It is often the most innocuous data that certain agencies find the most useful. For example, links between ‘known associates’. Try googling the story of Maher Arar, who was illegally deported, imprisoned and tortured – all for once having casually met (through a friend) a person who had come to the attention of the authorities. These days, people publish and helpfully tag their encounters on Facebook, MySpace, Flickr et al.

It is not in the imagination of a few paranoids that the authorities find these sites useful. Both Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics have stated that they are working on systems – being used for homeland defence, border control and anti-terrorism – which scour publicly accessible information on blogs, social networking sites, forums and other internet-based resources. They do this to build profiles and establish links between people, and this info is being used to target people for surveillance and investigation, to add them to no-fly lists and more.

Of course, there will always be people who are happy to be sheep….

I probably would if I had any such accounts!

Jack(21), I find a perverse humour in a government mining Facebook data. So does the CIA have “Are you a vampire” on their fake profile page? Maybe this calls for a “Spot the Fed” application in the style of the old DefCon T-Shirts.

Only the paranoid will survive [corollary: it's not because you're not paranoid that they're not watching you (FaceBook and other data trawling is a case in point)].

I did exactly what you suggested here in September. I tried filling my Facebook account with meaningless and false data, because I knew there was no way to delete the account.

Sadly (and evil) here is what Facebook did. They “deactivated” my account, because they said that I added people who I did not really know.

I wrote to them to ask them to please reactivate the account, but they said no. My reply after that never got another response from them.

The problem is that I started adding “fake” friends before I changed my personal data. So, I think I did the steps in the wrong order.

Long story short… all my personal real data is still in Facebook… and they refuse to erase or delete it.

It is well known now in in-the-know circles that Facebook is tracking people for various governmental organizations.

Submit a complaint to abuse. Your account ought to be deleted better.

Let’s assume you want to spend all that time and effort, do you really think that a pattern of starting to add random websites/friends/apps/you-name-it here and there wouldn’t be easy to filter out? There are a myriad machine-learning and classification techniques (SVM’s etc) that are good enough to be able to filter chaff user activites from real ones given a decent training set (and boy is the “real” training set large).

In fact, if any of you out there in the information extration field read this, perhaps propose a solution, it’s actually an interesting but not intractable problem.

Nice post, though. It’s good to point out to the public that they do not have to give their data away to everybody who sticks out a hand for it. If more people followed that advice, there wouldn’t be so much identity theft in the world.

You are all insane if you even used your real name. I already have 2 utterly bogus accounts, and they were both just used for testing.

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