Saturday, August 20, 2011

Facebooks Collection of Data, and Tracking of Users

Everyday seems more, and more, as though we're living within the pages of 1984. The police state, the tracking, surveillance, all for "security".

One of the ways that internet giant Facebook decided was to implement a function on their website that would make their users feel secure, log access to their account, and alert you if an unauthorized access is made to the account.

Personally I believe that there wouldn't be a need for so much Facebook security if people practiced a bit of internet security themselves, made secure passwords, and didn't post illegal/inappropriate pictures, or videos. Regardless, Facebook is going full steam ahead with protecting their client base.

The system works like this, every time you log onto Facebook it checks your IP against a log of IP's, as well as checks what type of platform you're accessing the site from. If the platform, and the IP don't match, it's going to give you a box that looks like this:

Now, they simply want you to name the device you logged in on, and in you go. This is also an unchangeable feature, you cannot opt-out of this service, and you can't continue into Facebook until you give a name for the device.

The next time someone logs into Facebook using that device, you'll get an e-mail, which will look similar to the one below.
This includes the exact time of the login, the IP address, the device name, and a rough estimate of where that IP is located.

You can then make the decision of if that was authorized or not. Then maybe do something, unless it was unauthorized from your own house, or a prank, in which case this will do you no good.

This security system is nothing but a bunch of bells, and whistles. In reality, there are much more cost effective, and better security systems for this instance. For example, a very difficult password would suffice.

So now Facebook has a huge list of all the devices you've used, all the locations you've been, all the IP addresses used whenever someone accessed the site. You can see what users are occasionally together, who uses what device the most, etc. Bottom line, is nothing good can come from Facebook's cache of information like this.

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