Comment by danudey | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danudey | Hacker News Reader

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My philosophy is that Facebook provides a window into who I am and what I do, but also who my friends are and what they do. Gaining access to my Facebook account doesn't just tell them about me, it tells them about everyone I know. It lets them harvest the feeds of everyone who's ever friended me and then not stuck me in a 'sees none of my posts' group.

Even if I've never posted anything on FB that they'd find objectionable, it's possible someone I know from the US posted privately ('close friends only', for example) "Man I wish someone would put a bullet in Trump's head", feeling as though it was a safe place to vent. Suddenly they're getting investigated by the secret service, and possibly deported, because I gave up my Facebook login because "I have nothing to hide".

This is ridiculously insidious. For every one person whose Facebook info they get, they get to collect previously inaccessible data on potentially hundreds of people, none of whom agreed to share their data with the government, or even knew that it was happening. With one Facebook login the government can start building profiles on hundreds of people, and with each successive login that net expands.

Call me cynical, but I believe that those concerns are totally unfounded because the "evil government" doesn't need your FB login for that, IMHO they most likely can access that information directly without your consent. I would be really surprised if they really had to do this mass harvesting of profiles based on a series of one-time access to individual profiles of a small fraction of population; They had much more effective ways to do mass harvesting many years ago (as illustrated by various leaks) and probably do them now, having to involve thousands of immigration agents would be simply counterproductive.

I do believe that immigration services look at your account exclusively for their goals of evaluating immigration. They ask you to unlock your account because for them it's objectively simpler to ask that information from you than to get it from the other government agencies that have that information but won't disclose it because formally they shouldn't have it. There's no "the government", it is an amalgamation of many organizations that have conflicting goals and don't coordinate, so it's reasonable to expect that "the government" has some information and at the same time "the government" (i.e. other parts of it) don't have it and need to request it from you or do without.

In one breath you say the government would coordinate sharing fb data, in the other you say they don't. Which one is it?

Where does it look like I am I saying that multiple agencies would coordinate sharing FB data? I feel that the parent post was needlessly worrying about a risk of e.g. border teams using unlocked phones as a routine way to harvest data and hand it over to e.g. NSA or whatever "evil government" snooping agency they'd be worried about, because (a) NSA doesn't need this assistance because they are likely to have better mass collection methods on their own, and (b) they wouldn't coordinate this with a large number of DHS grunts, neither by asking them to gather data nor by providing them with a list of all data that they have. DHS is likely to have a lot of data themselves, but anyway unlocking a phone provides extra information in a simple&practical manner.

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