5 ms·

Don't get me wrong, but why is everybody so upset about the NSA when they post everything on Facebook and use Google/Apple/Microsoft? Are they upset because th

by ohwp 13y ago

Don't get me wrong, but why is everybody so upset about the NSA when they post everything on Facebook and use Google/Apple/Microsoft? Are they upset because they lack the choice of who is tracking them? Because I don't think people should be upset about their privacy when they know a company like Facebook already knows everything about you.

jacquesm 13y ago
- because it is involuntary - because they said they didn't - because we don't all live in the USA - because we have some expectations of privacy regarding mail - because the reason why ('terrorism') is a fig leaf - because some people feel that surveillance can lead to a police state And so on... The mail one is tricky because somehow people expect that to carry over to email but email is an entirely different beast than regular mail.
- bostik 13y ago
  > And so on... The part that falls under "so on" is the scary one. From the article: "NSA reportedly is making a copy of nearly every international email. It then searches that cloned data, keeping all of the emails containing certain keywords and deleting the rest – all in a matter of seconds." Note the weasel wording: "certain keywords". You don't know what those keywords are. You don't even know what topics they happen to cover. Once you somehow become flagged for suspicious activity, the NSA can go back in time and see everything you have said about _all_ of their "suspicious" topics. You are now an even bigger suspect. And once you are a suspect, anything and everything in your past can be interpreted in the light of you seeking to commit the questionable activity. Thanks to NSA storing only the material that matched their keywords, they now have a stash of incriminating material that has a very strong selection bias. I'm pretty sure even Franz Kafka would have been proud.
  - w_t_payne 13y ago
    Indeed ... not to mention that once you have a security apparatus in place ... the imperative is to use it ... to justify it's existence by making arrests. The system becomes it's own justification. Reminds me a bit of the movie: "The Cube".
  - a3n 13y ago
    I would also think that once you have been flagged for keywords, your name and metadata themselves become keywords. It's brilliant.
    - caf 13y ago
      If that was the case, then through the "six degrees of separation" phenomena, it wouldn't take long before everyone's name and metadata were on the keyword list.
DanBC 13y ago
EDIT I'm gently sad that you've been downvoted so much. Your point is reasonable and was made politely. Privacy advocates have been talking about social media for many years, and warning people about the risks, yet social media is very popular even with lousy privacy controls. End edit I guess the overlaps between the different groups are not large. The group of people who post everything to FB doesn't overlap much with the group of people who are annoyed at the NSA surveillance program. At first glance it feels like a weird cognitive dissonance: People have been told for years that email is not secure, and you should treat email as you would a postcard that anyone can read. And now that we find out that people are reading all email we shouldn't be surprised. But that misses some points. People feel a difference between a technician getting occasional glances at emails as they transit through the Internet and the government collecting everything. There's a big difference between a mail worker reading a post card and the government photocopying every postcard and storing these copies. And people feel rightly aggrieved that strict laws about surveillance seem to have been side-stepped to allow mass surveillance of totally innocent people. Personally, I think I agree with you. I am more worried about all these other people having data about me than I am about the government slurping all my data into a big cache.
- Dylan16807 13y ago
  > I'm gently sad that you've been downvoted so much. Your point is reasonable and was made politely. Privacy advocates have been talking about social media for many years, and warning people about the risks, yet social media is very popular even with lousy privacy controls. No, their point most certainly was not reasonable, even though it was polite. The only claim was of letting facebook know 'everything'. This is either mean to be as-written, in which case it's blatantly false, or it's hyperbole, but this is an argument that doesn't work in a weaker form, and a weaker form is still false.
danboarder 13y ago
I'll bite - I think most people want to share information by choice, rather than by force (or secret surveillance). It's a big difference and it I think it really is that simple.
- w_t_payne 13y ago
  I don't mind Google knowing stuff about me ... as long as they use it in a limited way .. to find companies, products, news etc... in which I might be interested. I don't particularly want foreign governments to know the same stuff - because they have a tendency to use that information for entirely different purposes ... namely, to try to put me out of a job.
vidarh 13y ago
There's a substantial amount about me that Facebook doesn't know, as well as Google/Apple/Microsoft. But that isn't even the point for most of us. The bigger issue is the potential for future abuse. The next version of McCarthyism will, if it happens, be swift and brutal because they'll just get NSA to hand over the data they hold, and it won't matter if I used privately managed mail systems. Or if you decide to become politically active, and your views are not aligned with those of the US power structures: Just last night I was leafing through notes I wrote 20 years ago, as a teenager, when I'd just started being politically active. It only lasted 5 years or so before I got disillusioned and pretty much just dropped everything (except ranting online like a grouchy old man). But during that period, I had a lot of correspondence that quite likely would have triggered interest from intelligence agencies: I was active in marxist organisation, and I spent a substantial amount of time contacting groups in various parts of the world to try to kickstart and international network. That included contacts with several anarchist/communist/socialist/trotskyist groups in the US, as well as trade union organisers. It also included contact with other international groups and persons, some in countries where just expressing their political views to the wrong person could potentially get them imprisoned, and some of those countries are countries where the US is or were cosy with the incumbent regimes and where the CIA are known to have kidnapped and "rendered" people to for torture. While there was undoubtably surveillance happening back then too, if I was in contact with these people today, I'd have to deal with the certainty of extensive surveillance, and the situation that the mere fact I was in contact with them ("metadata" would be sufficient to implicate these people as being in contact with people who'd label them as likely troublemakers) could potentially put them at risk of being imprisoned or worse because of US intelligence agencies. Despite the fact that none of the people I was in contact with ever planned anything that'd be illegal in any democratic country (though some were willing to face the risk of illegal peaceful demonstrations in countries that weren't). Even just the knowledge of surveillance at this scale is stifling freedom of speech for those who does not know or are willing to engage in the hassle of taking technical measures to protect their speech, and will add serious restrictions for those who do know, and see it as important enough.
- w_t_payne 13y ago
  Guilt by association, eh? You will always be barred from certain jobs and viewed with suspicion by the authorities. The stink will never go away. Ever.
dpatru 13y ago
> Because I don't think people should be upset about their privacy when they know a company like Facebook already knows everything about you. The fact that a private company like Facebook knows a lot about you is not a problem as long as the company has a privacy policy and can be held accountable. The problem specifically is government access to the data. Unlike governments, companies like Facebook have never morphed into tyrannies. Facebook does not tax people, it does not prosecute, it does not put people in prison or fine them, it does not drone people, it does not go to war. Unlike Edward Snowden, an ex-Facebook employee who reveals Facebook's secret illegal activities does not have to fear for his life and take refuge in Russia.
- Amadou 13y ago
  Facebook knowing a lot about you is a problem. It is just an entirely separate problem that is only superficially similar to the problem of the government knowing a lot about you.
  - knowaveragejoe 13y ago
    I think it's a bit more than superficially related - in a lot of cases, the only reason the government knows what it does about you is because you turned your personal information into bits and sent it to Facebook.
    - narcissus 13y ago
      Except for when they do it without you even knowing your sending information to them. If you haven't heard of shadow profiles, then now is the time to learn about them. And don't get me wrong, I understand that I can do stuff to stop these things, but I don't see why I should have to, quite frankly. The point is that even if I have never visited Facebook, they more than likely know a lot about me already, unless explicitly going out of my way to stop it.
      - knowaveragejoe 13y ago
        > shadow profiles Which exist only due to the exact reason I described. > The point is that even if I have never visited Facebook, they more than likely know a lot about me already, unless explicitly going out of my way to stop it. Well, that's not what I was addressing. "Going out of your way to stop it" is simply becoming educated about what exactly it is we're doing when we use the Internet and societal institutions. Being prudent about what we enter into a form(either real or virtual) is key.
rooshdi 13y ago
Facebook shares your life, but the government can take yours.
bowlofpetunias 13y ago
I wish this wasn't downvoted, because it's important, especially in our industry, to discuss this common misunderstanding about the concept of privacy. It's not a matter of whether or not the information is publicly available. We spend a significant part of our lives in (semi-)public spaces where people are free to observe us. It's the collection, collation and use of that information that constitutes the violation of privacy. To put it simply: thousands of people may be able to observe me going from A to B on a regular basis, which is fine. But not even my wife has complete knowledge of all my daily comings and goings. I even have a high degree of privacy from the person I've spent the last few decades with. Compiling a complete record of all my public movements to the point where the owner of that database has better insight into my habits than even I myself have is a violation of that privacy. Unless I've given explicit permission to do so, and have a certain degree of control over what happens with that data. The bottom line is, even people who post "everything" on Facebook quite rightly expect a certain degree of privacy. Doing something in public does not equate surrendering your privacy.
czottmann 13y ago
Here's an analogy that (in my experience) seems to click with many non-tech-minded people who bring up the FB/Twitter/socnet argument: I like sex, I really do. But that doesn't mean I want to be drugged and raped by the police or stealth-humped by anyone. If anyone wants to have sex with me, I'd like to know before the act and definitely need to have a say in whether or not it'll happen.
- mtgx 13y ago
  The analogy is a good one. There's a reason it's called "violation of privacy". It's about not having a choice in the manner, and worse yet, not knowing how and when it will be used against you.
meerita 13y ago
If you're not upset, give me your email access. I will read it .
a3n 13y ago
Facebook can't arrest you.
northwest 13y ago
> [...] when they post everything on Facebook and use Google/Apple/Microsoft? I can only speak for myself, but my only sin is to still have an iPhone (soon to be replaced by an Ubuntu phone). Apart from this, I have left all of the NSA partner companies' products/services in favor of open-source products (or else nothing). It's really not that difficult, much more of psychological "hurdle". For those who missed it: https://prism-break.org/ https://prism-break.org/ is a good start.
PavlovsCat 13y ago
Because people end up getting fucking killed with drones somewhere down this slope. I don't care if it hits me. Not everybody is utterly selfish and short-sighted.

by ohwp 13y ago

jacquesm 13y ago

- because it is involuntary - because they said they didn't - because we don't all live in the USA - because we have some expectations of privacy regarding mail - because the reason why ('terrorism') is a fig leaf - because some people feel that surveillance can lead to a police state And so on... The mail one is tricky because somehow people expect that to carry over to email but email is an entirely different beast than regular mail.

bostik 13y ago
> And so on... The part that falls under "so on" is the scary one. From the article: "NSA reportedly is making a copy of nearly every international email. It then searches that cloned data, keeping all of the emails containing certain keywords and deleting the rest – all in a matter of seconds." Note the weasel wording: "certain keywords". You don't know what those keywords are. You don't even know what topics they happen to cover. Once you somehow become flagged for suspicious activity, the NSA can go back in time and see everything you have said about _all_ of their "suspicious" topics. You are now an even bigger suspect. And once you are a suspect, anything and everything in your past can be interpreted in the light of you seeking to commit the questionable activity. Thanks to NSA storing only the material that matched their keywords, they now have a stash of incriminating material that has a very strong selection bias. I'm pretty sure even Franz Kafka would have been proud.
- w_t_payne 13y ago
  Indeed ... not to mention that once you have a security apparatus in place ... the imperative is to use it ... to justify it's existence by making arrests. The system becomes it's own justification. Reminds me a bit of the movie: "The Cube".
- a3n 13y ago
  I would also think that once you have been flagged for keywords, your name and metadata themselves become keywords. It's brilliant.
  - caf 13y ago
    If that was the case, then through the "six degrees of separation" phenomena, it wouldn't take long before everyone's name and metadata were on the keyword list.

DanBC 13y ago

EDIT I'm gently sad that you've been downvoted so much. Your point is reasonable and was made politely. Privacy advocates have been talking about social media for many years, and warning people about the risks, yet social media is very popular even with lousy privacy controls. End edit I guess the overlaps between the different groups are not large. The group of people who post everything to FB doesn't overlap much with the group of people who are annoyed at the NSA surveillance program. At first glance it feels like a weird cognitive dissonance: People have been told for years that email is not secure, and you should treat email as you would a postcard that anyone can read. And now that we find out that people are reading all email we shouldn't be surprised. But that misses some points. People feel a difference between a technician getting occasional glances at emails as they transit through the Internet and the government collecting everything. There's a big difference between a mail worker reading a post card and the government photocopying every postcard and storing these copies. And people feel rightly aggrieved that strict laws about surveillance seem to have been side-stepped to allow mass surveillance of totally innocent people. Personally, I think I agree with you. I am more worried about all these other people having data about me than I am about the government slurping all my data into a big cache.

Dylan16807 13y ago
> I'm gently sad that you've been downvoted so much. Your point is reasonable and was made politely. Privacy advocates have been talking about social media for many years, and warning people about the risks, yet social media is very popular even with lousy privacy controls. No, their point most certainly was not reasonable, even though it was polite. The only claim was of letting facebook know 'everything'. This is either mean to be as-written, in which case it's blatantly false, or it's hyperbole, but this is an argument that doesn't work in a weaker form, and a weaker form is still false.

danboarder 13y ago

I'll bite - I think most people want to share information by choice, rather than by force (or secret surveillance). It's a big difference and it I think it really is that simple.

w_t_payne 13y ago
I don't mind Google knowing stuff about me ... as long as they use it in a limited way .. to find companies, products, news etc... in which I might be interested. I don't particularly want foreign governments to know the same stuff - because they have a tendency to use that information for entirely different purposes ... namely, to try to put me out of a job.

vidarh 13y ago

There's a substantial amount about me that Facebook doesn't know, as well as Google/Apple/Microsoft. But that isn't even the point for most of us. The bigger issue is the potential for future abuse. The next version of McCarthyism will, if it happens, be swift and brutal because they'll just get NSA to hand over the data they hold, and it won't matter if I used privately managed mail systems. Or if you decide to become politically active, and your views are not aligned with those of the US power structures: Just last night I was leafing through notes I wrote 20 years ago, as a teenager, when I'd just started being politically active. It only lasted 5 years or so before I got disillusioned and pretty much just dropped everything (except ranting online like a grouchy old man). But during that period, I had a lot of correspondence that quite likely would have triggered interest from intelligence agencies: I was active in marxist organisation, and I spent a substantial amount of time contacting groups in various parts of the world to try to kickstart and international network. That included contacts with several anarchist/communist/socialist/trotskyist groups in the US, as well as trade union organisers. It also included contact with other international groups and persons, some in countries where just expressing their political views to the wrong person could potentially get them imprisoned, and some of those countries are countries where the US is or were cosy with the incumbent regimes and where the CIA are known to have kidnapped and "rendered" people to for torture. While there was undoubtably surveillance happening back then too, if I was in contact with these people today, I'd have to deal with the certainty of extensive surveillance, and the situation that the mere fact I was in contact with them ("metadata" would be sufficient to implicate these people as being in contact with people who'd label them as likely troublemakers) could potentially put them at risk of being imprisoned or worse because of US intelligence agencies. Despite the fact that none of the people I was in contact with ever planned anything that'd be illegal in any democratic country (though some were willing to face the risk of illegal peaceful demonstrations in countries that weren't). Even just the knowledge of surveillance at this scale is stifling freedom of speech for those who does not know or are willing to engage in the hassle of taking technical measures to protect their speech, and will add serious restrictions for those who do know, and see it as important enough.

w_t_payne 13y ago
Guilt by association, eh? You will always be barred from certain jobs and viewed with suspicion by the authorities. The stink will never go away. Ever.

dpatru 13y ago

> Because I don't think people should be upset about their privacy when they know a company like Facebook already knows everything about you. The fact that a private company like Facebook knows a lot about you is not a problem as long as the company has a privacy policy and can be held accountable. The problem specifically is government access to the data. Unlike governments, companies like Facebook have never morphed into tyrannies. Facebook does not tax people, it does not prosecute, it does not put people in prison or fine them, it does not drone people, it does not go to war. Unlike Edward Snowden, an ex-Facebook employee who reveals Facebook's secret illegal activities does not have to fear for his life and take refuge in Russia.

Amadou 13y ago
Facebook knowing a lot about you is a problem. It is just an entirely separate problem that is only superficially similar to the problem of the government knowing a lot about you.
- knowaveragejoe 13y ago
  I think it's a bit more than superficially related - in a lot of cases, the only reason the government knows what it does about you is because you turned your personal information into bits and sent it to Facebook.
  - narcissus 13y ago
    Except for when they do it without you even knowing your sending information to them. If you haven't heard of shadow profiles, then now is the time to learn about them. And don't get me wrong, I understand that I can do stuff to stop these things, but I don't see why I should have to, quite frankly. The point is that even if I have never visited Facebook, they more than likely know a lot about me already, unless explicitly going out of my way to stop it.
    - knowaveragejoe 13y ago
      > shadow profiles Which exist only due to the exact reason I described. > The point is that even if I have never visited Facebook, they more than likely know a lot about me already, unless explicitly going out of my way to stop it. Well, that's not what I was addressing. "Going out of your way to stop it" is simply becoming educated about what exactly it is we're doing when we use the Internet and societal institutions. Being prudent about what we enter into a form(either real or virtual) is key.

rooshdi 13y ago

Facebook shares your life, but the government can take yours.

bowlofpetunias 13y ago

I wish this wasn't downvoted, because it's important, especially in our industry, to discuss this common misunderstanding about the concept of privacy. It's not a matter of whether or not the information is publicly available. We spend a significant part of our lives in (semi-)public spaces where people are free to observe us. It's the collection, collation and use of that information that constitutes the violation of privacy. To put it simply: thousands of people may be able to observe me going from A to B on a regular basis, which is fine. But not even my wife has complete knowledge of all my daily comings and goings. I even have a high degree of privacy from the person I've spent the last few decades with. Compiling a complete record of all my public movements to the point where the owner of that database has better insight into my habits than even I myself have is a violation of that privacy. Unless I've given explicit permission to do so, and have a certain degree of control over what happens with that data. The bottom line is, even people who post "everything" on Facebook quite rightly expect a certain degree of privacy. Doing something in public does not equate surrendering your privacy.

czottmann 13y ago

Here's an analogy that (in my experience) seems to click with many non-tech-minded people who bring up the FB/Twitter/socnet argument: I like sex, I really do. But that doesn't mean I want to be drugged and raped by the police or stealth-humped by anyone. If anyone wants to have sex with me, I'd like to know before the act and definitely need to have a say in whether or not it'll happen.

mtgx 13y ago
The analogy is a good one. There's a reason it's called "violation of privacy". It's about not having a choice in the manner, and worse yet, not knowing how and when it will be used against you.

meerita 13y ago

If you're not upset, give me your email access. I will read it .

a3n 13y ago

Facebook can't arrest you.

northwest 13y ago

> [...] when they post everything on Facebook and use Google/Apple/Microsoft? I can only speak for myself, but my only sin is to still have an iPhone (soon to be replaced by an Ubuntu phone). Apart from this, I have left all of the NSA partner companies' products/services in favor of open-source products (or else nothing). It's really not that difficult, much more of psychological "hurdle". For those who missed it: https://prism-break.org/ https://prism-break.org/ is a good start.

PavlovsCat 13y ago

Because people end up getting fucking killed with drones somewhere down this slope. I don't care if it hits me. Not everybody is utterly selfish and short-sighted.