Social networking is undermining our perceptions of security and privacy, claimed security expert Bruce Schneier at the RSA Security Conference in London.
Cryptographer and author Schneier, who is hief security technology officer at BT, pointed out that there are serious social changes happening. “We are witnessing massive invasions of privacy and businesses are deliberately manipulating this,“ he said at the RSA Security Conference in London.
“Don’t think you are users of sites like Facebook. We’re Facebook’s product that they sell to their customers,” he said.
Schneier separates the data that gets posted to the internet into six categories: service, disclosed, shared, incidental, behavioural and derived. Service data is the basic information about a user used to open an account. Disclosed data are posts and blogs. Shared is what you write on other people’s walls. Incidental is what is said about you on other people’s pages. Behavioural is the record of sites visited exposing your interests. Derived data is information implied by, other information – for example, if your friends centre on one geographical area, this might imply you live there too.
Any of this information can be correlated and sold to commercial concerns with scant regard to privacy because there is no fine-grained control on security, he said.
Schneier asserted that managing privacy is not a natural act for most people. Socialisation is the driving force. If someone finds all their friends using a particular social networking site, they will gravitate towards it regardless of privacy controls – or the lack of them.
“The death of privacy is a fallacy. The CEOs [of social networking sites] are killing it because technology is changing the balance of privacy,” he said. “The social norms are being set by businesses with a profit motive.”
The comments echoed – somewhat ironically – those of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who said that people’s expectations of privacy have changed. Other recent Facebook moves that have been questioned on privacy grounds include Facebook Places. Although Facebook has made improvements to its privacy poilicy, stories still regularly crop up, for instance of burglars using Facebook information.
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Bruce Schneier raises some concerns about how Facebook works with advertisers and what it does with people’s data. These concerns are based on some misconceptions so we wanted to clarify the facts for you.
Advertising is Facebook’s business model but nothing is more important to us than user experience, safety and enjoyment. We never share personally identifiable information with advertisers nor do we sell personal information to anyone. Advertisers only ever see annonymised and aggregated data. Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, explains how advertising works in relation to privacy here: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=403570307130
Users control and own all of their data on Facebook and this is clearly set out in our terms: http://www.facebook.com/terms.php. Users control when to add information to Facebook, when to change it and when to take it down. This is not affected by any third party. To find out what other people can see about you on Facebook then click “Preview my profile”.
You can visit our Help centre (http://www.facebook.com/help/), Safety Centre (http://www.facebook.com/help/?safety) and Guide to privacy (http://www.facebook.com/privacy/explanation.php) to find out more about safety, privacy and security on Facebook.