Beret

Facebook's new privacy settings.

They’re a bait & switch.

Users gain the ability to set privacy per post, but lots of control & privacy is lost. You can no longer opt-out of the app platform or beacon. It’s also impossible to set restrictions for your friend list, name, profile photo, gender, networks, pages, or current city. It’s all forced to being publicly available now.

This “public info” and anything set as viewable by everyone is available to any Facebook enabled website or app used by either you or friends. You and your friends will be leaking everyone’s information everywhere they go.

There is no setting to prevent this.

The new public profile also has a permanently public wall displaying most of your recent activity (added friends, liked statuses, etc.) Details on added friends was previously available to non-friends, but only in the timeline after an (unignored) friend request was sent. All this broad access is new.

Your whole profile photo album defauts to ‘everyone’ if you have more than one photo in that album. (or you have just one picture which you haven’t set as your profile image) You can revert this behavior here.

Facebook has a terrible dearth of privacy already; and it just keeps getting worse.
Oh well, welcome to the internet.

Say hello to your newer, more detailed and ~~intrusive~~ social, internet nametag.

ps: Even if a minor selects “Everyone,” the information they share will be restricted to their “Friends”, “Friends of Friends” and school or work networks.

edit 12/10: The public wall has been removed.
Note behavior of profile photo albums.

Facebook creepiness sent to me by a friend. They said that in this case, Facebook was checking that a stated minor was actually under 18.

“It should be common and legal to change your name at twenty-one and say, “That wasn’t me. It was a different person. Kind of looks like me but I’ve changed a lot.”

Google CEO Eric Schmidt on handling online identity.

Note: changing your name still won’t save you from the google cookie.

Bin-laden didn't even encrypt his phone calls.

Pretend for a moment that you’re running a international group of crazy people from your cave in Afghanistan, and you want to talk to your super secret switchboard in the capital of your fathers birth country.

So you just take out your satellite phone and call direct to HQ. To provide some level of security you speak in using code words like you’re an 8 year old with a secret clubhouse. Your sinister bearded operatives in foreign countries also call direct to your communications hub to receive your orders.

As you somewhat openly plot your moves, the agency motoring your calls (NSA) refuses to share intelligence with other agencies due to interagency rivalries. Similar issues of non-communication occur to a lesser extent with the CIA & FBI.

While they’re bickering you bomb 2 US embassies, the USS Cole and hijack 4 planes which you crash into various buildings of significance.

Congratulations, your operations are now at international mastermind level; and your enemies have hamstrung themselves.

ps: watch the whole nova program on this, it’s very interesting.

I was stuck without transportation or motivation last week so I decided to chart my online identity. Each node is an account or online presence with a list of what information can be gleaned from it. (eg: gender, location, sexual attraction to pink toilet seats)

Nodes are linked with others that have information in common (eg: shared alias or link pointing to other presence) Sites which are private or ambiguously linked (site linked to, but no specific user specified) are noted with a clouded outline.

Some interesting things can be considered with this data. Though my main/real email address is publicly available ~~(and associated with my name thanks to google cache)~~ it’s very hard to link it to any other facet of my online identities.

In other news, I am not paranoid; just realistic.

“You’re being creepy by not being on facebook.”

A friend trying to coerce me into joining.

One crime solved for every 1,000 CCTV cameras, senior officer claims

A senior Scotland Yard officer, Detective Chief Inspector Mick Neville, warned police must do more to head off a crisis in public confidence over the use of surveillance cameras. DCI Neville said officers need to improve their results to make captured images count against criminals. He said there are more than a million CCTV cameras in London and the Government has spent £500 million on the crime-fighting equipment. But he admitted just 1,000 crimes were solved in 2008 using CCTV images as officers fail to make the most of potentially vital evidence.
…
David Davis, the former shadow home secretary said it is ”entirely unsurprising” that the report highlights some shortcomings of CCTV. ”It should provoke a major and long overdue rethink on where the Home Office crime prevention budget is being spent,” he said. ”CCTV leads to massive expense and minimum effectiveness. It creates a huge intrusion on privacy, yet provides little or no improvement in security.

“I have never been so upset by a poll in my life. Only 22% of Americans now believe “the movie and television industries are pretty much run by Jews,” down from nearly 50% in 1964. The Anti-Defamation League, which released the poll results last month, sees in these numbers a victory against stereotyping. Actually, it just shows how dumb America has gotten. Jews totally run Hollywood. How deeply Jewish is Hollywood? When the studio chiefs took out a full-page ad in the Los Angeles Times a few weeks ago to demand that the Screen Actors Guild settle its contract, the open letter was signed by: News Corp. President Peter Chernin (Jewish), Paramount Pictures Chairman Brad Grey (Jewish), Walt Disney Co. Chief Executive Robert Iger (Jewish), Sony Pictures Chairman Michael Lynton (surprise, Dutch Jew), Warner Bros. Chairman Barry Meyer (Jewish), CBS Corp. Chief Executive Leslie Moonves (so Jewish his great uncle was the first prime minister of Israel), MGM Chairman Harry Sloan (Jewish) and NBC Universal Chief Executive Jeff Zucker (mega-Jewish). If either of the Weinstein brothers had signed, this group would have not only the power to shut down all film production but to form a minyan with enough Fiji water on hand to fill a mikvah.”

How Jewish is Hollywood? (via azspot)

The problem is that we’ve been trained that (entirely reasonable) observations about such matters are distasteful & anti-semitic.† If I were to say that jews hold a disproportionate share of wealth, power and control, I would be just repeating a stereotype; it’s accuracy outside of that context wouldn’t matter.

ps: I once had a long serious post about Jane Harman and AIPAC, but I lost it due to government scheming (codename: browser crash)

† It’s worth noting that the Palestinians are Semites too. Its formerly broad meaning has been dropped in favor of a more politically expedient (Israeli/Zionist lobby friendly) term.

“£400 million ($668 million) will be spent on installing and monitoring CCTV cameras in [20,000] homes of private citizens. Why? To make sure the kids are doing their homework, going to bed early and eating their vegetables. The scheme has, astonishingly, already been running in 2,000 family homes. The government’s “children’s secretary” Ed Balls is behind the plan, which is aimed at problem, antisocial families. The idea is that, if a child has a more stable home life, he or she will be less likely to stray into crime and drugs.”

Britain To Put CCTV Cameras Inside Private Homes

Read the full article. Then hide in a corner and weep.

ps: children’s secretary Ed Balls.