Hacker Group Anonymous Aims To Destroy Facebook on Nov. 5

by Erica Swallow

Hackivist group Anonymous vows to “kill Facebook” on November 5, citing users’ lack of choice in privacy as its reason for attack.

Update: Anonymous confirmed via a tweet that while some of its members are organizing the upcoming attack against Facebook, the hacker organization as a whole does not necessarily agree with the attack.

The group of hackers has claimed participation in just about every recent notable hacking attack of this year and successfully broke into 70 law enforcement websites and took down the Syrian Ministry of Defense website this week alone.

This recent interest in Facebook, despite a slew of privacy concerns raised against the social network since its founding, may be a result of Anonymous’s recent announcement that it plans to create its own social network, called AnonPlus. After the group’s Google+ account, called “Your Anon News,” was banned, it began fleshing out AnonPlus.com, “a new social network where there is no fear … of censorship … of blackout … nor of holding back.”

Below is a video and statement released by Anonymous explaining the reason for its upcoming battle with the world’s largest social network. Let us know your thoughts on the group’s statement in the comments below.

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Anonymous Statement

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Attention citizens of the world,

We wish to get your attention, hoping you heed the warnings as follows:
Your medium of communication you all so dearly adore will be destroyed. If you are a willing hacktivist or a guy who just wants to protect the freedom of information then join the cause and kill facebook for the sake of your own privacy.

Facebook has been selling information to government agencies and giving clandestine access to information security firms so that they can spy on people from all around the world. Some of these so-called whitehat infosec firms are working for authoritarian governments, such as those of Egypt and Syria.

Everything you do on Facebook stays on Facebook regardless of your "privacy" settings, and deleting your account is impossible, even if you "delete" your account, all your personal info stays on Facebook and can be recovered at any time. Changing the privacy settings to make your Facebook account more "private" is also a delusion. Facebook knows more about you than your family.

http://www.physorg.com/news170614271.html
http://itgrunts.com/2010/10/07/facebook-steals-numbers-and-data-from-your-iphone/

You cannot hide from the reality in which you, the people of the internet, live in. Facebook is the opposite of the Antisec cause. You are not safe from them nor from any government. One day you will look back on this and realise what we have done here is right, you will thank the rulers of the internet, we are not harming you but saving you.

The riots are underway. It is not a battle over the future of privacy and publicity. It is a battle for choice and informed consent. It's unfolding because people are being raped, tickled, molested, and confused into doing things where they don't understand the consequences. Facebook keeps saying that it gives users choices, but that is completely false. It gives users the illusion of and hides the details away from them "for their own good" while they then make millions off of you. When a service is "free," it really means they're making money off of you and your information.

Think for a while and prepare for a day that will go down in history. November 5 2011, #opfacebook . Engaged.

This is our world now. We exist without nationality, without religious bias. We have the right to not be surveilled, not be stalked, and not be used for profit. We have the right to not live as slaves.

We are anonymous
We are legion
We do not forgive
We do not forget
Expect us

Should Governments Monitor Social Media to Prevent Civil Unrest?

by Billie Edington

By now, plenty has been written around the circumstances of the London riots. Like Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen, social media has been credited, or in this case blamed, with aiding swift and active civil unrest. Criminal or political — or both — the “social media riots” of London have shown how almost any location is susceptible to the rapid assembly these networks afford a younger generation.

And it’s moving increasingly closer to home. As early as today, Philadelphia has had to impose a curfew on teenagers who used social media to organize criminal “flash mobs.” With an uncertain economic climate and a bleak job market, there’s reason to be concerned.

Rather than waiting to see how this might play out at home, the London riots in particular raise some larger questions about social media policy and government’s involvement. Police have attributed the rioters’ organizational speed primarily to BlackBerry’s messenger service (BBM) and Twitter.  These kinds of technologies used to be law enforcement’s leg up, and now they’re competing against its most adept users. The law does require these platforms to work with government agencies when criminal activity is suspected, but to what extent? BlackBerry has already felt the wrath of hackers for agreeing to help police in identifying potential rioters. But when it comes to public safety, who decides how far is too far? And can we, as users, trust our social platforms?

If our government and social networks start addressing these questions together preemptively, rights to freedom of speech, privacy, and assembly might not have to be so swiftly compromised in times of disruption. Consider the Pentagon’s recent request for research proposals that would help them better monitor conversation in the Middle East. This recognizes that social listening is an effective way to understand and track political rebellion.

But can our government listen more effectively in the social space at home to stop the “social media riots” from occurring here? The amount to which our government is already listening to our social networks at home is unclear, although you can be sure they are. But just as the London riots reveal, the masses are increasingly demanding transparency. In advertising, we continually tell our clients that social media best practices require transparency, authenticity and engagement. Those who don’t engage don’t control the conversation. And those who listen engage most effectively.

So do governments need to become better social listeners? If government services and officials opened up more channels of discussion online, would this help relieve some issues of transparency for the masses? Would we feel like we had more access to our political system? In a more perfect world, could we even find ways to curate effective and actionable political protests online so it never escalates to violence?

Democracy is, by definition, the governing voice of the masses, and social networks are the new soapboxes. If our government isn’t listening and engaging, is it doing its job?

Facebook’s Photo Archive Can Identify People in Real Life [STUDY]

 by Stan Schroeder

Facebook has had its share of problems over face recognition — a feature that connects a photo of a person’s face with their Facebook profile, making it easier to tag people in photos — but researchers from Heinz College, Carnegie Mellon University recently proved that Facebook’s vast photo archive can be used to identify people on the street, too.

The authors of the study titled “Faces of Facebook: Privacy in the Age of Augmented Reality” — Alessandro Acquisti, Ralph Gross and Fred Stutzman — demonstrated it at the Black Hat technical security conference, which was July 30 to August 4 in Las Vegas. They used publicly available data — photos from Facebook profiles of students — and then used face recognition technology to recognize these students as they look into a web camera.

The results? Using a database of 25,000 photos taken from Facebook profiles, the authors’ face recognition software correctly identified 31 percent of the students after fewer than three (on average) quick comparisons. In another test, the authors took photos from 277,978 Facebook profiles and compared them to nearly 6,000 profiles from an unnamed dating Web site, managing to identify approximately 10 percent of the site’s members.

The study raises important questions about our privacy. Online, you can make steps to hide your real identity such as changing your name, but as the authors of the study note, “It is much harder … to change someone’s face.” Based on the results of the study, it’s not hard to imagine someone creating a simple software/hardware combination which could identify people simply as they walk through a street or peer into a store’s window.

“Our focus, however, was on examining whether the convergence of publicly available Web 2.0 data, cheap cloud computing, data mining, and off-the-shelf face recognition is bringing us closer to a world where anyone may run face recognition on anyone else, online and offline — and then infer additional, sensitive data about the target subject, starting merely from one anonymous piece of information about her: the face,” the study concludes.

South Korea Fines Apple $2,830 Over iPhone Data Collection

 by Erica Swallow

Apple’s controversial iPhone location-tracking practices aren’t sitting well with South Korean authorities — the Korean Communications Commission (KCC) has fined the company ₩3 million, which equates to a measly $2,830 USD, for violating the country’s location information laws.

Apple’s location-tracking controversy first came under attack in April in the United States, when researchers discovered that the iPhone includes a hidden file that stores latitude, longitude and timestamps.

Shortly after “Locationgate” arose, the company issued a statement, saying, “Apple is not tracking the location of your iPhone. Apple has never done so and has no plans to ever do so.” That sentiment was echoed in anemail from Apple CEO Steve Jobs and is now being reiterated word-for-word by Apple spokesman Steve Park as a result of the KCC statement.

In its official statement and Q&A on location data in April, Apple explained:

“The iPhone is not logging your location. Rather, it’s maintaining a database of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers around your current location, some of which may be located more than one hundred miles away from your iPhone, to help your iPhone rapidly and accurately calculate its location when requested.”

This same argument still applies, but regardless, South Korea isn’t having Apple’s shenanigans. AP reportsthat in levying the fine, the KCC hopes to influence regulators elsewhere to do the same.

Frankly, it seems a bit silly to send a $2,830 bill to a company that just announced a quarterly record revenue of $28.57 billion and a record net profit of $7.31 billion, making it just $50 billion away from being the world’s most valuable company.

Google was also contacted regarding location data stored on mobile phones that run its Android operating system. The search juggernaut, though, was not fined. The KCC just demanded that it — and Apple — ensure that user location information on their mobile phones be saved in an encrypted form.

A number of large multinational corporations have been facing regulatory problems in South Korea as of late. In April, two South Korean search engines filed antitrust complaints against Google. And in December, the KCC also pulled up arguments against Facebook, saying that the social network did not comply with the country’s privacy laws.

Google+ steers clear of privacy missteps

by Declan McCullagh

With the launch of a new social networking platform, Google seems determined not to repeat the privacy missteps it made last year with Google Buzz.

Public criticism, some valid, some not, prompted Google to make a series of quick changes to Buzz a few days after its launch in February 2010. Google finally settled allegations of unintentional oversharing in an agreement inked with the Federal Trade Commission earlier this year.

When creating Google+, which debuted yesterday, the Mountain View, Calif.-based company took pains to ensure there's no danger of that happening again. Google+ sports a clean, well-designed user interface that arguably offers greater privacy protections than Facebook, which has made more and more information public over time.

Some examples:

 • Google+ has, by my count, 13 privacy settings, each with an average of a sentence or two of text to explain them. There's another page if you want to edit individual items. Facebook has far more complicated privacy options that are more difficult to navigate.

• Facebook requires that you use your real name, a practice that has drawn criticism. At least in its published privacy policy, Google+ doesn't. (Neither does Twitter, for that matter.)

• Facebook says that "your name, profile picture, gender and networks are visible to everyone." Google+ appears to require that a name and profile picture, if one has been uploaded, be public. But gender and networks -- called circles, in Google-ese -- can be made private.

• Google has wisely turned off this option by default, though it can be enabled with a click or two: "Show geo location information from photos in newly uploaded albums."

• Google+ makes the identity of all your circles (including family and friends) visible to "Anyone on the web." Same with "Show people who have added you to circles," also selected by default. Both can be made private, of course, but what's clever is that the names of the corresponding circles aren't visible. That makes it a bit easier to put someone in the "acquaintance" circle, because they won't know where they ended up.

• When you create a circle, you know who's in it. That makes sharing to members of that circle simple. It's less obvious who a friend-of-a-friend might be on Facebook.

All posts on Google+ can be made public, turning it into a kind of high-powered, if not very customizable, blogging platform. But it's more useful when posts can be segmented by circles.

"A clear and extremely welcome difference between Google+ and Facebook is that G+ treats us as adults able to determine our own relationships and sharing preferences, in contrast to Facebook that treats us like sheep to be fleeced via pressures to overshare," wrote Lauren Weinstein of People For Internet Responsibility in, of course, a Google+ post.

Google+ is still in testing, but you can request to be added to the list.