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>It goes without saying that speaking out against police violence or government overreach shouldn’t land you in a surveillance database. But it can, and it does

>It goes without saying that speaking out against police violence or government overreach shouldn’t land you in a surveillance database. But it can, and it does. People need to realize is that social sites are voluntary surveillance platforms to begin with. In the best of cases they surveil you to learn what advertisements to show you, but of course once the infrastructure is built, it can be put to other uses. Social media gives the government and spy agencies undreamed of power. They don't have to create a file on each citizen, the citizen will create and update it for them!

cryoshon 10y ago
>Social media gives the government and spy agencies undreamed of power. They don't have to create a file on each citizen, the citizen will create and update it for them! Which is exactly why accessing this kind of public and innocuous info needs to require a warrant when the police do it. Unreasonable surveillance/stalking of an individual is not acceptable. We also need to clarify what "public" social media postings really mean. The intent is for a limited audience of peers to recieve postings, not the entire world, and not the police. Conflating a desire to communicate with friends with a desire to be surveilled is a mis-step that the police and state are happy to abuse.
- pc86 10y ago
  > The intent is for a limited audience of peers to recieve postings, not the entire world, and not the police. You can make statements to the police that will cause you to be arrested, convicted, and imprisoned - it does not matter one bit what your "intent" was. Social media posts are no different. If you make a public Facebook post admitting to a murder, the police should not need to get a warrant based on other evidence to get that post then arrest you.
- pjc50 10y ago
  No, this is bonkers. It's like trying to defeat racial profiling by requiring policemen to wear horse-blinkers. Public is public; if you meant to send it to a limited audience, send it to that audience. Otherwise you end up with bizarre conclusions such as police twitter accounts requiring a court order to follow someone. A certain amount of what police properly do is "surveillance" - of a particular area or situation. What does become a problem is the use of directed police attention as harassment, for political purposes, or in a racial or otherwise discriminatory way.
- mikestew 10y ago
  The intent is for a limited audience of peers to recieve postings That might be your intent, but whoo boy, do I have news for you: that's not the way it works, it's not how it was designed to work, and it's not how "they" tell you it works. Your "intent" has nothing to do with it. If you wish to keep your audience small, Facebook and Twitter aren't the way to do it. But long before "social media" showed up, we had means to keep things to a limited audience, things which do require a warrant to access.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    Hell, Facebook has - and had for a long time - ways to limit the audience all the way you like. Many people do use it to great success (which I find sad, btw. - the great thing about social media in the past was that people were sharing a lot about themselves; now they seem to again isolate in very small circles of real-life friends). But you can't expect software to magically understand your intention, nor should you ever expect to control the information you share with another human being. When you share information, you also share control over it.
    - mikestew 10y ago
      Hell, Facebook has - and had for a long time - ways to limit the audience all the way you like. And my experience says they'll flip that off on a whim. It's been several years now, but one day FB decided that all formerly private photos would now be public. Not a bug, a design decision. I deleted my account the next day, so I can't say I've kept up on the latest in FB's privacy features. FB has obviously since gone back on that decision, but there's nothing stopping them from doing it again, or from introducing a bug.
      - TeMPOraL 10y ago
        I've never seen that one and I've been using Facebook for quite some time. It sounds bad though :/. That said, the way I perceive Facebook over the last few years, is that they're constantly baiting people into increasing their privacy. They switch defaults towards "more private", and even for some time they had this annoying popup when you tried to post publicly that said something like "Did you know you're posting publicly? Click here to change it."
panic 10y ago
Sure, but what's the alternative? Social media is too involved in most people's lives for them to just leave. Maybe we should have legal restrictions on what data can be collected.
- ryandrake 10y ago
  The alternative is not using social media. Are you really saying it's impossible?
  - panic 10y ago
    Depending on your life circumstances, it can be very hard. What if you're part of a club that mainly communicates using Facebook? What if your friend group uses Facebook for events? Leaving Facebook makes it much harder to participate.
    - TunaRailgun 10y ago
      That's why it's best to load up on the false information, tag random people as you, and generally create noise. Lots of noise. Kind of like what gets generated for the keyword searches which are useless due to all the noise. Use those aliases.

cryoshon 10y ago

>Social media gives the government and spy agencies undreamed of power. They don't have to create a file on each citizen, the citizen will create and update it for them! Which is exactly why accessing this kind of public and innocuous info needs to require a warrant when the police do it. Unreasonable surveillance/stalking of an individual is not acceptable. We also need to clarify what "public" social media postings really mean. The intent is for a limited audience of peers to recieve postings, not the entire world, and not the police. Conflating a desire to communicate with friends with a desire to be surveilled is a mis-step that the police and state are happy to abuse.

pc86 10y ago
> The intent is for a limited audience of peers to recieve postings, not the entire world, and not the police. You can make statements to the police that will cause you to be arrested, convicted, and imprisoned - it does not matter one bit what your "intent" was. Social media posts are no different. If you make a public Facebook post admitting to a murder, the police should not need to get a warrant based on other evidence to get that post then arrest you.
pjc50 10y ago
No, this is bonkers. It's like trying to defeat racial profiling by requiring policemen to wear horse-blinkers. Public is public; if you meant to send it to a limited audience, send it to that audience. Otherwise you end up with bizarre conclusions such as police twitter accounts requiring a court order to follow someone. A certain amount of what police properly do is "surveillance" - of a particular area or situation. What does become a problem is the use of directed police attention as harassment, for political purposes, or in a racial or otherwise discriminatory way.
mikestew 10y ago
The intent is for a limited audience of peers to recieve postings That might be your intent, but whoo boy, do I have news for you: that's not the way it works, it's not how it was designed to work, and it's not how "they" tell you it works. Your "intent" has nothing to do with it. If you wish to keep your audience small, Facebook and Twitter aren't the way to do it. But long before "social media" showed up, we had means to keep things to a limited audience, things which do require a warrant to access.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  Hell, Facebook has - and had for a long time - ways to limit the audience all the way you like. Many people do use it to great success (which I find sad, btw. - the great thing about social media in the past was that people were sharing a lot about themselves; now they seem to again isolate in very small circles of real-life friends). But you can't expect software to magically understand your intention, nor should you ever expect to control the information you share with another human being. When you share information, you also share control over it.
  - mikestew 10y ago
    Hell, Facebook has - and had for a long time - ways to limit the audience all the way you like. And my experience says they'll flip that off on a whim. It's been several years now, but one day FB decided that all formerly private photos would now be public. Not a bug, a design decision. I deleted my account the next day, so I can't say I've kept up on the latest in FB's privacy features. FB has obviously since gone back on that decision, but there's nothing stopping them from doing it again, or from introducing a bug.
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      I've never seen that one and I've been using Facebook for quite some time. It sounds bad though :/. That said, the way I perceive Facebook over the last few years, is that they're constantly baiting people into increasing their privacy. They switch defaults towards "more private", and even for some time they had this annoying popup when you tried to post publicly that said something like "Did you know you're posting publicly? Click here to change it."

panic 10y ago

Sure, but what's the alternative? Social media is too involved in most people's lives for them to just leave. Maybe we should have legal restrictions on what data can be collected.

ryandrake 10y ago
The alternative is not using social media. Are you really saying it's impossible?
- panic 10y ago
  Depending on your life circumstances, it can be very hard. What if you're part of a club that mainly communicates using Facebook? What if your friend group uses Facebook for events? Leaving Facebook makes it much harder to participate.
  - TunaRailgun 10y ago
    That's why it's best to load up on the false information, tag random people as you, and generally create noise. Lots of noise. Kind of like what gets generated for the keyword searches which are useless due to all the noise. Use those aliases.