Facebook to Be Used by US Federal Law Enforcement

If you have a problem with police officers with a search warrant accessing your Facebook page, then your problem shouldn't be with this particular ruling but with the search warrant system as a whole; this is just a logical extension of that.

That ain't true. You can't treat e-mails like correspondence:

Presumably, you burn incriminating correspondence once it has been read. People would intuitively delete Private Messages and e-mails that incriminate them after reading'em. However, there are a buncha pricks that keep a copy, and that can give it to police. That's evil, man.

It's the same as if you just threw all your letters in the trash and the cops got a warrant to dig through said trash.

That's what burn pits are for.

@Barkey: It'd only be equivalent to the trash example if Facebook didn't archive nor retain mail you delete.

NEWSFLASH: This has been happening for a long time in most countries. Facebook is a trojan horse of the police state, it is a brilliant surveillance tool for big brother which takes data of your everyday life, online activities, and psychological profile. All maintained by you under the guise of "social networking".

edited 13th Jul '11 7:25:17 AM by Shichibukai

The whole point of a search warrant is for the police to find information that someone is trying to hide. Complaining that search warrants on electronic communications are more effective is kinda missing the point.

I'm complaining about retention of your private conversations and private messages. They shouldn't be retained at all, under any circumstances, beyond the point on which the user deletes them.

Don't you give Facebook permission to do that when you accept their End User Agreement, though?

Ahh yes, all written in the T's and C's. The terms and conditions are made to be cumbersome and difficult to read, even nonsensical and contradictive. Legalistic nonsense, which as far as I'm concerned shouldn't be legally valid unless it is clearly defined and highly visible. Same with all small print, it's deception by contract.

edited 13th Jul '11 7:50:26 AM by Shichibukai

I've never looked into getting a Facebook account, but I've never had trouble understand a terms and conditions contract. I've gotten bored by them, sure, but if you don't read your whole contract because it bores you then you don't have a right to complain when its contents surprise you.

-yawn- Here's your tinfoil hat.

Anyhow, I agree with Savage Heathen, there need to be provisions that the shit you delete stays deleted.

It wouldn't be too hard for any privacy-abiding social media site to encrypt all private messages and IM convos with GPG... And not share with authorities any data that the user has deleted. That's what I'd do, anyway. I'd encrypt everything and let each user have a public key to share and a private key to decrypt. If someone with access to that person's photos finds something that violates the TOS, that person's profile would be deleted.

If none of his friends report, nobody was offended, and there's no reason for management to do a single thing. In case of a warrant, management could (and would) hand over the encrypted data, but not plaintexts (it would not have'em).

It's not that hard, IMO. If a social media site didn't want to cooperate with the police state, there are ways and means to do that.

It looks like we're agreeing on a whole lotta stuff lately, Barkey.

edited 13th Jul '11 8:01:26 AM by SavageHeathen

Easier than that — delete (and overwrite) the data themselves so even they cannot read it.

Co-operation with the State by holding a gun to their heads, right?

edited 13th Jul '11 8:03:24 AM by Greenmantle

Sure, they could do that, but you'd have to show them that there's a large public demand for that service.

Hmm... Auto-overwriting deleted data in scrub runs of the disk that'd replace deleted stuff with randomly-generated garbage... I like it!

If you post something on the internet, then you should consider it to be a sheet to the wind. In fact, same goes for just about anything you say/do/whatever, but this mostly is for the net.

@Raven: That's the wrong attitude to take here. Most people just want to register, they don't want to go through a bunch of legal mumbo jumbo just to get an account. They should not have to. Also, more and more crap has been piled onto existing terms and conditions which retroactively apply to all users. It's changing the rules of the game, which is completely unfair when it comes to personal data. It is deception by contract and this sort of trojan horse practise is fraudulent and underhanded.

Imagine that your bank hid a clause granting them permission to give your data to third parties so that they can debit your account without asking you first, as you technically gave them contractual consent. Businesses should not be able to hoodwink you into signing away your rights and privacy.

You need it far more than I do.

edited 13th Jul '11 8:10:07 AM by Shichibukai

I'm not the one ranting about a police state, not sure what I'd need one for.

True, who says it can't be found in cached data, held by Google and others (no doubt including the Security Services).

In the end, the only hope is to make it so obscure that nobody will find it unless they know — or to hide it in plain sight.

edited 13th Jul '11 8:15:07 AM by Greenmantle

Myself ——> Is either already wearing a tinfoil hat, something better, or just doesn't need one.

You ——> Needs tinfoil hat to think outside the box, deflect mind control rays (), or just to get a different perspective on all this.

So please, you put it on.

edited 13th Jul '11 8:17:55 AM by Shichibukai

I'm part of the "police state", so from where I sit things are pretty good.

Footsoldiers of the police state aren't exactly initiated into its true nature.

Anyway, Facebook has an economic incentive to abuse privacy as much as it can get away with. Who do you think pays the bills?

Not me, being a Facebook avoider.