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Re:Personal Privacy Is Only One of the Costs of NSA Surveill... by vezzy-fnord on Tuesday July 29, 2014 @10:14AM (#8102326)
It's not just that, though. All of the casual information that you post on Facebook, including timestamps and whatnot, can all be used to infer and create a detailed portfolio as to your personality, location, political views, sexual orientation, interests, commonly visited places, employer, etc. EXIF data from photographs alone is a goldmine.

There was actually a practical example of a man FOIAing his documents from Facebook, which revealed that they had over a thousand pages specifically devoted to him alone on every facet of his life. Even though he was only a "casual" user (one wall update a week, or so). You can see it in the documentary film Terms and Conditions May Apply.

As for me personally, I've never had a Facebook account. Although virtually no one is impervious, reducing social media presence is still always useful to get rid of the blatantly incriminating things.

Unfortunately, the biggest threat is perhaps, what other people are saying about you. I have no idea about what's going on there...

Re:Personal Privacy Is Only One of the Costs of NSA Surveill... by XorNot on Tuesday July 29, 2014 @10:27AM (#8102385)
"incriminating". You don't want to use that word. Because if you're actually doing something illegal or immoral, that is not a compelling reason for us not to act on it.

The idea that you need to be able to hide your political speech is a problem to start with. You won't be saved from tyranny by that power - if you use it, you already experience it and tyranny needs no reason to kick in doors beyond suspicion. Accurate intelligence is what you need when you're trying to do things right (or you've executed all the dissidents and the remaining ones are still a real threat).

Those who want to hide don't interest me. If there fears come to pass, I'll be long dead, and they'll have sat by and done nothing while it happened.

Re:Personal Privacy Is Only One of the Costs of NSA Surveill... by cryoshon on Tuesday July 29, 2014 @10:49AM (#8102481)
Of course you need to be able to hide your political speech; people automatically temper their opinions to conform more with the group or choose to remain silent in situations where everyone's political speech is visible. Without the ability to keep cloistered political speech as a realm to discuss and test ideas without condemnation, the political speech landscape begins to look horrifically uniform and (inevitably, because they control the media) pro-state. To reiterate, if the state has the ability to spy and understand 100% of online political speech, people will self-censor their speech, preventing different ideas from propagating.

This is currently the case-- radical political ideas have been accompanied by state surveillance and attempts at discrediting for a long time, and the current crop of NSA totalitarianism is no different.

Re:Personal Privacy Is Only One of the Costs of NSA Surveill... by sp332 on Tuesday July 29, 2014 @11:43AM (#8102840)
There's still a big gap between "illegal activity" and "things I would prefer random strangers in the government not know about me".
Re:Personal Privacy Is Only One of the Costs of NSA Surveill... by jessaustin on Tuesday July 29, 2014 @11:00AM (#8102534)
...then they came for the Facebook users, and I said nothing, because I didn't use Facebook...

b^)