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A California man is suing Facebook for allegedly scanning the content of private messages sent between users of the site.
The suit alleges that Facebook scans the messages in search of hyperlinks sent between users. "If there is a link to a web page contained in that message, Facebook treats it as a 'like' of the page, and increases the page's 'like,' counter by one," the suit contends. The site tracks when users "like" pages in order to compile individual profiles that allow third parties to send targeted advertisements.
Source: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/facebook-sued-for-scanning-private-user-messages/article/2591806
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Facebook Sued for Scanning Private User Messages
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(Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Tuesday May 24 2016, @11:10AM
Did you even read the summary? Allegedly, Facebook is not only collecting the information but also increasing like-counters, thus more or less impersonating the user. BTW: Last time I checked, Telegram was free, and still offered end-to-end encryption (as in "private messages"). Although I wouldn't trust with meta-data. Maybe Tox [tox.chat] would be even better.
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(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Tuesday May 24 2016, @01:42PM
Unless the site is getting a list of name and personal information of the list of people that "fake liked" the link, I don't see how this is a violation of privacy or impersonation. I guess that there are so many more scummy things that facebook does, this seems kind of minor.
Anyhow, you are right unless you are encrypting end to end, there is no such thing as "private messages".
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday May 25 2016, @09:41PM
I don't think the page owner has access to that (although who knows -- they're constantly changing pages and groups and interests and all that, and some membership lists are public while others aren't)...but actually, it's *worse* than that -- all of your friends have access to everything you like. And therefore they have access to everything you send in a message. So if you use Facebook messenger to IM your wife...well, all your old highschool friends now know about that condition you were researching after visiting your doctor. Or some closeted homosexual kid in highschool sends a link to a trusted friend, and Facebook outs them to the whole school. So yeah, that could be far worse than some company trying to figure out what ads to show you...
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday May 24 2016, @01:44PM
I'm still on the fence about Telegram. Good on em for the utility and encryption but I can't figure out a use for it yet that isn't already well covered. Clue me in?
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Informative) by q.kontinuum on Tuesday May 24 2016, @02:26PM
Main feature of Telegram would be "not owned by Facebook" ;-)
No, seriously: If you look compare to WhatsApp, Telegram client is open source. Which is essential for a private messenger with encryption; there is no other way to ensure that the encryption doesn't have any backdoor and the key is not secretly leaked somehow to Facebook. There are other messengers available, but I wouldn't know of any fully encrypted with a decently huge user-base. Telegram got some good press after Facebook bought WhatsApp, and makes i to the news often enough to stand a chance.
tox is even better, as it is afaik a distributed protocol, which means no-one gets all the meta-data for free. But the userbase is probably tiny now.
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday May 24 2016, @02:54PM
Right but I still don't see a use case when A) I don't particularly care if FB can read the casual and boring things I send over their messenger. B) Anyone on my friends list who I want contacting me off of FB already has my phone number.
Channels look somewhat useful but they're already covered with more utility by other things. Private chats are the only thing I can see that would be worth bothering and they're not quite useful enough in my daily life to harass people into installing another messenger.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by vux984 on Tuesday May 24 2016, @03:12PM
A) I don't particularly care if FB can read the casual and boring things I send over their messenger.
I care to avoid software with advertising baked in. And something like whatsapp owned by facebook, I'm not going to touch with a 10 foot pole. Even if the communication itself is innocuous I don't need anyone harvesting it for advertising. I don't use facebook. I don't use whatsapp. I also dislike skype.
B) Anyone on my friends list who I want contacting me off of FB already has my phone number.
And that's sort of where telegram fits in. I am interested in software that will let me communicate with people from a desktop/taptop to their phone and vice versa. I prefer to send a messages to my wife via a desktop app than pick up my phone type on that. While she prefers to recieve them and chat back from her phone. My brother prefers to use his ipad.
So telegram's use case for me is that it fills the gap in basic sms in that it can go back and forth to a desktop. Skype and whatsapp both do this too... but the advertising infrastructure behind both is undesirable. I've only recently tried telegram... and its worked well for what i wanted it for. It also syncs messages between multiple devices, so i can wander from my desktop to laptop to phone and the conversations stay in sync... again this isn't novel, but its a feature i wanted.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 24 2016, @08:36PM
It will beat tox, or telegraph or any of these other apps hands down.
Additionally there are two routers available for it, traditional java i2p-router, and the c++ based i2pd. The downside to the latter is many 'plugin services' are java based and expect to be run via the i2p-router console directly. On the other hand both can allow IRC, XMPP, and web services as both a server and client, as well as SOCKS and HTTP(S) tunnels for web browsing inside the I2P network. Unlike Tor however it does have 'outproxy as default' built in, and only has one or two outproxy nodes available if you manually configure them (safer for keeping your anonymity, since web browsing will never hit the clear net by default, but more complicated for a casual user to set up if they are expecting tor or tbb style clearnet access.)
As an added bonus over Tor however it DOES have DNS style second level hostnames under the .i2p TLD, with .onion style host(keyhash)names under .b32.i2p or (rarely/never ATM) under .b64.i2p
The network has ~60k nodes at the moment, ~30k of those from Vuze users and 30k from traditional sources. It has a few thousand published .i2p hostnames/services, including wikis, a coin exchange and many websites covering a variety of topics, from personal blogs, to technical resources, and a few git repositories.
While it still has some possible identification attacks, similiar to tor, it has a number of configurable traffic sharing settings to help obfuscate personal traffic within traffic shared over the network. Up to 4 hop per direction tunnels (each hop encrypted seperately, not including application encryption), offering up to 8 hop totals if both service and client are set up for maximum paranoia. It also supports multiple encryption standards for host keys with provisions for future changes and legacy compatibility.