Want to leave Facebook? Do this vital step first to save your photos and videos from the prying eyes of Facebook
Facebook isn’t just a harmless social networking site. It’s also a powerful surveillance tool.
The social network has become a powerful surveillance tool for governments and law enforcement, and an invaluable tool for corporations. It has also spread quickly via mobile phones.
But Facebook presents a unique problem. The site allows users to upload photos and videos, but the only way to remove such content – aside from deactivating the account in which it was stored – is with the use of the site itself.
A user’s photos and videos have long been a minefield for law enforcement and Facebook itself has been a target of some pretty serious investigations.
While there’s no evidence that the company knowingly helped a wanted terrorist in Britain, there have been reports that it helped U.S. law enforcement to track down other wanted terrorists.
And in the U.S., the Department of Justice recently asked the social network for more data.
Facebook’s answer: “It is not a question of your privacy, it’s a question of ours. We want to be able to do our job; we need to be able to police our users for terrorist propaganda and to do that, we need to be able to figure out who’s sending that material.”
Even though there are legitimate uses for Facebook’s powerful surveillance tools, its power as a tool for government and law enforcement is a real threat, particularly when it comes to tracking down terrorists and criminals.
In the U.S., Facebook has also helped law enforcement in the field.
In one case, the government asked Facebook to track down a suspected bomb maker, with the help of the social network. Facebook made an unusual appeal to the Justice Department to not to make use of its “terrorist propaganda” database.
“Facebook is under no obligation to assist law enforcement in the investigation of terrorism or criminal activity. Facebook makes its data available for other legitimate purposes, but not for the investigation of potential criminal activity,” a Facebook representative said in an email to CBS this week. “We are hopeful that this policy change will result in broader acceptance of these legitimate uses.”
But a few