Here we go again. Found this over at Adam’s place, and seen it mentioned elsewhere too. Basically, Iran is monitoring people’s activity on facebook and punishing ex-pats and dissidents:

One 28-year-old physician who lives in Dubai said that in July he was asked to log on to his Facebook account by a security guard upon arrival in Tehran’s airport. At first, he says, he lied and said he didn’t have one. So the guard took him to a small room with a laptop and did a Google search for his name. His Facebook account turned up, he says, and his passport was confiscated.

I thought that was noteworthy, and left the following comment:

Again, another reason not to have a Facebook account. So after using Facebook as a hub for all of one’s private communications and relationship mapping, you get forced to sign into your account, compromising your password and likely all your information stored on Facebook by a theocratic security guard. What’s more, all of your dissident friends who “friended” you are now pegged to be monitored.

Seriously, if you want a web presence, get a website. And keep your address books private.

I will diss the Iranian regime as much as I like here. And should I for some unforeseeable reason decide to travel to Iran, I will will have no facebook account for them to force me to log into, and they will not have access to my private address book, emails, or other crap.

Tags: Emergent Chaos, Facebook, Iran

This entry was posted on Friday, December 4th, 2009 at 2:01 pm and is filed under News & Politics, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.