

Dear Julian Assange: The Internet is the Most Appalling Spy Machine - luigionline
http://www.i4u.com/46379/dear-julian-assange-internet-most-appalling-spy-machine-ever-invented

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billybob
Silly. The internet has plenty of potential for government abuse, but Facebook
gives governments a single entity to talk to whose sole purpose is to
centralize your personal information.

If you're paranoid, the Internet at large can be pretty anonymous: proxies,
encrypted communications, etc. It's just a communications network and you can
make it nearly as secure as you want.

It's a heck of a lot easier to be anonymous on the Internet than it is in the
real world. Being anonymous on Facebook doesn't even compute, and any privacy
options you select are at their discretion to provide and honor.

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ThePinion
The Internet isn't blatantly selling your data or giving it away to just
anyone because. Believe it or not there are actually safe places/protocols in
which your data can't/shouldn't ever be recovered. Assange was right to point
out Facebook, because it's literally the best example of what he was trying to
say about how everyone is quickly helping the Government build a database of
everyone and everything about them..

Maybe we need less people trying to re-create social networks with lies about
privacy, and more people helping users create their own safe/secure cloud.
Hosting your own e-mail is an amazing place to start.

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loup-vaillant
Wrong title. A more accurate one would be "Big Centralized Services are the
Most Appalling Spy Machine".

Unless of course you estimate that the internet is a place where you _have to_
use big centralized services very often. We _do_ use them very often, but as
billybob¹ said, we don't actually have to.

[1]: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2510133>

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retrogradeorbit
Oh come on. This is a long bow to draw. Nice try, Facebook apologist, but the
Internet does not have an easy to access interface for any US intelligence
agent to find out what any person in the world is up to.

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drallison
The Internet is a communications network and a collection of accessible data
(that is, facts and information). Facebook is a site on the Internet which
aggregates and makes available relationships between people and organizations.
If you want to spy, relationships and dependencies are at least as significant
as facts. The Social Graph has information that is hard to deduce from
documents using a search engine.

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guscost
It goes both ways - I've spied on government organizations using the Internet,
more than once. Without threatening national security, of course.

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hammock
Dear luigionline: Facebook is the Internet.

