Facebook "Privacy"...,

What to see what Facebook has on you (at a minimum)?

1. Goto https://t.co/UFPfcZwJw7
2. Click "Download a copy of your Facebook data"
3. Wait for automatic email from Facebook
4. Download the ZIP file link in the email
5. Extract it and open 'html/index.htm'

— Julian Assange ⌛ (@JulianAssange) March 24, 2018

 

Sent it to the kids... 

Heard back from the 54yo Chemist Son

This was in the email he received:

What info is available?	What is it?	Where can I find it?
About Me	Information you added to the About section of your Timeline like relationships, work, education, where you live and more. It includes any updates or changes you made in the past and what is currently in the About section of your Timeline.	Activity Log Downloaded Info
Account Status History	The dates when your account was reactivated, deactivated, disabled or deleted.	Downloaded Info
Active Sessions	All stored active sessions, including date, time, device, IP address, machine cookie and browser information.	Downloaded Info
Ads Clicked	Dates, times and titles of ads clicked (limited retention period).	Downloaded Info
Address	Your current address or any past addresses you had on your account.	Downloaded Info
Ad Topics	A list of topics that you may be targeted against based on your stated likes, interests and other data you put in your Timeline.	Downloaded Info
Alternate Name	Any alternate names you have on your account (ex: a maiden name or a nickname).	Downloaded Info
Apps	All of the apps you have added.	Downloaded Info
Birthday Visibility	How your birthday appears on your Timeline.	Downloaded Info
Chat	A history of the conversations you’ve had on Facebook Chat (a complete history is available directly from your messages inbox).	Downloaded Info
Check-ins	The places you’ve checked into.	Activity Log  Downloaded Info
Connections	The people who have liked your Page or Place, RSVPed to your event, installed your app or checked in to your advertised place within 24 hours of viewing or clicking on an ad or Sponsored Story.	Activity Log
Credit Cards	If you make purchases on Facebook (ex: in apps) and have given Facebook your credit card number.	Account Settings
Currency	Your preferred currency on Facebook. If you use Facebook Payments, this will be used to display prices and charge your credit cards.	Downloaded Info
Current City	The city you added to the About section of your Timeline.	Downloaded Info
Date of Birth	The date you added to Birthday in the About section of your Timeline.	Downloaded Info
Deleted Friends	People you’ve removed as friends.	Downloaded Info
Education	Any information you added to Education field in the About section of your Timeline.	Downloaded Info
Emails	Email addresses added to your account (even those you may have removed).	Downloaded Info
Events	Events you’ve joined or been invited to.	Activity Log  Downloaded Info
Facial Recognition Data	A unique number based on a comparison of the photos you're tagged in. We use this data to help others tag you in photos.	Downloaded Info
Family	Friends you’ve indicated are family members.	Downloaded Info
Favorite Quotes	Information you’ve added to the Favorite Quotes section of the About section of your Timeline.	Downloaded Info
Followers	A list of people who follow you.	Downloaded Info
Following	A list of people you follow.	Activity Log
Friend Requests	Pending sent and received friend requests.	Downloaded Info
Friends	A list of your friends.	Downloaded Info
Gender	The gender you added to the About section of your Timeline.	Downloaded Info
Groups	A list of groups you belong to on Facebook.	Downloaded Info
Hidden from News Feed	Any friends, apps or pages you’ve hidden from your News Feed.	Downloaded Info
Hometown	The place you added to hometown in the About section of your Timeline.	Downloaded Info
IP Addresses	A list of IP addresses where you’ve logged into your Facebook account (won’t include all historical IP addresses as they are deleted according to a retention schedule).	Downloaded Info
Last Location	The last location associated with an update.	Activity Log
Likes on Others' Posts	Posts, photos or other content you’ve liked.	Activity Log
Likes on Your Posts from others	Likes on your own posts, photos or other content.	Activity Log
Likes on Other Sites	Likes you’ve made on sites off of Facebook.	Activity Log
Linked Accounts	A list of the accounts you've linked to your Facebook account	Account Settings
Locale	The language you've selected to use Facebook in.	Downloaded Info
Logins	IP address, date and time associated with logins to your Facebook account.	Downloaded Info
Logouts	IP address, date and time associated with logouts from your Facebook account.	Downloaded Info
Messages	Messages you’ve sent and received on Facebook. Note, if you've deleted a message it won't be included in your download as it has been deleted from your account.	Downloaded Info
Name	The name on your Facebook account.	Downloaded Info
Name Changes	Any changes you’ve made to the original name you used when you signed up for Facebook.	Downloaded Info
Networks	Networks (affiliations with schools or workplaces) that you belong to on Facebook.	Downloaded Info
Notes	Any notes you’ve written and published to your account.	Activity Log
Notification Settings	A list of all your notification preferences and whether you have email and text enabled or disabled for each.	Downloaded Info
Pages You Admin	A list of pages you admin.	Downloaded Info
Pending Friend Requests	Pending sent and received friend requests.	Downloaded Info
Phone Numbers	Mobile phone numbers you’ve added to your account, including verified mobile numbers you've added for security purposes.	Downloaded Info
Photos	Photos you’ve uploaded to your account.	Downloaded Info
Photos Metadata	Any metadata that is transmitted with your uploaded photos.	Downloaded Info
Physical Tokens	Badges you’ve added to your account.	Downloaded Info
Pokes	A list of who’s poked you and who you’ve poked. Poke content from our mobile poke app is not included because it's only available for a brief period of time. After the recipient has viewed the content it's permanently deleted from our systems.	Downloaded Info
Political Views	Any information you added to Political Views in the About section of Timeline.	Downloaded Info
Posts by You	Anything you posted to your own Timeline, like photos, videos and status updates.	Activity Log
Posts by Others	Anything posted to your Timeline by someone else, like wall posts or links shared on your Timeline by friends.	Activity Log Downloaded Info
Posts to Others	Anything you posted to someone else’s Timeline, like photos, videos and status updates.	Activity Log
Privacy Settings	Your privacy settings.	Privacy SettingsDownloaded Info
Recent Activities	Actions you’ve taken and interactions you’ve recently had.	Activity Log Downloaded Info
Registration Date	The date you joined Facebook.	Activity Log Downloaded Info
Religious Views	The current information you added to Religious Views in the About section of your Timeline.	Downloaded Info
Removed Friends	People you’ve removed as friends.	Activity Log  Downloaded Info
Screen Names	The screen names you’ve added to your account, and the service they’re associated with. You can also see if they’re hidden or visible on your account.	Downloaded Info
Searches	Searches you’ve made on Facebook.	Activity Log
Shares	Content (ex: a news article) you've shared with others on Facebook using the Share button or link.	Activity Log
Spoken Languages	The languages you added to Spoken Languages in the Aboutsection of your Timeline.	Downloaded Info
Status Updates	Any status updates you’ve posted.	Activity Log  Downloaded Info
Work	Any current information you’ve added to Work in the About section of your Timeline.	Downloaded Info
Vanity URL	Your Facebook URL (ex: username or vanity for your account).	Visible in your Timeline URL
Videos	Videos you’ve posted to your Timeline.	Activity Log Downloaded Info

After he had read some of the 305mb provided,he responded:

It's fucking horrifying!! I've looked at about 2% of it, and it makes me grateful that I have used discretion out there for the most part. Even the "private messages" are in the files....

Fist tap Big Don.

With "Platform" Capitalism - Value Creation Depends on Privacy Invasion

opendemocracy |  The current social mobilization against Facebook resembles the actions of activists who, in opposition to neoliberal globalization, smash a McDonald’s window during a demonstration. 

On March 17, The Observer of London and The New York Times announced that Cambridge Analytica, the London-based political and corporate consulting group, had harvested private data from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their consent. The data was collected through a Facebook-based quiz app called thisisyourdigitallife, created by Aleksandr Kogan, a University of Cambridge psychologist who had requested and gained access to information from 270,000 Facebook members after they had agreed to use the app to undergo a personality test, for which they were paid through Kogan’s company, Global Science Research.

But as Christopher Wylie, a twenty-eight-year-old Canadian coder and data scientist and a former employee of Cambridge Analytica, stated in a video interview, the app could also collect all kinds of personal data from users, such as the content that they consulted, the information that they liked, and even the messages that they posted.

In addition, the app provided access to information on the profiles of the friends of each of those users who agreed to take the test, which enabled the collection of data from more than 50 million.

All this data was then shared by Kogan with Cambridge Analytica, which was working with Donald Trump’s election team and which allegedly used this data to target US voters with personalised political messages during the presidential campaign. As Wylie, told The Observer, “we built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons.”

These platforms differ significantly in terms of the services that they offer: some, like eBay or Taobao simply allow exchange of products between buyers and sellers; others, like Uber or TaskRabbit, allow independent service providers to find customers; yet others, like Apple or Google allow developers to create and market apps.

However, what is common to all these platforms is the central role played by data, and not just continuous data collection, but its ever more refined analysis in order to create detailed user profiles and rankings in order to better match customers and suppliers or increase efficiency.

All this is done in order to use data to create value in some way another (to monetize it by selling to advertisers or other firms, to increase sales, or to increase productivity). Data has become ‘the new oil’ of global economy, a new commodity to be bought and sold at a massive scale, and with this development, as a former Harvard Business School professor Shoshana Zuboff has argued, global capitalism has become ‘surveillance capitalism’.

What this means is that platform economy is a model of value creation which is completely dependant on continuous privacy invasions and, what is alarming is that we are gradually becoming used to this.

American News Media Is a Propaganda Organ For Imperial Dictatorship

strategic-culture |  America’s ‘news’-media possess the mentality that characterizes a dictatorship, not a democracy. This will be documented in the linked-to empirical data which will be subsequently discussed. But, first, here is what will be documented by those data, and which will make sense of these data:

In a democracy, the public perceive their country to be improving, in accord with that nation’s values and priorities. Consequently, they trust their government, and especially they approve of the job-performance of their nation’s leader. In a dictatorship, they don’t. In a dictatorship, the government doesn’t really represent them, at all. It represents the rulers, typically a national oligarchy, an aristocracy of the richest 0.1% or even of only the richest 0.01%. No matter how much the government ‘represents’ the public in law (or “on paper”), it’s not representing them in reality; and, so, the public don’t trust their government, and the public’s job-rating of their national leader, the head-of-state, is poor, perhaps even more disapproval than approval. So, whereas in a democracy, the public widely approve of both the government and the head-of-state; in a dictatorship, they don’t.

In a dictatorship, the ‘news’-media hide reality from the public, in order to serve the government — not the public. But the quality of government that the regime delivers to its public cannot be hidden as the lies continually pile up, and as the promises remain unfulfilled, and as the public find that despite all of the rosy promises, things are no better than before, or are even becoming worse. Trust in such a government falls, no matter how much the government lies and its media hide the fact that it has been lying. Though a ‘democratic’ election might not retain in power the same leaders, it retains in power the same regime (be it the richest 0.1%, or the richest 0.01%, or The Party, or whatever the dictatorship happens to be). That’s because it’s a dictatorship: it represents the same elite of power-holding insiders, no matter what. It does not represent the public. That elite — whatever it is — is referred to as the “Deep State,” and  which nominally is headed by the head-of-state of its leading country (this used to be called an “Emperor”), but which actually consists of an alliance between the aristocracies within all these countries; and, sometimes, the nominal leading country is actually being led, in its foreign policies, by wealthier aristocrats in the supposedly vassal nations. But no empire can be a democracy, because the residents in no country want to be governed by any foreign power: the public, in every land, want their nation to be free — they want democracy, no dictatorship at all, especially no dictatorship from abroad.

Media Has Denied Black Students a Voice in Parkland School Shooting Aftermath

theroot |  During an Axios event Friday, which focused on the national gun debate, Marjory Stoneman Douglas student David Hogg was asked by Axios co-founder Mike Allen what the media’s biggest mistake was during the shooting at his school in Parkland, Fla., was that they failed to highlight the voices of his black classmates, according to Yahoo!.

“Not giving black students a voice,” Hogg responded, via Axios. “My school is about 25 percent black, but the way we’re covered doesn’t reflect that.”

He also said that his school felt “like a prison” after school officials upped security measures. This week, his school announced that it would require students to wear clear backpacks after spring break. 

The Black American Male Has Been Permanently and Intentionally Left Behind

NYTimes |  A new study rebuts a widely shared view that racial disparities in social mobility are economic inequalities in disguise — the belief that if we address class issues, we can fix racism.

The report, by the Stanford economist Raj Chetty, the Harvard economist Nathaniel Hendren and colleagues at The Equality of Opportunity Project, provides an empirical basis for an economic susceptibility that black parents like me have sensed: Across generations, we are less likely than whites to rise and when we do, are more likely later to fall. We seem unable to grasp or preserve economic gains as other groups do, including Latinos and Asian-Americans.

The study’s findings build on the authors’ prior research that has empirically substantiated two insights about intergenerational economic mobility. One is that a child’s economic position is sticky: Children from affluent families are many times more likely to maintain their privileged status than children from poor families are to attain it.

The other is that while economic mobility may be individual, the conditions that enable or retard it are social. Wealthy neighborhoods with good schools and strong social ties propel even poor children toward a brighter future.

But the reality for black communities is grim.

Black families trace our economic insecurity in part to a gender divide that we see but often don’t discuss. We know that African-American daughters tend to do well. They climb the socioeconomic ladder as high as their white peers, if not higher.

It’s the boys who fail. Whether born to a rich family or a poor one, in an impoverished neighborhood or wealthy one, black boys lag behind their white peers as adults. Black boys who grow up rich are twice as likely as their white counterparts to end up poor. And of those black boys who start life poor, nearly half will remain so in adulthood, while more than 2 in 3 of their white peers will escape the poverty of their youth.

Black women may surpass their white counterparts in individual income, but they lag in household income. The men who would be their husbands are missing — incarcerated, unemployed, unable to be the partners that women want. Or the parents that children need.

Backstory Behind The Atlanta Hack?

nakedsecurity |  The US state of Georgia is considering anti-hacking legislation that critics fear could criminalize security researchers. The bill, SB 315, was drawn up by state senator Bruce Thompson in January, has been approved by the state’s senate, and is now being considered by its house of representatives.

The bill would expand the state’s current computer law to create what it calls the “new” crime of unauthorized computer access. It would include penalties for accessing a system without permission even if no information was taken or damaged.

One of the bill’s backers, state Attorney General Chris Carr, said the bill is necessary to close a loophole: namely, the state now can’t prosecute somebody who harmlessly accesses computers without authorization.

From a statement his office put out when the bill was first introduced:

As it stands, we are one of only three states in the nation where it is not illegal to access a computer so long as nothing is disrupted or stolen.

This doesn’t make any sense. Unlawfully accessing any computer in Georgia should be a crime, and we must fix this loophole.

But critics of the legislation believe it a) will ice Georgia’s cybersecurity industry, penalizing security researchers reporting on bugs; b) would criminalize innocent internet users engaged in innocuous and commonplace behavior, given that the law’s definition of “without authority” could be broadly extended to cover behavior that exceeds rights or permissions granted by the owner of a computer or site (in other words, terms and conditions); and c) is unnecessary, given that current law criminalizes computer theft; computer trespass (including using a computer in order to cause damage, delete data, or interfere with a computer, data or privacy); privacy invasion; altering or deleting data in order to commit forgery; and disclosure of passwords without authorization.

That’s all coming from a letter sent by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to Congress in opposition to the current draft of SB 315.

The EFF calls the legislation “misguided.”

The EFF, along with other groups, are worried that beyond criminalizing innocent online behavior, the bill would criminalize security researchers for the sort of non-malicious poking around that they do.

Not Merely "A Reckoning" Rather "A Moral Reckoning" Because "Trump Adjacent"

NewYorker |  The most significant Trump-adjacent scandal of the week, the one involving Cambridge Analytica, a data-mining organization financed by the conservative Mercer family, has indeed forced a moral reckoning. But it is not a reckoning in Washington; it is centered, instead, in Menlo Park, California.

From the early days of Silicon Valley’s Internet-era revolution, as engineers, designers, and financiers began to recognize the potential of their inventions, sanctimony was a distinct feature of the revolutionists. The young innovators of Silicon Valley were not like the largely amoral barons of industry and finance. They were visionaries of virtue. Google adopted the slogan “Don’t Be Evil” (which morphed into “Do the Right Thing”). These young innovators were creating a seamlessly “connected” world; they were empowering the dispossessed with their tools and platforms. If you expressed any doubts about the inherent goodness of technology, you didn’t “get it.” And to fail to get it was to be gloomy, a Luddite, and three-quarters dead.

The era of sanctimony has, in the past few years, given way to a dawning skepticism. Even as Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook continue to reap immense riches, they have faced questions that could not be answered with flippant declarations of rectitude: Is Google the Standard Oil of search engines, a monopoly best broken up? Does Apple, which has a valuation nearly three times greater than ExxonMobil’s, exploit factory workers in China? Why is Facebook—“the biggest surveillance-based enterprise in the history of mankind,” in the memorable phrase of the critic and novelist John Lanchester—allowed to exploit the work of “content creators” while doing so little to reward them financially? Does the company care that its algorithms have helped create an informational ecosystem that, with its feeds and filter bubbles, has done much to intensify raw partisanship? What does Silicon Valley intend to do about the disparities of race and gender in its ranks? What is the cost of our obsession with the digital devices in our palms—the cost in attention, civility, and moment-to-moment consciousness? The triumphs and wonders of the Internet age have been obvious; the answers to such questions less so.

Careful reporting by the Times, and by the Observer, in the U.K., has now revealed how Cambridge Analytica “scraped” information from as many as fifty million unwitting Facebook users in order to help the Trump campaign. This was a scam with global intent. “They want to fight a culture war in America,” Christopher Wylie, one of the founders of Cambridge Analytica, told the Times. 

“Cambridge Analytica was supposed to be the arsenal of weapons to fight that culture war.” (Wylie left the firm in 2014 and is now regarded as the main whistle-blower against it.) Just as congratulating autocrats on their election victories is nothing new, Cambridge Analytica did not invent data harvesting for political gain. But, as the news reports make plain, it got hold of the data in particularly deceptive ways. The entire operation is now said to be under scrutiny by Robert Mueller’s investigators.

The question is whether the barons of Silicon Valley can move beyond ritual statements of regret and assurance to a genuine self-accounting. In November, 2016, when Facebook was first presented with evidence that its platform had been exploited by Russian hackers to Trump’s advantage, Mark Zuckerberg, serene and arrogant, dismissed the suggestion as “pretty crazy.” As Nicholas Thompson and Fred Vogelstein write, in Wired, it took Zuckerberg at least a year to fully acknowledge Facebook’s role in the election drama and take action.

Is Silicon Valley Headed For A Reckoning?

LATimes | There are calls to eliminate "safe harbor" for platforms such as YouTube, Twitter and Facebook so that they can be regulated like media companies. Other ideas include turning Google into a public utility like its counterparts in the telecommunications sector. And Amazon is forcing new ways of thinking about monopolistic powers beyond just consumer prices.

One recent sign that Washington is willing to take on the industry occurred Wednesday when the Senate overwhelmingly passed the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, which penalizes sites that facilitate prostitution. Silicon Valley opposed the law, fearing it was a slippery slope that would make tech companies liable for content. Already, Craigslist has removed its personals section, and Reddit said it would ban certain transactions.

Still, it may be unreasonable to expect wholesale change without public opinion turning irrefutably against Silicon Valley. Consumers remain captive to technology and investors aren't exactly ready to dump internet stocks.

That said, Facebook shares fell nearly 6% this week amid calls from some users to quit the social network. Similar public pressure led to the ouster of Uber's controversial CEO last year. Perhaps to quell such speculation, Facebook's board took the unusual step of releasing a statement in support of the company's executives Wednesday.

The harsh backlash belies the general sense of fatalism about privacy in the digital era. A Pew Research poll from 2014 showed an overwhelming majority of Americans lacked confidence in internet companies to keep their information private and secure.

Despite that, a Pew survey from this year showed how beholden Americans are to some of these companies after finding 73% of U.S. adults use YouTube and 68% use Facebook.

It's why advertisers won't abandon the platforms anytime soon, even if they have to weather scandals such as Facebook's and cry foul once in a while for placing their ads next to objectionable material.

"The reality is, right now, [Facebook's] profits are still rising," said David Kirkpatrick, author of "The Facebook Effect" and founder of the tech conference Techonomy. "Advertisers for the most part are still going to be there. This is not a fundamental break with their commercial success. Not yet. It depends entirely on what they do now."

Facebook says it has matured from its "move fast and break things" days (its motto was amended in 2014 to "move fast with stable infra," shorthand for infrastructure). And Zuckerberg's response to the current crisis, however late, shows how much more seriously he's acknowledging privacy concerns.

Disrupted Services, Platitudes and Gibberish, Commercial and Federal Fustercluckery...,

11Alive |  "We don't know the extent of the attack," said Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms in a Thursday afternoon press conference.

New Atlanta COO Richard Cox said public safety, water and airport operations departments have not been affected.

Officials also said Thursday afternoon they are working with the FBI, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Cisco cybersecurity officials and Microsoft to determine what information has been accessed and how to resolve the situation.

Bottoms said everyone who has done business with the city is potentially at risk, and advised businesses and consumers to check their bank accounts.

"City payroll has not been affected," Cox said, "and we have not determined that City Hall will need to be closed on Friday."

Multiple sources confirmed to 11Alive earlier on Thursday that various city systems have been impacted by the ransomware attack.

According to a statement from the city, its computers are "currently experiencing outages on various internal and customer facing applications, including some applications that customers use to pay bills or access court-related information. 

"At this time, our Atlanta Information Management team is working diligently with support from Microsoft to resolve the issue. We are confident that our team of technology professionals will be able to restore applications soon. Our city website, Atlantaga.gov, remains accessible and we will provide updates as we receive them.”

Emails have been sent to city employees in multiple departments telling them to unplug their computers if they notice suspicious activity. Professor Green said that directive and the note itself is indicative of a serious ransomware attack.

One expert said based on the language used in the message, the attack resembles the "MSIL" or "Samas" (SAMSAM) ransomware strain that has been around since at least 2016.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the SAMSAM strain was used to compromise the networks of multiple U.S. victims, including 2016 attacks on healthcare facilities that were running outdated versions of the JBoss content management application.