Thursday, June 27, 2013

Facebook's Other Face; Profiles and Shadow Profiles

Facebook is asserting an unique claim. It claims to have more rights to your data than you do. If suppose you, like me, are not a Facebook user but you gave your email address, phone number, and street address to a friend who was good enough to upload his contact list to Facebook. Since legally once you gave your information to your friend it became his and since he gave it to Facebook it's none of your damn business what they do with it. A tongue in cheek quip from Slate puts it this way;
Congratulations: You’ve just donated all of your friends’ and colleagues’ email addresses and phone numbers to that social network’s internal database. If you’re lucky, its employees will treat your friends’ contact information with more respect than you just did.
The inadvertent disclosure of data by Facebook of some 6 million users has not drawn a lot of attention either in the mainstream media or the political blogosphere so it is probably news to many that Facebook not only disclosed its users personal data but also the data of non users. Furthermore the data disclosed was not the data furnished by the users but also a "shadow profile" it had constructed by, for want of a better verb, spying on its users and any non user whose data was divulged by users.
Ed Snowden, where are you when we need you? If the Facebook fiasco has been mentioned in the mainstream media I am not aware of it. It has been written about at Slate, ZD Net and a few technical blogs but as far as I know my own single post is the only entry on a political blog. Does not the fact that personal data of millions Americans is stored on private sector servers that have in the past been compromised by hackers interest anyone? We have heard about the many safeguards that NSA employs lest essentially the same data collected by Facebook be misused but while James Clapper lied about collecting personal data Facebook has never been asked the same question. The question arises how much data does Facebook have on its users? In the video below Facebook had collected 1,222 .pdf files on an Austrian user, Max Schrems with only 234 friends. Imagine the files Facebook has on Sarah Palin or better yet another prominent user, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
In Europe, where Silicon Valley does not fund raise for presidents or surreptitiously fund so called Tea Party Republicans to do it bidding on immigration reform, Facebook does not have it so easy. Any user can demand to know what data Facebook has collected on him. Might I suggest the same right should be extended to all Americans, Facebook users and non users alike? And what about the famous Obama data base that Congresswoman Maxine Waters brags “That database will have information about everything on every individual in ways that it’s never been done before?" Should not every voter have a right to know what the Democratic Party knows about them?


 

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