Friday, October 15, 2010
A privacy watchdog has uncovered a government memo that encourages federal agents to befriend people on a variety of social networks, to take advantage of their readiness to share -- and to spy on them. In response to a Freedom of Information request, the government released a handful of documents, including a May 2008 memo detailing how social-networking sites are exploited by the Office of Fraud Detection and National Security (FDNS).
As of Thursday morning, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and Digg had not commented on the report, which details the official government program to spy via social networking. Other websites the government is spying on include Twitter, MySpace, Craigslist and Wikipedia, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which filed the FOIA request.
"Narcissistic tendencies in many people fuel a need to have a large group of 'friends' link to their pages, and many of these people accept cyber-friends that they don't even know," stated one of the documents obtained by the EFF. "This provides an excellent vantage point for FDNS to observe the daily life of beneficiaries and petitioners who are suspected of fraudulent activities," it said.
According to the EFF, this memo -- which specifically details how the government evaluates potential citizen requests -- suggests there's nothing to prevent an exaggerated, harmless or even out-of-date offhand comment in a status update from quickly becoming the subject of a full investigation...
Labels: big brother, privacy, social networking, spying
Thursday, April 15, 2010
According to a recent survey from Arbitron and Edison Research, nearly half of Americans age 12 and older have a profile on one or more social networking Web sites. The study also revealed that the use of social networking sites is not limited to youth: Approximately 78% of teens and 77% of 18 to 24-year-olds have personal profile pages. Nearly two-thirds of Americans between the ages of 25 and 34 have personal profile pages...
Labels: social networking
The CIA will soon have nothing on the social networking watchdogs. Teneros has launched a product that is designed to let a company monitor its employees’ social networking activities. Not that employers who wanted to see what employees past and present might say about them – but it would have been a labor intensive job. Now its automated – employers can discover and monitor their employees’ Facebook and Twitter posts and tweets – with more sites promised (YouTube, MySpace, and LinkedIn, for example)...
Labels: personal Information, privacy, social networking, spying
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