[trailfox]

Creating a LinkedIn account was by far the creepiest thing I've ever experienced when signing up.

I signed up using email address A, and when I signed in I saw suggestions for "people you may know", but it included people I had only every corresponded with via email address B (bear with me here, it gets more interesting...). It wasn't even people any of my contacts know. From what I can tell people I had corresponded with using email address B (which incidentally doesn't even have a real name associated with it) had given their password to LinkedIn (probably via 'find people you know' or whatever). It seems that LinkedIn went through my friends' gmail contacts and one or more of my friends had probably annotated me in their contact list with my actual name. LinkedIn then associated my name with email address B. From that LinkedIn combined it with more info from people who gave them their gmail address and password who I'd only ever corresponded with a few times anonymously via my unnamed address (B, which LinkedIn has now linked with my name).

Net result is "people you may know" including people I had only corresponded with anonymously via email address B with full details of their name and place of work etc. What makes it creepy I used email address B when I tried online dating a few years ago. I used email address B to first get to know people before deciding whether to give them more info about me etc. Now LinkedIn has kindly provided me with the full name and place of employment of the women I chatted to via "people you may know" (I recognised their photos from the dating site from a few years ago) and vice versa (yikes! a great way to wind up getting stalked). The only link between me and "people you may know" is that I corresponded with them via an email address not even associated with my LinkedIn account, and none of my friends or contacts is in any way associated with them. If that isn't creepy I don't know what is.

[Create]

Probably you already had an account, called a shadow account -- when signing up, you merely asked for your password for a limited access login.

So the primary form of collection that should concern us most is media that spy on us while we use them. Books that watch us read them, music that’s listen to us listen to it. Search boxes that report what we are searching for to whoever is searching for us and doesn’t know us yet.

There is a lot of talk about data coming out of facebook: is it coming to me? is it coming to him? is it coming to them? They want you to think that the threat is data coming out. You should know that the threat is code going in.

For the last 50 years what has been happening in enterprise computing, is the addition of that layer of analytic on top of the datawarehouse that mostly goes in enterprise computing by the name of "business intelligence". what it means is you’ve been building this vast datawarehouses in your company for decade or 2 now you have only information about your own operations your suppliers your competitors, your customers now you want to make that data start to do tricks. By adding it to all the open source data out there in the world, and using it to tell you the answers to questions you didn’t know you had. That’s business intelligence.

The real threat of facebook is the BI layer on top of facebook warehouse. The facebook datewarehouse contains the behavior not just the thinking but also the behavior or somewhere nearing a billion people. The business intelligence layer on top of it which is just all that code they get to run covered by the terms of service that say "they can run any code they want for improvement of the experience". The business intelligence on top of facebook is where every intelligence service of the world wants to go.

Imagine that you are a tiny little secret police organisation in some not very important country. Let’s put ourselves in their position Let’s call them I don’t know what, you know ... "kirghista".

You are a secret police you are in the "people business" secret policing is "people business". You have classes of people that you want you want agents, you want sources you have adversaries, and you have influencables, that is people you torture who are related to adversaries wives, husbands, fathers, daughter you know those people.

So you are looking for classes of people. You don’t know their names, but you know what they are like you know who is recrutable for you as an agent you know who are likely sources, you can give the social characteristics of your adversaries, and once you know your adversaries, you can find the influencables.

So what you want to do is run code inside facebook. It will help you find the people that you want it will show you the people whose behavior and whose social circles tell you that they are what you want by way of agent, sources what their adversaries are and who you can torture to get to them.

So you don’t want data out of facebook the day you have data out of facebook it is dead. You want to put code into facebook and run it there and get the results you want to cooperate.

http://benjamin.sonntag.fr/Moglen-at-Re-Publica-Freedom-of-t...

[ams6110]

I think that you just have to assume that every internet interaction you have with any service is tracked, indexed, cross-referenced, and then bought and sold. Possibly as aggregated data, but likely traceable to you if someone were so inclined. To think otherwise is just to believe that somehow human nature has changed. Scott McNealy was right, "You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it."