[quote=paramount][quote=CA renter]For those who haven’t heard of it, yet:
“The Utah Data Center is a data storage facility being built for the National Security Agency that is designed to be a primary storage resource capable of storing data on the scale of yottabytes.[1] It is designed to capture “all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.””[1] The planned structure is 1,000,000 square feet, and projected to cost $2,000,000,000 when finished in September 2013.[1] It is expected have a power demand of 65 megawatts, costing about $40,000,000 per year.[1] It is located on Camp Williams, near Bluffdale, Utah.”
Even Orwell Himself wouldn’t have dreamed of this…or did he?[/quote]
…And yet people have no qualms sharing every intimate and personal details about their life on facebook, myspace, linkedin, twitter, etc,etc,etc..
You know the government is dumb… It would have been cheaper and more efficient form the government just to have bought facebook, myspace, and linkedin, twitter, etc… In that case, people wouldn’t be so adamant about divulging their personal data to complete strangers and the concerns over privacy wouldn’t have been an issue !
And before we get into huffy about this… I’m sure it’s pretty easy to piece together almost anyone online these days… Because most everyone puts everything on social media without thinking first about the consequences of voluntarily surrendering their privacy… And please don’t challenge me to make a point….Because I’m sure a lot of you I could piece together who you are with a few clicks away.
Because a lot folks don’t care when it’s marketed as social media….But the information out there is equally as “private” as folks want to make it out to be….
I’ll give you an example…
Mistake #1: A lot of folks sign up from blogs..The end up using the same login handle as some social media like myspace of facebook. So if you punch in the login handle on a blog into google, chances are immediately there’s a match on myspace/facebook/twitter/etc.
Mistake #2: Providing pictures and actual identifying information on social media that is public visible..
The same people then end up posting a picture of themselves on social media. Some go as far as even put in their current location, their previous location, and where they went to school and what they do and and did, along with a real name…
So complete strangers now know what you look like, where you live (roughly), even your education and maybe your employment history…
Mistake #3: Same person ends up using same name/handle on something like LinkedIn… And furthermore does the baffoon thing by making the career profile publicly visible so that it can be searched for on google or some other indexing website…
Great, now some complete stranger has relatively your complete employment history more or less, and possibly even who your colleagues and friends are…
And in case you have a common name like “John Smith”, no worries, because chances that person was baffoon enough to enter where they work, on both socially media websites so that you have a matching linkedin profile with a matching facebook/myspace/twitter profile….
Mistake#4: Now with all this data, someone can go to one of the personal record search services…Like intellius.com, etc, punch in person’s name, occupation,etc, and probably get a list of addresses (current or past) because obviously, one didn’t opt opt of a bunch of mailing lists/phone numbers/etc…
#5: Throw in a couple of publicly visible pictures, and then run them through online facial recognition software to reverse looks up pictures to online identity, then a complete stranger uncovers picasa/shutterfly/etc accounts, and then if the person has publicly visible tags, reverse lookup who/whom his/her contacts are…
And then the fun begins for a real good con artist….Because it’s a field day to start social engineering maybe not you directly but one of your friends or distance acquittance and gradually work your way into a closer circle.
Oh, and by the way. Don’t worry about making some of your profiles private once it was out their publicly visible to everyone. Because if you do it after it was already publicly visible, chances are google/yahoo or some other website has already indexed and cached the public version of your private information, so someone can still get to it.
But hey… While we really care about government easedropping on our phone sex calls to our significant others, Social media and web 2.0 is really cool!
