Tuesday - January 08, 2013

Spying for no reason

Fuck this, and fuck them.

An effort by the Library of Congress to archive Twitter posts has amassed more than 170 billion tweets, which the library is now seeking to make available to researchers and other interested parties.

Created in 1800, the Library of Congress serves as the unofficial library of the United States, as well as being Congress’ official research library.

In April 2010, the library signed an agreement with Twitter to gain access to all public tweets since the site’s founding in 2006.

“Twitter is a new kind of collection for the Library of Congress but an important one to its mission,” Gayle Osterberg, the library’s director of communications, wrote in a blog post. “As society turns to social media as a primary method of communication and creative expression, social media is supplementing, and in some cases supplanting, letters, journals, serial publications and other sources routinely collected by research libraries.”

Osterberg wrote that the library has completed digitally archiving all of the tweets it currently possesses and is now working on how to best make them available to the public. The library already has received about 400 requests from researchers all over the world looking into topics ranging from the rise of citizen journalism to tracking vaccination rates to predicting stock market activity.

The archive promises to keep growing fast. Currently, the library is processing roughly 500 million tweets per day, up from about 140 million daily messages in 2011, according to the blog post.

Blah blah blah, as if any of that nonsense has the slightest bit of importance. The people who request access to the data will be marketing groups trying to drill down into it to spotlight trends and to target market their products. The rest, aside from NSA using it as a spy tool, is garbage.

Not that Twitter was innocent here. Or any other of the social network sites. They are all about collecting, analyzing, and then selling a nearly infinite amount of personal data about everyone. No. The “we’re all connected” meme that you should share every detail of your life with the public is complete crap. Not only does it give you a false sense of self-importance which you don’t deserve, it trains you to forget about anything that was ever called privacy.

Big Brother also stores your telephone and cell phone conversations, and most likely any emails sent by or to the common email engines (gmail, yahoo, etc). And they’ll open your paper mail if they feel like it. So there is no communication privacy, and hasn’t been for a very long time.

“no search without a warrant” ... what a laugh. Who needs a warrant when you make your every thought, emotion, experience, and attitude public. Suckers.

So keep on Tweeting sheeple.

Posted by Drew458     on 01/08/2013 at 08:58 AM   
Filed Under: • Big Brother • Computers and Cyberspace •  
• Comments (1) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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