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0 pointsFreak_NL9y ago0 comments

In the case of Facebook I would expect governments to be more interested in your connections (and their connections) than in your posts. You could be as minimal in your output as you can possibly be; unless you ignore all friend requests, you will be surrounded by at least some people who do 'like' and 'follow' as if their lives depended on it, and the aggregate graph of data will make it trivial to gain a rough idea about who you are and what your place in society is.

Any data that isn't obviously fake can help build their profile of you. The idea is that they can build on that profile when you do become a person-of-interest.

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semi-extrinsic9y ago· 1 in thread

> governments to be more interested in your connections (and their connections) than in your posts

Aren't most people's friend lists on Facebook consisting of 80% "People I went to school / university / work with"? In which case government already knows? Once we gets to "connections pf connections", you're looking at a set of many thousand people with no real indication of how strong the connection is. E.g. some of my best IRL friends I haven't even added on Facebook, but I have several people as FB friends that I haven't spoken to in a literal decade.

Freak_NLOP9y ago

> In which case government already knows?

How? A citizen's own government might conceivably know who you work with professionally via the tax agency, but a foreign government doesn't (not without specifically requesting such data on a case-by-case basis). For most people who use Facebook, their list of contacts will provide any big data analysing actor with a very nice outline of their life and interests, especially if you are the type of state actor that can coerce Facebook into cooperating.

Even if your own profile is clean and seemingly meaningless, mom will have you tagged as her son/daughter, and who you communicate with and when will quickly filter out the uninteresting friends.

DanBC9y ago

"English"[1] use this relationship mapping for gangs (mostly London and Manchester) and sometimes child sexual exploitation networks. But they're also interested in the content - see for example the Blackberry messaging used to convict people after the London riots.

I tend to be on the not bothered end of the spectrum[2] and I'm a bit wortied by the direction it's going in England with more stuff gathered, from more people, with less rigorous oversight.

[1] there are many different forces in England

[2] mostly because I saw regulation getting better. There are problems with RIPA, but it stoppwd some abuses.

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