Why I Hate Facebook by Tom Hodgkinson

by radical Tue Jan 15, 2008 10:59

I've no problem connecting with people online, I don't like the pub, I get a kick out of drugs, I've no problem with organised religion as long as they keep their hands off my social rights, & I enjoy non-committed sexual relationships.

Maybe i've gone right wing or something without realising it.

by Steve Tue Jan 15, 2008 11:47

Networking sites are literally crammed to bursting point with lonely women looking for men.

by Hank Tue Jan 15, 2008 12:15

There might be a lot of lonely men out there looking for womanly companionship too. In the increasing atomisation of urban society dating agencies thrive and the newspapers are crammed with lonely hearts advertisements, some of them funny in a literary way.

Having "relationships" online isn't the real thing. It's merely vicarious living, illusory socialising. You have to join clubs and associations, take part in committees and support common interest campaigns to meet and get to know people, especially if you live far away from your family roots.

So switch off your computer and trade in your tv set for a radio/CD player. Then get out there and live.

by SpookyMulder Tue Jan 15, 2008 16:16

Excerpt Taken from Bruce schniers newsletter.
http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram.html

Article is about how easy it is to co-relate anonymous data to de-anonymise it. Think google / choicepoint / facebook / amazon / doubleclick / yahoo IM / etc
They know who you are!!

Anonymity and the Netflix Dataset

Last year, Netflix published 10 million movie rankings by 500,000 customers, as part of a challenge for people to come up with better recommendation systems than the one the company was using. The data was anonymized by removing personal details and replacing names with random numbers, to protect the privacy of the recommenders.

Arvind Narayanan and Vitaly Shmatikov, researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, de-anonymized some of the Netflix data by comparing rankings and timestamps with public information in the Internet Movie Database, or IMDb.

Their research illustrates some inherent security problems with anonymous data, but first it's important to explain what they did and did not do.

They did *not* reverse the anonymity of the entire Netflix dataset. What they did was reverse the anonymity of the Netflix dataset for those sampled users who also entered some movie rankings, under their own names, in the IMDb. (While IMDb's records are public, crawling the site to get them is against the IMDb's terms of service, so the researchers used a representative few to prove their algorithm.)

The point of the research was to demonstrate how little information is required to de-anonymize information in the Netflix dataset.

On one hand, isn't that sort of obvious? The risks of anonymous databases have been written about before, such as in this 2001 paper published in an IEEE journal. The researchers working with the anonymous Netflix data didn't painstakingly figure out people's identities -- as others did with the AOL search database last year -- they just compared it with an already identified subset of similar data: a standard data-mining technique.

But as opportunities for this kind of analysis pop up more frequently, lots of anonymous data could end up at risk.

Someone with access to an anonymous dataset of telephone records, for example, might partially de-anonymize it by correlating it with a catalog merchants' telephone order database. Or Amazon's online book reviews could be the key to partially de-anonymizing a public database of credit card purchases, or a larger database of anonymous book reviews.

Google, with its database of users' internet searches, could easily de-anonymize a public database of internet purchases, or zero in on searches of medical terms to de-anonymize a public health database. Merchants who maintain detailed customer and purchase information could use their data to partially de-anonymize any large search engine's data, if it were released in an anonymized form. A data broker holding databases of several companies might be able to de-anonymize most of the records in those databases.

What the University of Texas researchers demonstrate is that this process isn't hard, and doesn't require a lot of data. It turns out that if you eliminate the top 100 movies everyone watches, our movie-watching habits are all pretty individual. This would certainly hold true for our book reading habits, our internet shopping habits, our telephone habits and our web searching habits.

The obvious countermeasures for this are, sadly, inadequate. Netflix could have randomized its dataset by removing a subset of the data, changing the timestamps or adding deliberate errors into the unique ID numbers it used to replace the names. It turns out, though, that this only makes the problem slightly harder. Narayanan's and Shmatikov's de-anonymization algorithm is surprisingly robust, and works with partial data, data that has been perturbed, even data with errors in it.

With only eight movie ratings (of which two may be completely wrong), and dates that may be up to two weeks in error, they can uniquely identify 99 percent of the records in the dataset. After that, all they need is a little bit of identifiable data: from the IMDb, from your blog, from anywhere. The moral is that it takes only a small named database for someone to pry the anonymity off a much larger anonymous database.

Other research reaches the same conclusion. Using public anonymous data from the 1990 census, Latanya Sweeney found that 87 percent of the population in the United States, 216 million of 248 million, could likely be uniquely identified by their five-digit ZIP code, combined with their gender and date of birth. About half of the U.S. population is likely identifiable by gender, date of birth and the city, town or municipality in which the person resides. Expanding the geographic scope to an entire county reduces that to a still-significant 18 percent. "In general," the researchers wrote, "few characteristics are needed to uniquely identify a person."

Stanford University researchers reported similar results using 2000 census data. It turns out that date of birth, which (unlike birthday month and day alone) sorts people into thousands of different buckets, is incredibly valuable in disambiguating people.

This has profound implications for releasing anonymous data. On one hand, anonymous data is an enormous boon for researchers -- AOL did a good thing when it released its anonymous dataset for research purposes, and it's sad that the CTO resigned and an entire research team was fired after the public outcry. Large anonymous databases of medical data are enormously valuable to society: for large-scale pharmacology studies, long-term follow-up studies and so on. Even anonymous telephone data makes for fascinating research.

On the other hand, in the age of wholesale surveillance, where everyone collects data on us all the time, anonymization is very fragile and riskier than it initially seems.

Like everything else in security, anonymity systems shouldn't be fielded before being subjected to adversarial attacks. We all know that it's folly to implement a cryptographic system before it's rigorously attacked; why should we expect anonymity systems to be any different? And, like everything else in security, anonymity is a trade-off. There are benefits, and there are corresponding risks.

Narayanan and Shmatikov are currently working on developing algorithms and techniques that enable the secure release of anonymous datasets like Netflix's. That's a research result we can all benefit from.

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/shmat_netflix-prelim.pdf
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/netflix-faq.html
http://www.securityfocus.com/news/11497
http://arxivblog.com/?p=142

2001 IEEE paper:
http://people.cs.vt.edu/~naren/papers/ppp.pdf

De-anonymizing the AOL data:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE3DD...C8B63 or http://tinyurl.com/2dhgot
http://www.securityfocus.com/brief/286

Census data de-anonymization:
http://privacy.cs.cmu.edu/dataprivacy/papers/LIDAP-WP4a....html
http://crypto.stanford.edu/~pgolle/papers/census.pdf

Anonymous cell phone data:
http://arxivblog.com/?p=88

Wholesale surveillance and data collection:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/03/the_futur....html
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/05/is_big_br....html

by hmmmmm Thu Jan 17, 2008 12:25

I must admit till Mark brought our attention to this article in "The Guardian", I hadn't really given "Facebook" much thought. Yep, I'd noted the headline a few weeks back alledging employers are increasingly "screening" potential employees by turning to "Facebook". But I thought that was just another space filler, after all internet profiling is an old story but only recently has it been narrowed down from the plethora of blogs & rivals such as "myspace" to simply one service - "Facebook". http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/11/us/11recruit.html?ex=...=5070 Perhaps there is a subtle public opinion influence exercise going on? Have Facebook really become the Tesco of cyberpal websites? For now everywhere I turn in the European media, I find a "Facebook story". Top of the bill today is the news that "Facebook" users are campaiging to save the rip-off "scrabulous" game they get to enjoy as a perk of membership now that Mattel Toy Corporation have moved on from blaming the Chinese for everything. Of course Scrabble was a rip-off in the first place, people have been throwing letters about in bags for centuries using them either to tell runic fortunes or pass the time in wordplay. I'm sure none of us care which is the real letter game - "scrabulous or scrabble", so we ought only notice how in 24 hours 13,000 users of the site joined up to the cyber-protest. It took several days to clock up that many signatures to blaming China for Burma - just for comparison's sake, contrast's pith & priority sizing.

Today's RTE wonders at the likelihood of "Facebook" setting up its European operations in Dublin or Ireland http://www.rte.ie/news/2008/0117/facebook.html an idea getting the run-a-round in the Irish Times too. But oddly enough the Germans are wondering exactly the same thing as this interview between "Spiegel" and Alexander Samwer of the trio known as the "Samwer brothers" on the potential future of the business. ...."[the brothers] earned their first millions when they sold the online auction house Alando to eBay for more than $50 million in 1999. They later founded Jamba, a company that produces ring tones for mobile phones, and then sold it to VeriSign for more than $270 million in 2004. Since that time, the three have invested in a number of startups and, most recently, in Facebook. Alexander Samwer holds an MBA from Harvard Business School."
http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/0,1518,529....html

Ah! smell the gravy. So is their stake in Facebook as high as the €165m for a 1.6% which Microsoft paid? ...........do you really care?

Let's remind ourselves of an experiment carried out by "Sophos" a software company which sells products to protect us all from "viruses, spyware, adware, hackers, spam and phishing, and control VoIP, IM, games, and unproductive web browsing". Last August they created a facebook IS & used it to demonstrate how open to abuse by ID thieves the service is. Then to their chagrin the BBC consumer interest show "Watchdog" did the same thing & even went one step further dabbling credit card fraud to boot. [ c/f http://www.sophos.com/security/blog/2007/10/696.html http://www.bbc.co.uk/consumer//tv_and_radio/watchdog/re...shtml ]

by wageslave Fri Jan 18, 2008 01:45

This is quite funny (but also somewhat relevant to this topic ! :)

http://www.cracked.com/article_15825_internet-party-wha....html

by Love Coincidencs! Fri Jan 18, 2008 10:37

http://www.ejc/media-news/afp_reporters_barred_from_usi...rces/

AFP have banned their journos using wiki and facebook as source-

interesting how precious journalism has become, even the youth media network is advertising on
the newswire!

btw- it did not say how this ban would be instituted, but it calls to mind the PD Mc Dowell
whose attempts to 'rein in certain forms of newsgathering' causing a lot of ire....

[privacy and defamation bill 2006-2008]

by Mark C Mon Feb 04, 2008 22:38

FaceBook's Privacy Policy

http://www.boreme.com/boreme/funny-2007/facebook-privac...1.php

Mark.

by Pollytix Mon Feb 04, 2008 23:42

When I read the guardian article I put fingertip to keyboard and whittled an email out and got the reply below.

To whom it may concern,

There is a discussion below that there is a rights grab on Facebook.

http://www.lightstalkers.org/copyright-grab-by-facebook-

Looking forward to your reply,

And the response:

We appreciate your concern. Please note that it is highly unlikely that Facebook will ever use any material that you have uploaded to the site. It is even more unlikely that we would use this material or license this material for the financial gain of Facebook. For legal reasons, we must keep the following clause in our Terms of Use to protect ourselves from possible litigation:

"By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing. You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content. Facebook does not assert any ownership over your User Content; rather, as between!
us and
you, subject to the rights granted to us in these Terms, you retain full ownership of all of your User Content and any intellectual property rights or other proprietary rights associated with your User Content."

Additionally, all users retain the copyright for any information they post on the site and must obey all applicable copyright laws in their use of any information on the site, including the downloading or printing of any materials.

Please let us know if you have additional questions or concerns.

Thanks for contacting Facebook,

xxxxxxxxxx
User Operations
Facebook

by Mark C Tue Feb 05, 2008 09:50

Facebook say: "Please note that it is highly unlikely that Facebook will ever use"

This is simply a get out of jail free card. "Highly Unlikely"? Why not just say, "never", as in: "Facebook will never use material posted on its website for financial dot dot dot..."

Mark.

by polly tix Fri Feb 08, 2008 04:02

'Facebook has come under fire from photographers after it emerged that the social networking website claims a licence over any images posted onto the site.'

'Facebook did not return calls for comment.'

http://www.bjp-online.com/public/showPage.html?page=700094

by Benji Hardcore - The Hardcore Effect Wed Jan 07, 2009 17:35

My Main problem with facebook is that it has become rather gimicky, hell, if they wanted to use photos of me drunkenly slumped outside a fried chicken franchise, for whatever reason, thats cool. I just dislike that it has become everything that ruined myspace for the average user, and its stupid user agreement extends further than you may think;

http://thehardcoremanifesto.blogspot.com/2008/09/great-....html