Fresh questions over Facebook intrusion of privacy

Reports are coming in of yet more security concerns over Facebook at the way it interacts with personal data. It has always been possible to connect to friends using the friend finder service, asking Facebook to match your e-mail address book with it's records, but this has historically been done only at your request. Now it appears that Facebook is doing this as a matter of course as more and more people see recommended “friends” from their personal e-mail accounts that aren't linked to Facebook. This suggests strongly that not only is Facebook gaining access to the address book of the e-mail that you have registered in your account, but potentially to any other e-mail addresses that you may have. This raises a number of questions, but perhaps most importantly, lets take the case of one correspondent recently who has a Google Mail account that is registered on Facebook, and a separate Yahoo Mail account that isn't and has never been mentioned on Facebook. The Google account is only used for Facebook, the Yahoo account being used for day to day e-mailing and personal and business use.

The odd thing is that our correspondent has started seeing suggested friends whose only connection is through their e-mail address being on the Yahoo account. This is odd because theoretically at least Google, Yahoo and indeed Facebook are in competition and it seems unusual that there would be a a sharing of information in this way, yet it seems to be happening. This comes amidst reports, including a previous article on this blog about the new Facebook policy of automatically creating and publishing Facebook email addresses for users that are then linked to the registered email address. There has already been concern expressed that this allows Facebook, or anyone behind it to scan through mail being sent via this method before onward transmission. It also suggests that there are existing links between Facebook and the major email providers, so the question is, how deep do these links go, and how much covert co-operation is really going on between these supposedly commercially competitive companies?

Lets start with what we know to be the case. Recent proposed legislation in the UK and US is aimed at granting powers to monitor internet activity, email, and so on. The legislation, interestingly, allows the use of such data in court proceedings, suggesting that such monitoring is already going on unofficially, something that has been suspected for a long time. So we know that the intelligence community already monitors our online activity, and to do so they would need the cooperation of the various commercial operations that dominate the internet, so if we suppose that in order to create an effective and efficient monitoring operation, one of the stipulations of operating a search engine, or email service or browser might well be that it is interoperable with other products. To achieve this there would have to be disseminate of commercially confidential information, and therefore these companies would be in breach of anti-trust and anti-competition legislation in normal circumstances so it is clear that something is going on that bypasses these safeguards, and the most likely possibility is that the CIA are creating a complete suite of internet monitoring technologies that will allow them complete access to everything that we do online without the necessity of reasonable cause, or even suspicion, and more importantly without the need for court authorisation of that monitoring as there is with such older technology as wire tapping. It will be interesting to discover just how far this big brother, Orwellian intrusion goes, and whether or not it will include controlling activity as well as monitoring it. Only time will tell.