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No, you have framed the issue incorrectly.
Finding people does not require accessing those people's information without authorization. A "secure" social network is one in which the user controls access - today on facebook the user controls access by other users but facebook itself can circumvent that because it is essentially a man in the middle attack.
I don't care to give the idea away for free; the important thing is that such an app(lication) actually comes to life.
Ideas are a dime a dozen. See my original post for an example. The hard part is execution.
> will never happen: requires forethought
No, it only requires forethought by the people who develop it. The developers need to come up with a system that is both reasonably functional and dead easy to use, with all the distributed security stuff is in the background and not the main selling point.
It is kinda like piracy and DRM - you only need one pirate to rip / crack something and it will end being spread by thousands of people who don't even think about how it was originally cracked.
Facebook and other social networks are useful because they host your pictures. That is not as useful as it once was because phones have much more storage space and much faster networking than they did 7 years ago.
I'd like to see a social network app that runs on phones (and PCs, and even big servers for people who need major horsepower because they have a lot of "friends" like celebrities). Maybe with the ability to backstop your media on a variety of sources like dropbox, or even a bittorrent swarm of all your "friends" so that when your phone is turned off, or out of cell bandwidth (versus wifi bandwidth) your friends can still get access to your shared media.
Facebook is "over centralized" in that anyone on facebook is equally close to you all the same server farms - but that ignores the entire point of having friends. All we need is a system where your phone knows about the ip addresses of the people on your friends list. It is OK if it takes a lot longer find the people who are not your friends list because accessing their data is going to be pretty rare.
Yes, and have the distance between you eyes adjusted, lower your nose, change the bridge of your nose, and sink your cheek bones, flatten your forehead, pin your ears back, and lower them as well, change your jaw line.
Much of those can be fuzzed by avoiding a dead-on camera angle. My understanding is that most DMV's require you to look directly into the camera (and not smile), but you may get a camera operator who doesn't give a damn. The last time I had to get a DMV photo taken I was able to turn my head to the left and down with a big smirk. The ladies running the camera laughed their asses off at my picture, I really look goofy - and let it pass.
Any facial recog software is going to have to work extra hard to calculate things like distance between eyes / nose / mouth / jaw from that picture. I'm sure really smart software could interpolate a 3D model of my face - but the incentive for that kind of software to be applied is minimal when the vast majority of DMV photos are dead-on and expressionless.
Also, why does nobody remember the "always on" feature of the MS Teleprompt?
Because nobody knows wtf that is.
And why would this guy go to Hong Kong of all the places he could go?
Six reasons why choosing Hong Kong is a brilliant move by Edward Snowden.
It's our huge tracts of land.
doesn't mean that there aren't other mechanisms in place to collect a lot more data without specific requests. For example, the NSA could be collecting data where Facebook's servers connect to the Internet.
Apparently SSL encryption at all of the large internet corps is handled by dedicated front-ends - and the network between the SSL front-ends and the real guts of entities like facebook, google, etc are all in the clear. That makes for a perfect location for the NSA to drop their sniffers in, no need to compromise any SSL certs at all, no forward secrecy, etc, just wide open traffic perfect for raw harvesting.
And, of course, you have to assume that the Utah data center is going to be used to store something, and it ain't gonna be data obtained from just 20000 Facebook-related requests, because those would fit on my hard drive.
I think that bears repeating - the NSA ain't building data silos (there are others, like one in san antonio, texas) that consume as much electricity as a small city for nothing. They are collecting literally tons of data on us, its gotta be coming from somewhere.
I simply cannot wrap my head around this. How is it in public's interest to be constantly surveiled in violation of the bill of rights?
That is what happens when the people in power become convinced of their own righteousness. It is not an evil plot, it is simply the natural result of fact that basically no one ever thinks of themselves as the bad guy. So if they are the good guys, then whatever they do must also be good. They convince themselves that any harmful side-effects truly are minimal (easy to do when the side-effects don't impact them directly) and are a necessary cost for the greater good.
There's no such thing as a free lunch. -- Milton Friendman