Living with the surveillance state

Posted Oct 30, 2013 10:35 UTC (Wed) by eru (subscriber, #2753)
In reply to: Living with the surveillance state by ms
Parent article: Living with the surveillance state

Equally, if facebook open sourced all its software today, I would bet it wouldn't make a blind bit of difference to the NSA.

I think Facebook is a bit poor example in this case, because its point is to seduce people into publishing data, and it makes its living from mining said data. From the privacy point of view, it is broken by design. (I use it a bit nowadays, but I never put anything there I would not mind having shouted from rooftops).

Email and other person-to-person channels are another matter and more important for privacy. It might be easier to implement changes there, judging by the way various mobile chat systems have started to supplant SMS, even though SMS is still the only system every user's handset is compatible with.