Many website owners use Facebook and other social media platforms to promote their site, articles or products, but others use it and provide a week-by-week, day-by-day and sometimes minute-by-minute update on everything they are doing in their lives...... well the European Comminission is now warning their citizens to "leave Facebook," because their "Safe Harbour framework cannot ensure privacy of EU citizens’ data when sent to the US by American internet firms."
The comments were made by EC attorney Bernhard Schima in a case brought by privacy campaigner Maximilian Schrems, looking at whether the data of EU citizens should be considered safe if sent to the US in a post-Snowden revelation landscape.
“You might consider closing your Facebook account, if you have one,” Schima told attorney general Yves Bot in a hearing of the case at the European court of justice in Luxembourg.
I have heard people say and comment many times that if they are doing nothing wrong they do not really care if the US government is compiling what they put out there publicly, but as the Snowden revelations made very clear, it is not only what is being done publicly that is being "watched," compiled and stored and therein lies the problem.
I heard Steve Quayle say on a radio interview, (just confirmed the exact quote) that "for the first time in history the intelligence agencies got people to build their own self perpetuating and continually updated intelligence dossiers, for them."
The case, dubbed “the Facebook data privacy case”, concerns the current Safe Harbour framework, which covers the transmission of EU citizens’ data across the Atlantic to the US. Without the framework, it is against EU law to transmit private data outside of the EU. The case collects complaints lodged against Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Microsoft-owned Skype and Yahoo.
Schrems maintains that companies operating inside the EU should not be allowed to transfer data to the US under Safe Harbour protections – which state that US data protection rules are adequate if information is passed by companies on a “self-certify” basis – because the US no longer qualifies for such a status.
The case argues that the US government’s Prism data collection programme, revealed by Edward Snowden in the NSA files, which sees EU citizens’ data held by US companies passed on to US intelligence agencies, breaches the EU’s Data Protection Directive “adequacy” standard for privacy protection, meaning that the Safe Harbour framework no longer applies.
Prism, according to the Snowden documents, is the biggest single contributor to the NSA's intelligence reports. As a 'downstream' program, it collects data from Google, Facebook, Apple and others - (Source)
While many organizations offer "alternatives" to Facebook, no matter where they are physically located, the information flow of most, flow through the use, meaning "big brother" is able to access almost anything a user does on the Internet.
The US government is not the only entity that is collecting information on Internet users. Facebook and those other "alternatives," collect information for a variety of reasons, whether it is marketing or to sell that information to third parties.
DATA-MINING
Data mining is described by StatSoft as "an analytic process designed to explore data (usually large amounts of data - typically business or market related - also known as "big data") in search of consistent patterns and/or systematic relationships between variables, and then to validate the findings by applying the detected patterns to new subsets of data. The ultimate goal of data mining is prediction - and predictive data mining is the most common type of data mining and one that has the most direct business applications. The process of data mining consists of three stages: (1) the initial exploration, (2) model building or pattern identification with validation/verification, and (3) deployment (i.e., the application of the model to new data in order to generate predictions)."
The point is, nothing an Internet user does online is private. Not from the US government, other governments, companies or social media platforms, no matter what they claim.
