ACLU exposes Facebook, Twitter for selling surveillance company user data
This is a very messy, multi-layered issue.<p>First of all, a large part of a social network&#x27;s utility is derived from sharing data about oneself. This data is public, for the benefit of other participants of the social network. Some of those participants may have agendas that are contrary to one&#x27;s own: stalkers, adversaries, data aggregators -- it&#x27;s impossible to know all of them ahead of time, and a granularity of permissions that satisfies these competing goals is... tough.<p>Second, it ought to be a person&#x27;s reasonable expectation that law enforcement is a benevolent actor. Actions such as this, which amount to targeted crowd surveillance, don&#x27;t instill much faith in this assumption. This is a very serious issue that merits more discussion than my terse comment.<p>Lastly, this data aggregator should not be the target of the outrage. They&#x27;re an intermediary in a system where we willingly share data with private companies to get some value-add, who then sell that data to fund their operations, and some of the purchasers of our data happen to be law enforcement. Anger directed at any particular intermediary -- like anger at reposessors or ambulance chasers or debt relief counselors -- is woefully misdirected; we should instead be asking why corporations feel the need to sell our data in the first place, and why we have law enforcement that feels the need to employ mass surveillance. If we ponder these questions, we&#x27;ll have accomplished something more than drive an inconsequential company out business while leaving the systemic faults in place.