Data Mining Facebook
A lot has happened in the past month. Mark Zuckerberg (founder of Facebook) has been found out, “calling users who joined his social networking site “dumb f---s” for trusting him”…
Surely the awesome popularity of Facebook was accidental.
How was Mark to know he was such a clever dude and would end up enlisting 400 million people into his venture;
unwittingly deluding them to trust him and his colleagues with their most personal details and relationship ties?
He didn’t ask for that.
It just happened with a little bit of prompting.
What has happened as a result of this intimate social media and the ties that it has made for us to servers and to company databases,
is the very slow and imperceptible breakdown of the anarchic Internet as we have known it for the last 25 years. Targeted advertising is a baby step towards a much more controlled, monopolistic version of what was once a beautiful and free-love version of the Internet.
Pro-active searches are giving way to passive receivables of what we “should” be looking at on the net.
Free movement and freedom of research, the things that we value so much about the unfettered terrain of the Internet,
seem to be ebbing away as we are tracked further and further into our most intimate and vulnerable hiding places on our computers. We trust the firmament of the Internet a little bit too much I fear. And those stars hurtling along inside it are driven by any number of motives
–those who wish to convey information and communication, and those who just want to make exponential profits. At the end of the day, nothing is for free. Unfortunately.
Joseph Bonneau is a savvy, good guy who understands the field of data mining intimately. He initially published findings on loopholes that allowed third-party data mining of Facebook in his paper “Prying Data Out of a Social Network” published in 2009 and presented at the 2009 International Conference on Advances in Social Network Analysis and Mining Here is the abstract of his paper: "Preventing adversaries from compiling significant amounts of user data is a major challenge for social network operators. We examine the difficulty of collecting profile and graph information from the popular social networking website Facebook and report two major findings. First, we describe several novel ways in which data can be extracted by third parties. Second, we demonstrate the efficiency of these methods on crawled data. Our findings highlight how the current protection of personal data is inconsistent with user's expectations of privacy." Joseph also contributes to the Security Research centre’s blog at Cambridge University, called “Light Blue Touchpaper”.
I have included links to his articles here: http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2009/03/31/facebook-giving-a-bit-too-much-away/ This sounds like small fry nowadays – but it proves that this was known ages before it was made public.
Very good example of how the personal data appears within the code: http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2009/06/09/how-privacy-fails-the-facebook-applications-debacle/ A bit more on the enthusiastic nature of Facebook applications: http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2010/02/04/the-need-for-privacy-ombudsmen/ Also a bit of activism regarding Google. We will address Google in-depth soon: http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2009/06/16/open-letter-to-google/
Joseph’s great. Here’s his homepage if you want to find out more: http://www.jbonneau.com/
(Stephen Hutcheon, Sydney Morning Herald, 14 May 2010)
Ahh, but wasn’t it obvious that this was his attitude already?
We made Facebook into the monster, and the amazing social engine, that it is today. We are to congratulate and to blame for its success.
It is an extension of how we work as social creatures, and has increased our natural tendencies to connect and to gossip ten-fold.
We have the most advanced online applications ever imaginable, with the best answers and liberating educational tools at our fingertips.
But we are being watched every step of the way, and I do not like the feeling.
Further below is some info. that you might want to look at about what’s happening at the moment.
This information is supplied by Joseph Bonneau, PhD candidate at the Security Group at Cambridge.
