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Here's another in a long and growing list of reasons why baring all on Facebook is a bad idea.

SEATTLE (AP) -- When Justin Bassett interviewed for a new job, he expected the usual questions about experience and references. So he was astonished when the interviewer asked for something else: his Facebook username and password.
Bassett, a New York City statistician, had just finished answering a few character questions when the interviewer turned to her computer to search for his Facebook page. But she couldn't see his private profile. She turned back and asked him to hand over his login information. More...

Everything you say and do online is public. It's like putting stuff on a supermarket bulletin board, only worse: it's accessible in real time, from anywhere. It was only a matter of time before this kind of crap started. I've always thought people who post personal information to sites like Facebook are asking for trouble, and now we're starting to see just what kind of trouble they were asking for.

As a rule, I'd suggest that you treat online conversations (written under your real name or traceable back to you) this way: Would you like to have that read aloud in a court case? How would it sound to the jury? Remember: Everything you say can and will be used against you.

First, we have The Onion Facebook-CIA faux-expose.

Now this:

In February 2011, the Department of Homeland Security announced that the agency planned to implement a program that would monitor media content, including social media data. The proposed initiatives would gather information from "online forums, blogs, public websites, and messages boards" and disseminate information to "federal, state, local, and foreign government and private sector partners." The program would be executed, in part, by individuals who established fictitious usernames and passwords to create covert social media profiles to spy on other users. The agency stated it would store personal information for up to five years.
[...]
The records reveal that the DHS is paying General Dynamics to monitor the news. The agency instructed the company to monitor for "[media] reports that reflect adversely on the U.S. Government, DHS, or prevent, protect, respond government activities."
[...]
The DHS instructed the company to "Monitor public social communications on the Internet." The records list the websites that will be monitored, including the comments sections of [The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, the Huffington Post, the Drudge Report, Wired, and ABC News.]"

Source: EPIC v. Department of Homeland Security: Media Monitoring via British Tourists Arrested in the U.S. for Tweeting (Bruce Schneier)

All I can say is... what did you expect?

THIS. IS. FUNNY. (Or is it?)

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Via Bruce Schneier

Addendum

Privacy? What privacy?

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Automated responses to climate catastrophe skeptics on Twitter? Sure, why not.

Nigel Leck, a software developer by day, was tired of arguing with anti-science crackpots on Twitter. So, like any good programmer, he wrote a script to do it for him.

The result is the Twitter chatbot @AI_AGW. Its operation is fairly simple: Every five minutes, it searches twitter for several hundred set phrases that tend to correspond to any of the usual tired arguments about how global warming isn't happening or humans aren't responsible for it.

It then spits back at the twitterer who made that argument a canned response culled from a database of hundreds. The responses are matched to the argument in question -- tweets about how Neptune is warming just like the earth, for example, are met with the appropriate links to scientific sources explaining why that hardly constitutes evidence that the source of global warming on earth is a warming sun.

The article is interesting for its use of ad hominem derogatory terms describing AGW/catastrophic climate change skeptics: anti-science nonsense, crackpots, tired arguments. Ahem.

The database began as a simple collection of responses written by Leck himself, but these days quite a few of the rejoinders are culled from a university source whom Leck says he isn't at liberty to divulge.

So, an unknown university source is collaborating in an effort to auto-respond to climate change skeptics? Very interesting, indeed.

Just another reason to be skeptical of tweets... Are you engaging a human being, or an automated agent? I can't imagine it would be difficult to know you're dealing with a bot -- the 'Eliza-like responses' should be a dead-giveaway. Continue reading or add a comment»