Get off Facebook if you value your privacy, EU commish tells court If you don’t want your personal info pored over by the US authorities, close your Facebook account – such is the reassuring advice given by the European Commission to the European Court of Justice. Judges yesterday grilled the Commish legal service in a case that could topple the 15-year-old EU-US data-sharing agreement known …
Some caution and restraint is all that is necessary. I use Facebook for various groups not unlike this very forum I'm posting to here. However, I use a fake name, fake date of birth, fake personal details and never disclose sensitive real life information. Who uses their real name etc on forums anyway?
Who uses their real name etc on forums anyway?
I do. Although I'm and advocate for people's right to anonymity and fully support your decision not to use your real name.
That said, I personally don't like the idea of milling around some place where it's better that people don't know who I am. I don't like what Facebook does with my info so I don't go there, I'm OK with El Reg. If I did go to Facebook, I'd definitely use false information.
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Those that want to be noticed and recognised for the wonderful people that they are and the awesome contribution that they make to the Internet. And those who still think it is possible to be anonymous on the Internet..
All I can say is keeping track of several dozen nyms and email addresses is tedious. I have a static IP address, if I wanna be naughty I have to Tor or I2P or use a MAC address altered device at a public access point with an email account I created over Tor/I2P providing I hide my face from the cameras or wear a mask.
The issue isn't just Facebook abusing/using your personal data. There are other reasons for using fake names and profiles on forums and facebook including the risk of identity theft or fraud - the more information you post about yourself you put out there the easier it is for scammers to build up a profile of you.
Secondly, not everyone you come across on the Internet is a pleasant law abiding citizen. I've moderated a very large forum with thousands of active members and sometimes had to ban some very nasty, vicious people. One of my fellow moderators was less protective of his real name and town of residence and after banning a particularly nasty character, events spilled over into real life, with the character tracking him down and sending poison pen letters sent to his employer claiming he was a pedophile and various other nastiness aimed at his family. He ended up getting a restraining order against the character; but better to keep real identities and internet usernames etc well separate in my opinion, even if you are just posting run of the mill stuff on mainstream sites, there are some really nasty people out there.
The first rule of confidentiality is "need to know".
None of you /need/ to know who I am (nor I you).
If you surrender your real name you might find yourself on the receiving end of, say, some spiteful ex-partner or threats of blackmail. It's not nice. Schoolkids have committed suicide over such things.
What they should have had was anonymity....
When I was a moderator of the unnamed site above, I was contacted on multiple occasions by people who had either used their real names as usernames or had used the same fake name across multiple sites. The people were asking for help because a stalker, classmate, ex-colleague, ex-boyfriend/husband was following them from site to site and making their life a misery one way or another. Typically the victims tended to be young women or school kids but not always. The problem was that once their identity was known there was little that could be done. I banned stalkers as and when they appeared. However, it is much better to use different fake names on every forum you join. Nobody needs to know your real identity on forums such as El-Reg or elsewhere. Besides, just think of all the hate mail I'd get if people knew I was really Bill Gates. ;-)
That's what you think. Even if you signed up as Joe Mc Soap who lives in 1 Main Street,Townville, all it takes is for one person to use the facebook app on their phone and now facebook knows whatever the phone knows about you, that is, your name, phone number, probably one or more email addresses and with some cross referencing, your circle of friends and your geographic location (with a high degree of certainty). The probably know your date of birth since at least one person will send you a happy birthday message or put you into a birthday reminder. They will have multiple photos of you even if you don't allow tagging because people will attempt to tag you anyway. They'll have a good idea of your socio-economic status based on that of your friends. You can probably take comfort in the fact that they would know all of this even if you didn't have a facebook account since they create shadow accounts for such identities so you probably haven't done anything to compromise your privacy, your facebook using friends have inadvertently done this for you.
sorry but that won't work.
big Data analytics will crunch through all your posts (anon or aliased or real) and connect them up due to your style of writing.
The only way to become anon is to go toally off grid, move countries and change sex. (well maybe not the last one) but it is becoming increasingly hard to escape the tentacles of the Google and Facebook Octopii.
Their only goal in life is to know everything about your life and sell it to the highest bidder.
The sooner we all accept this and take sensible steps to not give them information about yourself the harder they will have to work for their lunch.
You do realize that both Google and FB collect enough information from you that even using an alias online, that they can still join it to enough information about you to track the real you.
You don't even have to be on FB site to be tracked by FB. (Can you guess how many web sites embed FB javascripts? )
As I mentioned above, being tracked by FB is probably the least of people's worries. Of greater concern is the risk of identity theft, fraud, bullies, stalkers and trouble makers who may go after you in real life. So while FB may be aware I'm using fake IDs on different sites, other FB users and internet stalkers etc won't be able to. Why make it easy for criminals and trouble makers?
By the way I also don't allow scripts on most sites, delete cookies before and after visiting any sensitive sites such as online banking, and never allow third party sites to use scripts or set cookies. While this isn't foolproof it all helps to minimize the tracking. My mobile-based IP address is also shared by a thousands of others on the same ISP, making it even more complex to track me.
I'll add that based upon the suggestions facebook made for my town/country of birth, city of residence and where I was educated facebook seems to know bugger all about me.
As I mentioned above, being tracked by FB is probably the least of people's worries. Of greater concern is the risk of identity theft, fraud, bullies, stalkers and trouble makers who may go after you in real life.
What happens if you join up those two ideas? The risk of a data breach at Facebook and other data silos is very real. Whether it's merely to the FBI, NSA, CIA, MI5, etc. or to organised crime is why this case is before the court.
As usual, this assumes that everyone on FB dutifully fills in all the personal guff.
Isn't it the dog and cat accounts that have more personal stuff than anything else?
With all the analysis stuff that FB have bought over the years they ough to be able to scan my posts and tell me where I live, when I was born and educated etc. -- but they just keep on asking.
Seems like much effort and time is being spent hand wringing about something where the damage has largely already been done and likely will be a faded, slightly comical memory a decade from now (like Livejournal, Geocities, Bebo &c.).
It would be refreshing to see concrete plans being drawn up now to nip in the bud the next onerous privacy destroying / behaviour modifying thing before it really sparks into life, (care.data, shared private insurance databases, &c.).
"if they still hold all your data. The EU need to force FB et al to provide an easy method to download/migrate your data and then delete everything they hold when you leave"
IIRC, Facebook does provide an easy way to download your data.
As for deleting all your data, when you close your account it gives you a small window during which you can reactivate your account, after which your data is supposedly deleted. Whether it truly is deleted is another question - but certainly after I quit they kept enough information to be able to offer some friends of mine other friends of mine as possible connections.
I said some months back in another El Reg discussion on the subject of Facebook that I was considering setting up a new account to see if it offered any of my old data to me (friends, at the very least). It didn't - but I didn't realise until afterwards that I didn't use the same email address as before, and minor details like my date of birth will be different than what I used last time around. Facebook might not (yet?) have successfully put two and two together.
They certainly ONLY want to appear to reluctantly apply what someone bigger decides... With 29 of the top 30 International* "Internet scraping" companies having EU HQ in Ireland.
Hence it getting to ECJ. Ireland is never going to change status quo on anything without external binding resolutions.
(*How many are not American?)
You don't need to have ever registered yourself on Facebook your friends will have very kindly put your photo and a lot more about you on it and often not at all hidden. Good close friends you may be able to control but friends of friends...
The genie is well and truly out of the bag. There is now no hiding place.
especially with face scanning software getting pretty decent.
It is plausible you can be in the database simply because you were in the wrong place, wrong time and in the background of someone else's photograph.
I wish we had that device the Tracy's had in the thunderbirds!!!
P.
I actually looked into it years ago when working on a website to market US crap to Europe. Basically it exempts US companies from most EU privacy laws. All of them, if you consider that it's enforced by our Commerce Dept which really doesn't give a flying fuck about your rights.
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