The government can get a complete picture of who you are on Facebook friendship and monitor your friends and family? The Department of Homeland Security thinks so, and apparently willing to make the hot girl next door and ask to be your friend.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation recently held a DHS document, entitled "Social networking and its importance FDNS" (PDF) as part of his job of monitoring networks. It describes, in general, as the function of social networking to use and provides an overview of the most popular people around the world, such as Facebook, Badoo, Imeem, MySpace, Windows Live Spaces and more.
But the document also stresses the importance of an agent produces a long list of friends for many users of social networks and how they benefit. many narcissistic tendencies Friends' to a large group of fuels "for pages and many of these people are cyber-friends for granted that I do not know," the document said. "This provides an excellent overview of daily life FDNS the request of the beneficiaries and the eight defendants in the fraudulent activities."
Real estate agents are invited to see the possibility of fraud by people around stab wounds in the profiles, if they are valid in the reports or trying another type of fraud in the country to discover. "When a user online, make a public record and plan their activities. In essence, MySpace and other sites is used here as a Cyber surprise" visit "to the applicant [sic] and the beneficiary, the DHS.
As mentioned, the EFF, the note does not need to DHS officials, government affiliation (or even his real name), before revealing the friend requests, or to indicate the level of suspicion before the agents followed a friend of someone .
At the beginning of DHS also monitored (PDF) of a series of social networks "terms of interest" in the months preceding the establishment of Obama in 2009. Besides the usual suspects (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube, Digg, Blogger, Craigslist, Wikipedia, Flickr y), the DHS also control sites specific demographic groups, such as MiGente and Black Planet, as well as NPR and DailyKos.
While the document stresses that personal data can not be imposed, he said later disclosed to the public that everything is open season for further analysis.
EFF strongly criticized the government for its collection of data on citizens and noncitizens alike, and their apparent lack of transparency when it comes to friending people online. An important lesson for users remains to be skeptical, friend requests from people who do not know. Your online privacy is worth the effort of a different brand on the bedside table? As Senior Editor Nate Anderson said when talking about this piece, but clearly there are benefits of a miser Facebook, after all.