4 Months ago, after years of resisting, I finally joined Facebook for the first time. Half social experiment, half wanting to know what I was missing I concluded that in fact I was right and Facebook is bad news.
For the last few years I’ve been strongly fighting peer pressure to join Facebook.
From its introduction to the mainstream about 5 years ago I’ve had my suspicions about this website but I hadn’t really got a good enough argument, except that I had a feeling that there was something wrong about it.
But eventually, 4 months ago, I gave in, with the reason that my assumptions about it all were based on theory not experience, just like those who criticise books they’ve never read. So I swallowed my pride and took the plunge and set up a Facebook account, albeit in disguise as a bag of rice with a false name.
Privacy is an issue for me so I ignored all the sections available to input my interests and hobbies and ignored the random requests for friendships from friends of friends. Then I had to write my first status update.
What would I write? It had to be something ‘cool’. Something witty that would ingratiate me to my new public.
Unfortunately I did not record this audacious moment, but I do remember getting enthusiastic enough to post about 4 or 5 things in succession, unaware of the unsaid etiquette of not posting more than one or two things within a few hours of each other. Eventually realising this rule I rationed my posts, saving interesting videos for the next day if I’d already just posted something.
One of the things I came to notice about Facebook is the amount of information that is presented for ingesting. I ended my Facebook life with a modest 14 friends, which meant I wasn’t inundated with too much information – in fact I was left a little hungry at times – however, I can imagine for someone who has 200 friends, or for one of my ‘friends’ who had 2000 friends, the amount of information one is presented with, each day, must be astounding. The question is what happens when we are confronted with such an information glut?
What I found was that information lost its depth. Something was posted, watched, maybe commented on then it was quickly lost as the next mouthful of information was thrust in my direction. I quickly concluded that Facebook is not the best place to inform anyone of anything meaningful. It’s a good place to share cute kittens and weird fat men dancing to techno. Anything deeper is often taken equally as superficially as the kittens and fat men because it all merges into one constant stream.
Another affect I found that Facebook had on me was changing the way I thought.
I found myself thinking a lot about Facebook, even when I wasn’t on it. What was I going to write next? How would I write it? Who would be impressed and how could I impress the most people? From this I’ve discovered that I do not have the personality for using Facebook in a casual way.
Some people can use Facebook in a casual, light way, but I currently possess an extremely fragile ego that needs tons and tons of recognition and acceptance from my fellow man for me to feel good about myself. And I crave attention. This of course is an unhealthy way to exist and the task that is at hand for me is to break this habit and feel happy enough in myself to not need this esteem. Facebook, however, is like nicotine. But it’s not like a strong B&H, it’s more like a silk cut ultra, and I found myself going back and back for more to get the hit I wanted and knew I could get if I just said or did the right thing. In fact I did get a good hit at one point by posting an animation I made. And just to get every last ounce of juice I could from the praise I received I went back several times to look over the comments that people had left.
Facebook is bad news if you need the esteem of other people to feel good about yourself – which, it seems, could be nearly everyone in western civilisation.
Facebook is also a con. It is not a social networking site, not anymore anyway. Facebook wants to know what’s on your mind so that they can advertise that very thing back to you.
It’s a ‘focus group’ on a phenomenal scale. Like vampires, the marketers feed off our updates and shares so they can better understand what it will take to manipulate us into buying things we don’t need. There is a way you can turn the adverts off but sometimes the pages won’t work properly.
In fact unless you do everything Facebook says they will make it very difficult for you to use it. One of my friends had the experience of his interface changing to Timeline without his permission. There was nothing he could do, it seems, except submit to this new way of using the network. In another anecdotal incident a change in group settings ‘dictated’ (their word) that the user perform a labour intensive task that didn’t have to be done before. This is internet dictatorship.
Even in my own experience as I deactivated my account they wouldn’t let me go without telling them why I wanted to leave. And when you do want to leave Facebook uses guilt to try and keep you hooked, showing picture of friends that will ‘miss you’. How absurd and creepy! The fact that my account is never deleted, and I can always reactivate it just by logging back in, should send huge alarm bells off to us all about a more sinister intent of Facebook.
I’ll be strong enough to resist reactivation I hope because I believe that Facebook is an unwholesome way to communicate and is detrimental to the way we interpret reality and connect with each other. It encourages superficiality, narcissism, self-obsession, snooping, judging, takes up huge amounts of time and dramatically increases time spent on the internet, and it give the impression that you are staying in contact with friends, but because of this illusion I found that I actually communicated with them less, opting instead for sharing status updates that revolved around me.
Of course, just like any drug, it has its upsides and there are useful functions, but we survived for millions of years without it and its overall effect, in my opinion is a detrimental one.
We need to deeply consider the effects of this new way of communicating. It certainly makes things easier but is that always a good thing? And what will the consequences for our relationships be if we continue to use this very superficial way of connecting with others?
From its introduction to the mainstream about 5 years ago I’ve had my suspicions about this website but I hadn’t really got a good enough argument, except that I had a feeling that there was something wrong about it.
But eventually, 4 months ago, I gave in, with the reason that my assumptions about it all were based on theory not experience, just like those who criticise books they’ve never read. So I swallowed my pride and took the plunge and set up a Facebook account, albeit in disguise as a bag of rice with a false name.
Privacy is an issue for me so I ignored all the sections available to input my interests and hobbies and ignored the random requests for friendships from friends of friends. Then I had to write my first status update.
What would I write? It had to be something ‘cool’. Something witty that would ingratiate me to my new public.
Unfortunately I did not record this audacious moment, but I do remember getting enthusiastic enough to post about 4 or 5 things in succession, unaware of the unsaid etiquette of not posting more than one or two things within a few hours of each other. Eventually realising this rule I rationed my posts, saving interesting videos for the next day if I’d already just posted something.
One of the things I came to notice about Facebook is the amount of information that is presented for ingesting. I ended my Facebook life with a modest 14 friends, which meant I wasn’t inundated with too much information – in fact I was left a little hungry at times – however, I can imagine for someone who has 200 friends, or for one of my ‘friends’ who had 2000 friends, the amount of information one is presented with, each day, must be astounding. The question is what happens when we are confronted with such an information glut?
What I found was that information lost its depth. Something was posted, watched, maybe commented on then it was quickly lost as the next mouthful of information was thrust in my direction. I quickly concluded that Facebook is not the best place to inform anyone of anything meaningful. It’s a good place to share cute kittens and weird fat men dancing to techno. Anything deeper is often taken equally as superficially as the kittens and fat men because it all merges into one constant stream.
Another affect I found that Facebook had on me was changing the way I thought.
I found myself thinking a lot about Facebook, even when I wasn’t on it. What was I going to write next? How would I write it? Who would be impressed and how could I impress the most people? From this I’ve discovered that I do not have the personality for using Facebook in a casual way.
Some people can use Facebook in a casual, light way, but I currently possess an extremely fragile ego that needs tons and tons of recognition and acceptance from my fellow man for me to feel good about myself. And I crave attention. This of course is an unhealthy way to exist and the task that is at hand for me is to break this habit and feel happy enough in myself to not need this esteem. Facebook, however, is like nicotine. But it’s not like a strong B&H, it’s more like a silk cut ultra, and I found myself going back and back for more to get the hit I wanted and knew I could get if I just said or did the right thing. In fact I did get a good hit at one point by posting an animation I made. And just to get every last ounce of juice I could from the praise I received I went back several times to look over the comments that people had left.
Facebook is bad news if you need the esteem of other people to feel good about yourself – which, it seems, could be nearly everyone in western civilisation.
Facebook is also a con. It is not a social networking site, not anymore anyway. Facebook wants to know what’s on your mind so that they can advertise that very thing back to you.
It’s a ‘focus group’ on a phenomenal scale. Like vampires, the marketers feed off our updates and shares so they can better understand what it will take to manipulate us into buying things we don’t need. There is a way you can turn the adverts off but sometimes the pages won’t work properly.
In fact unless you do everything Facebook says they will make it very difficult for you to use it. One of my friends had the experience of his interface changing to Timeline without his permission. There was nothing he could do, it seems, except submit to this new way of using the network. In another anecdotal incident a change in group settings ‘dictated’ (their word) that the user perform a labour intensive task that didn’t have to be done before. This is internet dictatorship.
Even in my own experience as I deactivated my account they wouldn’t let me go without telling them why I wanted to leave. And when you do want to leave Facebook uses guilt to try and keep you hooked, showing picture of friends that will ‘miss you’. How absurd and creepy! The fact that my account is never deleted, and I can always reactivate it just by logging back in, should send huge alarm bells off to us all about a more sinister intent of Facebook.
I’ll be strong enough to resist reactivation I hope because I believe that Facebook is an unwholesome way to communicate and is detrimental to the way we interpret reality and connect with each other. It encourages superficiality, narcissism, self-obsession, snooping, judging, takes up huge amounts of time and dramatically increases time spent on the internet, and it give the impression that you are staying in contact with friends, but because of this illusion I found that I actually communicated with them less, opting instead for sharing status updates that revolved around me.
Of course, just like any drug, it has its upsides and there are useful functions, but we survived for millions of years without it and its overall effect, in my opinion is a detrimental one.
We need to deeply consider the effects of this new way of communicating. It certainly makes things easier but is that always a good thing? And what will the consequences for our relationships be if we continue to use this very superficial way of connecting with others?
Comments
Hide the following 25 comments
in ya mout
17.02.2012 00:00
fish hook
ive never used facebook
17.02.2012 00:28
but the fact that you have reminded me facebook exists several times may mean i will eventually get curious
and they have leveraged your free time and effort to promote their business to me
do you ever get the feeling you have been conned
x
hear hear!
17.02.2012 00:53
why have a secrete police when we confess with such willness? it makes our domestication all to easy
KEEP CALM AND LOG OF, BREAK THE NET AND SWIM FREE!
xXx
burn the i pods not thbe books!
listen to others
17.02.2012 00:59
Joining something you know to be shit and then complaining it's shit...
wake up. ffs.
easy
this isn't news
17.02.2012 01:00
why?
Its an individual's choice
17.02.2012 01:23
Just like Marmite
Just because you've had a bad vibe about it, doesn't mean that there isn't people who are hugely benefiting from it. I find it particularly useful to keep tabs on the social side / events of the clubs i'm members of.
anon
this is the sort of thing that should be on facebook
17.02.2012 02:02
bollocks to it all
mark zuckersomethingberg
Indymedia should use Facebook "like" buttons
17.02.2012 03:12
Someone "likes" an article, their friends see the link, they click on it and then "like" it.
Thats how the internet works today. Social media marketing is proven to improve traffic to a site.
However, seems everyone is poo-pooing it because it is an evil capitalist organisation.
I take it that a lot of you use Windows or iOS, both made by evil capitalists.
Then of course there is the hardware you are using + the internet infrastructure + the power companies electricity.
anon
Like Ketamine before it, I loose my friends one by one to it.
17.02.2012 05:56
I was the only kid in my town with a computer for a large part of my childhood. for me, I was born with a connected machine in the house.
At the time, "the internet", wasn't the only network. there would be dozens of dial in networks, darknets and chat-rooms full of hackers.
No one had an identity, only alter egos. The only reason you might put your real name on the internet (Or any other network) is for official business. it was a world of geeks/ nerds/ hackers/ techies. it was clear to everyone that eventually, this will explode and reach the general population. But we liked our little niche. You were anonymous in as far as it would take some effort from anyone to track who you are in real life.
For most people the internet was a novelty fax machine.
In the mid naughties something awful happened. most people call it web 2.0, but it's actual name is ajax. this allowed for website interaction to be a lot more like the applications that most people had some experience with. It became intuitive, you no longer had to have any understanding of the inner working of your machine to do anything. Viruses changed a lot in their nature. from a malicious program which deletes all your files and copies itself on your diskettes, they evolve into vicious creatures which steal your identity and flog it on some darknet by the killo.
It's no longer the dark secret place that was run by a select few enthusiasts, it's not a playground with unwritten rules. it's more like Oxford street where everyone is naked and only a handful knows it.
I can sit in an internet cafe for an hour and capture dosens of logins for all sorts of services, because people don't know they should be using https. I can put my router near the window for a day and capture hundreds of phones because no one knows never to "automatically connect to an open network", I can pawn all of the machines on the building block because no one knows of the (recently disclosed) WPS vulnerability. I have automated tools to own any home machine I want. once I'm on it, I can know who you are, sometimes better then you do. I can look in your cache, I can steal your encryption keys and pretend to be you, I can look into your flash cookies which hardly anyone even knows exist, let alone delete. and I can come back any time I want from anywhere in the world because I can leave a backdoor. Of course I don't do these things, not anymore.
it's no fun anymore. it used to be a challenge, now it's a chore. in the old days, you would break into a machine of someone in the irc chatroom, and then tell them to close this port to this kind of traffic etc, now the temptation would be to sell you by the killo for a nice amount of bitcoins, or to make some purchases with your card details, or even just to turn your mic on and listen in on you silently. all these things are easily achievable, I know how easy they are to do, and this makes me trust my own machine very very little. In principle, anything you don't want to be on the front page of the telegraph shouldn't me on a machine.
I am by no means a super hacker, there are plenty of hackers out there who are way better at their thing than me. But all of these things, these dangers that no one takes seriously pale, shrivel and die in comparison to what you give to facebook/youtube/twitter etc. It doesn't take a genius to know that the police no longer need you to make an in depth psychological analysis of everything you do on the internet. since everything is so easily available, your activity, your likes and dislikes, the friends you keep, the ones you keep away from, the amount of time you spend in cyberspace etc. all these things can be analysed to a T by a psychologist.
If in the past the feds would have to use a small paper file on you, now they have all they need to know available with a couple of phone calls.
You keep on chanting the mantra, facebook is a useful tool, but it's not, you are the tool, the product is you, and the consumer is the state, advertisers, law enforcement etc. If you use facebook for political propaganda, who do you think they are going to come to? It will not matter whether you broke any law, because, this is the dark world of the internet, the one few understand. the laws do not apply here, suspicion is equivalent to proof, fabrication is easily done, and you no longer are facing the local bobby who has to follow the law (I know, I know...), you are facing people who can make you disappear without a trace.
You must be ignorant if you think this is empowering you to reach a wide audience. if you were a real threat to the stability of the state you would not be able to use facebook, which in this role serves as a pressure valve to make the state understand dissidence long enough in advance to take precautions, target the right people, break up networks (of people), intercept communications, change message contents, and watch us from the ivory towers secure in the knowledge that any revolution will start and end on facebook.
xyz
facedick...
17.02.2012 10:06
....we need to use our facedick page and our email list and our blog....
annoying but if we need numbers for a demo then it's a tool we need to use....as for the endless posts of SHITE...yep, i ignore em, say what i have to say then get out. If we could get the numbers onto our blogs or lists then we could ignore facedick but alas those days are past us and we must use what we can to do what we can....when i socialise it's in person, not online cus thats shit.....
good article!
farseekill
With Facebook, you are the product, not the customer
17.02.2012 10:42
And there are a lot of people (see: comment "Its an individual's choice") who are seduced by the "shiny things" Facebook offers them. It is a little sad that people feel their social life relies around sharing every aspect of it with a faceless corporation, but there you go.
If you live a good obedient boring consuming little life, maybe what you do on Facebook won't come back to haunt you. But if you are in the slightest bit concerned with changing things for the better or doing anything that some people might frown on, beware.
anon
@poster
17.02.2012 13:44
Balls
@XYZ
17.02.2012 17:29
iRebel
To the author
17.02.2012 21:13
But it sounds like you didn't delete your account properly. There's a full explanation on this page:
You can properly delete your account so that they *claim* to delete all your info - you are deactivated for 2 weeks (but can log back in and reactivate at any time so switch all applications off, delete all links etc) but if you don't log back in for 2 weeks you're allegedly gone for good.
The page above explains and I believe (can't check as I don't have facbeook any more) that the proper link to the deactivate button is:
If you log back in to reactivate your account and then go to that link it should be all good.
sdlfkg
Thanks for that info!
17.02.2012 22:57
iRebel
I think people are over-reacting
17.02.2012 23:16
Yes, sure, if you are a criminal or involved in criminal activity then more the fool you for putting it on facebook. However, most people arn't criminals.
Fcebook is just a website that millions of people find useful. There seems to be a handful of philistines on here who have opinions, but those opinions are massively in the minority.
Most sound like doddery old folk who are warey of new technology and ideas.
When cashpoints came out, there was the same kind of comments.
Hell, there are some tribes in the world that still think the camera takes away your soul.
The next generation of people will be used to Facebook and wont have these paranoias.
XYZ states that web2.0 is ajax. This is incorrect......
web2.0 was born out of the idea of user-generated content, ie. people being able to contribute to the content of the website eg. a blog or facebook. Ajax is just a technology that is commonly (but not exclusively) used to develop web2.0 style sites. There are plenty of web2.0 type sites that have user content that don't use Ajax.
The idea that Web2.0 sites are "bad" is crock. It depends how you use them.
I keep tabs on the sports clubs i'm joined with through facebook, it really is just a "notice board" to me, but done on a computer rather than in physical form - whats the problem with that? Its useful. Just because you lot don't lead that lifestyle doesn't mean facebook is bad - it means that facebook is inappropriate for your lifestyle.
Lastly, this rubbish about you being the product, not facebook being the product blah blah
Utter Shiteeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
Making such a mountain out of a molehill.
What you need is a backbone, willpower and self-confidence to be able to be immune to a few banner adverts. If you think that is going to be an issue, then im afraid you shouldn't be using the internet fullstop, because nearly every website in existance is trying to sell something.
Even Indymedia, its full of articles telling you how to think and what to do.
Perhaps you should avoid these, if you dont have the confidence to handle a facebook advert?
anon
facebook was not invented by teh state
17.02.2012 23:21
Fortunately, we don't like a country like North Korea where this is probably true. We have a lot of freedom here.
>>>>>>> which in this role serves as a pressure valve to make the state understand dissidence long enough in advance to take precautions
lol! Facebook was NOT developed as a "pressure value" for state use!!!!!!
Go and read some history books on facebook and educated yourself about how it evolved.
dumbass
Making money for Facebook
18.02.2012 01:01
Now read this about the data mining that corporate retailers are doing, where they know before families do that family members are pregnant, it's long but very interesting:
How Companies Learn Your Secrets
There are lots of very good reasons for people who don't get involved in political activity not to use Facebook, never mind activists...
However activists are making use of facebook, libcom for example:
How do you find our use of social networking?
What is it going to take to get people off corporate sites like Facebook when activists are taking to it like this?
Chris
"We are the product........."
18.02.2012 02:01
So we better stop using google then.
And Yahoo
And Bing
Oh and twitter because that has sponsored links that are targeted to you
And Gmail
And Hotmail
It is going to be a bit difficult to use the Internet if I can't use anything where "i'm the product" and it is paid for by targeted advertisement. I guess ITV, Channel 4 and 5 are out of the question also. I think people need to get a grip otherwise you might accidently end up living under a rock.
anon
Indeed "anon"...
18.02.2012 02:08
Also install ad blockers and bug blockers, eg
Chris
Too long; don't read!
18.02.2012 06:29
It's not so much about it being free, and yes you sell a little bit of yourself whenever you use google or youtube, it's just that to facebook you give out tons and tons of info about yourself, this is the product, other people who also put their lives on FB also provide this product, It's more complicated then this, but basically you are both a consumer and a product. You wouldn't use FB if you couldn't snoop on the lives of others, and they wouldn't use it if they couldn't, but at the same time you all provide your life to it as the product, FB itself does not create any significant content, it just feeds on the content we provide it, which often is "our lives". Other customers like advertisers also feed on that data as the product.
Ok, AJAX is not exactly "Web 2.0". Web 2 is just a buzz word for a style of technology which often relies on AJAX. Flash, MVC, ruby on rails and plenty of other platforms combined make what people call Web 2.0. Ajax in itself isn't evil, it's just annoying.
What's evil is how far away people's understanding on how these work, and how little effort people are willing to devote to learning these things for online anonymity.
I highly recommend using No Script, as it allows you to selectively block different sites. Google Analytic for example is deployed in almost all websites, and is used to collect statistical marketing data, but it can be blocked. This doesn't stop it from snooping altogether, as some of the actions you take are reported directly from the site, but it limits the data collection to the site, whereas javascript runs locally on your machine and is a lot more intrusive.
And this gets us to iRebel's question: It is possible to hack into phones. and has been done in the past. On rooted iPhones, it used to be the case that the default root password allowed anyone from the network to log into your phone. Once you log in, and I am not sure exactly how iOS works, but you need access to the mic device which is probably something like /dev/dsp. If you have ssh and permissions to access that device then a line like :
ssh -C -Y root@yourip dd if=/dev/dsp | dd of=/dev/dsp
should allow you to listen on to the mic. The camera works in a similar way. I don't know exactly, but I would (if I needed to do that) do the same thing as above, only changing the input file to /dev/video0 and the output to some local file, then figure out how to convert that file to mpeg. (I'm more of a Linux person but it should be similar on iOS in principle).
If you join a network, then naturally all internet traffic would be routed through that network, if any of the applications you use are vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks then you can do things like steal passwords or read emails. if any of the applications are vulnerable to packet injection attacks then you can almost certainly gain the application's execution privileges, once you have those then it's usually trivial to escalate to the highest privileges. Encrypted traffic is significantly harder to trick, but sometimes possible, when it is, it often relies on the fact that people don't pay attention to that little lock thing in the corner or don't check the certificate chain.
Again, it depends on the particular target you have, some iPhones can be flushed using javascript. the way this works is that when running javascript, the browser compiles the JS code to binary to run on your device, by clever manipulation, you can put tailor made binary into the code (in a variable), when the execution reaches this data it thinks it's binary instructions and carelessly runs them (This is way over simplified). in principle this can be done on any javascript running browser, so most browsers execute(Or should) that JS in what they call a sandbox , which is a restricted execution environment. but even those can often be broken out of by all sorts of methods like buffer overflow. these are considered quite complicated attacks. none-the-less, javascript can do all sorts of things that you don't want it to.
In firefox, press ctl+shift+k, this will open a console which briefly lets you know what the browser is doing, almost all sites when loaded throw some exception, this often means they have some exploitable component, you then have to figure out what it is. but this is getting into web application exploitation which is kinda off topic. so... in short the answer is yes if it's electronic it's exploitable, a good hack can take months to plan out and execute. I don't know what back doors are built into each device, but if I had to guess I would say that most of them have a manufactured backdoor. Also, there are very talented people working on making sure they can own your device.
this is all a really really big topic, and it's critical that as many people as possible spend the time and effort learning what these vulnerabilities are. On a brighter note, when you know these things it makes it significantly harder to attack you. This gives little comfort if you assume that your adversary is better equipped and more talented than you, but at least you know they had to work harder to get there.
One fun thing to do is this: Buy a mobile internet USB card and a sim. put set it up to connect to the internet. you will get an address and a netmask from the DHCP of your provider. say it's 169.10.11.23, the netmask would be something like 255.255.255.254, using ifconfig change that:
ifconfig ppp0 169.10.11.23 netmask 255.255.255.0 #then run
nmap -sP 169.10.11.1/24
This will show you all the phones that are connected on your subnet, probably this means all the phones on the same phone mast. (And don't do it from your home either). A while a go there was an iPhone virus which spread this way on rooted phones...
If you are using tor (If not then why not?) then there is a very good hidden service called hackbb, it's a sort of forum for fraudsters, hackers and thieves, but it has plenty of info which you can use to protect yourself:
Ok, I can talk about this forever, and this is a massive topic, so I'll leave you with these questions: If you drive a car, you might not know how all the bits inside fit together, but you have some intuitive idea about how the motor works, and how the gears work, would you drive a car if you had no intuitive understanding of at least the basic mechanics of it? Have you got this sort of intuitive understandings on how the computer/phone works and how different data is transmitted on your connected devices? Do you trust the providers of these services to act in your best interests? And should you be using those if you don't? at the end of the day it's your choice.
xyz
Surveillance is endemic
18.02.2012 13:04
FortiusOne / GeoIQ -mobile phone visualization on maps
RedSeal Systems -security testing
Network Chemistry - RFprotect -WiFi security
Veracode -application security testing
ArcSight -Threat and Risk Management software
rz
re: I think people are over-reacting
18.02.2012 13:15
Except of course it is true. And it isn't even a new idea, the same was being said about commercial TV in the 1970s:
Richard Serra "Television Delivers People" (1973)
(apologies for the Youtube link)
"What you need is a backbone, willpower and self-confidence to be able to be immune to a few banner adverts"
If only it were that simple - and with TV it's true - that is all you need to do. But the internet is two-way - it really is as Orwell predicted in 1984 where the screens watch you as you watch them.
Just look at the people making jokes on Facebook about the riots and getting locked up for years. Thoughtcrime, anyone? Google knows everything you searched for ever. What about all the people in Iran, China and other places getting locked up or even executed for things they have said on the internet?
Facebook is doubleplus ungood.
Social media doesn't have to be centralised, there are alternatives being worked on like Diaspora
anon
re: "We are the product........."
18.02.2012 13:24
I think you're getting it! Basically centralisation of anything is generally not a good thing, because it puts too much power in the hands of too few people. Can we not agree on that? Power corrupts, etc?
The main people criticising these things are usually far from Luddites - they tend to be people with the technical understanding to know the implications of these things. People who don't see a problem with Facebook etc. tend to be the ones who don't really understand what sort of data is being collected on them and how it could be used against them.
I know it's not always trivial to find alternatives, given the "network effect" and social pressures. But who said life was easy?
anon
.
19.02.2012 09:50
funding
The Pentagon will invest up to 42 million dollars in a program that will monitor and influence social media websites, such as twitter.
Inktomi Corp - network infrastructure software
Visible Technologies -Social Media monitoring
Attensity - Social search engine
cyber-threat-summary
us-dhs-leftwing-extremist-cyber-threat
ARGENTINA: FUGITIVE HACKER RETURNS TO ARGENTINA AND THREATENS TO TELL ALL
exploitation-of-chinese-internet-2007
China
fbi---ellectronic-surveillance-of-public-voip
IP numbers
Surveilance
Virtual Reality -1993
Inference and Cover Stories -1993
Unofficial Vocabulary -1991
Error Messages: The Importance of Good Design -1992
NSA's Analysis and Reporting of Foreign Spaceborne Reconnaissance -1994
Infiltrating the military with fake routers
A court in Texas sentenced the Saudi Arabian-born Ehab Ashoor to four years imprisonment May 6, for trying to sell counterfeit Cisco routers, manufactured in China, to the military base administered by the U
Vital Infrastructure, But Not Hacker-Proof
Arrested by the FBI on June 26, Jesse McGraw was accused of taking over control of the ventilation system of a hospital in Dallas.
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Nicola