Interesting thought about the possibilities of using Social Media to thwart terrorism — almost to the point of it being a privacy issue concern.

Do we really understand what Facebook, LinkedIn, and MSN among others are required or will do with our information if the government comes knocking on their doors?

In the article, “Social Networking and Time Machines,” it says: 

In the governments latest attempt to grab data and increase surveillance, they are now looking to obtain the network connections/relations between people on social networking sites, in an attempt to “reduce the threat of terrorism”.

This latest data grab is as disingenuous as it is worrying. 
Six Degrees of Separation

Firstly, the issue with social networking is that everybody is connected to pretty much everybody else. So as innocent as a person may be they will almost always be linked to a  guilty person on their social networking site. The age old wives tale of every is linked by 6 connections is not just a tale, but is true, and has shown to be true on  several separate studies, including one by Microsoft involving 30 billion MSN 

Read the entire article at:
http://whereismydata.wordpress.com/2009/03/29/social-networking-and-time-machines/ 

 

Maybe instead of the word “saying” I should use the word “telling.”

The common discussion is about our invasion of privacy… yet many may be easily and readily giving away more info than they ever dreamed.

In the latest post at O’Reilly Radar – “ETech: Mobile Phones Reveal the Behaviors of Places and People,”  it says:

Tony Jebara’s presentation “Mobile Phones Reveal the Behaviors of Places and People” really opened my eyes to what amazing things you can derive from large data sets. Tony co-founded Sense Networks which specializes in taking GPS and mobile phone location data and deriving as much useful information as possible from it. Sense Networks works with mobile phone service providers who collected data from users who opted in to have their data be collected and mined. All the data they receive from the service provider is GPS location data — no personal information at all was ever made available to Sense Networks.
read more at http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/03/etech-mobile-phones-reveal-the.html