Lifteing The Veil

I think the biggest reason so many people don't mind companies like Facebook, Google, etc. collecting so much data on them because they don't understand how it could actually be used. I think it'd be great if lainons could work on a project that informs people how data can and is being used. The image is from the Maltego GUI which lets you easily graph users connections through their wifi SSID that is intercepted through a drone or just walking around with a router setup correctly. I think the best way to go about it is by collecting screenshots and making images that show tools like wifi pineapples to display how "hackers" could get your data and also have images on how Facebook etc collect and use your data. some useful reading on what Big Data can be used for https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/29/facebook-users-emotions-news-feeds https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/mar/04/nigel-oakes-cambridge-analytica-what-role-brexit-trump http://www.bbc.com/news/business-39947942 Please refrain from talking about politics and focus on how we can easily inform the general population the (mis)uses of Big Data I think something that would work would be a fictional story of a character we come up with using real world technologies to mess with a population\person sort of like how the novel Little Brother is. This could be from the perspective of a tech CEO stalking an employee they fall in love with, or a college student who wants to track and mess with their classmates\professors, or a politician looking to blackmail his opponents. Once we decide on a story and work out a script I'm willing to hire illlustrators\Designers so it's easier for the general population to absorb.

Some time ago someone made a web thing called "take this lollipop" or something similar, it was a website that read your browser's cookies (I guess) to get your facebook acct name and then played a video of a murderer-looking guy that scrolled through your profile, pinpointed your house in a map and went out for you looking at your profile pic for reference. I think that's a pretty good way to convey the raw data.

>>1659 That sounds like a fun idea. You could create a website and app which tracks your social media profile information, gps location etc. and displays it visually, much like OP's example. You could click on each link and find out what data you are providing, how it can be used, and maybe the potential value to each company. You could then put citations and useful links under each subcategory and allow people to look into the subject further if they were interested.

Bumping this thread because the idea is awesome! :D

>>1658 >I think the best way to go about it is by collecting screenshots and making images that show tools like wifi pineapples to display how "hackers" could get your data and also have images on how Facebook etc collect and use your data. >a fictional story of a character we come up with using real world technologies to mess with a population\person I'm worried that it would be very easy for the media to spin this as "evil hackers do evil things" and leave the big data and corporations out of the story all together. And what do you want people who see your propaganda to do about it anyway? Be scared of pineapples? It doesn't sound very constructive at the moment.

>>1658 >through their wifi ssid what? I'm assuming you mean it sorts that way. facebook uses tls tho so the most you could see is someone was browsing facebook.

>>1659 Website asks for you to connect it to facebook, seems to defeat the point.

Any FOSS alternatives to Maltego? It looks useful.

> I think the biggest reason so many people don't mind companies like Facebook, Google, etc. collecting so much data on them because they don't understand how it could actually be used. This is a classic misconception, and falls completely short of the reality of the system. It's one aspect of the fundamental contradiction of our time: that despite the proliferation of information consumed by people, the amount of knowledge it has engendered has actually decreased. The articles you link are commonplace and widely read -- ask anyone on the street, and they'll tell you (maybe with a grunt-half-laugh) that yeah everything we do is tracked these days. Everyone is aware of the broad outline of the facts, but no one (not even us /sec/ types, or the people with access to the raw data) really know the heart of the matter. It's too vast to be sensible. «One both believes it and doesn't believe it at the same time, without questioning it seriously, an attitude that may be summed up in the phrase: "Yes, I know, but all the same." ... The myth exists, but one must beware of thinking that people believe in it: that is the trap of critical thought, which can only operate on the assumption that the masses are naive and stupid.»

>>1658 This is a good source for corporate surveillance. http://crackedlabs.org/en/corporate-surveillance/

>>1808 >ask anyone on the street, and they'll tell you (maybe with a grunt-half-laugh) that yeah everything we do is tracked these days. >because they don't understand how it could actually be used I don't think there were any misconceptions but it's certainly a good distinction to make. To be clear, I do think most people want privacy but don't always understand how information can be used against them. For example, doctor/patient confidentiality. Most people expect their medical records to be private and any leaks regarding those documents are usually met with outrage. Their shopping habits though? Nobody gives a fuarrrk if some marketing company knows that soykaf. But I'm guessing they don't realise that data can be used to determine information they'd otherwise prefer remained private. I'm mostly referring to the following. This is not a new idea and has only been refined over the years. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html

>>1808 Your telling me the average Facebook user knows that Facebook can figure out what kind of political stories influence them more than others? Or that Facebook can figure out if they are for or against Open Borders, or Facebook know when they are depressed just by their posting\liking\clicking habits? come on. Be realistic.

>>1658 Just because someone has the knowledge doesn't mean they will use or react to it at all so, no. If anything, widely circulating knowledge like that rapidly will serve to cause a panic and a greater profit to internet securities corps. Aside from the lack of people really understanding where their data goes, the other big(or bigger) reason is the inner-tradeoff people make when they do anything in a modern society; To either work or pay. People buy hamburgers because they dont want to fry meat or buy groceries, we drink hypersweetened drinks instead of settling for moderately sweet ones. We buy electronics because we dont want to make them. The world peace is built on this system of leverages. Until FOSS security-hardened and privacy-conscious alternatives to facebook pop up AND gain traction, people will use either use facebook to talk with friends or sacrifice their everyday ease-of-operations for increased security. Why? Because people either use it or they dont. The middle ground does not exist.

>>1814 I talked to someone once who's idea of security was to click on all the John Deere and farm related ads even if he wasn't interested and ignore the gun related ones. He said he was already registered as a farmer anyway so they knew that about him already. This wasn't an old man, he recently turned 30. People do not have a clue.

>>1808 Bull s h i t [sic!]. You overestimate normal people.

>>1840 >This I know I'm late but this is important. There is a huge difference between saying "yeah privacy is dead," as a matter of course, and actually seeing a map of your whole fuarrrking life on somebody else's computer. It's the difference between saying "the world is ending" and watching the corals and other animals at your nearest beach die off due to overheating It's the difference between hearing "1 in 3 Americans will witness or fall victim to a violent crime" and actually having your soykaf kicked in I'm bumping this thread out of the deep because this needs to be talked about more

>>1795 You, and others in the thread, create in your head a model of how information works, and apply it to what's been said even though that model is absolutely unrealistic. Human exchange of information is not, never was, and could never be linear. It's not basic logic, like it comes from point A, travels to B or C, and is contradicted at this or the other point. That was too simplistic for cavemen conveying hunting techniques and it so to the point of absurdity in the modern world. If we, an esoteric and obscure community with an extremely dissident world-view, values and rings of information, ever touched with our ideas any sort of big, even medium, public media, there'd be huge consequences to that, no matter how they reacted or received it. I'm not saying it would have immediate effects, or those we expect, nor that they can't corrupt it in ways. Information is corrupted every time it travels from point A to B, let alone to thousands or millions. The point is that information has the contours of a virus, if some propositions before obscured enter a certain forum, they'll change it, always. Yes, big media has talked about privacy issues and outlined the issue, but journalists are paid to make their readers comfortable, with small pokes of sharpness just to be interesting and so people would fall asleep as they read it. Giving our outsider perspective and showing a bit more how ugly the face of Big Data is becoming would indeed lead to panic more than to reaction, but that's because most people when they panic, they can not react rationally. That we can't change, so as far as possibilities panic is good because it causes movement and change. But even bad movement is ultimately good also, because it causes change. The hugest power of evil in the world right now is crystallization.

>>2996 (cont. because the site wouldn't let me post the whole thing at once. Wrote a fuarrrklot I know, but really thought this could be useful) Just look at what the / pol/ culture did in the last couple of years. Regardless of what you may think of their claims, the work they've done is amazing in scope. No, they didn't get what they wanted, and probably never will, but they got some obscure and very scandalous ideas in the minds of millions, and are now constantly talked about literally everywhere. They outlined a path that any esoteric community can follow and, with enough work, get to similar success. And I can't think of any mentality that is more needed for the world right now, that that of /tech/-related privacy paranoia. Not aiming necessarily to give people more privacy, as that is so hard, but to at least oppose, and then maybe at least slow down until other solutions come by, the social and political changes that the over-exposition of personal lives is causing around. We won't do something that makes a multitude of people change their minds. We can, though, do something that inspires some people, that will inspire other and so on. Just look at how similar, even though different in many other aspects, we here are/have become, because of a single piece of art that was Serial Experiments Lain. If you were there when someone first talked about that project, you wish you were the guy who said 'that's never going to get anywhere and accomplish nothing'?

>>2997 >>2996 Not that guy, but I like the way you think, man. But I have to say I'm also still waiting on some sort of idea. I remember when the Snowden leaks came out, even though I completely distrust what he says about his motives, at the time I thought that at least the American public would start giving a soykaf about computer security. I even thought that maybe the OPM and Equifax hacks might have that kind of effect. Not so. If anything, what I'm seeing on my end is almost the opposite. Awareness among laymen seems to be up--but understanding is the key here, not awareness. The effect is that at the same time that laymen are becoming more aware (see:fearful) of computer threats, their awareness only fools them into thinking they understand what to do about it and why. Meanwhile, the tech leaves them increasingly further behind in the dust So, what are we to even do?

>I think something that would work would be a fictional story of a character we come up with using real world technologies to mess with a population\person sort of like how the novel Little Brother is. This could be from the perspective of a tech CEO stalking an employee they fall in love with, or a college student who wants to track and mess with their classmates\professors, or a politician looking to blackmail his opponents. Mr. Robot almost pulled this off but went too big too fast...I guess because the narrative was "Little Man -vs- The Machine", rather than "This Could Happen to You." If it's a narrative you want you're going to have to have something that is both universally appealing and small in scope

>>3003 We operate on the assumption that the common man can handle information, it can't. If he could, democracy would be a heaven, which it isn't by any measure. What he responds to are myths. The drive for the future in the last decades, and the space technology occupies in our culture came much more from 2001 Space Odyssey (the movie) than from new types of propulsion they were inventing, from Blade Runner much more than the creation of LISP. The fact is that OP's idea of creating a story, a symbol that could shake people up, is 100% feasible and can have great consequences. History has shown time and time again. The only question is if we are up to the task, but we'll only now if we try it. We could be more advanced if we did that months ago when he first posted, instead we were discussing if we should. That's just a terrible habit our generation has.

>>3005 What, you think that we should have been working away to make a home-grown version of Black Mirror? There already is a huge modern mythos around technology and its attendant hazards -- everyone's feeling this angst, even if they don't have specific information. The post above you talks about Mr Robot, and recent years have seen the production of countless science fiction films, shows and books -- all of which are dystopian in some way. They share an interlocking language of the tech narratives, some of the fastest-growing of which are the way that social media changes social relations, and that learning machines are learning about you for profit. The stuff we're talking about here is definitely already part of the milieu. But if the narrative is mostly negative (e.g. Facebook knows you better than you know yourself!) there's some weird cognitive dissonance thing where it's taken on only as a hushed, nagging, depressing feeling. (How many compulsive snap-chatters do you think feel mortally self-conscious whenever they stop to think about it?) What about positive narratives? Not necessarily in the sense of optimistic, but of saying "do something!" instead of "something is being done to you!". Instead of "the bees are all dying it's so weird and scary" saying "let's set up a hive of native bees, we can share the honey". That kind of thing. >>2929 The comparisons you make are perfect (global warming, gun violence) because just like in this domain, they have their own collections of well-established narratives and prevalent, though not necessarily acute, social awareness. In both of them (and they're older, better-established than the tech thing) there is yet to be substantial collective action in deferring their dangers. (Well, lots of countries, my own included, have dealt with the guns thing just fine ...)

>>3006 >The comparisons you make are perfect (global warming, gun violence) because just like in this domain, they have their own collections of well-established narratives and prevalent, though not necessarily acute, social awareness. When I was in high school (prior to the snowden leaks) I presented a class project where I discussed the ethics and open source information that hinted that programs could and likely did (and some examples of public domain systems) that basically did everything that the ones that snowden said actually confirmed existed. I was met with a "lol we get it, big brother is watching, haha lainon, get out of here ,we don't want to hear about your tinfoild hat conspiracies, and by the way do you have something to hide?" Years later (after snowden) >#OMG THE GOVT HAS BEEN SPYING ON AMERICANS IM SO STARTLED, LOL WHATEVER I HAVE NOTHING TO HIDE its a confirmation bias, people still have an innate trust in authority, because they don't understand that authority is just other human beings... I have been a victim of several major data breaches, and I don't blame the organization, I blame the individual people who knew about the problem and failed to do anything or admit the breach had happened in order to perpetuate the image that nothing was wrong, when really it was all falling apart. I have had to give up a good part of my personal information to my company as part of a hiring process to get access to certain information, but as a result, I expect nothing less than someone ensuring that that information does not fall into the wrong hands. but just like in other fields, few people really care as long as they are getting paid. When I catch our IT taking known dangerous shortcuts, i need to resist the urge to bitchslap them right there. in my opinion, you should not trust people with information unless you can be certain that it wont get compromised, also whats with those fuarrrking post-it notes with passwords to secured proprietary databases There is also the idea that people do not think them selves to be gullible, as the saying goes, it is easier to fool a person than to convince him he has been fooled" on a related note, my family questioned why i carry a dumb phone and don't use social media, when i try to explain that its not safe because companies are inherently for profit, and i'm not going to willingly become someones bitch or give information to organizations with no incentive to keep it safe, i get asked what i have to hide, like i'm some sort of l33t anoneemus h4xorman cybercriminal

>>3006 >There already is a huge modern mythos around technology and its attendant hazards Yeah, well, if it hasn't worked yet then it should only be incentive for us to do even more. Instead we see people saying it's impossible, it will be useless, etc., and that's a very corrupted mentality. That's what I'm saying. Analyze things to do better, list the problems, the difficulties, is great. The question you put of the tone that might work better is very on point in that regard. >What about positive narratives? Not necessarily in the sense of optimistic, but of saying "do something!" instead of "something is being done to you!". And it's a great point. What I was kinda ranting against is the over-analyzing that is often halting, and keeps us in a loop. The idea that having a privileged amount of information shouldn't paralyze us was a cornerstone of hacker culture from the beginning. I think we should honor it more, and I also believe very strongly that this universe we're inhabiting here, in this imageboard, could potentially create a specific myth with a special power we may not have seen yet.

>>1658 People understand what information can be used for. Sure, some might be ignorant of the specific details, but nobody is a fool. They just don't care. Things like Facebook and so on are used because they're convenient. Nothing you can really do will change that, least of all creating a fictional story; we've already got an awful lot of those out there. The damage is done, Lainanon, I'm sorry. I've watched all this happen, and unfortunately there's little that can be done about it.

>>3007 >people still have an innate trust in authority, because they don't understand that authority is just other human beings Very much so. I think this is a very big reason that people are so complacent with government and large regulated companies having so much access to their data (and I'm going to purposely keep clear of politics here, as per the OP). We've become so complacent with having that level of control over us as individuals, by... other individuals. I know somebody that used to work for the police, and were always of that same "nothing to hide" opinion. One day it was suggested to them that, hey what if someone you used to work with has some grudge against you, and wants to go through your emails or facebook posts to set you up for something? Are you still happy with them having that power now? That really seemed to have an effect on the way they were viewing the situation and got them out of this mindset of thinking about "the government" and/or "Facebook" as single entities rather than collectives of individuals - who each will have their own agenda.

>>3006 > we can share the honey I'm going a little off topic but that is NOT THE MAIN PROBLEM caused by the bees dying off.

>>3041 > That really seemed to have an effect on the way they were viewing the situation and got them out of this mindset of thinking about "the government" and/or "Facebook" as single entities rather than collectives of individuals - who each will have their own agenda. Thats the point that I think OP is trying to prove. On a similar note, i'm petty sure that some of the people i know are alphabets, but none of them use any type of social media because they are afraid of megacorps, not the government. one thing that does concern me is when politicians try to "downsize or reduce government involvement" because it means that all of the work gets farmed out to - you guessed it, megacorps, each of which operates with its own agenda in line with the governments goals (but not their legal obligations). If you want to do black hat kind of stuff, you can get paid to do it by some country and be fully protected instead of doing it for some shadowy characters, even moreso if you do it for megacorps who work for the government. And unlike governments with their varying ideologies, megacops have incentivized compromising human beings, their security, and their privacy down to a product, i'm just waiting for the day when Facebook makes privacy settings a paid feature. Already some public records companies will only remove your data from their site (not all of the sites that already got the information) for a small processing fee.

>>3043 > i'm petty sure that some of the people i know are alphabets, but none of them use any type of social media because they are afraid of megacorps, not the government They may not even be allowed to use it. I don't know.

>>3044 I have heard at least one of them mention how most people don't because it could make them targets, even though alphabets are allowed to, i would also imagine having a linked-in that says "secret agent man" is not good for keeping a low profile

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