why you should avoid social networking sites...

[uncloned]

As has been mentioned here before:


"In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It's part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using 'open source intelligence' — information that's publicly available... Visible Technologies crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. (It doesn't touch closed social networks, like Facebook, at the moment.) Customers get customized, real-time feeds of what's being said on these sites, based on a series of keywords. 'That's kind of the basic step — get in and monitor,' says company senior vice president Blake Cahill. Then Visible 'scores' each post, labeling it as positive or negative, mixed or neutral. It examines how influential a conversation or an author is. ('Trying to determine who really matters,' as Cahill puts it.) Finally, Visible gives users a chance to tag posts, forward them to colleagues and allow them to response through a web interface.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/10/exclusive-us-spies-buy-stake-in-twitter-blog-monitoring-firm/


"Apropos: Another anonymous reader writes points out an article which makes the point that users don't even realize how much private information they're sharing over these services.

http://www.net-security.org/article.php?id=1324

[Sam_Zen]

Well, I never had any reason to join such social networking sh*tes in the first place.
I consider it a waste of time, I don't want to do a campaign to gather a lot of 'friends' on my 'free' space.
And of course state intelligence or big companies are greedy to gather data to define your personal profile.

To me, the MPF is a nice place to meet nice people, and I don't need more.

[PabloLuna]

Why do you need a social network if you have the real world?
I may love technology, but not enough to join such social networks.

[g]

Isn't MPC some sort of social network...?

[PabloLuna]

Fear an intel agency?

There is a rule of life:  What you give to life, shall be given to you.
If they cause fear, they will fear later.
Politics is a theater, I do not give it too much importance.

Spending taxpayers money in causing fear does not add value to economy and pushes towards hiperinflation.
Hyperinflation is something that is worth to fear.

Heart attacks kill thousands every year and it is not a national security problem.  They should monitor heart attacks, not twitter or facebook.

Sometimes I ask myself if I am crazy or if the world is crazy.

[Rakib]

It's a forum.  Nothing more.