A Facebook case
My good friend became a victim of serious crime. I don't go into details, the topic is very delicate. Doesn't matter actually.
So police got the permission, given by prosecutor's (or judge, I am not very good at jurisprudence) decision to have fully access to accused's person Facebook account. Right now in trial Facebook's chat history is one the main evidences.
From one side Facebook is evil that they give access to government structures and secret police with ease. From the other hand in this case it is good because for my friend, that maybe justice will be done.
This is a bit dilemma. All things cannot be just black and white. I think.
Targeted collect/surveillance, ordered by a judge, is useful. The risk for democracy is mass surveillance as practiced by Facebook itself (or the NSA through Facebook) without any judge in the loop. One single company should not be allowed to allowed to collect those many personal data in the first place (federated networks are fine).
Thanks for your reply. Not it is more clear for me.
I'm in the process of switching to Diaspora and/or GNU Social.
Maybe you and your friend could do that too?
I am a translator!
disapora is nice
I agree it's basically a good thing when a judge has to order surveillance...but I think it's a huge difference if e.g. a company has to give access to certain data or if police forces get permission to infect a suspect's machine with some kind of malware. I think the latter is extremely dangerous to society (even if ordered by a judge).
But if I understand correctly, Facebook just had to give out the data in this case?