Facebook's Ex-Security Chief Details His 'Observatory' for Internet Abuse (wired.com) 41
Andy Greenberg, writing for Wired: When Alex Stamos describes the challenge of studying the worst problems of mass-scale bad behavior on the internet, he compares it to astronomy. To chart the cosmos, astronomers don't build their own Hubble telescopes or Arecibo observatories. They concentrate their resources in a few well-situated places and share time on expensive hardware. But when it comes to tackling internet abuse ranging from extremism to disinformation to child exploitation, Stamos argues, Silicon Valley companies and academics are still trying to build their own telescopes. What if, instead, they shared their tools -- and more importantly, the massive data sets they've assembled?
That's the idea behind the Stanford Internet Observatory, part of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center where Stamos is a visiting professor. Founded with a $5 million donation from Craigslist creator Craig Newmark, the Internet Observatory aspires to be a central outlet for the study of all manner of internet abuse, assembling for visiting researchers the necessary machine learning tools, big data analysts, and perhaps most importantly, access to major tech platforms' user data -- a key to the project that may hinge on which tech firms cooperate and to what degree.
"Misinformation is not just a computer science problem. It's a problem that brings in political science, sociology, psychology," Stamos says. "Part of the idea of the Internet Observatory is to build a place for these people to work together, and we want to build the infrastructure necessary to allow all the different parts of the political and social sciences to study what's happening online." Stamos says the observatory is currently negotiating with tech firms -- he names Facebook, Google, Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit as examples -- that it hopes will offer access to user data via API in real time and in historical archives. The observatory will then share that access with social scientists who might have a specific research project but lack the connections or resources to grapple with the immensity of the data involved.
That's the idea behind the Stanford Internet Observatory, part of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center where Stamos is a visiting professor. Founded with a $5 million donation from Craigslist creator Craig Newmark, the Internet Observatory aspires to be a central outlet for the study of all manner of internet abuse, assembling for visiting researchers the necessary machine learning tools, big data analysts, and perhaps most importantly, access to major tech platforms' user data -- a key to the project that may hinge on which tech firms cooperate and to what degree.
"Misinformation is not just a computer science problem. It's a problem that brings in political science, sociology, psychology," Stamos says. "Part of the idea of the Internet Observatory is to build a place for these people to work together, and we want to build the infrastructure necessary to allow all the different parts of the political and social sciences to study what's happening online." Stamos says the observatory is currently negotiating with tech firms -- he names Facebook, Google, Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit as examples -- that it hopes will offer access to user data via API in real time and in historical archives. The observatory will then share that access with social scientists who might have a specific research project but lack the connections or resources to grapple with the immensity of the data involved.
Five eyes (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Another name that comes up in a search for the Stanford Cyberpolicy Program is Danil Kerimi [linkedin.com] of the World Economic Forum and the Berkman Center. Those two names should throw red flags for anyone familiar with modern geopolitics.
A name that comes up in a search for Stanford Cyber Policy Center is Nathaniel Persily of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences which is controlled by Microsoft [deepfreeze.it].
Craig Newmark has powerful friends. [wilsoncenter.org] I'm gues
GDPR implications? (Score:2)
Re: Five eyes (Score:2)
Not surprising from an ex-Facebooker (Score:2)
and perhaps most importantly, access to major tech platforms' user data
What could possibly go wrong?
Opt out ... (Score:1)
I want to opt out. Thank-you.
Not that I shared anything with these assholes anyway, but I opt out of further dissemination of any covert information they may have collected about me, and I further explicitly deny them permission to do so.
Just F-Off!
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I further explicitly deny them permission to do so.
You know how to stop them?
Consolidation of Censorship (Score:4, Insightful)
Stamos says the observatory is currently negotiating with tech firms -- he names Facebook, Google, Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit as examples -- that it hopes will offer access to user data via API in real time and in historical archives. The observatory will then share that access with social scientists who might have a specific research project but lack the connections or resources to grapple with the immensity of the data involved.
More importantly, they can keep everyone on the same page by denying access to researchers who step out of line, e.g. by not observing the implicit rule to completely ignore leftist misinformation, extremism, abuse, etc in their results. Why would anyone expect political censors to consolidate their efforts for any other reason?
Re: Consolidation of Censorship (Score:2)
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It's sad that discourse on Slashdot has descended to the level of "you contradict my hard right narrative, you must be a troll".
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Re: leftist misinformation (Score:1)
More importantly, they can keep everyone on the same page by denying access to researchers who step out of line, e.g. by not observing the implicit rule to completely ignore leftist misinformation, extremism, abuse, etc in their results.
Hey, you forgot Jews and their international banking conspiracy!
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New player on
Re: Consolidation of Censorship (Score:2)
Re: Consolidation of Censorship (Score:2)
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Set It Up (Score:1)
Let's have the universities and scientists work along side the big tech companies and build an all seeing "observatory" to peer into any aspect of the massive worldwide internet with intense focus and clarity. Nothing at all will be secret anymore, and they can identify problems and trends and crimes and work to correct or eliminate them.
Once it's all set-up the Neanderthals (Simpleton fools that run our government) can come in and have a backdoor into everything!! it'll be great !
Kinda almost exactly like
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Consolidate research resulting in better Malware? (Score:2)
I get where Mr. Stamos is coming from, but I can see two problems consolidating malware research the first being the bureaucracy that will come of it and the second being the bad guys know what's going on. This is an area I've always thought that competition was a very good thing - the analogy that multiple companies are like a bunch of astronomers pursuing science using multiple small instruments rather than one big one is something of a fallacy. It doesn't take billions of dollars to detect and eliminat
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Internet Panopticon (Score:1)
Government would never want to use it.
Advertizers would never want to use it.
MPAA would never want to use it.
etc.