All the hoopla over the Wall Street Journal’s so-called Facebook “privacy breach” article, it’s subsequent and curiously-timed MySpace followup, and also the New York Times’ take on the ability of Facebook advertisers to target ads for nursing schools to gay men is unwittingly creating cover for a social networking privacy issue that’s much bigger. It might be surprising to some, but it turns out that U.S. federal agents have been urged to “friend” people in order to spy on them.
The feds operate such social sting operations aided by the fact that there are very few individuals that actually know every single person in their “friend” list on Facebook. For instance, it is typical to connect to someone because one thinks they might have met them. Or, a connection might take place because two people share common interests and want to view each other’s news posts going forward. But that’s not how the government sees it.
In a memo obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) discovered that the Feds see Facebook as a psychological crutch for the needy. Here’s a direct quote from a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) memo: “Narcissistic tendencies in many people fuels a need to have a large group of “friends” link to their pages and many of these people accept cyber-friends that they don’t even know.” And it gets worse.
The memo explains that these “tendencies” provide “an excellent vantage point for FDNS to observe the daily life of beneficiaries and petitioners who are suspected of fraudulent activities.” Translation: spy on unsuspecting people on Facebook and MySpace in order to catch the bad guys.
Such tactics are decidedly creepy (how many completely innocent people are they spying on), but the argument could be made that if you have nothing to hide, then why worry? Here’s why: many people post items to their profiles that they forget to update or that are not necessarily true, and which they certainly wouldn’t be saying if they knew they were under investigation. Indeed, a recent study initiated by UK insurance company Direct Line concluded that “people are more likely to be dishonest when chatting using technology, such as Twitter, than they would be face to face.”
Why is it that people might lie more on social media than in person? According to Psychologist Glenn Wilson, “we sometimes use these means of communication rather than a face-to-face encounter or a full conversation when we want to be untruthful, as it is easier to fib to someone when we don’t have to deal with their reactions or control our own body language.” This leads to a few common sense conclusions.
First, government officials need to take note that one should not believe everything one reads on the Internet—even if it is generated by a “person of interest.” Second, as the EFF’s Jennifer Lynch pointed out, “the memo makes no mention of what level of suspicion, if any, an agent must find before conducting such surveillance, leaving every applicant as a potential target.” In a country that prides itself on freedom of speech, government should not be in the business of creating an atmosphere that could chill expression.
On October 18th, Congressmen Edward Markey (D., Mass.) and Joe Barton (R., Texas) sent Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg a letter in which they expressed their concern about marketing companies that “gathered and transmitted personally identifiable information about Facebook users and those users’ friends.”
To many tech folks, it seems more than a bit hypocritical for government representatives to be going after Silicon Valley companies for using social networking data when the government is doing exactly the same thing itself (and more). In addition to bureaucrats urging agents to befriend targets, the EFF also discovered that the Department of Homeland Security used “a ‘Social Networking Monitoring Center’ to collect and analyze online public communication during President Obama’s inauguration.” And, recall how Google Maps has been used to track down hoes with “unpermitted” pools in Long Island, NY. Those Big Brother moves are much more disconcerting than Facebook applications using referrer URLs to better target ads.
Editor’s note: Guest author Sonia Arrison is a senior fellow in technology studies at the San Francisco-based Pacific Research Institute and has been writing about privacy issues for over a decade. Follow her on Twitter @soniaarrison.
Photo credit: Flickr/nolifebeforecoffee.
After watching the cleantech industry develop for several years, I feel like it’s now at a key transition point.
Finally, utilities across the country are upgrading their technologies and as such the electrical grid is turning into something analogous to the Internet.
Just as the Internet circa 1996 was suffering from congestion and inefficiency, so the nation’s power grid in 2010 is suffering from bottlenecks and blackouts. And while the Internet’s growth spurred the need for sophisticated routing and security technology from Cisco and a generation of other companies such as Juniper, Cerent and Siara, so the electrical grid needs an upgrade to exploit smart transformers. And there’s a lot of money that can be made from investors who back these “core” technologies. “This is what we’re paying attention to,” says Vinod Khosla, a venture capitalist who backed companies during the Internet era and made billions, but who is now backing grid companies.
Also, the urgency to combat climate change hasn’t diminished, despite the failure of federal legislation recently.
There’s only one place where the industry’s top minds will debate the problems and identify new billion-dollar opportunities, and that’s VentureBeat’s GreenBeat 2010 conference.
You still have time to put yourself in the mix at a special rate. Register by tomorrow evening, Saturday, October 23, and you’ll get a special earlybird discount of 30 percent. Our 2010 conference on green investing will be held Nov. 3-4 at Stanford University, and is cohosted by SSE Labs, a student-run organization.
The theme is “Charging the Supergrid.” We’ll be debating the big challenges of green investing today. Cleantech is moving into a new stage, where venture capital isn’t enough. Green businesses need to tap public markets to get the capital to make big changes in our infrastructure. We’re starting to see some IPOs in key sectors like electric vehicles and biofuels. But public-market investors are still skittish and the success stories are few and far between.
Here are some of the topics we’ll tackle:
- New electric vehicles are rolling out from Nissan, Coda, General Motors, and more. The utilities are saying the grid needs an upgrade to charge them up for the road. Both sides will mix it up on stage. It promises to be, literally, an electrifying debate.
- Consumers need to be motivated to go green. The rollout of smart meters has proven to be pretty dumb. What’s needed: New policies? Monetary incentives? Better marketing? Smarter technologies? And could the green sector learn something from social media and the gamification movement?
- A super-grid infrastructure push to match the information superhighway that blossomed in the 1990s. Green venture-capital pioneer Vinod Khosla, a longtime skeptic of the smart grid, will lay out what’s required to build networked intelligence into the super grid.
Here are some of the recently confirmed speakers:
- Scott Lang, President & CEO, Silver Spring Netwoks. He leads the smart grid company that everyone is expecting to file for iPO soon
- Kevin Surace, CEO, Serious Materials. He’ll bring focus on buildings, another part of the “edge” that we’re focusing on this year
- Scott Hublou from EcoFactor, one of the coolest young companies shaking up consumer energy management and demand response.
- Kevin Skillern, Managing Director of Venture Capital at GE Energy Financial Services, in charge of choosing which new smart grid technologies to fund at the smart grid giant GE.
- David Merkoski Executive Creative Director, Frog Design, who will explore how frog’s work with smart meters, solar panels, in-home energy readers, thermostats, eco-packaging and more has shaped groundbreaking shifts in consumer’s behavior.
See why GreenBeat 2010 is a can’t-miss event? Register now to get a special discount, and I’ll see you in November.
Next Story: VCs get onboard with design-it-yourself offerings Previous Story: Blizzard classics not coming to App Stores any time soon
Juan Williams: Fox <b>News</b> Lets 'Black Guy With A Hispanic Name' Host <b>...</b>
Juan Williams said Tuesday that he's still upset about his firing from NPR, and added that NPR does not understand the Fox News culture or audience. In an interview with Baltimore Sun columnist David Zurawik, Williams said he remains ...
Google donates $5 million for <b>news</b> innovation to Knight Foundation <b>...</b>
Google and news organizations have had a rocky time of it. To overdramatize the situation only slightly: Google insists that it cares about journalism as a.
Shepard Smith Inks New Fox <b>News</b> Deal – Deadline.com
EXCLUSIVE: Fox News Channel's signature news anchor Shepard Smith has signed a new multi-year deal to continue as the channel's lead news anchor as well as anchor of FOX Report and Studio B. Smith's most recent pact with Fox News inked ...
bench craft company complaints
bench craft company complaints
Juan Williams: Fox <b>News</b> Lets 'Black Guy With A Hispanic Name' Host <b>...</b>
Juan Williams said Tuesday that he's still upset about his firing from NPR, and added that NPR does not understand the Fox News culture or audience. In an interview with Baltimore Sun columnist David Zurawik, Williams said he remains ...
Google donates $5 million for <b>news</b> innovation to Knight Foundation <b>...</b>
Google and news organizations have had a rocky time of it. To overdramatize the situation only slightly: Google insists that it cares about journalism as a.
Shepard Smith Inks New Fox <b>News</b> Deal – Deadline.com
EXCLUSIVE: Fox News Channel's signature news anchor Shepard Smith has signed a new multi-year deal to continue as the channel's lead news anchor as well as anchor of FOX Report and Studio B. Smith's most recent pact with Fox News inked ...
bench craft company complaints bench craft company complaints
All the hoopla over the Wall Street Journal’s so-called Facebook “privacy breach” article, it’s subsequent and curiously-timed MySpace followup, and also the New York Times’ take on the ability of Facebook advertisers to target ads for nursing schools to gay men is unwittingly creating cover for a social networking privacy issue that’s much bigger. It might be surprising to some, but it turns out that U.S. federal agents have been urged to “friend” people in order to spy on them.
The feds operate such social sting operations aided by the fact that there are very few individuals that actually know every single person in their “friend” list on Facebook. For instance, it is typical to connect to someone because one thinks they might have met them. Or, a connection might take place because two people share common interests and want to view each other’s news posts going forward. But that’s not how the government sees it.
In a memo obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) discovered that the Feds see Facebook as a psychological crutch for the needy. Here’s a direct quote from a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) memo: “Narcissistic tendencies in many people fuels a need to have a large group of “friends” link to their pages and many of these people accept cyber-friends that they don’t even know.” And it gets worse.
The memo explains that these “tendencies” provide “an excellent vantage point for FDNS to observe the daily life of beneficiaries and petitioners who are suspected of fraudulent activities.” Translation: spy on unsuspecting people on Facebook and MySpace in order to catch the bad guys.
Such tactics are decidedly creepy (how many completely innocent people are they spying on), but the argument could be made that if you have nothing to hide, then why worry? Here’s why: many people post items to their profiles that they forget to update or that are not necessarily true, and which they certainly wouldn’t be saying if they knew they were under investigation. Indeed, a recent study initiated by UK insurance company Direct Line concluded that “people are more likely to be dishonest when chatting using technology, such as Twitter, than they would be face to face.”
Why is it that people might lie more on social media than in person? According to Psychologist Glenn Wilson, “we sometimes use these means of communication rather than a face-to-face encounter or a full conversation when we want to be untruthful, as it is easier to fib to someone when we don’t have to deal with their reactions or control our own body language.” This leads to a few common sense conclusions.
First, government officials need to take note that one should not believe everything one reads on the Internet—even if it is generated by a “person of interest.” Second, as the EFF’s Jennifer Lynch pointed out, “the memo makes no mention of what level of suspicion, if any, an agent must find before conducting such surveillance, leaving every applicant as a potential target.” In a country that prides itself on freedom of speech, government should not be in the business of creating an atmosphere that could chill expression.
On October 18th, Congressmen Edward Markey (D., Mass.) and Joe Barton (R., Texas) sent Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg a letter in which they expressed their concern about marketing companies that “gathered and transmitted personally identifiable information about Facebook users and those users’ friends.”
To many tech folks, it seems more than a bit hypocritical for government representatives to be going after Silicon Valley companies for using social networking data when the government is doing exactly the same thing itself (and more). In addition to bureaucrats urging agents to befriend targets, the EFF also discovered that the Department of Homeland Security used “a ‘Social Networking Monitoring Center’ to collect and analyze online public communication during President Obama’s inauguration.” And, recall how Google Maps has been used to track down hoes with “unpermitted” pools in Long Island, NY. Those Big Brother moves are much more disconcerting than Facebook applications using referrer URLs to better target ads.
Editor’s note: Guest author Sonia Arrison is a senior fellow in technology studies at the San Francisco-based Pacific Research Institute and has been writing about privacy issues for over a decade. Follow her on Twitter @soniaarrison.
Photo credit: Flickr/nolifebeforecoffee.
After watching the cleantech industry develop for several years, I feel like it’s now at a key transition point.
Finally, utilities across the country are upgrading their technologies and as such the electrical grid is turning into something analogous to the Internet.
Just as the Internet circa 1996 was suffering from congestion and inefficiency, so the nation’s power grid in 2010 is suffering from bottlenecks and blackouts. And while the Internet’s growth spurred the need for sophisticated routing and security technology from Cisco and a generation of other companies such as Juniper, Cerent and Siara, so the electrical grid needs an upgrade to exploit smart transformers. And there’s a lot of money that can be made from investors who back these “core” technologies. “This is what we’re paying attention to,” says Vinod Khosla, a venture capitalist who backed companies during the Internet era and made billions, but who is now backing grid companies.
Also, the urgency to combat climate change hasn’t diminished, despite the failure of federal legislation recently.
There’s only one place where the industry’s top minds will debate the problems and identify new billion-dollar opportunities, and that’s VentureBeat’s GreenBeat 2010 conference.
You still have time to put yourself in the mix at a special rate. Register by tomorrow evening, Saturday, October 23, and you’ll get a special earlybird discount of 30 percent. Our 2010 conference on green investing will be held Nov. 3-4 at Stanford University, and is cohosted by SSE Labs, a student-run organization.
The theme is “Charging the Supergrid.” We’ll be debating the big challenges of green investing today. Cleantech is moving into a new stage, where venture capital isn’t enough. Green businesses need to tap public markets to get the capital to make big changes in our infrastructure. We’re starting to see some IPOs in key sectors like electric vehicles and biofuels. But public-market investors are still skittish and the success stories are few and far between.
Here are some of the topics we’ll tackle:
- New electric vehicles are rolling out from Nissan, Coda, General Motors, and more. The utilities are saying the grid needs an upgrade to charge them up for the road. Both sides will mix it up on stage. It promises to be, literally, an electrifying debate.
- Consumers need to be motivated to go green. The rollout of smart meters has proven to be pretty dumb. What’s needed: New policies? Monetary incentives? Better marketing? Smarter technologies? And could the green sector learn something from social media and the gamification movement?
- A super-grid infrastructure push to match the information superhighway that blossomed in the 1990s. Green venture-capital pioneer Vinod Khosla, a longtime skeptic of the smart grid, will lay out what’s required to build networked intelligence into the super grid.
Here are some of the recently confirmed speakers:
- Scott Lang, President & CEO, Silver Spring Netwoks. He leads the smart grid company that everyone is expecting to file for iPO soon
- Kevin Surace, CEO, Serious Materials. He’ll bring focus on buildings, another part of the “edge” that we’re focusing on this year
- Scott Hublou from EcoFactor, one of the coolest young companies shaking up consumer energy management and demand response.
- Kevin Skillern, Managing Director of Venture Capital at GE Energy Financial Services, in charge of choosing which new smart grid technologies to fund at the smart grid giant GE.
- David Merkoski Executive Creative Director, Frog Design, who will explore how frog’s work with smart meters, solar panels, in-home energy readers, thermostats, eco-packaging and more has shaped groundbreaking shifts in consumer’s behavior.
See why GreenBeat 2010 is a can’t-miss event? Register now to get a special discount, and I’ll see you in November.
Next Story: VCs get onboard with design-it-yourself offerings Previous Story: Blizzard classics not coming to App Stores any time soon
bench craft company complaints
Juan Williams: Fox <b>News</b> Lets 'Black Guy With A Hispanic Name' Host <b>...</b>
Juan Williams said Tuesday that he's still upset about his firing from NPR, and added that NPR does not understand the Fox News culture or audience. In an interview with Baltimore Sun columnist David Zurawik, Williams said he remains ...
Google donates $5 million for <b>news</b> innovation to Knight Foundation <b>...</b>
Google and news organizations have had a rocky time of it. To overdramatize the situation only slightly: Google insists that it cares about journalism as a.
Shepard Smith Inks New Fox <b>News</b> Deal – Deadline.com
EXCLUSIVE: Fox News Channel's signature news anchor Shepard Smith has signed a new multi-year deal to continue as the channel's lead news anchor as well as anchor of FOX Report and Studio B. Smith's most recent pact with Fox News inked ...
bench craft company complaints bench craft company complaints
Juan Williams: Fox <b>News</b> Lets 'Black Guy With A Hispanic Name' Host <b>...</b>
Juan Williams said Tuesday that he's still upset about his firing from NPR, and added that NPR does not understand the Fox News culture or audience. In an interview with Baltimore Sun columnist David Zurawik, Williams said he remains ...
Google donates $5 million for <b>news</b> innovation to Knight Foundation <b>...</b>
Google and news organizations have had a rocky time of it. To overdramatize the situation only slightly: Google insists that it cares about journalism as a.
Shepard Smith Inks New Fox <b>News</b> Deal – Deadline.com
EXCLUSIVE: Fox News Channel's signature news anchor Shepard Smith has signed a new multi-year deal to continue as the channel's lead news anchor as well as anchor of FOX Report and Studio B. Smith's most recent pact with Fox News inked ...
bench craft company complaints bench craft company complaints
Juan Williams: Fox <b>News</b> Lets 'Black Guy With A Hispanic Name' Host <b>...</b>
Juan Williams said Tuesday that he's still upset about his firing from NPR, and added that NPR does not understand the Fox News culture or audience. In an interview with Baltimore Sun columnist David Zurawik, Williams said he remains ...
Google donates $5 million for <b>news</b> innovation to Knight Foundation <b>...</b>
Google and news organizations have had a rocky time of it. To overdramatize the situation only slightly: Google insists that it cares about journalism as a.
Shepard Smith Inks New Fox <b>News</b> Deal – Deadline.com
EXCLUSIVE: Fox News Channel's signature news anchor Shepard Smith has signed a new multi-year deal to continue as the channel's lead news anchor as well as anchor of FOX Report and Studio B. Smith's most recent pact with Fox News inked ...
bench craft company complaints bench craft company complaints
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