
ACLU exposes Facebook, Twitter for selling surveillance company user data - AdmiralAsshat
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/10/aclu-exposes-facebook-twitter-for-selling-surveillance-company-user-data/
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niftich
This is a very messy, multi-layered issue.

First of all, a large part of a social network's utility is derived from
sharing data about oneself. This data is public, for the benefit of other
participants of the social network. Some of those participants may have
agendas that are contrary to one's own: stalkers, adversaries, data
aggregators -- it's impossible to know all of them ahead of time, and a
granularity of permissions that satisfies these competing goals is... tough.

Second, it ought to be a person's reasonable expectation that law enforcement
is a benevolent actor. Actions such as this, which amount to targeted crowd
surveillance, don't instill much faith in this assumption. This is a very
serious issue that merits more discussion than my terse comment.

Lastly, this data aggregator should not be the target of the outrage. They're
an intermediary in a system where we willingly share data with private
companies to get some value-add, who then sell that data to fund their
operations, and some of the purchasers of our data happen to be law
enforcement. Anger directed at any particular intermediary -- like anger at
reposessors or ambulance chasers or debt relief counselors -- is woefully
misdirected; we should instead be asking why corporations feel the need to
sell our data in the first place, and why we have law enforcement that feels
the need to employ mass surveillance. If we ponder these questions, we'll have
accomplished something more than drive an inconsequential company out business
while leaving the systemic faults in place.

~~~
imh
>Second, it ought to be a person's reasonable expectation that law enforcement
is a benevolent actor.

I totally disagree. Care to expand on that?

~~~
int_19h
I think the point is that police etc should not behave in such a way that many
people immediately assume that an encounter would likely be antagonistic.

Basically, if you're afraid to go ask a police officer for help (which,
apparently, is fairly common among black people in US, for example), then
something is very wrong about police, and needs to be fixed.

~~~
geomark
It's worse than that. Some prominent lawyers advise that everyone should never
talk to the police.

~~~
cyphar
Which is very good advice, but it's because of the fact that testimony given
to a police officer can only ever be used _against_ you (it's hearsay
otherwise). Not to mention that if someone slips up and accidentally tells a
lie in the middle of a testimony, that instills doubt in the entire testimony
("I didn't kill her, I've never killed anyone, I've never even used a gun, I
wasn't in the area that night" sounds fine until the last part if it turns out
you were in that suburb that night).

Basically, to a lawyer a client talking to the police is giving the
prosecution ammunition. Not to mention that nobody (not even the supreme
court) can claim to know every federal law that applies to a person at a
particular time (there was a quote for that but I can't find it on my phone
right now).

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tremon
_Which is very good advice, but [..]_

Wrong conjunction? It seems like you're explaining why it is good advice, not
offering an opposing view.

I think you have given a perfect illustration of the GGP's assertion that "if
you're afraid to go ask a police officer for help [..] then something is very
wrong about police". This is a good example where the law sets up the police
as antagonists against the general population.

~~~
cyphar
My point with the "but" was that the reason why lawyers advise this is not
because police are trying to harm you. It's because in general, people are
very bad at law and providing testimony. So maybe I should've clarified that
-- the police are not at fault for doubting flawed testimony.

To be fair, police do engage in manipulative tactics in questioning, but
that's kinda their job. The job of the person being interrogated is to ask for
your lawyer and say nothing else.

~~~
geomark
It's good to keep in mind how police are incentivized. They are paid to arrest
suspects and close cases. Whether or not they nab the wrong person hardly
matters to them. So although they generally may not intend to harm you they
will gladly do so if it increases the numbers on which they are graded. And if
you happen to have some cash on you when you make the mistake of talking to
them then there is the bonus opportunity of asset forfeiture.

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mjevans
[https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-future/facebook-instagram-
and...](https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-future/facebook-instagram-and-twitter-
provided-data-access-surveillance-product-marketed)

Instead of ArsTechnica, why not link to the ACLU's website?

~~~
hackuser
> Instead of ArsTechnica, why not link to the ACLU's website?

I prefer journalism to the original source's post. The ACLU is an advocate for
its cause; a secondary source can provide context, other sources, opposing
points of view, etc. For example, compare a post by a political candidate,
with its natural extreme bias, to a newspaper article about it, which includes
fact-checking, expert analysis, their opponent's reaction, etc.

That's the reason Wikipedia requires secondary sources for its citations and
forbids primary sources.

EDIT: Fleshed it out a bit.

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Pxtl
If the data is public, why is it a problem? If they're sending private info to
cops, that's different, but a reasonable person expects all public info to be
visible to the last person you want to see it. Theyre just feeding the
customers the same data users can see in a more condensed form aren't they?

~~~
throw2016
This conflation is made too often. I think the problem with the assumption
that if someone made something public willingly they don't care is if people
knew they are under surveillance they may not speak their mind, or speak at
all.

If people who use the internet expect all their activities to be logged and
mined for patterns that can potentially be used against them, they may behave
very differently.

Since we all act in self interest this means no one will speak freely. This is
what surveillance does, this is what the chilling effect is.

This reduces the value of the internet for the free exchange of ideas and
discussion. People who seek this will have to resort to encryption and other
tools and forced to behave in a secretive fashion as if they were doing
something wrong.

Protests and activism are supposed to be normal part of every democracy and
its disconcerting the see the strange discomfort our 'democratic societies'
show to activism and the sheer amount of effort devoted to managing it from
infiltration to surveillance.

~~~
cyphar
> If people who use the internet expect all their activities to be logged and
> mined for patterns that can potentially be used against them, they may
> behave very differently.

Unfortunately you see this already. Though usually people are worried about
adversaries taking screenshots of conversations out of context and then
painting them in a negative light, not the government doing that. But
ultimately it's the same issue, there's a chilling effect on speech which is
caused by the overwhelming fear of mass surveillance.

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Mendenhall
I laugh at twitter playing stupid to what their information was being used
for.

Government loves its surveillance. Try this though, if you live next to a cop,
FBI agent or public official place a high res video camera on your property
facing their house and leave it live streaming. Post it to a website with
photos of all their family and children, their license plate numbers the time
they leave for work etc. All things that are publicly available and captured
from a simple video camera. Start having multiple people do the same and
locate it all on your website. Then watch how fast the hypocrisy rears its
head.

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matheweis
It's interesting to note that in some cases the data was being fed through an
intermediary... who's to say there aren't other integrations doing the same
thing?

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type0
> ... The companies need to enact strong public policies and robust auditing
> procedures to ensure their platforms aren't being used for discriminatory
> surveillance."

Hm, is it okay to use it for non discriminatory surveillance? Can there ever
be surveillance that is not discriminatory since the surveying entity is
usually has no interest of surveying itself and to provide that data to the
public.

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thomasthomas
from a story posted yesterday about the CIA crunching data to predict social
unrest, it is fairly obvious the feds have access to social media firehoses

[https://www.engadget.com/2016/10/05/cia-claims-it-can-
predic...](https://www.engadget.com/2016/10/05/cia-claims-it-can-predict-some-
social-unrest-up-to-5-days-ahead/)

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Steeeve
I find it strange that it would be perfectly OK to sell this data to a
commercial entity, but it's not OK to sell it to the government.

~~~
nostrademons
I think that what the buyer _does_ with the data has a lot to do with this.
They would be in even more trouble if they had sold the data to a private
mercenary firm who takes out contracts on business rivals, for example.
Conversely, if they had been selling to, say, the U.S. Census Bureau or FEMA,
they would likely be lauded.

It does say a lot about how little people trust the police these days, though.

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pluma
As a non-native speaker this headline took me way too many attempts to parse
correctly. For anyone wondering the same, it's meant to be read as:

ACLU exposes Facebook and Twitter for selling user data to a surveillance
company

The way I read it the first few times I thought they sold user data _of_ a
company, _for_ surveillance.

~~~
dredmorbius
As a native speaker, it's a poorly written headline.

One term for this form of misleading / confusing sentence (and especially
headline) is a "crash blossom".

[http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/fun-
with-...](http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/fun-with-crash-
blossoms)

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_ambiguity](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_ambiguity)

~~~
pluma
I think in this case it's made worse by the wording "selling X Y" as a
substitute for "selling Y to X" being relatively rare and in this case both X
and Y being compound words (surveillance company and user data).

So not only is it a crash blossom in the sense that it's ambiguous whether
it's [surveillance] [company user data], [surveillance company] [user data] or
[surveillance company user] [data], but it could also be read as [surveillance
company user data]. There are at least four possible ways to attempt to parse
the sentence and the only one that makes sense relies on unusual phrasing.

------
gell_mann
I'm pretty sure I have seen other apps do similar things. The data they are
feeding them does seem to be mostly public data. I'm not exactly sure how I
feel about this, or how outraged / surprised I should be.

~~~
CoryG89
Just because the data is public doesn't mean it can be easily accessed or
aggregated en-masse for real time survellience.

If Geofeedia was only using public data, easily available to anyone else, then
Twitter and Facebook wouldn't have been able to cut off their access.

~~~
nl
"Public data" doesn't mean easily accessible.

Twitter sells access to their data. They can cancel that account, but the data
is still public. Without the access contract it is inconvenient and against
the terms of service to access in bulk.

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meriobrudar
I love that "user data sales" has become such a normal thing that when someone
stops selling it to ONE company out of like several thousand, it's considered
newsworthy.

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webmaven
Here's Geofeedia's response: [http://blog.geofeedia.com/a-commitment-to-
freedom-of-speech-...](http://blog.geofeedia.com/a-commitment-to-freedom-of-
speech-and-civil-liberties)

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newscracker
Shame on Facebook! Shame on Instagram! Shame on Twitter! I consider this a
despicable act on the part of these companies. They stopped this data selling
only because they were caught. Using data internally to feed to algorithms to
show targeted ads is one thing (though privacy wise it's bad). Selling data
outright to other companies is a terrible state of affairs. It's sad that this
won't make a big dent in the user base or make people flee these platforms in
large numbers.

