Laura Poitras: ‘Facebook is a gift to intelligence agencies’
I've read a couple of articles in the past that linked Facebook and Google to CIA and that's a fair thought given the business that they're in. Of course the NSA and the CIA would like to have access to their data (and most probably they do in one way or another).<p>That said, doesn't take anything away from Facebook as a service. Facebook adds extreme value to your <i>social life</i> connects you with people that you don't see daily, lets you know about birthdays, events, comments and what not. It's excellent at what it does IMHO and if used properly is really what web-2.0 is all about. I can say that if Zuckerberg didn't invent Facebook in ~ 2004, it would have been invented by now, by someone else because that was what people <i>needed badly</i> to stay <i>connected</i>.<p>Facebook is just a tool. If you are in the intel business or you are a possible target (e.g. prominent figure of some sort) and fairly young to understand how the internet works, you use FB for PR and nothing else. Maybe not even that.<p>Every social network can be used for data mining from intelligence agencies. Do most people care? No. Why? Because they don't see any kind of real threat. It doesn't interfere with their lives. The HN crowd is composed mostly by <i>hackers</i>. It's natural for <i>us</i> to see where all this might go wrong, because that's what <i>we do</i> and it's natural for others not to care until the shit hits the fan.<p>I'm eagerly waiting for her Snowden related movie/documentary.