Google, Facebook, Microsoft store user information
13 Jun 2013
No information users' post on websites, social networks and even in emails on the companies' servers is private. Most, if not all, information gets stored on company servers, including those used by Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Twitter, and help create websites that people want to use to post more information about themselves, and to sell products people want to purchase.
Any information provided by users online can be stored both explicitly (information users enter, such as a name or address) or implicitly including address, browser, and computer operating system), which can be provided it to an outside agency.
For instance, Google can store users' name, age, location, email address and payment details, and if users wrote anything on their Google+ page, Google would store that information as well, along with any address provided or even the search terms they used.
With YouTube account of users, Google also had access to all the videos that they have posted and watched. With Google Chat, the logs get stored indefinitely unless users decided to clear them.
And Facebook stores everything that users post on the website, including the photos and videos that they shared, telephone numbers, relationship status and even users' hobbies and preferences. It also stored the pages that users 'liked' the games they played and the apps that they used through the website.
Meanwhile, when internet companies faced accusations recently of allowing the National Security Agency direct access to their servers, they strenuously denied it, but when AT&T was accused of allowing the NSA direct access to its network, it did the opposite.
According to Mark Klein, who worked as an AT&T technician for over 22 years, he met with NSA officials and witnessed the diversion of domestic internet traffic through a "splitter cabinet" to secure room 641A in one of the company's San Francisco facilities. Klein added, only NSA-cleared technicians were allowed to work on equipment in the SG3 secure room. He said he was told similar taps existed in other major cities.
Without denying, AT&T sought to downplay the reasons for the existence of NSA-controlled hardware on its network while defending a lawsuit brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
In May 2006, CNET obtained an improperly redacted PDF document that AT&T's lawyers filed in that lawsuit, which read: "Although the plaintiffs ominously refer to the equipment as the 'Surveillance Configuration,' the same physical equipment could be utilized exclusively for other surveillance in full compliance with" the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
