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Comment by edouard1234567 | Hacker News Reader

To keep things in perspective (assuming these numbers are roughly accurate...)

The odds of Facebook handing over your data to a government agency are similar to the odds of dying from a shark attack or lightning...

source : http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/31/how-scared-should-w...

I still find these numbers fairly high. If cops need a warrant to get into my home why don't they need one to get into my "facebook home"?

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I find it darkly amusing that the rarity of these events is being invoked to convince people to moderate their concern, when this situation only exists due to the government's insistence that we treat even more rare events as gravely serious threats to our way of life.

Goddamned that's a brilliant take I hadn't considered. Well said.

> "why don't they need one to get into my "facebook home"?

Because there is no such thing as your Facebook home.

If you're associating Facebook with "your home", they have you by the balls. Google is trying desperately to grab your balls too, so that your Google profile is the center of your online persona. They make incremental, subtle changes to push users towards Google+ to achieve this. The latest change happened this week, where you can no longer have a profile picture on Youtube unless it comes from Google+. They actually removed my profile picture, and popped a message up saying I have to go to Google+ to set up the profile picture again. They replaced my avatar with a generic blue pattern that looks like crap. Bastards. I don't want a Google+ profile. I don't like being forced to use social media services just to have a profile picture on Youtube, or just to rate an app on the play store.

Your "home", digital or otherwise, should be under your control, not sold out to a company. IMHO there needs to be new laws designed to protect our "digital homes" from the very tech giants who facilitate them and change the rules at their choosing, absent user preference and input.

Imagine not being able to get into your own house without first logging into Facebook? Or not being able to use the internet without first checking in with Google? Far-fetched? Not really, it's slowly heading that way in baby steps. The needs and wishes of companies and government first, citizen freedoms and user-control and true privacy second or third, or not at all.

   They make incremental, subtle changes to push users towards Google+ [...]

I wouldn't call it subtle. These steps are very direct and probably successful in that avoiding a G+ profile became really hard.

Well, except that the risk of Facebook handing over my data is uncorrelated with how often I swim at beaches or stand under a tree in an electrical storm.

It's not like someone goes around with a random number generator deciding whether you'll have horrible things happen to you. They depend on your specific circumstance.

"The odds of Facebook handing over your data to a government agency are similar to the odds of dying from a shark attack or lightning..."

How do yo know that? What if I have friends, relatives or clients in the middle east and I'm known to be unhappy about particular political issues but never swim in shark infested waters?

This is true. The average Facebook user is unlikely to be affected, but that's not true for everyone. And you don't have to be a "terror suspect" or easily mistaken for one: if you have reason to worry about industrial espionage or Watergate tactics from the US government then your odds are likely to be a lot shorter too.

I don't know what numbers you are using but my calculations are different.

I don't think it matters that there are 1 billion users worldwide. I think it's fair to assume that a majority of local, state, and federal requests affected US users. That number is more like 165 million [1]. Which means the likelihood you are affected assuming a random distribution of requests and you live in the US is closer to one in a thousand.

And that only accounts for Facebook requests. Consider if you regularly visit 10 websites. That might make the odds much closer to one in a hundred.

[1] http://www.quintly.com/blog/2013/02/facebook-country-stats-f...

Why do you assume the NSA mostly targets US users? That's not a fair assumption at all.

I was under the impression they only needed to get a warrant, or, broadly speaking, gave a *k about the privacy of American citizens.

Anyone else, world wide, could have their data accessed without any need for special secret orders.

Am I mistaken? I honestly thought that was the case.

They would still need to issue a National Security Request to compel Facebook to release data.

If you're a non-resident alien, they have to get the FISC court to review and approve a FAA 702 order targeting you. The bad news is that there's no standard of probable cause or anything remotely like it: more or less the only thing the FISC is actually even supposed to review and rule on is the likelihood that you are not a US citizen or in the US. The good news is that they still have to issue that FAA 702 order, and fewer than 2000 FAA 70* orders have been issued in any year prior to this one. (That number includes 702s along with other orders which can intentionally target US citizens or residents but involve a higher burden of proof.)

That still leaves the possible loophole of having those 2000 orders cover a huge number of people in a manner similar to the Verizon metadata order (which is a FISA order, but isn't a FAA 70* order and isn't counted among the 2000 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5879366 ). But this Facebook disclosure along with earlier statements from Google and others allows us to cautiously rule that out (though we probably don't have the same clarity on the situation of all 9 PRISM firms).

Of course, none of this tells us much about what they're doing (or able to do) using "upstream collection" at the telcos. Or indeed through similar "direct collection" from non-US Web companies running non-US servers, which I'm guessing (IANAL) would probably be outside US law altogether.

I agree with your point re: the odds of it happening. It puts things in perspective.

Entire books have been written about the legal standards required. It's difficult to summarize here. One short answer is that the Fourth Amendment is not viewed as applying to non-U.S. citizens abroad. Check out the NSA director's 2006 testimony on nsa.gov for more on this.

> I still find these numbers fairly high. If cops need a warrant to get into my home why don't they need one to get into my "facebook home"?

The COPS do - they are required to get warrants for data requests and those warrants can't be overly broad.

The NSA are not cops, though, and somehow ended up with different rules.

"The odds of Facebook handing over your data to a government agency are similar to the odds of dying from a shark attack or lightning..."

The odds can only be determined by how many requests they rejected. If they approved 100% of the government's requests, then the odds of them handing over data requested by the government are notably higher than lightening or shark bites. All they're waiting for is the request.

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