A very interesting new project from Electronic Frontier Foundation:
Today EFF and the Tor Project are launching a public beta of a new Firefox extension called HTTPS Everywhere.
This Firefox extension was inspired by the launch of Google’s encrypted search option. We wanted a way to ensure that every search our browsers sent was encrypted.
H/T to BoingBoing for the link.
All 1,472 employees of Facebook, Inc. reportedly burst out in uncontrollable laughter Wednesday following Albuquerque resident Jason Herrick’s attempts to protect his personal information from exploitation on the social-networking site. “Look, he’s clicking ‘Friends Only’ for his e-mail address. Like that’s going to make a difference!” howled infrastructure manager Evan Hollingsworth, tears streaming down his face, to several of his doubled-over coworkers. “Oh, sure, by all means, Jason, ‘delete’ that photo. Man, this is so rich.”
“Entire Facebook Staff Laughs As Man Tightens Privacy Settings”, The Onion, 2010-05-26
A few links you may find worth your attention:
Matt McKeon has a very persuasive set of images, showing the extent of changes to your private information on Facebook between 2005 and last month:
2005
Compare that to the latest set of changes to the default Facebook privacy settings:
April 2010
Facebook is a great service. I have a profile, and so does nearly everyone I know under the age of 60.
However, Facebook hasn’t always managed its users’ data well. In the beginning, it restricted the visibility of a user’s personal information to just their friends and their “network” (college or school). Over the past couple of years, the default privacy settings for a Facebook user’s personal information have become more and more permissive. They’ve also changed how your personal information is classified several times, sometimes in a manner that has been confusing for their users. This has largely been part of Facebook’s effort to correlate, publish, and monetize their social graph: a massive database of entities and links that covers everything from where you live to the movies you like and the people you trust.
Ryan Singel looks at where Facebook started and why it’s changed its privacy protections:
Facebook used to be a place to share photos and thoughts with friends and family and maybe play a few stupid games that let you pretend you were a mafia don or a homesteader. It became a very useful way to connect with your friends, long-lost friends and family members. Even if you didn’t really want to keep up with them.
Soon everybody — including your uncle Louie and that guy you hated from your last job — had a profile.
And Facebook realized it owned the network.
Then Facebook decided to turn “your” profile page into your identity online — figuring, rightly, that there’s money and power in being the place where people define themselves. But to do that, the folks at Facebook had to make sure that the information you give it was public.
So in December, with the help of newly hired Beltway privacy experts, it reneged on its privacy promises and made much of your profile information public by default. That includes the city that you live in, your name, your photo, the names of your friends and the causes you’ve signed onto.
This spring Facebook took that even further. All the items you list as things you like must become public and linked to public profile pages. If you don’t want them linked and made public, then you don’t get them — though Facebook nicely hangs onto them in its database in order to let advertisers target you.
Every time Facebook changes their privacy policies, well-meaning folks try to explain how to retain as much of your previous settings as possible . . . and every time, Facebook’s defaults have changed further towards exposing everything. There’s money in that information, money that Facebook is determined to obtain. Privacy? The inevitability of zero-privacy is Facebook’s unspoken motto.
As someone noted the other day, when it comes to Facebook and their constant twiddling with privacy settings, you can just copy-and-paste the last outraged story you did and change the date. That being said, the latest Facebook changes are pretty bad:
“Connections.” It’s an innocent-sounding word. But it’s at the heart of some of the worst of Facebook’s recent changes.
Facebook first announced Connections a few weeks ago, and EFF quickly wrote at length about the problems they created. Basically, Facebook has transformed substantial personal information — including your hometown, education, work history, interests, and activities — into “Connections.” This allows far more people than ever before to see this information, regardless of whether you want them to.
Since then, our email inbox has been flooded with confused questions and reports about these changes. We’ve learned lots more about everyone’s concerns and experiences. Drawing from this, here are six things you need to know about Connections:
- Facebook will not let you share any of this information without using Connections. [. . .]
- Facebook will not respect your old privacy settings in this transition. [. . .]
- Facebook has removed your ability to restrict its use of this information. [. . .]
- Facebook will continue to store and use your Connections even after you delete them. [. . .]
- Facebook sometimes creates a Connection when you “Like” something. [. . .]
- Facebook sometimes creates a Connection when you post to your wall. [. . .]
Overall, you’d have to assume that nobody in the Facebook architecture group has ever needed or even wanted to keep certain information private. Every change they make seems to make it harder and harder to restrict where your personal information will be accessible, and it’s not as though there haven’t been complaints: Facebook just carries on as if nobody cared.
I’ve still got a Facebook account, although I find I’m using it less and less (ironically, many of you reading this will have come here because of a link from Facebook . . .). Lack of ability to fine-tune the privacy settings is certainly one of the reasons I don’t use Facebook as much as I once did.
The ubiquitous mobile phone in adolescent hands has meant an enormous increase in adolescent freedom to communicate and to form groups to take action. But it’s also meant an unprecedented (and as yet, largely unfelt) increase in the amount of surveillance data available to parents and authority figures, from social graphs of who talks to whom to logs of movement to actual records of calls and texts.
Will we wake up in 20 years and say, “Christ, how could we have spent all that time talking about how kids were sending each other texts without taking note of the fact that we’d given every teen in America his own prisoner tracking cuff and always-on bug?”
My, what a pretty Panopticon we’ve built ourselves . . .
Milena Popova, guest-blogging while Charles Stross is out experiencing Japan, has a long discussion up about public goods and why content (digitally speaking) is a classic example:
There’s a theory in economics about things called “public goods”. To understand the distinction between private goods, public goods and the couple of shades of grey in between, you first need to get your head around two concepts: rival and excludable.
Rival: (Wikipedia seems to call this “rivalrous”, but when I were a young economist lass we used to call it rival so I’ll stick with that.) A good is rival if my consumption of it diminishes the amount of the good that you can consume. Say we had 10 apples, and I ate one. There would now be 9 apples left which you could eat. If we had one apple and I ate all of it, tough luck, no apples for you. Knowing whether a good is rival or not tells you whether you want to use the market (if I were a good economist that would possibly be capital-M Market 😉 to allocate access to that good. If it’s rival, then the market is an efficient way of allocating the good; if it’s not, then you might want to think about other ways of getting your good to people. Remember that scary anti-piracy clip at the start of your DVDs which says “You wouldn’t steal a handbag”? Hold that thought for a minute.
Excludable: A good is excludable if you physically have a way of stopping people from consuming it. Back to the apples: if they’re in my fridge, inside my locked house and you don’t have a key, you can’t have my apples. (Yes, yes, you could break in. The law provides additional protection here, but ultimately there’s probably a better way for you to obtain an apple than breaking into my house, right?) Knowing whether a good is excludable tells you whether you can use the market to distribute the good. If your good is excludable, go ahead and sell it on the open market; if it’s not — you might struggle because you can’t stop people from just taking it for free.
So. Most of the goods you deal with in your day-to-day life are both rival and excludable. We call them pure private goods. But there’s a few things here and there that aren’t as clear-cut, and this is where it gets a little messy.
Of course, the headline assumes that they had any such privilege in the past . . .
Samuel Taliaferro is disturbed by provisions in a new law which will extend US government intervention into foreign bank business:
The name of the bill is the Hiring Incentives to Restore Employment Act (H.R. 2487) commonly known as the HIRE Act. This is the jobs incentive bill that was signed by the President on March 18th amid little fanfare.
Relatively small by Washington standards (“just” an $18 billion stimulus package) the bill was drafted to provide incentives to employers to hire more people but contains some very disturbing language concerning the ownership and transference of money to any overseas account. The truly galling part of the bill is that it attempts to require “foreign financial and non-financial institutions to withhold 30% of payments made to such institutions by U.S. individuals unless such institutions agree to disclose the identity of such individuals and report on the bank transactions”. Think about this — the U.S. government is attempting to strong arm foreign financial and non-financial institutions (think banks and law firms) to either withhold 30% of the transactions in a U.S. individual’s account (and presumably remit this to the U.S. Treasury) or disclose the account details to the U.S.. The language of the bill addresses both bank accounts and any foreign trusts (ie- Private Interest Foundations).
In other words, the US government is afraid more Americans are going to be worried about the security of their money and will look to offshore institutions to preserve their savings. The government is moving pre-emptively to deter that flow of money away from their direct control. You’d almost think they didn’t trust their own citizenry.
Things aren’t improving in schools, as this report from James Stephenson makes clear:
I remember the day they installed the cameras in my high school. Everyone was surprised when we walked and saw them hanging ominously from the ceiling.
Everyone except me: I moved to rural Virginia from the wealthier and more heavily populated region of northern Virginia. Cameras have watched me since middle school. So I wasn’t surprised, just disappointed. “What have we done?” asked one of my friends. It felt like the faculty was punishing us for something. A common justification for cameras is that they make students safer, and make them feel more secure. I can tell you from first hand experience that that argument is bullshit. Columbine had cameras, but they didn’t make the 15 people who died there any safer. Cameras don’t make you feel more secure; they make you feel twitchy and paranoid. Some people say that the only people who don’t like school cameras are the people that have something to hide. But having the cameras is a constant reminder that the school does not trust you and that the school is worried your fellow classmates might go on some sort of killing rampage.
Cameras aren’t the worst of the privacy violations. Staff perform random searches of cars and lockers. Most of the kids know about locker searches because they see the administration going though their stuff in the hall. But not everyone knows about the car searches, all the way out in the parking lot where administrators aren’t likely to be observed. (People don’t often bother to lock their cars, either).
In a world where everyone seems to be desperately worried about dangers to kids, the one thing that’s overlooked is the almost complete loss of human rights: being a student in the public school system means you don’t have many rights at all. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that prisoners in jail have more rights — and better-protected rights — than children and teenagers in school.
Petty acts of rebellion–and innocent little covert activities–kept our spirits up. The school’s computer network may have been censored, but the sneakernet is alive and well. Just like in times past, high school students don’t have much money to buy music, movies or games, but all are avidly traded at every American high school. It used to be tapes; now it’s thumbdrives and flash disks. My friends and I once started an underground leaflet campaign that was a lot of fun. I even read about a girl who ran a library of banned books out of her locker. These trivial things are more important than they seem because they make students feel like they have some measure of control over their lives. Schools today are not training students to be good citizens: they are training students to be obedient.
Of course, obedience must be enforced.
Just in case you British internet users weren’t already aware, the government may start including pop-ups whenever you access an out-of-country social networking site. Nice of them to at least warn you that your internet usage will be monitored for quality and customer satisfaction (the customer in question is the government, BTW):
The ACPO document, obtained by The Register, suggests the government may “minimise or discourage or give ‘pop-up’ warnings as regards to communications services within the online environment where there is evidence, presented to a Circuit Judge or Secretary of State, that allowing the public access or use of specific communications services could make them vulnerable to fraud, the theft of personal information or other attack”.
ACPO does not explain the technical details of its plan, but points out that “measures already exist to minimise the availability of potentially illegal content”. However, it cites the Internet Watch Foundation’s blacklist of international URLs carrying indecent and abusive images of children, suggesting a parallel list of social networks, forums and real time messaging sites judged to be risky could be created.
The proposal was drawn up by ACPO’s Data Communications Group. The group is chaired by Jim Gamble, the chief executive of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, which is responsible for policing paedophiles on the internet.
A fascinating story about a case in Britain where the government’s shiny new powers under Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) have been used to jail a schizophrenic man for refusing to divulge the passwords to access his files:
The first person jailed under draconian UK police powers that Ministers said were vital to battle terrorism and serious crime has been identified by The Register as a schizophrenic science hobbyist with no previous criminal record.
His crime was a persistent refusal to give counter-terrorism police the keys to decrypt his computer files.
The 33-year-old man, originally from London, is currently held at a secure mental health unit after being sectioned while serving his sentence at Winchester Prison.
In June the man, JFL, who spoke on condition we do not publish his full name, was sentenced to nine months imprisonment under Part III of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA). The powers came into force at the beginning of October 2007.
[. . .]
Throughout several hours of questioning, JFL maintained silence. With a deep-seated wariness of authorities, he did not trust his interviewers. He also claims a belief in the right to silence — a belief which would later allow him to be prosecuted under RIPA Part III.
[I]t is worth noting a minor English trait which is extremely well marked though not often commented on, and that is a love of flowers. This is one of the first things that one notices when one reaches England from abroad, especially if one is coming from southern Europe. Does it not contradict the English indifference to the arts? Not really, because it is found in people who have no aesthetic feelings whatever. What it does link up with, however, is another English characteristic which is so much a part of us that we barely notice it, and that is the addiction to hobbies and spare-time occupations, the privateness of English life. We are a nation of flower-lovers, but also a nation of stamp-collectors, pigeon-fanciers, amateur carpenters, coupon-snippers, darts-players, crossword-puzzle fans. All the culture that is most truly native centres round things which even when they are communal are not official — the pub, the football match, the back garden, the fireside and the ‘nice cup of tea’. The liberty of the individual is still believed in, almost as in the nineteenth century. But this has nothing to do with economic liberty, the right to exploit others for profit. It is the liberty to have a home of your own, to do what you like in your spare time, to choose your own amusements instead of having them chosen for you from above. The most hateful of all names in an English ear is Nosey Parker. It is obvious, of course, that even this purely private liberty is a lost cause. Like all other modern people, the English are in process of being numbered, labelled, conscripted, ‘co-ordinated’. But the pull of their impulses is in the other direction, and the kind of regimentation that can be imposed on them will be modified in consequence. No party rallies, no Youth Movements, no coloured shirts, no Jew-baiting or ‘spontaneous’ demonstrations. No Gestapo either, in all probability.
George Orwell, “England, Your England”, The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, 1941-02-19.
BBC News reports that a couple of Edinburgh pub-goers chose a particularly unsuitable place to go have sex after meeting in the pub:
An amorous couple have been fined for having sex in broad daylight — in a police station car park.
Leanne Richardson, 26, and Ross Welsh, 30, had to be physically stopped mid sex act by officers from Portobello police station in Edinburgh.
They both pleaded guilty to committing a breach of the peace in the car park on 21 April and were fined £200.
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