They’re experimenting with putting up a page that shows the number of requests they’ve received, and (partially) the action they took, for the most recent six months.

You can view their map and click the pushpins to see country-specific data. For China, it says

Chinese officials consider censorship demands to be state secrets, so we cannot disclose that information at this time.

Isn’t it interesting that rather than saying “removal requests” Google used the word “censorship” in this case?

To read more about legitimate (legal) requests and requests that do not have the force of law behind them and may simply be trying to intimidate a web site owner, visit the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse.

The Open Net Initiative seeks to identify and document Internet filtering and surveillance.

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The post Reclaim your Facebook privacy appeared first on Sky's Blog.

It’s a “service” that shows my little face photo on sites that subscribe to their service, saying “Sky has been reading this page.” Given what Facebook did to me in December, revealing who all of my friends are^[1][2], I’ve become somewhat protective of where I go and what I read. Why would I want people to see that I’ve been reading some blog that just happens to subscribe to this service? What if I arrive at a site, gag on its contents, and then leave? MyBlogLog still shows that I’ve recently been there.

Goodbye privacy? Nope, goodbye MyBlogLog — I just unregistered. And they miss me already?

[2] The King (Facebook) has no Friends — and Neither do we [any more]

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But anyway it’s too late. Whatever harm has been done has probably been scarfed up by the scurrying search engines which have picked up this valuable information while it has been available. What if some unscrupulous operator has already built a private search engine that has traversed Facebook pages and sucked up all of the relationships while they were public. Even if Facebook hides them later on, any such information could be preserved and used by unscrupulous individuals. (And in case you think you can’t build a search engine in a few hours, I built a search engine in 1999 that spiders, on my behalf, any site I point it at… and I could easily configure it to spider Facebook for this kind of information, and have it running on the task within an hour.)

Julia says that Facebook has added the option to protect your friend list (must have happened while I was sleeping). But I can’t find it. I did find a place to restrict what Facebook shows to the search engines, but searchers have ways around that. And there’s an interesting, long post that I found in Valleywag, that deals with some of the intricacies of making your information more difficult to find. It’s worth reading.

The post The King (Facebook) has no Friends – and Neither do we appeared first on Sky's Blog.

EPIC—the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and nine other co-signing organizations have filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission about this problem.^[1] Read what Larry Dignan says on ZDNet about this. I investigated and found that we’re all naked now…

I checked my own profile and turned the volume down on some of the privacy settings, but I was unable to restrict my friend list – all 127 of them are freely available to anyone who searches for me on Facebook (not to search engines – just to someone who joins Facebook, but that’s trivial). Now I ask you, do you want the entire world to know who you have friended on Facebook? It exposes your entire set of social connections. I consider my friend list to be much more private than the rest of the info they release. (Though I’m not entirely happy that they show my fan pages, for that matter.)  ¡No way José!

34. Facebook now treats the following categories of personal data as “publicly available
information:”

• users’ names,
• profile photos,
• lists of friends,
• pages they are fans of,
• gender,
• geographic regions, and
• networks to which they belong.38

35. By default, Facebook discloses “publicly available information” to search engines, to
Internet users whether or not they use Facebook, and others. According to Facebook,
such information can be accessed by “every application and website, including those you
have not connected with . . . .”39

36. Prior to these changes, only the following items were mandatorily “publicly available
information:”

• a user’s name and
• a user’s network.

The post The King (Facebook) has no Clothes – and Neither do we appeared first on Sky's Blog.

I’ll start with China, which is of course very much in the news right now for repressive measures it takes against its citizens. Many of you will know already that China monitors and censors Internet (particularly web) users, but may not be aware how widely it monitors its citizens.

This article China’s All-Seeing Eye by Naomi Klein in Rolling Stone, should get you started. Her subtitle is With the help of U.S. defense contractors, China is building the prototype for a high-tech police state. It is ready for export.

China is notable because what we in the U.S. might regard as fundamental freedoms, like the right to free speech and dissent, seem to be viewed as hindrances to social and economic development.

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