Loss of Privacy

In the past week, two stories have arisen that should give any Facebook user concern over the privacy of their Facebook accounts.

Facebook has introduced its timeline feature in which old posts would be available under their new, and downgraded, privacy settings. Users need to clean up their histories themselves as Facebook has enabled this option for everyone.

If you logged onto Facebook yesterday, perhaps you caught a link at the top of the News Feed that read: “About Ads: Ever wonder how Facebook makes money? Get the details.” The answers provided some context on the news that starting in January, Facebook will start integrating a type of ad, called “sponsored stories,” that display your friends faces next to content they have “liked” in larger-sized ads your News Feed mix. “Facebook makes its money from showing you ads,” the company told consumers yesterday and with the ramp up to its spring 2012 IPO, the social network is getting serious about that endeavor.

In what seemed like an unrelated move, in September, Facebook announced a brand new type of profile called Timeline, where your whole personal history is laid out by month-by-month, all the way back to your birth. At the time, Facebook described it to consumers as a chance to: “Share and highlight your most memorable posts, photos and life events on your timeline. This is where you can tell your story from beginning, to middle, to now.” By the end of this year all 800 million plus Facebook profiles will have been converted to this new interface.

Timeline is centered around making Facebook money.

Disguising ads as your friends’ updates is being offered up as an antidote to the dismal click-through rates for traditional web advertising. Sponsored stories in your feed and sidebar ads based on your friends’ likes will become ubiquitous. Indeed in marketing materials, Facebook says these new premium ads are 90 percent accurate, compared to the industry average of 35 percent. “When people hear about you [the brand] from friends, they listen.”

sponsored stories are different from ads in that a user’s name or profile might appear alongside the ad,  ”If you’ve liked that business’s page, the story about you liking the page (including your name or profile photo) may be paired with the ad your friends see.”

Facebook is currently being sued in California over the issue of ads that people have liked. It depends on the users how much they will tolerate from Facebook’s new sponsored stories in their Timeline.

In Australia, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) found that it is perfectly legal for anyone to take photos from facebook and use them in their news stories as the photos are not private.

“The ACMA made it clear that while it considers the use of privacy settings an important consideration when assessing material obtained from social networking sites, the actual settings are not determinative,” the regulator noted.

Instead, the regulator will determine matters taken before it on a case-by-case basis.

The ACMA’s CyberSmart web site advises that “even if your profile is private, you can’t control what your friends do with the information you post”.

“Don’t post photos or information that you wouldn’t want anyone else to see,” it states.

Here, the ACMA is advising people that you shouldn’t really trust anything on Facebook because 1) it’s not going to be private anyway and 2) if you don’t want your information shared, don’t share it. A person may assume that, since they have tagged a photo as private, if they share it with just one other person, their control of that photograph is now out of their hands. Anyone who sees the photograph can copy it and move it to a more public area on their Facebook page or send them to a third party. Although the sharing of the photograph violates copyright, the question of any damage done is still up for debate.

It is understandable that the general public’s idea of privacy and Facebook’s are diametrically opposed. The public only wants certain people to see their information. Facebook desires to monetize everything about a person, thus the less private it is the better for the company. The general consensus on Facebook, or any other social networking site, is that nothing on Facebook is private. It doesn’t matter if you’ve marked something as private. Consider that it isn’t private and the information will be leaked one way or another.

Always remember, if you are not paying for the service, you are not the customer, you are the product. On free social networking sites, such as Facebook, your information is worth money to Facebook and they will use it to make a profit.

The FBI is adding facial scanning, iris scanning, and palm scanning to its biometrics databases at the Criminal Justice Information Services Division (CJIS) and its getting some help from the DOD to accomplish this mission.

CJIS is responsible for information repositories–such as the National Crime Information Center, the Interstate Identification Index, and the National Instant Criminal Background Check System–that provide law-enforcement officers with real-time data on people’s criminal history, stolen property, missing persons, and other information.

The additional biometric information will be added to the system that can already track fingerprints.

CJIS processes about 140,000 requests a day through the system, double the number it could handle on a good day a few years ago, he said. Moreover, the algorithm is allowing the FBI to match fingerprints at 99% accuracy versus 92%, which was the previous norm.

The FBI also added facial-recognition and iris-scan systems to its biometrics matching system–which is gradually replacing its predecessor, the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System–and next year will be able to match palm prints for the first time, he said.

To further its work in biometrics, the FBI is teaming with the Department of Defense to build a Biometrics Technology Center on its FBI campus in Clarksburg, West Virginia, Cutherbertson said. The center, which will focus on research to advance biometrics technology, is due to be completed in spring of 2014. “It will be a tremendous resource to carry us into the future,” Cutherbertson said.

With the inclusion of multiple points of biometric data, the FBI hopes to improve security at home. The research conducted at the new Biometrics Technology Center will also allow the FBI to accomplish one of its other goals, biometrically identifying individuals on the internet.

From The Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

Technology now exists that can allow a government security agency to secretly and remotely install a small piece of software on your mobile phone. This will turn it into a device that can trace your location, listen in to your conversations, and even take pictures of you and the people around you using the built-in camera.

This video showcases technology offered by Italian software company Hacking Team. The company claims its software can be installed on phones running popular operating systems, including the Apple iPhone, BlackBerries, and phones running Windows Mobile.

In Video: Phone Tracking from TBIJ on Vimeo.

Following Digital Breadcrumbs To ‘Big Data’ Gold

What do Facebook, Groupon and biotech firm Human Genome Sciences have in common? They all rely on massive amounts of data to design their products. Terabytes and even zettabytes of information about consumers or about genetic sequences can be harnessed and crunched.

The practice is called big data, and as the term suggests, it is huge in both scope and power. Analyzing big data enables anything from predicting prices to catching criminals, and has the potential to impact many industries.

The Search For Analysts To Make Sense Of ‘Big Data’

Businesses keep vast troves of data about things like online shopping behavior, or millions of changes in weather patterns, or trillions of financial transactions — information that goes by the generic name of big data.

More malls are testing out the latest technology to track individuals while they shop at the mall.

Starting on Black Friday and running through New Year’s Day, two U.S. malls — Promenade Temecula in southern California and Short Pump Town Center in Richmond, Va. — will track guests’ movements by monitoring the signals from their cell phones.

“We won’t be looking at singular shoppers,” said Stephanie Shriver-Engdahl, vice president of digital strategy for Forest City. “The system monitors patterns of movement. We can see, like migrating birds, where people are going to.”

Still, the company is preemptively notifying customers by hanging small signs around the shopping centers. Consumers can opt out by turning off their phones.

This is a disingenuous response from the company as it is already known that turning off the phone will still leave you subject to being tracked.

The tracking system, called FootPath Technology, works through a series of antennas positioned throughout the shopping center that capture the unique identification number assigned to each phone (similar to a computer’s IP address), and tracks its movement throughout the stores.

The system can’t take photos or collect data on what shoppers have purchased. And it doesn’t collect any personal details associated with the ID, like the user’s name or phone number. That information is fiercely protected by mobile carriers, and often can be legally obtained only through a court order.

“It’s just not invasive of privacy,” she said. “There are no risks to privacy, so I don’t see why anyone would opt out.”

The risks to privacy include the fact that the data collected with the cell phone can be matched to video surveillance cameras in the mall. Your credit card information is also tracked when you make a purchase. Once vendors start to share the information, how anonymous is that data really going to be when joining these databases is such an easy task?

“Most of this information is harmless and nobody ever does anything nefarious with it,” said Sucharita Mulpuru, retail analyst at Forrester Research. “But the reality is, what happens when you start having hackers potentially having access to this information and being able to track your movements?”

This is precisely why this sort of research shouldn’t be conducted. The risks outweigh the data that the company can cull later. Just how easy is it to gather the data? Go to the mall with an android phone and start up DroidSheep. Within minutes, you’ll have a nice collection of facebook logins.

As I have suggested before, take the battery out of your phone before you leave for the mall or leave it at home. It’s the only way to be sure you won’t be tracked.