Facebook’s Privacy Changes Get Scary

Facebook’s
long had some privacy issues, and now that they’re broadening their
reach on the web, who knows what’ll happen next? Oh, right. We do:

2007 – Facebook Beacon links your purchases at online stores to your Facebook account so your friends (and marketers) can see what you’re buying.

2010 – Facebook makes it impossible for you to hide certain information, such as your interests and location, from everybody.

2011 – Facebook History Tracker makes your web
surfing history publicly viewable on your feed (and to marketers).
After a brief uproar, Facebook enables an "incognito mode" for when you
want to look at porn, but it’s buried deep within the settings and
automatically shuts off after each session.

2012 – Facebook Life Recorder is a small camera
apparatus that’s worn on your head, automatically tagging the friends
you interact with via facial recognition and posting to your wall.
Information such as where you shop and what you buy is put into a
database (for marketers).

2014 – Facebook Implant combines a chemical scanner
with a GPS chip. Everything you eat and everywhere you go are
automatically posted to your News Feed in minute detail. This setting
can be deactivated through outpatient surgery.

2015 – Facebook Guy Who Moves Into Your House With
You and Is Always On the Phone With Potential Advertisers Telling Them
What You’re Doing meets initial resistance, but once the site starts
publicizing its "Watcher Marriages"—instances where a follower and
followee have fallen in love—public opposition melts away.

2016 – Mark Zuckerberg is elected president in the first election that allows voting via Liking candidates on Facebook.

2017 – Facebook User Relocation to Facebook’s
Headquarters ensures Facebook’s ability to track every single thing you
do to post to your Feed. Considered necessary after "Watcher Marriages"
resulted in too many compromised Facebook Guys Who Move Into Your House
With You.

2018 – Facebook Pods provide remote 24 hour contact
with Facebook, as well as all bodily needs, including food delivery and
waste removal (which is then provided to marketers for analysis).

2020 – Facebook Genital Pictures takes pictures of
everyone’s junk, which was real easy what with everyone in those Pods.
Finally, Facebook fulfills its ultimate destiny: showing you (and
marketers) everyone you’ve ever met with no clothes on.

A document from the latest ACTA negotiation round in New Zealand has been released. Here it is.

It is a sanitized version of the draft agreement
text, where all information about which positions are held by which
countries has been removed. But at least it is something. It shows that
the European Parliament’s resolution demanding transparency is having some effect.

But it appears that we are still quite a bit away from full
transparency. They are still trying to hide things from both the
European Parliament and the general public.

We can see an example of this in the highly
controversial ”Internet Section” of the agreement. This is Section 4 on
page 18 in the official document, with the title ”Special Measures
Related to Technological Enforcement of Intellectual Property in the
Digital Environment”.

This is where we should be looking for ”three-strikes” provisions,
and other measures for shutting people off the Internet without any due
process or involvement by the courts.

When discussing ”three-strikes”, it is important to
understand how this kind of provisions may be introduced. It will not
be by openly requiring governments to mandate it. You can say what you
will about the copyright lobby, but they’re not entirely stupid. They
are a bit more subtle than that.

Instead of explicitly demanding that countries introduce
three-strikes measures, they do it by attacking the Internet service
providers.

ISPs are generally protected from being held
responsible for what their customers do on the net. This is called
”safe harbour” or ”mere conduit”, and is an absolute necessity for any
Internet service provider. If they do not have that protection, there
is simply no way that they can take the risk of operating their service.

The interesting thing to look at is what conditions an ISP has to
fulfill in order to qualify for ”safe harbour” or ”mere conduit”
protection, and what measures they have to take against their customers
if they want to be safe.

In the released document, it is true that the phrase ”three-strikes” is not mentioned explicitly anywhere. But in the previous leaked version of the document, it actually  was.

It was mentioned in a footnote, as an example of an ”appropriate
measure” that ISPs could take against their customers, if the ISP wants
to make sure that it does not expose itself to unlimited liability for
things that its users have done.

If you compare the officially released version with the previous leaked version, and look at page 21 in the official version, you will find an interesting difference in the footnotes.

In the official version, footnote 58 on page 21 reads:

[58] At least one delegation proposes to include
language in this footnote to provide greater certainty that their
existing national law complies with this requirement.

In the leak, in exactly the same place, you find the three strikes footnote:

[29] An example of such a policy is providing for the
termination in appropriate circumstances of subscriptions [US: and]
[AUS: or] accounts on the service provider’s system or network of
repeat infringers.

In other words, the US has not given up on imposing
a three-strikes regime in Europe. They have just hidden the reference
to it in the version that was officially released. With the consent of
the EU Commission, obviously.

Is this how the Commission interprets its obligation to keep the EU Parliament fully informed at all stages of the procedure?

It appears so. I think that’s pretty disgraceful.

…………

Previous articles on ACTA

Andra som skriver om ACTA: Michael Geist, Rick Falkvinge (PP), ACTA-bloggen, Hax, DN,

Andra bloggar om: piratpartiet, eu, politik, informationspolitik

http://christianengstrom.wordpress.com/2010/04/