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FacebookIsDangerous 4 - 28 Feb 2012 - Main.AbiolaFasehun
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Facebook is Dangerous
I ran into this article where Eben describes Facebook as analgous to a "man in the middle" attack that a hacker might employ to intercept apparently private communication for nefarious purposes. I think Eben's analogy is spot on: this isn't a technical hack, this is a social hack, and it amazes me how oblivious we are to the increasing damage Facebook is inflicting on our privacy and the danger it can pose to people who are deemed "criminals" wanted by law enforcement. | | | I think this analysis is largely correct, though I think, for reasons I will be discussing in my other course in coming weeks, the Facebook coverage has been anemic and uninformative in the extreme, and your relative indifference to this among other privacy problems is misplaced. Your point, however, that Facebook is merely part of a larger failure in the Net to be robust against attacks on privacy and freedom is surely correct. Hence I agree with you that solving the Facebook problem is one necessary rather than the sufficient condition for remediation of the problem overall. For my diagnosis of the problem overall, and the beginning of my working through a possible solution, see my Freedom in the Cloud.
-- SanjayMurti - 08 Feb 2012
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> | I am joining this conversation a little late, but one of the things that I find interesting in the Facebook debate, is the lack of credit that Facebook users are given. I realize that I am probably in the minority, but I feel that I am very conscious of the fact that really nothing I put on Facebook is ever really "private" in the traditional sense (and yes I too resisted a Facebook account for years). Sanjay makes an interesting point about how far this problem stretches, but in analyzing Facebook's user implications, I also think it is important to remember why people have Facebook accounts. I know this doesn't speak to necessarily everyone, but I don't believe it would be a stretch to say that for the most part- man is a narcissist. Facebook users want people to be able to find them, look at their super cool pictures, their awesome friends, and know about that fabulous job they just landed. People want to be able to connect with others for platonic and not so platonic reasons, as well as make announcements to the world about who they are. Through lack of hindsight, they don't really want to be bothered by the details. I believe it is fair to say that a good amount of people do not mind "Facebook exposure" and are not naive to the fact that through Facebook other websites can track where they've been and create formulas to ascertain suggestions on future internet use. I think if anything, the danger occurs in the public's general lack of understanding of how deep this tracking system extends and how the information can be used against them.
I do agree with Harry's point that the world needs another option. But I think more likely what will happen is that just as some may say that Facebook took over MySpace? , there will be another tech company that takes over Facebook, rendering Facebook obsolete and still leaving us with one popular option. In Moglen's Freedom in the Cloud speech, he said, "It's not a pretty story...We haven't lost. We've just really bamboozled ourselves. And we're going to have to unbamboozle ourselves really quickly or we're going to bamboozle a bunch of innocent people who didn't know we were throwing away their privacy for them forever." I believe this quote sheds light on the importance of properly educating individuals about the extent to which their collected information is used. But at what point should we hold users accountable for performing due diligence, and at least putting in some effort to find out how their information is used?
I am not a tech wiz, and from reading Moglen's speech I was assured of how naive my understanding of the web is. Moglen's Freedom in the Cloud speech gave me an abbreviated history of how technology has gotten to the point where it is now. But more importantly, Moglen's speech left me wondering, if the extent of the problem is so vast, when will people demand more transparency? Beyond protesting against wars and violent crimes, when will people take to the streets to demand that as internet "clients" we be re-empowered? | | | \ No newline at end of file |
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