People Freak Out About Privacy On Facebook, But Ignore Widespread Government Surveillance
from the sad dept
Reason has a great (if disappointing) post noting the very different reactions from both the press and the public to silly and exaggerated stories about privacy issues around Facebook as compared to the Senate reapproving the FISA Amendments Act, which has almost certainly allowed massive surveillance of and collection of data and communications from millions of Americans. You'd think the latter would deserve more attention, but nope.The post, by Scott Shackford, notes that you can't just blame the media for failing to cover the FISA Amendments Act votes -- they're just responding to what the public wants. And because Facebook seems more "real" to people than the NSA recording all their info, it seems to hit closer to home, even if one is a real abuse of privacy, and the other isn't.There's currently nothing on the New York Times web site about the votes (either yesterday's or today's). The Associated Press wrote a story about the House's vote in September but nothing yet from yesterday or today. The Washington Post did post a story this morning. A Google news search will land hits with mostly tech or web-based media outlets.
Compare the lack of response to the way people react to privacy breaches connected to Facebook or Twitter. Media outlet after media outlet carried reports about a private picture of Randi Zuckerberg, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's sister, accidentally being made public somehow through social media channels. And how many of your Facebook friends posted that silly, pointless "privacy notice" on their walls?
As he points out, this is why it's been so important for the government to keep the details of its spying program a secret. If people realized that the government really was sweeping up all sorts of data, they might realize that this directly impacts them too. But, that's all secret.The degradation of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments is an academic or theoretical matter for so many people and often lacks a strong human narrative to draw public outrage. Indeed, the very secrecy behind the application of federal domestic wiretapping has made it impossible to introduce a human narrative. We do not even know how many Americans have been spied on due to these rules (which was what Wyden's amendment was trying to fix). Like our foreign drone strikes and indefinite detention laws, the public's distance from the actual rights violations (and government-fueled fears of acts of terrorism) is a useful barrier for the state to get away with expanding its authority beyond the Constitution's limitations without significant voter pushback.
Whereas, just about everybody's on Facebook. Facebook's privacy systems affect them directly every day, and they see it. So Americans are furious that Instagram might sell their photos, while shrugging at what the federal government might do with the exact same data.
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Filed Under: comparison, fisa, nsa, privacy, surveillance
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People Freak Out About Privacy On Facebook, But Ignore Widespread Government Surveillance
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Try saying that and keeping a straight face.
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Re:
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Dear OOTB
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Dear OOTB
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Re: People Freak Out About Privacy On Facebook, But Ignore Widespread Government Surveillance
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People Freak Out About Privacy On Facebook, But Ignore -- GOOGLE.
Take a loopy tour of Techdirt.com! You always end up at same place!
http://techdirt.com/
Where "no evidence of real harm" means let secretive mega-corporations continue to grow.
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Re: Re: People Freak Out About Privacy On Facebook, But Ignore Widespread Government Surveillance
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Heh
I found this out myself when I went public with Blizzard secretly watermarking all screenshots produced by the game World of Warcraft. Even though a lot of people agreed that Blizzard should have mentioned this in the Terms of Service, a large number of trolls, I mean, people, stated that they don't mind having their account data secretly watermarked if it helps Blizzard catch bad guys performing game hacks.
The problem was/is that the watermarked data were/are unencrypted, so anyone could have decoded them, thus continuously stalking uninformed gamers.
People are getting more and more used to the idea that personal data gathering is used for their own protection/benefit, without realizing that, be it private companies or government agencies, the same rule always applies: "You will be treated as guilty, just in case you ever decide to actually break bad".
PS: Techdirt didn't even mention the Blizzard watermark issue. Why Mike, why? :P
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Re: People Freak Out About Privacy On Facebook, But Ignore -- GOOGLE.
keeping its lists, and checking them twice no doubt.
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Hammer them all
Look, the holy grail of private companies is to have us all using mobile devices that feed everything we do into databases which can then be used and sold to marketers. The government doesn't really want to monitor every citizen to the extent that private companies do. And I am pretty sure that these companies amassing all this data on people would be very happy to provide it to governments for the right price. As they say, data is the new oil.
If anything, I think the private companies want to shut out government so that the private companies are the only ones in possession of all this info on private citizens and then they can sell it to governments. Really, government intelligence often involves private contractors anyway.
The game is to lessen laws on private companies gathering data and shift the focus to governments, so the private companies get a free pass and governmental agencies stay out of their way. It's not really about privacy protection at all.
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The Wiretapping miracle
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People freak out about privacy on facebook because they feel they can have an impact on the policy.
People do not freak out about widespread government surveillance because they feel they can not have an impact on the policy.
I think this is also a sign of a significant difference in how much respect or the expectations people have for the government and facebook.
Sadly this would mean people respect facebook more than the government. Excluding doing it pointlessly, ie freaking out at a rock, raising commotion or freaking out is a human response based on the assumption that the other party can be reasoned with to achieve a desired response. In this case, the government is treated similar to a petrified turd while facebook is treated more like a person.
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its not like the FBI was datamining using outside information brokers and funneling the results to terrorism fusion centers.
Er wait...
Nevermind
http://www.justiceonline.org/commentary/fbi-files-ows.html
Its nice that the banks also get the benefit of the data and being able to carry out spy operations on citizens exercising those silly rights we are supposed to have.
But then more people care and vote for the next American Idol than president...
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People don't care about privacy unless it obviously impacts them.
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Re: Hammer them all
This. It's like the whole "death panels" scare. While the concern was definitely overblown to Logan's Run-level proportions, it still boiled down to a simple point: do you want your access to healthcare determined by private entities who need not answer to anybody, or the government which (ideally) we as people have some control over?
Same deal with the TSA. Airport security run by the government, who we elect, or private companies who are basically allowed to run roughshod over people's rights?
Exactly. Anyone who has studied espionage and data-collection by military agencies et al quickly learns that an over-abundance of information is usually their problem, not a lack of it. 9/11, for instance, only seems foreseeable in hindsight because it's easy for us to now disregard the hundreds of thousands of meaningless communiques intercepted by the NSA at the time.
Private companies on the other hand never know what information might turn out to be valuable, so they keep it all. (Hell, just think about the average freeloader's media collection full of movies and music s/he'll never find time to listen to, yet it's all held on to in hope that it might turn out to be useful). To the government, a post about what you ate for dinner can be ignored immediately, but Google might like that info! The encryption and data retention methods employed by private companies far outpaces the government. Famously, Google's data centers alone pull the equivalent power of 200,000 US homes.
Quoted for emphasis.
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Re: Hammer them all
It's true that in general the government isn't interested in you. But once they do get interested in you, they want everything about you, whether it's relevant to the reason they originally got interested in you or not, and whether the original reason was related to crime or just simple curiosity.
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Re: Re: Hammer them all
Be wary about government monitoring all you want. I just don't want to give private data collection a pass. I hope the pressure is put on Facebook, Google, and the like so that people are aware of how much info they are collecting. They aren't necessarily the "good" guys here.
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Re: Re: Hammer them all
If the information is available for sale to clients, I'm sure the info can be be purchased by government, either directly by a government agency or via a private company acting on the government's behalf.
Also, many websites say that while they won't "sell" your information, they will make it available to "partners." That leaves a lot of doors open.
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Re: Re: Re: Hammer them all
Indeed, and they do. Remember those price lists that were leaked last year? Major telecoms have them for law enforcement agencies, telling the LEOs how much it costs for various kinds and quantities of their customer information.
Constitutional protections largely do not exist when you're dealing with a private entity. They can, and do, sell your information directly to the government and anyone else they wish. No warrant needed. Often, they just give it away.
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Re: People Freak Out About Privacy On Facebook, But Ignore Widespread Government Surveillance
the blind leading the naked, again.
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Warrantless surveillance
Unfortunately many Americans can't wrap their head around the word "warrantless".
They like the idea that the government is wiretapping suspected terrorists, but they don't appear to understand or have an interest in the idea that wiretapping a person who is suspected of terror or other criminal activity is not the same thing as tapping anyone, anytime, for any reason that law enforcement desires.
Warrants are a paper trail that protect us from government employees acting in a malevolent fashion. Warrants ensure that a second opinion about the necessity or appropriateness of the tap is obtained. Law enforcement complains that warrants get in the way and they don't have time in an emergency situation.
My response to all of the above is to compare to the medical community. Physicians must do their paperwork if they want to operate. Imagine a surgeon who could do anything he/she wanted during an operation but was not required to have any paper-trail to document it. Without question the public would be less safe.
With respect to emergent situations, I do not see that a warrant requirement has to slow down law enforcement. We have doctors on call in order to keep the public safe from middle of the night emergencies. There is no reason that judges couldn't be on call for middle of the night emergencies as well.
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Re: Warrantless surveillance
I don't think it is enough to say government can't have the data but data collectors and their clients can have it.
At the very least, consumers need to know how to use tools to inhibit that data collection. And if tracking blockers screw up online advertising and the web companies they support, so be it. If we end up stepping away from mobile because it is location-based, so be it. If we decide not to use Google broadband because it gives Google too much control over our lives, so be it. If Facebook goes down the tubes because it can't be trusted, so be it.
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This is after all my best interest and I am sure not leaving it for others to do "the right thing" here.
The government is doing what it is doing because people don't seem to care, well, the day everyone starts to secure their communications is the day that the government will be forced to come open and try to stop people from being secure all the time, that is the time when a human narrative will appear.
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Re: Re: People Freak Out About Privacy On Facebook, But Ignore -- GOOGLE.
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In a way is like people not freaking out about seeing smoke, they try to find out where it is coming from and freak out only when they can see the fire for real, this is a good thing me thinks.
Facebook showed to them and so people freaked out, the government can be a bit more stealth, but ultimately if all people start securing or a large number of people start securing their communications, the government will have to reveal themselves, also this kind of thing promotes the creation of secure communications.
http://www.hacker10.com/encryption-software-2/3-ways-to-encrypt-your-voip-calls/
http://sourceforge.net/directory/os:windows/freshness:recently-updated/?q=secure+voip
You see the ultimate faith of your own privacy in this case fortunately lies in the hands of each and everyone of us, not the government, they would have to take away the right to people to communicate securely if they wanted to spy on that, and when that happens the shitestorm will come also.
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Re: Re: People Freak Out About Privacy On Facebook, But Ignore Widespread Government Surveillance
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Re: Re:And the govt will keep a list.
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difference
tl;dr : The perception of most is that Facebook is for profit and their government is for the common good
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Re: Re: Warrantless surveillance
The only thing that works with certainty is a firewall with outbound blocking ability. Most consumer firewalls don't block outbound traffic, and even if you run those that do, they are somewhat of a pain to manage because they not infrequently hinder your online experience. Using outbound blocking requires the user to use judgement, and to take the time to manually unblock at times.
IT security firms have largely ignored outbound firewall strategies and have only focused on what to keep out instead.
If you wonder why the most popular computer security programs don't have outbound firewalls, well here's a little fact they don't want you to know: Many of the big name security and anti-viral firms are actually right in there purloining your data for sale to others. They are scarcely any different in this regard that the companies who more openly acknowledge that they take your information. To name a couple of names -- AVG and Symantec.
Furthermore Microsoft has a long history of aiding and abetting anyone who wants to get data out of your computer by making tools such as LSP and more recently WFP technology which can allow silent interception of all of your IP traffic, including SSL. WFP is embedded in the kernel and is meant to be undetectable and not removable. Microsoft does not provide the user with any way to prevent this kind of activity.
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I feel like this is completely out of my control. I feel that the people in general are helpless when it comes to choosing what legislation gets passed and which doesn't. Sure you could go protest, but who has time for that, or who can afford to sit day after day protesting? You may delay the passing of one bill, but then as soon as you go back to work/home they pass on another. It's so depressing...
Their occupation is governance while mine can't be defending my rights 24/7.
This is why I generally don't read these articles. It makes me feel like crap and not in control. I know it's like burying my head in the sand but it's so depressing reading and watching my rights being taken away little by little and feeling like I can't do anything about it.
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Governments need major trimming
GOVERNMENT IS NOT REASON, IT IS NOT ELOQUENCE, IT IS FORCE. LIKE FIRE, IT IS A DANGEROUS SERVANT AND A FEARFUL MASTER…” - George Washington
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Re: People Freak Out About Privacy On Facebook, But Ignore Widespread Government Surveillance
GOVERNMENT IS NOT REASON, IT IS NOT ELOQUENCE, IT IS FORCE. LIKE FIRE, IT IS A DANGEROUS SERVANT AND A FEARFUL MASTER…” - George Washington
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ps: You get the paper back annotated if you are lucky in some places you actually have to pay to know what was wrong with the filling, commonly a proxy of sorts like a guy who "understands" how it works and helps you out, which is a guy who has a friend inside who approves that BS.
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Or rather, those in power have gone mad drunk with that power?
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Re: Re: People Freak Out About Privacy On Facebook, But Ignore Widespread Government Surveillance
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If a ______ proposes solution #1, then you have people automatically against the idea with no comprimise whatsoever. If 'well a _____ came up with that so you know it can't be good' is someone's reasoning, there is no logical reasoning and it's not productive to even bother communicating with them.
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Re: Re: Re: People Freak Out About Privacy On Facebook, But Ignore Widespread Government Surveillance
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Re: Re: Re: People Freak Out About Privacy On Facebook, But Ignore Widespread Government Surveillance
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It isn't either/or, it is both
If your information is being amassed by anyone, it is available to hackers, to private companies, to government. That's the big problem. A networked world is a world with decreasing privacy unless we take steps no one has yet fully taken. Most companies WANT to decrease your privacy because there is money to be made in knowing everything about you.
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Re: Re: People Freak Out About Privacy On Facebook, But Ignore Widespread Government Surveillance
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"Privacy"
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"Privacy"
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Re: It isn't either/or, it is both
Google Requires People to Use the Google Social Network, Gains Ground Against Facebook - WSJ.com: "Both Facebook and Google make the vast bulk of their revenue from selling ads. But Facebook has something Google wants: Facebook can tie people's online activities to their real names, and it also knows who those people's friends are. Marketers say Google has told them that closer integration of Google+ across its many properties will allow Google to obtain this kind of information and target people with more relevant (and therefore, more profitable) ads."
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Re: Re: It isn't either/or, it is both
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Re: Re: Hammer them all
I would think of it as security run by the government, who doesn't give a crap about passengers (citizens), or by airlines, who need to satisfy their customers to stay in business? And what makes you think the TSA is accountable to anyone or respects people's rights?
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Social media and privacy will become yet a bigger issue
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Re: People Freak Out About Privacy On Facebook, But Ignore Widespread Government Surveillance
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