Creepy Facebook is Creepy

Via TechCrunch.com.

The latest Facebook data breach – which exposed personal contact information that Facebook had harvested on 6 million of its users – is a reminder that even if you’re not handing over all your contact data to Facebook, it is obtaining and triangulating that data anyway. And even if you’re not on Facebook yourself, your contact data likely is because the social network is building a shadow profile of you by data-mining other people.

You might never join Facebook, but a zombie you — sewn together from scattered bits of your personal data — is still sitting there in sort-of-stasis on its servers waiting to be properly animated if you do sign up for the service. Or waiting to escape through the cracks of another security flaw in Facebook’s systems. [emphasis mine]

Facebook is a crowd-fueled, data-mining machine that’s now so massive (1.11 billion monthly active users as of March 2013) that it doesn’t matter if you haven’t ever signed up yourself to sign over your personal data. It has long since passed the tipping point where it can act as a distributed data network that knows something about almost everyone. Or everyone who leaves any kind of digital/cellular trace that can be fed into its data banks

Chances are someone you have corresponded with — by email or mobile phone — has let Facebook’s data spiders crawl through their correspondence, thereby allowing your contact data to be assimilated entirely without your knowledge or consent. One such example was flagged to TechCrunch on Saturday when one of the users was informed by Facebook they had been affected by its latest breach found it had harvested an email address they had never personally handed over.

This behaviour casts Facebook as the Borg of the digital world: resistance is futile. It also underlines exactly why the NSA wants a backdoor into this type of digital treasure trove. If you’re going to outsource low-level surveillance of everyone, then Facebook is one of a handful of tech companies large enough to have files on almost everyone. So really, forget the futuristic Borg: this ceaseless data-harvesting brings to mind the dossier-gathering attention to detail of the Stasi.

Read the whole article here.