a repressive government would have no problem finding.

In point of fact, it would be interesting to do a study of a hundred  
random individuals picked out of the phone book, and find out how  
many of them have enough of a corpus of identifiable online postings  
to enable a reasonable guess as to their political affiliation - and  
then cross check that guess against voter registration records and  
direct inquiries. I'd bet the success rate for those folks where a  
reasonable guess could be made would be very high.

Regards,
Thomas Leavitt


From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Subject: Facebook smackdown
Date: Fri, 4 May 2007 10:45:26 -0400

Interesting

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Brock N. Meeks" <bmeeks () cox net>
Date: May 4, 2007 10:04:05 AM EDT
To: dave () farber net
Subject: Facebook smackdown

What do Facebook, the CIA and your magazine subscription list have in
common?  Maybe more than you think...

http://www.albumoftheday.com/facebook/

Trust me, it's worth the look.




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