Thoughts on Facebook

[Suave Mari]

Hi there! Great to see the group come alive!!

On the topic of "Too much info colected about us"... I have found a way to deal with it... I have one "official" profile that I use as scholl year book entry, so old friends and relatives may find me. Therw I keep contact information updated and some basic information to let then know it's me.

No likes or postings on this profile.

And I keep several othera for my interrests. None of them with information about me.

I beleieve that if you keep your information secluded from your activities, you can use social netwooks safely.

I never uae twitter for anything personal and never broadcast anything about my personal life.

I have a friend who was kidnapped because he placed a lot of informtion about his travels on his facebook and loved to tweet about where he was at the time making real easy to find him!

Facebook is a great tool and should be used but with caution. MHO

best regards,

Ricardo

[Sean Bonner]

Hi Ricardo-

Part of the problem is that people think doing something like this makes sense, but actually it doesn't make any difference. Your computer has an IP address, and that IP address is linked to your account - to each of your accounts, so FB and everyone else knows that all those accounts are the same person, and then every where you go online are linked to one of those accounts, and thus all of those accounts.

The concern isn't what the public knows as much as what the companies and ISPs know and can sell or use against you.

Good luck.

-sean

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Sean Bonner

homebase | twitter | G+ | SAFECAST

* I'm no longer on Facebook, here's why.

[Dino Corvino]

Are we not just simply talking about a massive change in the way we live as humans?  The lament of loss of privacy while posting online, in a google group seems a bit strange to me.

If you want to be off line, or invisible, that is entirely workable.  But, doing it from a google group seems a bit absurd.

I gave this up a while ago.  Doesnt it come down to what you seek to do for enjoyment, versus what is obtained by others while you enjoy yourself.

Sure, netflix probably tracks my watching history, but I like netflix and the service, so why not.

I think that for every case of foursquare guy who is kidnapped, there is the case of something positive coming from this interconnectedness that we are now getting closer to pulling off.

With Gratitude the Universe is Eternally Abundant

[Brandon Van Every]

On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 8:46 AM, Suave Mari
<suave.mari.mag...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I have a friend who was kidnapped because he placed a lot of informtion
> about his travels on his facebook and loved to tweet about where he was at
> the time making real easy to find him!

Yes this problem ruins my fantasy of an intentional community moving
around the US National Forests doing technical stuff and sharing
resources, such as electrical power generation from scrap wood.
Publication of the nature and whereabouts of such a caravan would make
it a juicy theft target. I've had all my camping gear robbed when it
was worth a mere $500, imagine if it's an entourage of stuff that's
collectively more valuable. I suppose a community camp site *could*
establish an electronic alarm perimeter and also carry guns + other
weapons to shoot people, and that could work for a group site of up to
30 people, but it would seriously condition and arguably ruin the vibe
of a community to have to be that security conscious. I have found
that better defense against theft or other crime is to make it
unlikely that anyone knows where you are, and to travel far up crappy
forest roads so that nobody in their right mind will just be casually
driving by looking for a "score." When I got robbed I had this
"excellent" campsite right next to a main highway through the woods.
It made logistical resupply really easy, I'd just zip to town and zip
back, but when I did that on Labor Day weekend someone zipped in, took
all my stuff at my site, and zipped away.

I suppose one could use the internet to locate other technomads in a
general geographic region, like "The Smokey Mountains," and then use
phones to meet people in more specific places. I would not even use
"a specific National Forest" as the internet identifier, because NFs
don't have that many campable roads in them. If I was a thief and I
knew a target rich environment existed in a specific NF, I bet I could
find it PDQ. Whereas if the location is as vague as "somewhere in the
GA/TN/NC/SC mountains" that's too much ground for a thief to cover,
but still close enough for technomads to find each other and form
caravans. There is still a risk of being inifiltrated by someone
who's up to no good, claiming a contact interest in the caravan when
they just want to rob them, but maybe there's some way to mitigate
that risk that I'm not thinking about right now. There *is* a problem
of someone in your caravan just being a blabbermouth anyways and
telling the whole world exactly where the caravan is, on their own
personal blog or whatnot. Not sure anything can be done about that
unless the caravan community develops a culture where that's a big
no-no and people are made to leave if they won't shut up. Of course
some people will never be made to leave because they're too charming
in person to get rid of, or people just don't want to deal with
enforcing anything, so....

It's a problem. I will probably attend a Rainbow Gathering for the
1st time in the near future, and one of my big concerns is getting
robbed. A RG attracts a lot of people who are definitely motivated to
steal.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every

[Sean Bonner]

On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 8:29 AM, Dino Corvino <corv...@gmail.com> wrote:

Sure, netflix probably tracks my watching history, but I like netflix and the service, so why not.

That's the crux of it. I like Netflix and I like Netflix recommending me things to watch so I'm OK with that.

I don't like Facebook, I don't want FB to know what other websites I'm visiting, I don't want FB to sell my browsing info to other companies that I don't even know about, so I'm not OK with it.

It's not a "live life offline" thing, it's a "be aware of where you are being tracked and what is happening with your data" thing.

-s

[Lefty]

On May 22, 2012, at 9:01 AM, Sean Bonner wrote:
>
> That's the crux of it. I like Netflix and I like Netflix recommending me things to watch so I'm OK with that.

Some people like Facebook, I suppose. Some people like _FarmVille_, for heaven's sake. A lot of people used to like MySpace. In five years, they'll all like something different.

I'm kind of surprised to see this debate being conducted as though there were some "bright line" between black-and-white in it all. There's not.

The best you can do is a) be informed about how sites like Twitter, Facebook, Google+ (which has puh-lenty of issues), and others obtain and use the information you provide them with, and make informed judgements about how much you're comfortable sharing publicly.

That, of course, takes actual effort and thought, unlike easy answers. There's no issue — apparently not in Cheri's and Chris' minds — that a Facebook group has some utility. Don't like it? Don't use it, by all means. Want one on Google+? Start one, by all means.

It's a big Internet. There's something for everyone.

[Brandon Van Every]

On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 11:29 AM, Dino Corvino <corv...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Are we not just simply talking about a massive change in the way we live as
> humans?  The lament of loss of privacy while posting online, in a google
> group seems a bit strange to me.
>
> If you want to be off line, or invisible, that is entirely workable.  But,
> doing it from a google group seems a bit absurd.

There are degrees of privacy and surveillance, so is not absurd. Like
I said before, the problem is not that Facebook is on the internet,
the problem is that Facebook is a "one stop shop" for learning nearly
everything about someone if they're not careful. Similarly,
advertizing a centralized service that would identify the exact
locations of technomads out in the real world, especially isolated
locations like a National Forest, is physically dangerous. Whereas
someone scrutinizing your Netflix account doesn't have as much risk.
At best, they might steal your credit card or commit some kind of
identity theft. Nobody's going to stop using the internet because of
such low risks, and there are security systems to try to deal with it,
even if they're not hermetic. Heck, regular home ownership and police
forces are all about mitigating risk, so I'm not seeing much "new"
here. Some people arm themselves because they don't think the police
will be there in time to help them. Other people go places that are
safer and keep a lower profile. This Google Group is safer than
Facebook.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every

[Brandon Van Every]

On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 12:18 PM, Lefty <le...@shugendo.org> wrote:
>
> I'm kind of surprised to see this debate being conducted as though there were some "bright line" between black-and-white in it all. There's not.

The line can be *quite* grey when you're taking about 900 million
active Facebook users
http://newsroom.fb.com/content/default.aspx?NewsAreaId=22 , and still
be definitively crossed for any conceivable fuzzy integral you
personally would perform on it. To put it in perspective, 900 million
was the population of China in 1975.
http://www.china-profile.com/data/fig_Pop_WPP2006.htm All "citizens"
of this virtual nation are accessible by one unified API, in the hands
of a company that's thoroughly corrupt about privacy issues and just
wants people to keep laying golden eggs. If you believe everyone will
just be using "something else" 5 years from now, I'll wager you're
wrong. It's like expecting Microsoft or Walmart to just go away.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every

[Vivek Gani]

Might be worth noting that there's a "technomads" subreddit at http://www.reddit.com/r/technomads, although any posts that were once there seem to have been deleted.

[Cherie @Technomadia]

That, of course, takes actual effort and thought, unlike easy answers. There's no issue — apparently not in Cheri's and Chris' minds — that a Facebook group has some utility. Don't like it? Don't use it, by all means. Want one on Google+? Start one, by all means.

It's a big Internet. There's something for everyone.

Exactly. This.   

We each must decide for ourselves what our tolerance is for risk, privacy and reward.  Go in with knowledge, make conscious decisions and accept the risks you choose to take.  

'Caution: Living is Dangerous to your Health'. 

We choose to not live in a state of paranoia that there's evil lurking around every tree we encounter, and embrace the connections that being intentionally public about pieces of our lives brings us.  All I can say, in the 25+ years I've been online and participating in BBSs, forums and social networking, I've only had one potentially scary encounter that came as a result of publicizing what I'm up to (and just turned out to be an admirer showing up to an event unannounced). And I've had far more scary stuff happen just by simply going through the day.  As with anything in life, use an appropriate level of caution... and carry on.   

Far more good has come of it than anything else for us.  Amazing friends made, work opportunities (we actually just landed a fairly large project because a potential client was evaluating our public page, unknown to us.. and liked something we posted - so reached out to hire us), connections and more.   For us 'hiding out in the open' is also part of our safety net - after all, if we do end up kidnapped or otherwise missing, someone is much more likely to notice our absence because we are regular about posting (both in our public profiles, and in our personal ones).  But, that doesn't work for everyone.... and nor should it. 

Simply put - bad things happen, regardless of how online you are or not.  I choose to define safety by my ability to adapt to the curves life throws me, and honestly believe that most people I encounter have positive intentions.

Yup, Facebook is a business, and is constantly tweaking their revenue stream.  If you choose to use it, go in knowing you are their product - not their customer. Play to your level of comfort. And if your comfort is none... that's good too. 

It is a big internet.. and we each will find our place within it. 

 - Cherie  

[Brandon Van Every]

On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 4:48 PM, Cherie @Technomadia
<che...@technomadia.com> wrote:
>
> We choose to not live in a state of paranoia that there's evil lurking
> around every tree we encounter, and embrace the connections that being
> intentionally public about pieces of our lives brings us.
>

> Far more good has come of it than anything else for us.

Because "we" in this case are typically living in affluent
industrialized countries, where the exploitation of our information
hasn't done us enough harm (yet) for people to worry about it. The
same is not true in all countries.
http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/2012/01/31/human-rights-concerns-linger-as-facebook-ipo-approaches/

"Among the human rights concerns potential investors should consider
are unanswered questions about how Facebook will approach user privacy
in countries where the internet is a tool of repression rather than
expression. According to Human Rights First, Facebook should explain
how it would respond to government requests for user information or
for censorship."

Social media is an ominous development to some of us who had studied
human history, such as the "Disappearances" in Chile in the 1970s.
Killing the most social people is a good strategy for a regime,
because it makes the biggest terror impact on others. And that was
pre-internet thinking, just going after people who had a lot of real
world friends.

There are many areas of politics and power that mass populations are
not terribly aware of, until something really starts biting them in
the butt. To write it all off as "personal choice" strikes me as
hopelessly naive about how the world works and how it changes. There
are always people in a vanguard trying to sound an alarm about what's
going on, and always a lot of people not really caring enough to take
the claims seriously. What typically happens is technology and
industrial practices outstrip the collective ability of a society to
understand what's happening or make effective laws about it.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every

[Lefty]

On May 22, 2012, at 2:18 PM, Brandon Van Every wrote:

> The same is not true in all countries.

There are countries where they torture people using electricity. I continue to use it in spite of this. Evidently, you do as well.

I also continue to watch Roman Polanski movies, in spite of my belief that he's a child-raping scumbag when he's not directing, as well as listen to Beethoven, despite his cheery habit of hurling large pieces of furniture from fourth-story windows when he lost his temper, which he did roughly nine times a day.

Ethical mathematics is _hard_. Life is full of compromise. If you're willing to avoid Facebook because of potential privacy difficulties, it's tough to imagine what you're doing pimping Google as an alternative.

But as I suggest, I may be the wrong person to ask. I'm a utilitarian at heart.

[Brandon Van Every]

On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 8:32 PM, Lefty <le...@shugendo.org> wrote:
> On May 22, 2012, at 2:18 PM, Brandon Van Every wrote:
>
>> The same is not true in all countries.
>
> There are countries where they torture people using electricity. I continue to use it in spite of this. Evidently, you do as well.

A flawed analogy not worth debating.

> If you're willing to avoid Facebook because of potential privacy difficulties, it's tough to imagine what you're doing pimping Google as an alternative.

I *don't* pimp Google as an alternative. The only thing I've really
seen as an alternative is Diaspora. Unfortunately work has been
difficult enough on that, that one of the lead developers committed
suicide.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every

[Sean Bonner]

On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 5:32 PM, Lefty <le...@shugendo.org> wrote:

If you're willing to avoid Facebook because of potential privacy difficulties, it's tough to imagine what you're doing pimping Google as an alternative.

It's not potential. Facebook has repeatedly violated their own privacy policy and made changes to users privacy settings without notifying them - including setting things to public that people had previously set to private. There are no shortage of lawsuits over these issues.

Google hasn't done that.

The issue with Facebook isn't about online privacy, it's about Facebook specifically being an untrustworthy company.

-s

[Sean Bonner]

On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 5:50 PM, Brandon Van Every <bvan...@gmail.com> wrote:

I *don't* pimp Google as an alternative.  The only thing I've really
seen as an alternative is Diaspora.  Unfortunately work has been
difficult enough on that, that one of the lead developers committed
suicide.

Diaspora isn't a service, it's software. There is a big difference.

-s

[Lefty]

On May 22, 2012, at 6:54 PM, Sean Bonner <se...@seanbonner.com> wrote:

> Google hasn't done that.

Little quibbles about illegal gathering of private communications via WiFi-enabled "StreetView" cars and stone-walling privacy authorities around the world over it aside, presumably.

[Sean Bonner]

So you think an engineer building in a feature to monitor PUBLIC (nothing private about open wifi networks) data, building it into the spec, and his supervisors not reading his spec and arguing about it and then apologizing for not doing their job correctly is the same as purposely and secretly changing all of your users privacy settings to public in order to enable more data collection that you can sell to advertisers the same thing?

[Brandon Van Every]

On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 9:56 PM, Sean Bonner <se...@seanbonner.com> wrote:
>
> Diaspora isn't a service, it's software. There is a big difference.

Isn't that the point? No centralized service to become valuated in
the billions of dollars that will screw everybody? Although I imagine
distributed ways of screwing with people will have to be dealt with.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every

[Sean Bonner]

Well, sure, but that's an entirely different argument. You can't prove Oranges are bad by talking about how good Apples are. 

[David A. Desrosiers]

On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 12:01 PM, Sean Bonner <se...@seanbonner.com> wrote:

I don't like Facebook, I don't want FB to know what other websites I'm visiting, I don't want FB to sell my browsing info to other companies that I don't even know about, so I'm not OK with it.

It's not a "live life offline" thing, it's a "be aware of where you are being tracked and what is happening with your data" thing.

You can have your cake AND eat it too, with some common sense and moderation.

1. Install Ghostery, Better Privacy, NoScript, AdBlock, etc. and block LSOs and tracking sites/cookies. You'd be surprised at how much of your browsing history is shared -with Facebook- when you're nowhere near Facebook, from hundreds of partner sites.

2. Obviously, don't post silly stuff or recognizable stuff on FB, if you care not to be tracked. I frequently take the train into work in Manhattan, and was riding one day with a man who represented a large, 3-letter agency, and he confided in me how much data they peel off the back end of Facebook, stuff we couldn't possibly imagine. They have access to -everything- posted there, including where you post it from, GPS data from when you upload photos to FB from your phone, etc. and this is all mashed up with Google Maps, facial recognition and all manner of other data, spidering through your friends, where they're posting from, and so on. He even went so far as to say that warrants were useless now, with the amount of accurate, up-to-the-second data found on Facebook and other sites through interpolating and integrating that data. That's just one aspect, but many commercial companies are paying millions of dollars for access to that same datastore, and we don't even know it, nor do we authorize that. It's already happening, buried under the FB TOS.

3. There is no such thing as anonymity. Understand that. Once you connect from anywhere using your phone or computer, you lose all hope of remaining anonymous. Hiding behind a throwaway email or sitting in a coffee shop on their "free" WiFi doesn't help, when your own devices are already giving you away, through cookies, AGPS data, and other streams. Encryption can help protect or validate authenticity, but where you go and what you do on the public Internet, is easily traceable, even when you're bouncing through systems like Tor and i2p.

4. If you want to minimize the impact, minimize the input. Post relevant things you want made public, from public sources, and keep the rest off the Internet, or use another mechanism (HAM? CB? Packet Radio?).

Here's some other links to digest:

The Stupid Things You Do on Facebook and How to Fix Them
http://lifehacker.com/5911639/the-stupid-things-you-do-on-facebook-and-how-to-fix-them

10+ Best Firefox Security Add-ons for Enhancing Security and Privacy
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/best-firefox-addons-for-enhancing-security-and-privacy/

Top 18 Firefox Addons For Better Privacy And Avoid Web Tracking
http://www.vikitech.com/686/top-18-firefox-addons-for-better-privacy-and-avoiding-web-tracking

--
David A. Desrosiers
david.a.d...@gmail.com

[Jack Bennett]

Not suicide. Facebook clandestine operatives just made it look that way.

[Lefty]

On May 22, 2012, at 7:41 PM, Sean Bonner <se...@seanbonner.com> wrote:

> So you think an engineer building in a feature to monitor PUBLIC (nothing private about open wifi networks) data, building it into the spec, and his supervisors not reading his spec and arguing about it and then apologizing for not doing their job correctly is the same as purposely and secretly changing all of your users privacy settings to public in order to enable more data collection that you can sell to advertisers the same thing?

As I've said, I don't have the confidence in my ethical calculus abilities that you seem to, Sean. I'd only note that EU privacy authorities seem to be _quite_ unhappy about the entire thing, and not apparently without reason.

[Sean Bonner]

On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 7:59 PM, Lefty <stone...@gmail.com> wrote:

As I've said, I don't have the confidence in my ethical calculus abilities that you seem to, Sean. I'd only note that EU privacy authorities seem to be _quite_ unhappy about the entire thing, and not apparently without reason.

Well, that's the difference then. I've looked at it closely and it seems to be completely without reason. That said, EU privacy authorities don't really take "reason" into account when making their rules, so this isn't unexpected.

-s

[David "Navalha" Costa]

Well, "reason" is a concept that is rarely applied to any privacy discussion on a political level. That seems to be true for most western countries including some in the EU (the EU is not a national entity yet). Most of the time, politicians are more than happy to trade privacy for security (read: control) and companies such as Facebook and Google are usually willing to play along due to the commercial value of our personal information. Add to this the fact that politicians are more often than not representing lobbied interests as opposed to their citizenry, and you get an environment that isn't conductive to protecting citizen's rights. This is true for the US as much as for some countries in the EU.

What the discussion of Facebook versus google boils down to is an issue of trust. And I do agree with Sean on the fact that Facebook has been actively abusing the trust of their users for a long time, while Google at least tries to safeguard this trust to some extent. Also, while Google happily coexists with all the other web services we use, Facebook is actively trying to make us use them as a gateway for all sorts of things. Take Spotify, for example, one of many services that now require you to have a Facebook account to use it. I personally resent the fact that pretty soon we won't be able to do much on the web without Zuckerberg's say so. That is a model that is inherently against the way the internet should work, and ultimately bound to fail (see AOL).

David "Navalha" Costa




Sean Bonner <se...@seanbonner.com> schreef:

--

[Lefty]

On May 22, 2012, at 10:41 PM, Sean Bonner <se...@seanbonner.com> wrote:

"Well, that's the difference then. I've looked at it closely and it seems to be completely without reason. That said, EU privacy authorities don't really take "reason" into account when making their rules, so this isn't unexpected."

According to today's New York Times, "Google Privacy Inquiries Get Little Cooperation": http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/23/daily-report-google-privacy-inquiries-get-little-cooperation/

Your sneering at EU privacy concerns, in the context of your complaints about Facebook, seems hugely inconsistent. You hate that Facebook sells you to advertisers. You're apparently fine with Google selling you to the same advertisers.

"The enemy of my enemy is not a friend on whose couch I'd want to be spending the night." — Stone Mirror's Book of Honest Truth

—
Sent from my iPad

-s

[Jack Bennett]

If the service is free, then we are not the customer, we are the product.

[Sean Bonner]

No, you are projecting or jumping to conclusions or just plain not reading what I'm saying.

On Wed, May 23, 2012 at 8:55 AM, Lefty <stone...@gmail.com> wrote:

Your sneering at EU privacy concerns, in the context of your complaints about Facebook, seems hugely inconsistent.

I'm not sneering at EU privacy concerns, I'm noting that EU privacy laws don't make sense and many companies have had to relocate parts of the business just to function around bad policy. For example: Spreadshirt - A site where you create a store, upload images, and sell t-shirts to people. By any reasonable definition if I upload a shirt design to my store and you buy a shirt you are my customer. But not in the EU, EU law states that you are spreadshirts customer and they legally can't tell me anything about you. Privacy law everywhere else in the world says you are my customer and spreadshirt doesn't get any info about you, only I do. It makes no sense.

 

You hate that Facebook sells you to advertisers. You're apparently fine with Google selling you to the same advertisers.

I never said that. I don't hate that Facebook sells anything to advertisers - I hate that they are deceptive and misleading about it. I don't trust them.

Google doesn't sell your info to advertisers, it uses your info to display better adds for you. And they are very public about exactly how and why they do what they do. Facebook would clearly rather not tell you anything.

It's not practices, it's ethics.

-s