On the 21st Anniversay of the 9/11 attack, my memory goes back to this video. It’s not the images, it’s the sound.

“… the sound of the PASS (Personal Alert Safety System) alarms worn by firemen, which continued chirping after the buildings collapsed, each one representing a life lost. I never have been able to erase that sound from my memory.”

SafeTradeSpots are designated locations at law enforcement offices where buyers and sellers can meet in public under surveillance to complete in-person transactions. There’s no charge for the service.

Every month, tens of millions of Americans use online marketplaces to buy and sell secondhand in their own neighborhoods.

With clear benefits for consumers, local businesses and the environment, this kind of ecommerce is among the most popular and fastest growing sectors online, facilitating tens of billions of dollars in local transactions annually.

We started SafeExchangePoint.com to support communities across the country that want to offer their own local, convenient and secure exchange points where buyers and sellers can complete transactions, and to help consumers find the nearest SafeExchangePoint.

Facebook’s stonewalling has been revealing on its own, providing variations on the same theme: It has amassed so much data on so many billions of people and organized it so confusingly that full transparency is impossible on a technical level. In the March 2022 hearing, Zarashaw and Steven Elia, a software engineering manager, described Facebook as a data-processing apparatus so complex that it defies understanding from within. The hearing amounted to two high-ranking engineers at one of the most powerful and resource-flush engineering outfits in history describing their product as an unknowable machine.

The special master at times seemed in disbelief, as when he questioned the engineers over whether any documentation existed for a particular Facebook subsystem. “Someone must have a diagram that says this is where this data is stored,” he said, according to the transcript. Zarashaw responded: “We have a somewhat strange engineering culture compared to most where we don’t generate a lot of artifacts during the engineering process. Effectively the code is its own design document often.” He quickly added, “For what it’s worth, this is terrifying to me when I first joined as well.”

[…]

Facebook’s inability to comprehend its own functioning took the hearing up to the edge of the metaphysical. At one point, the court-appointed special master noted that the “Download Your Information” file provided to the suit’s plaintiffs must not have included everything the company had stored on those individuals because it appears to have no idea what it truly stores on anyone. Can it be that Facebook’s designated tool for comprehensively downloading your information might not actually download all your information? This, again, is outside the boundaries of knowledge.

“The solution to this is unfortunately exactly the work that was done to create the DYI file itself,” noted Zarashaw. “And the thing I struggle with here is in order to find gaps in what may not be in DYI file, you would by definition need to do even more work than was done to generate the DYI files in the first place.”

The systemic fogginess of Facebook’s data storage made answering even the most basic question futile. At another point, the special master asked how one could find out which systems actually contain user data that was created through machine inference.

“I don’t know,” answered Zarashaw. “It’s a rather difficult conundrum.”

The safest exchange points are easily accessible and in a well-lit, public place where transactions are visible to others nearby. Try to arrange a meeting time that is during daylight hours, and consider bringing a friend along — especially when dealing with high-value items like laptops and smart phones.

Safeexchangepoint.com also advises that police or merchants that host their own exchange locations generally won’t get involved in the details of your transaction unless specified otherwise, and that many police departments (but not all) are willing to check the serial number of an item for sale to make sure it’s not known to be stolen property. //

• Beware of common scams, like checks for an amount higher than the amount of the deal; “cashier’s checks” that are forged and presented when the bank is closed.
• If you are given a cashier’s check, money order or other equivalent, call the bank — at the number listed online, not a number the buyer gives you — to verify the validity of the check.

SafeTrade is a program to help users of online classifieds trade safely.

The program launched in 2015 in response to the thousands of transactions initiated on Craigslist and other classified sites that have gone awry. At this writing, 105 killings have been linked to Craigslist.

​There’s nothing wrong with Craigslist --- it’s a wonderful site and a wonderful service --- but safety for users should be paramount. SafeTrade is designed to help everyone stay safe.

SafeTrade is open to all police departments and law enforcement organizations to offer. There’s no charge, no trademark, no fee. We encourage all police department and law enforcement agencies to join SafeTrade. (We’ll even supply the logo by email to any department that wants to use it, and we’re also supplying banners to a few departments as a “starter.”)