Facebook should be illegal
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Dear Jennifer Stoddart,
Thank you for finally waking up to the gradual encroachment of Facebook into basic civil liberties. The advent of social networking has raised a huge number of issues regarding privacy and personal information, but there has been surprisingly little reaction to the way that sites such as Facebook hand out personal details to private companies. I’m delighted to see you take a stand.
The report published by the Canadian Privacy Commission, which you front, could have serious implications for sites such as Facebook as it concluded that the site is breaching Canadian law by holding on to users’ personal information indefinitely. While you accepted that Facebook regarded privacy issues as a top concern, you found ”serious privacy gaps in the way the site operates”. More than 200 million people actively use Facebook, including about 12 million in Canada - more than one in three of the population. Facebook’s policy of holding on to subscribers’ personal information, even after their accounts had been deactivated, was one area that breached Canada’s privacy laws, as organisations can only retain such information for as long as it necessary to meet appropriate purposes. The report said Facebook’s information about privacy practices was “often confusing or incomplete”, and urged the site to make its policies more transparent to users. Facebook was also criticised for failing to adequately restrict access of users’ personal details to some of the 950,000 developers in 180 countries who provide applications such as games for the site. In response, Facebook Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly said it was working with the commission to resolve the issues, while you have stated that you’ll review Facebook’s progress in 30 days. Under Canadian law, you can take the case to a federal court to have your recommendations enforced, if you so choose.
I think most people have realised that you need to activate some privacy settings on Facebook to prevent your profile being accessed by people who are not your ‘friends’ but, unknown to many, Facebook is still allowed to throw your personal information to developers. Facebook’s own privacy settings page says: “When a friend of yours allows an application to access their information, that application may also access any information about you that your friend can already see.” So, according to Facebook, if your friend signs up to an extra little programme on Facebook, it is perfectly acceptable to hand over all of YOUR personal information including your picture, date of birth, address, work history, relationship status, all of your photos and a whole lot more. How can this be legal in the UK? How can we have such little respect for people’s privacy that we allow a company to just hand over extremely personal information? Now, you could argue that no-one is forced to use Facebook and you don’t have to put too much personal information on there, but the way that Facebook is set up deliberately sets the default options to allow sharing of your personal details. This is totally unacceptable. Every website and company operating online should work on a simple premise: you can’t give out my personal information unless I actively allow you to do so. Preying on people’s ignorance or lack of IT skills in order to harvest personal information is wrong and Facebook is clearly not the only offender in this respect. However, unless we put in place some privacy laws that not only stop the paparazzi snooping on people’s private lives but also stops companies stealing personal information without permission, this situation will only get worse.
I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times – why do all the people who supposedly care about civil liberties when it comes to 42-day detention suddenly disappear when it comes to basic civil liberties such as protecting our privacy? Just like Facebook, Google Earth and Google Street View automatically assume that we don’t mind our lives and homes being splashed all over the internet so we are then playing catchup if we want to protect our privacy. This is outrageous and must not be allowed to continue. Unless I specifically tell a specific company that I don’t mind them sharing specific information that I hand over to them, no-one should be able to touch my personal details or private life, and the penalties for breaking such a law should be huge. I wish you all the best with cracking Facebook’s appalling attitude to data protection, and I hope that the British government are watching carefully.
Yours sincerely,
A.Tory
Witanagemot Blogs
I’m fairly sure that Facebook was founded with seed capital from the CIA. Which makes sense when you consider that the meta data on their servers shows ‘networks’ of social groups. After all, what intelligence agency anywhere, ever, wouldn’t want a map of who was friends with who everywhere? Even if its only 90% accurate, the basic utility of such rough intelligence can help guide more resource intensive operations on groups of interest.
That the new head of MI6 fell foul of it made me laugh as an Aunt of mine did some secret work for a very quiet bit of the US Government with another 3-letter acronym and she wouldn’t go anywhere near it. Whether this was from professionalism or pique at a rival agency pulling off such a coup is a question I don’t really expect to ever get answered.
As for whether our Government is watching carefully, I’d suggest that perhaps it is. If it is also in receipt of Facebook derived intelligence from the CIA under standard intel-sharing procedures then it would, of course, be arguable that the rest of their ham-fisted assaults on our privacy is a mere smokescreen to distract us from the wealth of data we are voluntarily giving the Intelligence community. It also means that extremist fascist groups and religious nuts who coalesce around and on Facebook are even more deeply retarded than you’d first think.
Intriguing theory. No doubt transatlantic intelligence is handed around quite freely, hence why Miliband crapped himself when the US threatened to withdraw it recently if he didn’t do what he was told. The wealth of data being handed over is indeed phenomenal – what I would give for a government who gave a crap and stood up for civil liberties. I’ve never heard Cameron talk about personal privacy either.
Back in 2000, Arthur C Clarke wrote a book where, due to the invention of another disruptive technology, privacy was effectively rendered impossible. Its called The Light of Other Days and, as with all the best Science Fiction, uses its central premise to explore what would happen to society under those circumstances.
Facebook et al aren’t there yet but as life moves to immitate art, even with current technology, its worth a read!
I bring this up as, elliptically, perhaps Dave doesn’t think privacy as a concept has any legs left due to the flow of technological progress. His close relationship with Google heads may mean that he has been captured by their ‘all your data belongs to us’ worldview.
The facebook thing is slightly concerning, but I do not share your objections to Google Earth or Google Street View. All they basically do is allow people to see what they would see if they walked down a public street (as they have every right to do), and I personally find Street View useful when navigating an unfamiliar city. As for google earth, what is so objectionable about people seeing your roof?
If you knew the number of posts I’ve done on Facebook, going into their antecedents,their procedures and their secretiveness …
It’s great to come here and see such a post and you can be sure I’ll be quoting from this.
Shaun and James, why didn’t you tell me about this sooner?! I didn’t realise how bad this was until I started doing some digging around.
MancU, Google Earth allows people to see details about your private property, which may not bother you but is still a breach of privacy. Google Street View is different, but it still displays your private property online – which is by definition publishing personal information. I know it doesn’t sound sinister, but it’s still taking personal information (what car you drive, how big is your home) and putting on the internet for other people to access without your permission.
That link to DARPA/Facebook was the result of three or four people feeding me data and I just collated it. If people knew the half of this, they’d never join. Once you’re in though, it’s like the mafia – there’s no leaving.
A picture of your house is ‘by definition publishing personal information’? That’s your definition perhaps, but nobody else’s. Anyone can look at my house on Streetview, but it doesn’t tell them who lives there, or any information about us. The same as walking past my house and looking at it. Of course, if you know my name and address you could arguably connect that with the photo – but that’s because you already found my name and address from another source – not from Streetview. And Streetview allows you to see which are big houses, or what cars are in the drive? NEWSFLASH – burglars already know that houses in Chelsea are owned by rich people, who all drive Mercedes 4×4s. They also know that it’s easier to steal from houses in Peckham. They don’t care how ‘big’ a house looks on Streetview.
Jonathon – I agree with you on Streetview and Earth – the former is available to anyone with eyes and transport and the latter anyone wealthy enough to afford access to an aircraft, hot air balloon or RC plane with camera. However, where it gets interesting is when streetview captures you outside a brothel or puking in the street. There’s no context for these photos and yes, you could argue fairly strongly that you could simply have been ovbserved in Real Time by a passer by or alternatively, that viewers would/should be sophisticated enough to know that it was a transient moment of time and not a picture of behaviour.
However, while I’m not a fan of the ’slippery slope’ argument, two things are indisputably true – technology advances and makes things that are expensive today cheap tomorrow and google will use these technologies to provide access to data it (rightly or wrongly) believes it should make available to everyone*. So in six or twelve months time, when they do a new streetview with Infra Red cameras to create a heatmap by areas, will you have the right to complain that people can now see through your wall that you have an electric blanket? And if so, what if I just drove past your house with my own IR camera – that would be okay no? And if not, how does that differ from standard optical imagery? And what about in a decade or so when unmanned drones provide this information in real-time enabling proper surveillance?
If this sounds far fetched, be aware how cheap thermal imaging has become and that even Night Vision goggles are now cheap enough to form part of a £120 premium console video game pack where games retail alone for £55 in that context (curse our floppy pound!).
*Where it gets interesting is that Google do, of course, make exceptions. If you are a nation state like the USA, Israel or, when our clowns get around to it, the UK (remember the recent GCHQ & SAS imagery kerfuffle) and ask them, they’ll kindly obscure facilities like Dimona. Equally if you are a repressive regime with 1.2bn people, they’ll block access to whatever the hell you like and call you sir (China) and to hell with their slogan ‘don’t be evil’. Its only if you are a powerless, wealthless peon that they’ll publish your data.
[...] to a report by the Canadian Privacy Commission, Letters from a Tory explains why Facebook should be illegal: “I think most people have realised that you need to activate some privacy settings on [...]