Facebook is sniffing messages with questionable authority

Facebook’s E-mail Cen­sor­ship is Legally Dubi­ous, Experts Say | Epi­cen­ter | Wired.com

Not sure this should be a sur­prise, but Face­book sniffs email con­tent exchanged on the built-in mes­sag­ing plat­form, then cen­sors that con­tent. I haven’t tested this.

As out­lined in the post, it’s not unusual for con­tent to be decon­structed algo­rith­mi­cally, it’s done all the time. And email shouldn’t be con­sid­ered pri­vate by any stretch. But the fact that Face­book is then cen­sor­ing that data whole­sale amps up the dis­cus­sion about Face­book falling out of favor with some.

Wired.com ran a test using a tor­rent file linked on the Pirate Bay to confirm:

Wired.com con­firmed Face­book is block­ing pri­vate mes­sages by send­ing a link to a Pirate Bay tor­rent feed of a book in the pub­lic domain. Such con­tent is freely avail­able to every­one, as all copy­rights have expired. Nev­er­the­less, the mes­sage bounced twice, return­ing the fol­low­ing fail­ure notice: “This Mes­sage Con­tains Blocked Con­tent. Some con­tent in this mes­sage has been reported as abu­sive by Face­book users.” (Facebook’s link-censoring sys­tem is may be just tilt­ing at wind­mills, how­ever, because remov­ing a sin­gle vowel from the domain name lets the URL go through.)

In the case of Wired.com’s test, there were only two Face­book users who should have been aware of the con­tent — Wired.com edi­tor John C. Abell and his message’s intended recip­i­ent, who was sit­ting five feet from him — and nei­ther had the slight­est objec­tion to it whatsoever.

The whole post is worth reading.