Category Archives: Spying

#Facebook Uses AI to predict your future thoughts and actions, in order to control you #DeleteFacebook #Zuckerberg

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Facebook is all about mind control, using what it knows about you – or what its algorithms think they know about you – to manipulate your actions:

Instead of merely offering advertisers the ability to target people based on demographics and consumer preferences, Facebook instead offers the ability to target them based on how they will behave, what they will buy, and what they will think. These capabilities are the fruits of a self-improving, artificial intelligence-powered prediction engine, first unveiled by Facebook in 2016 and dubbed “FBLearner Flow.”

Source: Facebook Uses Artificial Intelligence to Predict Your Future Actions for Advertisers, Says Confidential Document

Facebook is dangerous for everyone to be using.

#Facebook is a platform for mind control #DeleteFacebook #Zuckerberg

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Perhaps at some point in the past few years you’ve told Facebook that you like, say, Kim Kardashian West.

….

What you probably missed is that researchers had figured out how to tie your interest in Ms. Kardashian West to certain personality traits, such as how extroverted you are (very), how conscientious (more than most) and how open-minded (only somewhat). And when your fondness for Ms. Kardashian West is combined with other interests you’ve indicated on Facebook, researchers believe their algorithms can predict the nuances of your political views with better accuracy than your loved ones.

Facebook creates a detailed psychological profile of you, to determine your weaknesses, vulnerabilities and key times to “see you something” via advertising or propaganda messaging. “Something” may be a product, a service or someone’s ideology.

More on this in the next post.

Police said to be able to routinely access encrypted #iphones #privacy

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Police forces and federal agencies around the country have bought relatively cheap tools to unlock up-to-date iPhones and bypass their encryption, according to a Motherboard investigation based on several caches of internal agency documents, online records, and conversations with law enforcement officials.

Source: Cops Around the Country Can Now Unlock iPhones, Records Show – Motherboard

Aleksandr Kogan collected direct messages between #Facebook users #DeleteFacebook #Privacy #Zuckerbuerg

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Aleksandr Kogan collected direct messages sent to and from Facebook users who installed his This Is Your Digital Life app, the Guardian can reveal. It follows Facebook’s admission that the company “may” have handed over the direct messages of some users to the Cambridge Analytica contractor without their express permission. The revelation is the most severe breach of privacy yet in the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Source: Revealed: Aleksandr Kogan collected Facebook users’ direct messages | News | The Guardian

Note – other apps had the ability to do this too. This is not just limited to Kogan’s app and Cambridge Analytica.

Having just finished reading Code Warriers by Stephen Budiansky, it seems 100% likely that US spy agencies would have used these methods to collect everything as well (at least for all FB users outside the U.S.).

#Facebook says EU compliant privacy policies will roll out globally

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Contrary to a recent Reuters report, he said, new controls for privacy settings required by European law will roll out globally.

Source: Mark Zuckerberg: Actually, We Are Going to Roll Out Fancy EU Privacy Controls Everywhere

He’s said a lot of things over the years that never happened. The reporter on this story points out that Zuckerberg’s comments were mostly platitudes.

#Facebook admits: Most of its 2 billion users have had their data scraped #DeleteFacebook

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Facebook said Wednesday that most of its 2 billion users likely have had their public profiles scraped by outsiders without the users’ explicit permission, dramatically raising the stakes in a privacy controversy that has dogged the company for weeks, spurred investigations in the United States and Europe, and sent the company’s stock price tumbling.

It seems likely that more than just “public” data was taken. Facebook is not telling anyone what was taken (why the secrecy?)

It seems highly likely that the vast amount of private data, detailed in my other post, was also taken, through the “Apps Others Use” data theft system built by Facebook. Effectively, everything everyone ever posted, Liked, plus Facebook’s assessment of each of us – was lifted by potentially hundreds of thousands of apps.

Apps were also able to scrape the posts and profiles of private groups.

Source: Facebook said the personal data of most of its 2 billion users has been collected and shared with outsiders – The Washington Post

Their privacy violations have been vast. It is difficult to see how Facebook remains a sustainable business.

Mark Zuckerbeg is a lying scoundrel.

 

Likely that every #Facebook user’s private data was scraped into third-party databases – everything #DeleteFacebook #Zuckerberg

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Prior to 2014, applications using the Facebook platform could download nearly everything posted by users, including photos, Likes, Interests, Groups and more – including from the friends of the person running the app – even items restricted to “Friends only” – and did so without permission of the Friends.

Everything ever posted on Facebook was “Public” to applications that requested access to “Friends” data.

An estimated 10+% of Facebook applications requested permission to access the data of Friends. Presumably most collected a limited set of personal data, but with 9 million applications in existence today, that would be 900,000 applications.

What could they get?

  • Every post you ever made on your Timeline (including those that were to Friends and not Public)
  • Every photo you posted online,
  • A list of every Like you ever made on Facebook
  • Every group you belonged to
  • The Facebook determined list of “Interests” (determined by Group membership, Pages you Liked/Followed, and possibly text analysis)
  • Your family relationships
  • Your religion and politics

Here is Table 5 from a 2015 paper, cited below, capturing the Facebook API permissions in effect at the time. Applications could scrape any of the data listed in the “Friends Data” column, which is essentially everything as “friend.status” refers to timeline posts.

In 2014, Facebook rewrote this programming interface to restrict access to Friend’s data. Apps approved after that point were restricted – however, apps approved prior to that point could continue to run and continue to collect data.

Until last weekend, Facebook had a hidden privacy setting for Apps Others Use.The default settings for this page  had almost every item as share-able. I took this snapshot after I had cleared the settings; Facebook deleted this the next day.

When most every item was checked (and the default was checked) Apps run by your friends had access to all of your personal activity. This included everything you “Liked” on Facebook, plus all Interest and Group memberships – even apparently posts on your Timeline intended for Friends-only.

Consumer Reports noted that applications were sharing data for Friends – back in a 2012 online column (https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine/2012/06/facebook-your-privacy/index.htm).

An estimated 10% of Facebook applications requested access to your “Friends”. Thus, it is highly likely everything we shared with Facebook, including items to “Friends” only was scraped, including Timeline posts, Photos, Likes and more and are now stored in non-Facebook, private, third-party databases.

It is likely that if applications could this, then major intelligence agencies also scraped this data.

Most apps would not have collected all of the possible data but just a limited subset. However, a combination of several apps, each collecting a subset, could merge their data together to ultimately collect everything about everyone.

News reports about the Cambridge Analytica beach now affecting 87 million (mostly) Americans are missing the story. It is likely that nearly all 2 billion Facebook users have had their data scraped, including what they thought was private information.

Why are you still using Facebook? Facebook is a dangerous platform that has operated for 14 years in a reckless manner.

Reference

Symeondiis, I., Tsormpatzoudi, P., and Preneel, B. (2015). Collateral damage of Facebook Apps: an enhanced privacy scoring model

Retail stores share “product return” information with 3rd party firm #privacy

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Stores have to deal with people engaged in product return fraud. This is a problem, for example, where people have purchased a big screen TV the week before the Superbowl, and then returned it the week after or bought new clothing for a special occasion, but return it a few days later. And more.

To combat this, retail stores share your product return information with a third party company called “The Retail Equation”. This company creates a database of all the items returned by a consumer and uses that to produce a risk score for each consumer.

It is understandable why stores are doing this – but most consumers are unaware that everything is not only tracked today, but shared between retailers.

Source: The Retail Equation – For Consumers

#Facebook reads everything you send to other people on #Messenger #DeleteFacebook

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Facebook Inc. scans the chats and images that people send each other on Facebook Messenger, making sure it all abides by the company’s rules governing content. If it doesn’t, it gets blocked.

Source: Facebook Scans What You Send Other People on Messenger App – Bloomberg

I used the word “reads” because these are not simple keyword scans but machine-learning systems that are the machine equivalent of reading your emails and taking notes.

This further confirms that Facebook is a global surveillance platform spying on every one of us. #DELETEFACEBOOK