On Fri, 2013-06-21 at 09:23 +0100, Joe wrote: > On Fri, 21 Jun 2013 01:33:41 +0200 > Ralf Mardorf <ralf.mard...@alice-dsl.net> wrote: > > > On Thu, 2013-06-20 at 15:25 -0700, Scott Linnenbringer wrote: > > > Facebook stores every wall post, private message, photo, etc even > > > after you remove from wall, delete or untag. > > > > In some countries this is forbidden. > > > > Meaning that only the government can do it. > > But if forbidden things didn't have a way of happening, we would have > no need for police, prisons etc., the existence of the law would > guarantee good behaviour. > > It is safest to assume that any available technology *will* be used by > one's own government, and any private organisations large enough to > lean on members of that government.
I agree with this, at the moment a lawyer is helping me, regarding to a data protection issue, that has to do with a German department. This department needs information about me, so they need a file containing this + tons of other information. They want to archive the file and "guarantee" that nobody in their house will read anything, but the needed information only. I want to give them the needed information only and not the complete file. It's an expert report and I want an independent expert to do it and to give them just the needed information, but they want the report from their own expert. That is completely against the "idea" of the German law, even the lawyer said, that I'm right, but it's normal and we can't do much against it. This is about a file made of paper. I guess they don't do it in bad faith, they simply don't think about data protection. However, the times are changing and misuse is very likely. I once was in private contact with a women working for a German department and she verified what I've written her privately, without the permission to do it. Since I'm not a liar she only get the same information I already gave her, but it's anyway not correct to do it and does show how (un)save data is at German departments. OTOH the commissioner for data protection is interested, when there are issues regarding to computer data protection. If you like, you can send each spam you received to the commissioner for data protection and (s)he will directly forward it to the public prosecution department and they directly take action. The problem here usually are servers in other countries. You'll get a mail that the German public prosecution department is working together with public prosecution departments of other nations to fight against some very dangerous spammers. Note, not all spam mail simply is ludicrous, some spam is dangerous for inexperienced computer users. IOW, if Facebook would have servers in Germany, they need to offer the German government something very useful or they need to follow the German law. I don't think that Facebook can offer something very useful to a government, OTOH Facebook can offer useful information for companies, such as the once from the food processing industry/mafia and their lobby might have marionettes who are members of the German government. Sure, there are security wholes and you need self-responsibility and need to fight against misuse and most people are neither self-responsible, nor do they fight against misuse of their data. You can test it, randomly call a phone number and ask for private data using a trick or simply take a look in the headers of some mails, sometimes you see private servers and you can get telephone numbers and addresses of people who want to be anonyme at e.g. denic.de within a few seconds. But again, I really don't know what Facebooks offers, that so many people are subscribed to it. Is there something we could use Facebook for? I'm a lone wolf, it's work for me to keep up a hand full of friends, I'm unable to do it for 500 virtual friends and I don't see anything useful in it. Btw. the handful of friends I've got don't devastate my possession and I don't want to have "friends" from Facebook doing this. IIUC Facebook is for people who are unable to do something useful with the less time we have to live, instead of learning, being creative, they tend to be destructive, uninterested in science and arts etc., but they like to party, to party and to party. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/1371811691.691.54.camel@archlinux
