Guest Post by Blazej Bulka: Social Networking That Went Wrong

(Guest post by Blazej Bulka. Thanks Blazej! Especially for translating and summarizing these articles for us non-Polish speakers..)

nasza-klasa.pl is currently the most popular social networking site in Poland. "Nasza klasa" means "our class," and the website is similar in design to classmates.com. It allows people to join schools, from which they graduated, and classes within schools. It also allows to build a social network by reconnecting to old friends, and post photographs.

Initially, nasza-klasa lacked any privacy controls because it was meant as a small, local project. After one year of existence, a sudden surge in popularity came. The number of registered users quickly exceeded 1 million, which started exponential growth. After a few months, the site had more than 5 million users. Currently, the site has more than 11 million users. (The population of Poland is roughly 40 million.) The unexpected growth choked the website, and the utmost priority of the developers was performance, and not privacy.

Right now, the website offers only basic privacy protection such as black listing, and restricting the visibility of the information in the profile. However, the biggest privacy problem are the users themselves. Most of them have had no prior experience with social networks before. The theme of the site is very encouraging to share as much personal information as possible. After all, the users are surrounded with their classmates, who are the people they usually trust, and with whom they shared their personal secrets in the childhood. They have not seen each other for multiple years; therefore, they are extremely willing to share a lot of personal information to make up. They also want their profiles to be easily searchable, in case another old friend should join the site in the future.

Unfortunately, many of the users are unaware that their information can be actually accessed by almost everyone, and not just their friends are interested in it. Moreover, because of their inexperience, they do not know that any information published on the internet may be copied endless number of times, changed, and may stay there forever. Sometimes, consequences of careless publishing of information on the site were quite surprising.

Below, I present an overview of five such unexpected uses of published information based on the articles published in press or on the internet (mostly in Polish).

1. Tracking users by debt collectors and law enforcement
(Source: "Nasza-klasa is a true treasury for debt collectors and law enforcement")
Debt collectors in Poland tend to massively use nasza-klasa to track the debtors. Nasza-klasa seems to be very good source of information for them. Personally, I also heard of cases when the debt collectors compare the friends' lists of the wanted person with the lists of their classmates. A classmate who is missing from the friends' list may indicate that a dislike existed between the two. Apparently, the debt collectors tried to exploit such dislikes to extract more information.

2. Police officers expose themselves and their colleagues
(Source: "Nasza-klasa.pl exposes police officers")

Irresponsible officers post at portal nasza-klasa.pl pictures from the educational institutions, from which they graduated. This reveals identities of undercover officers -- experienced officers say.

[..] The officers add themselves to classes, in which they studied [at police schools]; often, the classes specializing in police operations, investigations, or reconnaissance. And they add class pictures. "I hunt bad people" -- this is the profile information in "About me" section of Marek -- a graduate of a reconnaissance-operational police school in Pila. More experienced officers are disgusted by the behavior of the novices. At police internet forums, they write that such a database about police officers and their friends may be used to track a particular officer.

3. Police officers brag about their authority, and how they could abuse it
(Source:   "Give me their names, I will find them in the national ID registry")

A police officer from Grodzisk Mazowiecki brags on nasza-klasa portal that he can determine the addresses of his former classmates because he has access to the national ID registry (PESEL). [..] On the forum for the 2nd Elementary School, Jaroslaw B. writes: "If anybody of you has telephone numbers of our former classmates, please call them so that they sign up. I also have access to PESEL database. I need last names, and I will determine the addresses."
A former classmate asks him: "Jarek (i.e., Jaroslaw), where do you work, if you have access to PESEL database?"

The police officer responds: "the less you know, the better."
Another classmate writes: "(..) Now the whole school knows about Jarek's capabilities :) However, I propose not to use authority or even force to find our classmates :) (...) And maybe we should move our conversation to the class forum from the school's forum :):).)

In his profile, Jaroslaw wrote that he graduated from the Police University in Szczytno.

4. Intelligence agents should know better to be low-profile ... well, apparently not!
(Source:  "Our new secret service revealed themselves on the internet"; the article contains interesting pictures posted by the intelligence agents ...)

Pictures of six SKW (Military Counter-intelligence Agency) officers are shown without their names or rank. According to the SKW Act, this data is considered particularly sensitive. The officers themselves did not exercise enough care -- during their mission, they posted pictures showing them armed, both in uniform and disguise. They were posted in profiles registered with their real names. They did not mention that they are SKW officers, they only mentioned that they are officers of the Polish Military Force. But they did not try to conceal the fact that the pictures were taken in Afghanistan.

5. People brag about committing crimes and spreading hateful ideology
(Source: "Responsibility for 'Sieg Heil' (Nazi greeting) on Nasza-klasa")
One of the profile pictures is here and another "nazi" profile picture is here.

In February, the journalists from "Gazeta Wyborcza" noticed the son of the mayor of Leczna is one of the millions people who signed up with nasza-klasa. One of the photographs in his profile showed him with two baldly-shaved friends, with their right hands raised in the fascist gesture "Sieg heil". The faces of the two friends were covered with scarves with logo of the fans for soccer club Gornik Leczna.

[..] As the journal reports, the state prosecutor's office in Lublin has already contacted nasza-klasa.pl with an inquiry regarding the user profile. The investigators want to find out how long the picture was available on the site, and how many people may have watched it. Promoting fascist ideology may lead to a financial fine, and a penalty of imprisonment up to two years in jail.

Comments

[Pavel]

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