Lawsuit Alleges Facebook Privacy Violations

From PC World:

Facebook has been accused of intercepting private messages of its users to provide data to marketers, according to a class-action lawsuit filed in a federal court in California.

The social networking company scanned plaintiffs’ private messages containing URLs (uniform resource locators) and searched the website identified in the URL for “purposes including but not limited to data mining and user profiling,” according to the complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

The company does not engage in the practice to facilitate the transmission of users’ communications via Facebook, but to enable it to mine user data and profit by sharing the data with third parties such as advertisers, marketers, and other data aggregators, the complaint said.

Facebook is said to have violated the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and California privacy laws by its intentional interception of electronic communications.  The complaint cites third-party research to back its claim that Facebook is intercepting and scanning the content of private messages.

Shielding Yourself from Prying Eyes and Algorithms on Google, Facebook and Twitter

A quick how-to on shielding yourself from online tracking by Google, Facebook and Twitter, from Mashable:

Many sites, apps and browsers are using your information in ways you might not entirely comply with if you'd take the time to read their privacy policies. Often, opting out is only a click away, though it may be difficult to find out where exactly to click. We've compiled this list of ways various Internet companies are tracking and using your data — plus, given you the tools to opt out, if you wish . . .

Is the GMail Model Legally a Wiretapping Scheme?

According to at least one court, it may well be.  From Wired:

A federal judge today found that Google may have breached federal and California wiretapping laws for machine-scanning Gmail messages as part of its business model to create user profiles and provide targeted advertising.

The decision by U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh was rendered in a proposed class-action alleging Google wiretaps Gmail as part of its business model. Google sought to have the federal case in California dismissed under a section of the Wiretap Act that authorizes email providers to intercept messages if the interception facilitated the message’s delivery or was incidental to the functioning of the service in general.

LinkedIn Accused of Hacking Users Address Books to Spam Their Contacts

Is anyone else sick and tired of getting spammed with email requests to join LinkedIn from family, friends and co-workers?  It appears that LinkedIn users are now sick and tired of having their contact lists surreptitiously mined and exploited by the service.  From Bloomberg:

LinkedIn, owner of the world’s most popular professional-networking website, was sued by customers who claim the company appropriated their identities for marketing purposes by hacking into their external e-mail accounts and downloading contacts’ addresses.

The customers, who aim to lead a group suit against LinkedIn, asked a federal judge in San Jose, California, to bar the company from repeating the alleged violations and to force it to return any revenue stemming from its use of their identities to promote the site to non-members, according to a court filing . . . 

Blue Jay: Police Twitter Surveillance App

Ars Technica has a lengthy and interesting piece on Blue Jay, a Twitter live feed scanner intended for use by law enforcement officers, from a company with connections deep inside the US intelligence bureaucracy.  From Ars:

  . . . the "Law Enforcement Twitter Crime Scanner," which provides real-time, geo-fenced access to every single public tweet so that local police can keep tabs on #gunfire, #meth, and #protest (yes, those are real examples) in their communities. BlueJay is the product of BrightPlanet, whose tagline is "Deep Web Intelligence" and whose board is populated with people like Admiral John Poindexter of Total Information Awareness infamy.

BlueJay allows users to enter a set of Twitter accounts, keywords, and locations to scan for within 25-mile geofences (BlueJay users can create up to five such fences), then it returns all matching tweets in real-time. If the tweets come with GPS locations, they are plotted on a map. The product can also export databases of up to 100,000 matching tweets at a time.

Facebook: "All Your Data Are Belong to Us"

Just in case there was any doubt, Facebook pwns your data.  From the WSJ:

Goaded by a court decision, Facebook just wants to make it clear: they really can use everything they know about you – including your face.

The company announced Thursday that it was updating its privacy policies to clarify how the personal information of its more than 1 billion users gets collected and used by advertisers. In a blog post, Chief Privacy Officer Erin Egan outlined section-by-section changes to two legal documents, the Data Use Policy and the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities.

“As part of this proposed update,” Egan says, “we revised our explanation of how things like your name, profile picture and content may be used in connection with ads or commercial content to make it clear that you are granting Facebook permission for this use when you use our services.”

New Gadget Provides Electrical Shock to Deter Facebook Use

From the LV Guardian:

Two PhD candidates were tired of being addicted to Facebook. They are after all, extremely busy with studying and need less interruptions and more focus. These two scholarly-aimed students decided to create an end to their Facebook distraction. Robert R. Morris and Dan McDuff put their collectively intelligent minds together, and devised a novel way to stop wandering minds and mouse clicks. The video at the end of this article, shows how the Pavlov Poke works. It is an accessory for the keyboard, where a user’s wrist rests upon it. Script is inputted for specific sites, say like Facebook; once the user has moved over to that site for a specific amount of time, the system releases a shock to jolt the user back to their studying habits . . .

Taxpayers Cover Costs of their Own Illegal Surveillance

From Engadget:

The mounting national debt? Yeah, you're probably better off just ignoring why exactly it's mounting. The Guardian is continuing the blow the lid off of the whole NSA / PRISM saga, today revealing new documents that detail how the NSA paid out "millions" of dollars to cover PRISM compliance costs for a multitude of monolithic tech outfits. As the story goes, the National Security Agency (hence, tax dollars from American taxpayers) coughed up millions "to cover the costs of major internet companies involved in the PRISM surveillance program after a court ruled that some of the agency's activities were unconstitutional." The likes of Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and Facebook are expressly named, and while Google is still angling for permission to reveal more about its side of the story, other firms have conflicting tales.

Huffington Post to Prohibit Anonymous Comments: Huffington Attacks Anonymous Speech

The Huffington Post, reportedly, will soon do away with the option of anonymous commenting on its website.  Justifying the change, Huffington herself cited the aggressiveness and ugliness of internet trolls and apparently argued that free speech rights essentially should not be extended to individuals who have not submitted to some kind of vetting process.  From the Boston Globe:

The days of anonymous commenting on The Huffington Post are numbered. Founder Arianna Huffington said in a question-and-answer session with reporters in Boston Wednesday that the online news site plans to require users to comment on stories under their real names, beginning next month.

“Freedom of expression is given to people who stand up for what they’re saying and not hiding behind anonymity,” she said. . . .

This last statement is highly offensive, no?  Freedom of expression is not "given" or granted to anyone, it is a human right.  I guess Huffington would have told the authors of the Federalist Papers to take a hike.

Facebook-Led Tech Group Seeks to Expand Internet Access

From the New York Times:

On Wednesday, Facebook announced an effort aimed at drastically cutting the cost of delivering basic Internet services on mobile phones, particularly in developing countries, where Facebook and other tech companies need to find new users. Half a dozen of the world’s tech giants, including Samsung, Nokia, Qualcomm and Ericsson, have agreed to work with the company as partners on the initiative, which they call Internet.org.

The companies intend to accomplish their goal in part by simplifying phone applications so they run more efficiently and by improving the components of phones and networks so that they transmit more data while using less battery power.

Depressed? Get Off Facebook

Concerned about your privacy?  You should probably logout of Facebook.  Concerned about your mental health and well being?  You should probably logout of Facebook.  From the BBC:

Using Facebook can reduce young adults' sense of well-being and satisfaction with life, a study has found.  Checking Facebook made people feel worse about both issues, and the more they browsed, the worse they felt, the University of Michigan research said.  The study, which tracked participants for two weeks, adds to a growing body of research saying Facebook can have negative psychological consequences.

Facebook has more than a billion members and half log in daily.  "On the surface, Facebook provides an invaluable resource for fulfilling the basic human need for social connection. Rather than enhancing well-being, however, these findings suggest that Facebook may undermine it," said the researchers.

Mega Encrypted Email Service in Progress

From ZDNet:

Kim Dotcom's "privacy company" Mega is developing secure email services to run on its entirely non-US-based server network as intense pressure from US authorities forces other providers to close.

Last week, Lavabit, which counted NSA leaker Edward Snowdon as a user, and Silent Circle both closed. Lavabit's owner, Ladar Levison, said he was shutting it down to avoid becoming "complicit in crimes against the American people".

Last week, Mega chief executive Vikram Kumar told ZDNet that the company was being asked to deliver secure email and voice services. In the wake of the closures, he expanded on his plans.

Kumar said work is in progress, building off the end-to-end encryption and contacts functionality already working for documents in Mega.

Instagram Hack Serves Up Fruit

Here's a funny little story from The Next Web:

An Instagram hack that posts pictures of fruit to users’ timelines has returned. We last saw the issue back in June.  Once again, the images – often of fruit but sometimes (as The Verge notes) of smoothies – are accompanied by text suggesting that the user is trying a new diet and encouraging others to follow a link that has been inserted into their bio.

US Tech Companies Take Economic Hit in Aftermath of Surveillance Revelations

From the Washington Post:

There has been a lot of speculation that the revelations about NSA surveillance program PRISM damaged the credibility of U.S. tech companies, especially with international clients who were the primary targets of the snooping operation. But now it’s starting to look like the snooping is hitting U.S.-based cloud providers where it really hurts: Their pocketbooks.

Computer World UK reports a recent Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) survey found 10 percent of 207 officials at non-U.S. companies canceled contracts with U.S. providers after the leaks, and 56 percent of non-U.S. respondents are now hesitant to work with U.S.-based cloud operators.

Yahoo Removes Adult and Erotica Blogs and Tumblrs from Search

From ZDNet:

When Yahoo bought Tumblr, it suggested that its adult and porn blogs would be left alone.  Users found out this wasn't true when a new adult blog search policy went public on Thursday, capping Tumblr's quarantine on adult content, which now also includes excluding adult blogs from Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines.

The changes render an estimated 10% of Tumblr's userbase invisible and unfindable.  Now, around 12 million Tumblr blogs marked "adult" have been removed from Tumblr's internal search; this follows the revelation two months ago that adult blogs were no longer indexed by Google, and the pre-sale removal of Tumblr's "Erotica" category from its category index.

Tumblr's "Erotica" category had been launched in January 2010 with much sex-positive fanfare - it would appear that the days of Tumblr's tolerance are long gone . . .

You've Been Skyped: Microsoft Provides NSA with Backdoor Access

The paranoiacs are proven right, yet again.  New documents reveal that Microsoft has provided the NSA with access to its users' audio and video chats on Skype, as well as email and message chat logs.  If you want secure messaging, you may have to revert back to carrier pigeons.  From Ars Technica:

Skype audio and video chats, widely regarded as resistant to interception thanks to encryption, can be wiretapped by American intelligence agencies, according to a new report in The Guardian. The report appears to contradict claims by Microsoft that it has not provided the contents of Skype communications to the government.

In a story published Thursday, based on documents leaked by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden, The Guardian offers some detail about extensive cooperation between the FBI, the National Security Agency, and Microsoft to enable government access to user communications via the intelligence tool known as PRISM. That cooperation included, according to the leaked NSA documents, enabling access to Outlook.com e-mails and chats, the SkyDrive cloud storage service, and Skype audio and video calls.

App Provides Visualization of Twitter Retweets

From Wired:

The online application Where Does My Tweet Go?, created by information architect Benoît Vidal and the team at MFG Labs in France, uses a visual algorithm to illustrate how your messages spread between your followers and strangers alike. Rather than looking at your Twitter feed and seeing an obscure number of retweets for a post, these graphs let you see how your messages travel and who moves them along in the Twitterverse. Vidal says that while they were inspired by how information gets out so quickly over the Internet, they were also inspired by their dissatisfaction with other applications that tracked your activity and gave you content suggestions, but did so in an invisible way.

UK Leads the Way on Social Media Surveillance and Spying

From Ars Technica:

The PRISM scandal engulfing US and UK intelligence agencies has blown the debate wide open over what privacy means in the digital age and whether the Internet risks becoming a kind of Stasi 2.0. The extent of the UK's involvement in this type of mass surveillance—which already appears exhaustive—shows just what a potential intelligence goldmine social media data can be.

But the monitoring of our online trail goes beyond the eavesdroppers in GCHQ.  For the past two years, a secretive unit in the Metropolitan Police has been developing the tools for blanket surveillance of the public's social media conversations. Operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week, a staff of 17 officers in the National Domestic Extremism Unit (NDEU) has been scanning the public's tweets, YouTube videos, Facebook profiles, and anything else UK citizens post in the public online sphere.

The intelligence-gathering technique—sometimes known as Social Media Intelligence (Socmint)—has been used in conjunction with an alarming array of sophisticated analytical tools . . .

Remote Desktop Feature Added to Google Hangout

From Geekosystem:

Getting started with Hangouts Remote Desktop is pretty basic. We just gave it a test drive, and everything went smoothly. The feature can be installed as an app in the hangout itself. It’s found under the “Add Apps” tab on the left of the screen. Once one person enables Remote Desktop, the other party can choose to accept or reject it. Now you’re free to click around the other person’s screen.

Trojon Virus Continuing to Spread Via Facebook

Just in case you needed to be reminded that you should always be cognizant of the links you click, the New York Times reports on a six year old piece of malware that continues to dupe Facebook users and drain bank accounts.  Excerpt:

a six-year-old so-called Trojan horse program that drains bank accounts is alive and well on Facebook.  Zeus is a particularly nasty Trojan horse that has infected millions of computers, most of them in the United States. Once Zeus has compromised a computer, it stays dormant until a victim logs into a bank site, and then it steals the victim’s passwords and drains the victim’s accounts. In some cases, it can even replace a bank’s Web site with its own page, in order to get even more information– such as a Social Security number– that can be sold on the black market.