Facebook is your friend. Or not.

About a month ago, the New York Times told us "Facebook Offers More Disclosure to Users" (Kevin J. O'Brien, April 12, 2012). Facebook, eager to "address concerns about the personal information it collects on its users ... would provide any user with more about the data it tracks and stores." Facebook did this before, in 2010, by giving users "a copy of their photos, posts, messages, list of friends and chat conversations."

The new version goes beyond that: it

includes previous user names, friend requests and the Internet protocol addresses of the computers that users have logged in from. More categories of information will be made available in the future, Facebook said.

So Facebook is going to let us get a better idea of how much and what kind of data it collects from us. That's mighty big of them.

But, you know, after Facebook's initial public offering (IPO) today, Facebook will have stock holders to keep happy. Which means that Facebook will have to make more money, and then still more money, and then much more money. How will they do it?

As Fred Cate, my colleague at Indiana University, puts it:

When Facebook investors and founders rake in billions of dollars on Friday, they are making that money by selling little bits of each of us.... What Facebook is selling is us. [IU law professor: Facebook IPO will 'sell little bits of each of us', May 16, 2012]

Cate, Distinguished Professor, and C. Ben Dutton Professor of Law, and Director of IU's Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research, knows what he's talking about.

Shouldn't Facebook users at least get a cut of this action?

Ken Pimple, PAIT Project Director

"Police Are Using Phone Tracking as a Routine Tool"

A recent article published in the New York Times ("Police Are Using Phone Tracking as a Routine Tool" by Eric Lichtblau, March 31, 2012) reveals that local police forces - not just the FBI and CIA - are now using cellphone tracking as "a powerful and widely used surveillance tool ... with hundreds of departments, large and small, often using it aggressively with little or no court oversight."

If that's not bad enough, some carriers are profiting at their customers' expense.

The practice has become big business for cellphone companies, too, with a handful of carriers marketing a catalog of “surveillance fees” to police departments to determine a suspect’s location, trace phone calls and texts or provide other services. Some departments log dozens of traces a month for both emergencies and routine investigations.

The police, naturally, claim that the practice saves lives. "Law enforcement officials" contacted by the Times "said the legal questions were outweighed by real-life benefits."

The police in Grand Rapids, Mich., for instance, used a cell locator in February to find a stabbing victim who was in a basement hiding from his attacker.

I assume that the police are mostly tempted to use tools that they find helpful, which is good and proper. But to disregard the legality of such use - that's another matter.

The law in this area is not yet clear, so perhaps the police and the cellphone companies should be given the benefit of the doubt. But I, for one, am unwilling to do so until they convince me that warrants aren't necessary.

Special thanks to the American Civil Liberties Union, which obtained "5,500 pages of internal records ... from 205 police departments nationwide" and provided them to the Times.

Ken Pimple, PAIT Project Director

"The Snails of War"

Future headline: "PETA protests robotics facility."

Or has that already happened?

It isn't surprising that researchers with an eye on funding from DARPA are trying to create "tiny, self-powered animal/machine hybrids as an alternative to tiny robots" ("The snails of war"" by James Gorman, New York Times March 20, 2012). Insects and other small critters already know how to move and sense things and whatnot. All you have to do to make them into weapons or surveillance tools is create some kind of controlling mechanism, a power supply for the electronics, and suitable hardware (weapons, microphones, whatever). Eventually the technology will be commercialized (probably with surveillance, but not weapons) and everyone will want a iSlug.

It's a strange world where the potential for military applications can make the strangest of dreams come true. Or maybe I'm just strange to think it is.

Ken Pimple, PAIT Project Director

"Cars that drive themselves"

Always at the cutting edge of risky behavior, Nevada has "released draft rules to govern self-driving cars, which it has approved for testing on its public roads" (Cars that drive themselves, MSN Money, February 22, 2012). The car will have to have a sober, licensed driver behind the wheel. But it'll be legal to text while driving.

Thanks to Donald Searing for bringing this to my attention.

Ken Pimple, PAIT Project Director