NSA ♥ Facebook
A while back, the Washington Post reported on a set of leaked NSA slides that most people seem to have ignored.
There was one interesting piece of data in the report that I think deserves more attention. On the slide titled “Address Books” is a table setting out how many people’s address books have been collected, and how many are “Attributed” — that is, how many allow the NSA to tie an online ID to a real named person.
Here’s the data as a table, to make it easier to read:
Provider | Collected | Attributed | Attributed% |
---|---|---|---|
Yahoo | 444743 | 11009 | 2.48% |
Hotmail | 105068 | 1115 | 1.06% |
Gmail | 33697 | 2350 | 6.97% |
82857 | 79437 | 95.87% | |
Other | 22881 | 1175 | 5.14% |
Total | 689246 | 95086 | 13.80% |
Notice that Facebook is far and away the NSA’s best source of information about you and your friends. Doing the math, 79437/95086 = 84% of the NSA’s information linking named individuals to their friends online is sourced from Facebook.