Time | Need to disappear from Facebook or Twitter? Now you can scrub yourself from the Internet with Web 2.0 Suicide Machine, a nifty service that purges your online presence from these all-consuming social networks. Since its Dec. 19 launch, Suicide Machine has assisted more than 1,000 virtual deaths, severing more than 80,500 friendships on Facebook and removing some 276,000 tweets from Twitter.
Once you hand over your log-in details and click Commit, the program will methodically delete your info — Twitter tweets, MySpace contacts, Facebook friends, LinkedIn connections — much like users could do manually. What remains is a brittle cyberskeleton: a profile with no data. Users seem to love it. Testimonials range from joyous farewells ("Goodbye, cruel world!") to good-riddance denouements ("Thank you, microblogging. You are, in fact, totally useless"). Suicide Machine is so popular that thousands of people are waiting their turn for their own cyberoffing. "Our server is so busy handling the requests," says Suicide Machine co-creator Walter Langelaar.
But be warned: As in life, resurrection is impossible. Going through the process means that your Web doppelgänger will croak for good. When it does, you'll receive a cybermemorial on the site. RIP, 2.0. We'll miss you.
CNet | Everyone in Austin, Texas always seems unusually charming to me.
The people in Starbucks always have time for a chat. And the staff at the wildly gothic Mansion at Judges Hill (which, I am told, used to be a very fine rehab facility) can induce a smile by merely looking at you.
However, it appears that when certain citizens of Austin get behind their computers, they turn into monstrous villains.
This, at least, appears to be the view of Austin Police Chief Art Acevedo. According to the Austin American-Statesman, the chief is considering pursuing commenters on blogs who have either impersonated him or his officers or maligned them beyond the boundaries of legal tolerance.
Options under discussion appear to be not only libel suits, but also criminal charges if the police believe these are warranted.
"A lot of my people feel it is time to take these people on," Acevedo told the Statesman. "They understand the damage to the organization, and quite frankly, when people are willfully misleading and lying, they are pretty much cowards anyway because they are doing so under the cloak of anonymity."
Among the suggestions allegedly implied under this cloak was behavior of an illegal and sexual nature, something the Statesman characterizes as "quid pro quo" arrangements.
The suggestion of lawsuits seems extreme. However, after the "Skanks in NYC" case, in which Google was forced (without trying too hard to fight) to give up the name of a blogger who targeted Vogue model Liskula Cohen, are anonymous bloggers or commenters truly immune from the consequences of their venting?
It so happens that Texas passed a state law on September 1 that specifically targets those who "use another person's name to post messages on a social-networking site without their permission and with the intent to harm, defraud, intimidate or threaten." Such willful behavior is now a third-degree felony.
Is it possible, then, that the Austin police will be the first to test this law out? One can only imagine some commenters' reactions.
Financial Times | Forget caller ID. A coming wave of “social” mobile phones is likely to tell you everything you ever wanted to know and more about the person calling you.
An application called Robo.to, available in the fourth quarter on the iPhone and handsets that run Google’s Android operating system, offers a stream of information about callers, including personal videos, photos and their current location.
It is an example of the “social address book” – the reinvention of a core handset feature that carriers will leverage to earn fresh revenues and win back consumer attention lost to iPhone applications and media companies’ services.
With Robo.to, when the phone rings, a user can see a video recorded by the caller as a “status update” that shows their mood and where they are.
The screen can also feature their latest Twitter messages, their name and title from the Linkedin professional network, recent photos posted to the Flickr photo service and a map of their location.
Rey Flemings, chief executive of Particle, Robo.to’s parent company, says the service should come into its own in 2010 as more phones feature a forward-facing camera for video calls.
Handset makers are also seizing on the popularity of social networks to make their phones more appealing. Motorola’s latest phone, the Cliq, features “Motoblur” software that merges tweets, e-mail and Facebook status messages under the address book listings of contacts. Motorola described the Cliq, or Dext as it will be known in Europe, as “the first phone with social skills” when it unveiled it this month.
However, the Cliq was preceded by another Android phone, the HTC Hero, which has HTC Sense software. This has a similar interface to Motoblur, grouping photos, e-mails and status updates with a contact’s information in its address book.
In July, Nokia bought the German company Cellity, which had developed a “phonebook 2.0” product merging contact information with social networks.
Handset makers are aiming to meet the priorities of carriers with the new capabilities. The merging of information draws users into using more multimedia and data to update their networks, increasing revenues.
“Carriers want to help users socialise their address books. That’s the big 2010 emphasis for them as it unlocks so much power,” says one industry executive.
“The carriers know your current location, who your friends are and what media you are consuming, so this will open up the advertising business for them.”
Kids today are exposed to vast amounts of sleazy, pornified media at the same time that they are hammered with silly puritanism. The future doesn't look good.
By Branwyn Lancourt
Alternet | Following in the footsteps of fellow zygote-ian twits Vanessa Hudgens and Rihanna, the most recent set of nudie pics leaked to the internets belong to tadpole Ashley Greene of “Twilight" fame.
Apparently she’s someone I should be aware of. I’ve actually never seen “Twilight," but soon after ogling Greene’s nubile young body I frantically placed it at the top of my Netflix Queue. I admit I felt a bit grubby slobbering over the photos, but what the hell, I’m no monument to morality! Besides, is it my fault that she was careless enough to let her private intimate bits turn into public internet hits?
I dare say not.
The thing that I always wonder whenever I hear about one of these types of leaks is who and/or what these photos were initially intended for. Was it simply a bit of naughtiness shared between two willing and consenting perverts, or were these young ladies merely conscientiously screening for moles with irregular borders? Unfortunately for them, whatever the impetus might have been, these once personal images have now become onanistic fodder for the masses. Across the land and behind closed doors, a generation of boys is bathed in the glow of a million smudgy monitors, singlehandedly keeping Kleenex afloat.
It’s a shaved new world, I tell you. Ever since Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan started stepping out of cars, flaunting one’s nether regions has become a national syndrome. Young girls everywhere have now incorporated this type of behavior as a basic part of how they relate to the outside world. Take a look at a typical Facebook or Myspace profile, and the evidence is clear. All you see are scantily clad young things twisting their coltish bodies into the most provocative of poses just as naturally as if they were taking a school picture. Interestingly, this syndrome isn’t simply relegated to the fairer sex, young boys have gotten in on the action as well, promenading their shirtless torsos about like a veritable Marky Mark army.
What might the future hold for the young men and women of tomorrow? Will this photographic experimentation be empowering, or will it only further promulgate our culture of objectification? Perhaps the answer is more ambiguous.
After years of growing up positively bombarded with mega-doses of hyper sexualized imagery we may be starting to see its ultimate effects. Incredibly, many of us still don’t want to acknowledge the power of media and the major role it plays in our formative years - its influence, however, is undeniable. My generation for instance, was over exposed to an abundance of Brady Bunch and MASH re-runs, Love Boat antics, and those horribly preachy ‘After School Specials’ which successfully instilled in all our brains that if one were to ever get the opportunity to have sex, most likely something HORRIBLE would happen, usually involving herpes, AIDS, pregnancy, or getting a likable football coach fired from his job for inappropriate touching. This subsequently turned me into a wise-cracking, hypochondriacal paranoid with a penchant for polyester, and an irrational fear of Gavin McCleod.
The new generation is a different breed altogether.
Kids today are being made to process an insane amount of sex, violence and stupidity in the form of reality TV, internet porn, and World Of Warcraft. In addition they’ve got all the Limbaughs, Hannitys and Becks aggressively spouting their righteous faux morality across the nation’s airwaves. This strange dichotomy must be far more stressful to try and make sense of, than what previous generations have had to contend with. It can only stand to reason that what might be waiting for us at the finish line could be a pretty mixed up bunch of sick puppies. In fact, if one were to crunch the numbers and extrapolate to an inevitable conclusion, it’s easy to envision a future society run by a lot of emotionally deadened, carnally motivated, morally neurotic, absurdly hypocritical right wing automatons.
Hmm… now that I think of it, the future may not be all that different from the present after all.
Still, it could possibly go the other way. Perhaps a backlash against all of this mendacity could take root, and set the stage for an eventual revolution that might recalibrate our collective psyches. Rather than worshipping at the altar of corporal superficiality, maybe our progeny might hang a left and eschew such pitiful pursuits, returning instead to a time where more substantial ideals were embraced. Less Rock Band and more rock stars! Less porn and more love! More Cronkite and less Limbaugh! A man can dream can’t he?
USA Today | The official White House Blog calls it "WhiteHouse 2.0." The administration is unveiling its membership in a trio of the social-networking leaders today: Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. How do the accounts look shortly after launch?
The Facebook page already has more than 38,000 fans, and the number appears to jump another thousand every few minutes at this hour. The MySpace page is a highly stylized version of designs typically seen on the service, with 5,300 friends and counting. "A quick glance at the profiles shows that they mostly just link to or copy entries on the existing WhiteHouse.gov blog, but they welcome comments and are quickly gathering thousands of fans," PaidContent.org says.
TechCrunch offers initial analysis of the MySpace page: "There are no ads on the page, but if you click through to photos page, then you do get some ads. The add beside this photo of the president running down a hallway with his daughter's puppy has an ad that says, 'Pimp My Profile.' Not very Presidential. On Facebook, there is an ad slot on the actual page, but I only saw a house ad for Facebook's gift shop with a penguin. ... The Facebook page basically has the same information, but presented as a stream. Which one do you like better?"
The @whitehouse Twitter feed so far has more than 10,000 followers and retweeted a swine-flu alert from the CDC. Information about the H1N1 virus is the most common theme across the White House's uses of the services today.
"Hopefully, these pages will follow the same pattern as the administration's other web efforts -- they start out underwhelming, but improve eventually," Venture Beat writes. The blog's underwhelmed headline is "Meet White House 2.0, same as White House 1.0 (but on Twitter!)"
SkyNews | Millions of Britons who use social networking sites like Facebook could have details of everyone they correspond with monitored by the Government.
Under the proposals, the Home Office is considering making the sites keep data about their users' movements.
These details may then be saved on a "Big Brother" database.
The Home Office said the idea was to tackle criminals and terrorists who might use the websites to communicate.
But it stressed the Government was not seeking the power to examine the content of messages sent via the sites.
However, civil liberties campaigners have called the proposals a "snooper's charter".
Many people in Britain use social networking sites, like Facebook, MySpace and Bebo to keep in touch with their friends.
The Government move follows plans to store information about every telephone call, email, and internet visit made by anyone in the UK on a central database.
Details were disclosed by Home Office Minister Vernon Coaker earlier this month at a Commons committee to examine draft EU directives.
He said the Government was considering acting on social networking sites because they were not covered by the latest proposals from Brussels.
"Social networking sites, such as MySpace or Bebo, are not covered by the directive," he said.
"That is one reason why the Government are looking at what we should do about the intercept modernisation programme because there are certain aspects of communications which are not covered by the directive."
He added the Government's intercept modernisation programme proposals may be extended to include "the retention of data on Facebook, Bebo, MySpace and all other similar sites".
Mr Coaker acknowledged the plan would raise fresh concerns about the right to privacy.
"I accept that this is an extremely difficult area. The interface between retaining data, private security and all such issues of privacy is extremely important," he said.
A Home Office spokesman stressed the Government was not seeking the power to examine the content of messages sent via the sites.
He said: "We have been clear that communications revolution has been rapid in this country and the way in which we collect communications data needs to change so that law enforcement agencies can maintain their ability to tackle terrorism and gather evidence."
Prison Planet | Rupert Murdoch’s Twentieth Century Fox corporation has admitted to planting political brainwashing within its globally popular TV shows and indeed boasts that it is proud of the fact.
A corporate video currently being showcased on another part of Murdoch’s media empire, MySpace.com, shows Fox executives and stars of its universally recognized shows bragging about how they use the platform of hit shows that are broadcast globally to implant messages about the supposed threat of global warming.
This is not the first time Fox have been enthusiastic in propagandizing for the establishment. In 2003, Rupert Murdoch himself admitted that the corporation had “tried” to help the Bush administration sell the war in Iraq.
The text accompanying the video states, “In 2006, News Corp. embarked upon a company wide initiative to reduce the size of its carbon footprint.”
The means by which this “initiative” was carried out is then made clear by a plethora of clips from Fox’s most popular shows - the Simpsons, King of the Hill, Family Guy, Prison Break - which are all loaded with messages about global warming and the need to do something about it.
“What could we do on a practical level to start making a difference,” asks one executive before another answers, “The biggest thing we’ve done is inserting messages about the environment into some of our content.”
In other words, Fox has embarked on a deliberate campaign, which could only have been done with the coordination of the script writers of each program, to force people to accept the pseudo-science of global warming by brainwashing them into accepting it as a reality. This has been achieved by weaving in messages about climate change and having popular characters in the TV shows embrace specific tenants of the global warming manifesto.
“The most powerful way we could communicate the commitment on behalf of our company, was to change the practices within the production, as well as work in a message about global warming, about environmental changes, about empowering people to take responsibilities,” states Fox chairman Dana Walden.
We’re also treated to the vomit-inducing sight of Kiefer Sutherland, who plays the torture loving Jack Bauer in 24, sounding about as genuine as a 3 dollar bill reading off a teleprompter about how Fox is committed to reducing its “carbon footprint”.
This again goes to show that the acceptance of global warming as a reality by the general public is not being accomplished as an organic reaction to scientifically proven threats, but by propagandists artificially piggy-backing the climate mantra on the back of fictional TV shows passively absorbed by people in their millions.
This is key because of the process that people’s brains undergo when they are watching television. Political messages implanted in fictional television programs will always enjoy a receptive audience.
According to an Associated Content article, “Studies have shown that watching television induces low alpha waves in the human brain. Alpha waves are brainwaves between 8 to 12 HZ. and are commonly associated with relaxed meditative states as well as brain states associated with suggestibility.”
Experiments have shown that less than one minute after the viewer begins to watch television, the brain switches from Beta level consciousness, associated with active and logical thought, to Alpha level, which is associated with passive acceptance and suggestibility. This is why advertisers spend billions a year on commercials as well as product placement within TV shows themselves.
The scale of what Fox is admitting to here is staggering, and the fact that they even boast about what they are doing beggars belief. As Darryl Mason sardonically comments, “I never realised just how much I’d learned about the dire threats of global warming-induced climate change simply by watching immensely, globally popular Murdoch/Fox entertainments like The Simpsons and 24.”
Millions of people not just in America but globally are being educated, or should I say re-educated, about the highly complex and highly debatable topic of global warming, not through a reasoned public debate between advocates and skeptics, but through fictional cartoons, comedies and drama shows produced by a monolithic corporation that has its tentacles deeply embedded into the same establishment that is trying to sell global warming in order to introduce a CO2 tax and regulate people’s lives.
How the Internet is Being Used to Control Your Mind
By Chris
Information Liberation | I was watching "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon" earlier and I saw the creators of "Digg.com" on the show. What struck me was that these people did not seem at all like programmers, but instead like actors.
If one studies the history of sites like Facebook, or DailyKos, they are riddled with CIA connections.
As I watched these characters on TV I couldn't help but think perhaps the CIA ties which bind Facebook and DailyKos go much, much, deeper. You have to wonder, with a site like Digg, it used to be totally dominated by truthers, yet with their new secret admins now the site is one story about Obama and then another about some tape from Al-Queda and so on. The site is just as phony as the rest of the mass media.
Promotion is an extremely difficult thing to do, people pass things around but it has a limit, even the most viral of stories or videos eventually dies off. With massive financing it is a different story though, especially if you have TV media behind you. For example take Twitter, within the last few weeks it is all the sudden being talked about on every major news channel there is. A while ago when Myspace was bought by Rupert Murdoch the same occurred, it was practically the only thing which the news talked about, they would constantly prose about "is it scandalous" or "too sexual" etc. just to get the masses all talking about it and using it. When Myspace started to die out Facebook came to replace it with an even wider "more sophisticated" appeal. If you are aware of how heavily controlled something like the TV news is, it is foolish to assume there is not also extremely heavy control over many of the biggest sites on the internet.
The big danger becomes that unlike the television, these sites have the ability to watch YOU. Think of everything you enter into Google and Yahoo, they admittedly store that info for years, but then combine that with an even more invasive technology like Facebook or Myspace, where staff, or computers, can analyze everything you personally write about in private messages to your friends.
They do not need to actually read what you are writing word for word to understand you, all they need to do is scan your writings for key words, for example if you are all the sudden messaging people about "Twitter" they could pin you as highly suggestible. Same goes for any stories about celebrities in the news, if you are writing to your girlfriends about Jennifer Aniston or whoever it reveals how you think, combine that now with a database of over a million products, things like pharmaceuticals, electronics, illicit drugs, foods, websites or even something like using an obscure vernacular, all these things can reveal A LOT about you. We are talking about 1984 times a thousand.
When you think of this you realize so much of this power comes from the idea the Internet is private, certainly some sites are but with ISPs actively being involved with the spying any semblance of privacy is going completely out the window. The danger in this is that this information can be used to control you COMPLETELY. If you know someones deepest darkest secrets you have a lot of power over someone.
Certainly this is the perception they want people to have, they want them to be afraid and live in fear, just the other day someone "demanded" I remove their comment (which was calling for nothing more than Blair and gang to be put in jail) because "the first few digits of his IP were showing" and "that could be used to track him down."
The man wanted freedom and justice but the mere possibility that he could be tracked down for expressing that feeling was too much to bear. If that is not complete and total mind control I do not know what is. We are talking about total mind control without even the use of high technologies like the sound of silence. The prospects are terrifying.
People must not let themselves be controlled by this perception. The reality is if you feel a certain way, chances are someone else does too, maybe even everybody else, it is just everyone is too afraid to express it. This is the political correctness which dominated life under the Soviet Union and in places like North Korea today, and it is done through the suppression of individuality and most of all self-honesty.
There is lots of talk of "taking back control" of the government, the federal reserve, etc. All these goals are perfectly fine and should be worked towards, but how much talk is there of taking back control of yourself, taking back control of your own mind which is being stolen from you in the most sophisticated and subtle of ways. To even communicate these days is difficult if everything you say is not politically correct, to express a feeling about some topic dealing with sexuality for example leads to endless misinterpreting and the creation of scandal from people who do not want to understand. The easiest way to deny a truth these days is to complicate it.
The most important thing that people need to understand is how they control themselves, external situations are not the root cause, it is the people themselves dodging responsibility which is at the core of the situation we are in today.
So many people are searching for freedom but they are looking in the wrong places, it is like trying to find your glasses when they are on your head. Freedom is the wellspring of life, when you promote life and help others to live you become free, when you denigrate life and promote degeneracy we all become slaves. - IL
It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than 'try to be a little kinder.' - Aldous Huxley
Tech Crunch | A constant criticism of MySpace is that real names are hidden when you view someone’s profile or interact with them on the site. They’re now making subtle product changes that encourage users to show their real name on the site.
Anonymity is great when you don’t want your actual identity to get in the way of whatever fantasy life you are living online. But it’s also one of the reasons Facebook, which identifies users by their real names, is gaining so quickly on MySpace. On Facebook, you generally know who you are talking to. On MySpace, it’s anyone’s guess.
All this anonymity suited MySpace just fine for the first few years of growth. But 2009 is going to be all about social network identity and spreading it out around the web. MySpace, Facebook and Google all want users to log in to third party sites using their account credentials from those sites, and having those accounts be associated with real names to do it is a competitive advantage.
Facebook has a big head start on that already with Facebook Connect, which is now available to any third party site that wants to use it. Google also has its product out the door, and is integrating with sites like Twitter.
MySpace is working to get MySpaceID (formerly Data Availability) out to partners.
MySpace also added a feature in account settings that ask users if they want to display their real name on their profile along with whatever display name they’ve chosen (so MySpace COO Amit Kapur’s MySpace page now shows his real name, it didn’t before).
When adding a new friend, MySpace users are also prompted to reveal their real name (see first image above).
All this serves to legitimize MySpace’s chaotic namespace with actual names of actual people. If they’re successful in getting a large percentage of users to reveal their names they’ll mitigate Facebook’s advantage in this area. I’d expect more of this over time, not less.
The book 1984, George Orwell's dystopia tale of Big Brother, has in recent years become a reference for the growing level of surveillance and loss of privacy to fight crime. The internet is being used as a data mining tool by law enforcement to gather intelligence and prosecute people with information obtained without warrants or court orders. The data gathered could be innocuous ramblings of a teen, or manufactured in order to lay blame upon someone else. Individuals could be charged falsely with crimes without any physical data, merely ones and zeros in cyberspace.
By Harold Gray
JustGetThere | Google news UK has announced an application for social networking site Facebook, that allows users to submit intelligence about crimes as well as keeping them up to date with news stories that are crime related. The application GMP Updates, also known as “The Greater Manchester Police Updates,” gives you a feed of crime updates and links to a form for reporting crimes. Assistant Chief Constable Rob Taylor said: "Greater Manchester Police is proud to be the first force in the country to use this new technology and it demonstrates our commitment to exploring all avenues available to us to help fight and detect crime." This seemingly sublime tool to catch criminals will allow law enforcement to have even more access to personal user data without consent. It will also foster a new level of digital snitching and sabotage, that can be used to implicate someone fraudulently.
Pre-Crime and the Evolution of Law Enforcement.
Over the past few years there have been several cases of law enforcement using Facebook and Myspace, to prosecute criminal cases. In these instances it seems that police would browse profiles as users, to gather information after a crime was reported. Cops would usual initiate profile searches based on tips, or the circumstances of the case. Being a developer will enable expanded access to user profiles by default, due to the terms and conditions these social networks subscribe to. In essence, the application will enable the cops to view whatever the user can, public or private. It also gives them the ability to see anything the users friends or other networking members are doing. This means that users who install this application will unknowingly allow law enforcement to view their friends information, even if they have not installed GMP Updates. Typically, in order to gather information on an suspect who has allegedly committed a crime, you need probable cause, specify the item to be retrieved and location to be searched. Once this has been sufficiently achieved, a warrant would be granted from a judge in accordance to the 4th Amendment. The police would then be able to gather intelligence legally. With this new emergence of social networking applications, even past content posted could be gathered by third-party providers and used without the consent or knowledge of the user.
Facebook allows application providers access to just about all profile information, as described in the “Platform Application Terms of Use“: “Platform Application Terms of Use“:
In order to allow you to use and participate in Platform Applications created by Developers (”Developer Applications”), Facebook may from time to time provide Developers access to the following information (collectively, the “Facebook Site Information”):
(i) any information provided by you and visible to you on the Facebook Site, excluding any of your Contact Information, and
(ii) the user ID associated with your Facebook Site profile.
Facebook provides some examples of what this means. Like:
The Facebook Site Information may include, without limitation, the following information, to the extent visible on the Facebook Site: your name, your profile picture, your gender, your birthday, your hometown location (city/state/country), your current location (city/state/country), your political view, your activities, your interests, your musical preferences, television shows in which you are interested, movies in which you are interested, books in which you are interested, your favorite quotes, the text of your “About Me” section, your relationship status, your dating interests, your relationship interests, your summer plans, your Facebook user network affiliations, your education history, your work history, your course information, copies of photos in your Facebook Site photo albums, metadata associated with your Facebook Site photo albums (e.g., time of upload, album name, comments on your photos, etc.), the total number of messages sent and/or received by you, the total number of unread messages in your Facebook in-box, the total number of “pokes” you have sent and/or received, the total number of wall posts on your Wall™, a list of user IDs mapped to your Facebook friends, your social timeline, and events associated with your Facebook profile.
These terms allow the application access to your data, even if you’ve marked it as not viewable by the police in your regional network or school. The viewing power of third party providers, even trumps users efforts to restrict their photos only to their "friends list". A snapshot of the defaults of these applications is below.
When you add applications, you’re told they get to see your information.
You are not told that you are also sharing your friends’ info.
Sabotage, Snitching and Surveillance
It is a known fact that the practice of COINTELPRO against peaceful activists is still happening today. Black-ops agents are being contracted privately to infiltrate peaceful activist groups in order to gather intelligence or to sabotage well meaning activists in order to discredit the movement. An agent could create a bogus profile that's connected to a particular group, and use it to tie the group to his manufactured criminal actions. The saboteur could also take over a users profile and create false entries that would lead authorities astray as well. Without physical evidence or probable cause to complement the digital data, criminals could take advantage of the system by overzealous cops. There are several websites that have codes for tracking visitor IP's on Myspace accounts. Using this hack, users would be informed who was viewing their profile and the geographic location of the IP. With this knowledge, a true criminal could plant false information at opportune times to confuse whoever is tracking them. Having this foreknowledge, saboteurs could plan intentional actions that could be meant to fool or provoke law enforcement. In these cases, law enforcement unknowingly would be helping perpetuate a fraud against someone else.
This new emergence of anonymously providing police tips at a click of a mouse is another example of a snitch culture being created by government. The ultimate power in a surveillance society is for people to police each other. This theme permeates all levels of our society from adolescence to adults, and leads to a state of mass paranoia. Snitching and surveillance in the 21's century could turn into another form of entertainment for a society that has been raised on "Americas Most Wanted", "Jerry Springer" and "Big Brother." The consequences are far more severe than any passing humiliation or thrill from reporting someone to authorities for kicks. Our most personal information is now being fed directly into a massive system of interlocking computer databases maintained by government agencies, law enforcement officials, for-profit businesses and private intelligence networks. Our medical, psychiatric, banking, credit, school, employment, housing, automobile, TV viewing, computer use and gun ownership records are all stored in several networks by people we have never met.
The future Semantic Web, will add even more ease to classify, correlate and combine data from multiple sources into a single compatible format. The cats out the bag and the technological advancements in cyberspace is unstoppable. This means the public needs to be aware of these privacy concerns and take steps accordingly to minimize the level of info divulged within the public realm. Choosing to use these huge corporate run social networks like Myspace and Facebook, could lead to violations in personal privacy. This will lead to new independent social networks that will value the privacy of the users within the community. People will begin to choose websites who eliminate and condone data mining practices and cooperation with the efforts of pre-crime without warrants or court orders. A more beneficial use of this technology would be for citizens to monitor government officials connections through lobbyists, campaign contributers and financial investments in defense contractors for example. Why can't we sign up for alerts when government is spending our hard earned tax money on a $7 hammer that ballooned to a price of $436, due to poor accounting practices. Total surveillance of our government and officials, could be a beneficial use of this technology. The Constitution affirms that our government is formed by the people and for the people, therefore we should have more visibility in the actions of our representatives in DC instead of our neighbor down the street.
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Time | Need to disappear from Facebook or Twitter? Now you can scrub yourself from the Internet with Web 2.0 Suicide Machine, a nifty service that purges your online presence from these all-consuming social networks. Since its Dec. 19 launch, Suicide Machine has assisted more than 1,000 virtual deaths, severing more than 80,500 friendships on Facebook and removing some 276,000 tweets from Twitter.
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