Saturday, June 10, 2006
No privacy
Pentagon sets its sights on social networking websites.
New Scientist has discovered that Pentagon's National Security Agency, which specialises in eavesdropping and code-breaking, is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks. And it could harness advances in internet technology - specifically the forthcoming "semantic web" championed by the web standards organisation W3C - to combine data from social networking websites with details such as banking, retail and property records, allowing the NSA to build extensive, all-embracing personal profiles of individuals...Hmmm. I took a look at some MySpace.com sites. They do, indeed, show lots of information. Some friends have accounts and were trying to talk me into setting up one, well, Chronic wasn't suggesting I set one up, but others were. I don't think I will, right now:)
