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A Facebook Sixth Sense

kirszenberg.com

51–60 of 84 posts

Re: A Facebook Sixth Sense

#51
post #19

A little while ago, someone used Facebook's last active time to track their friends' sleep: https://medium.com/life-tips/how-you-can-use-facebook-to-tra...

I remember a bunch of friends being upset about this. Apparently it's an outrage that your friends can do this, and perfectly fine that facebook probably does it all the time.

The scope of behavior Facebook is capable of obtaining is probably beyond comprehension for most users. Having a slice of that scope opened up and dissected publicly is quite creepy; despite intellectually understanding how much data Facebook has about them, actually seeing that data in use creates a much more visceral reaction that simply intellect can not create.

Re: A Facebook Sixth Sense

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook users are apparently broadcasting the fact that they are typing to their conversation partners, why should you ignore that information? If you don't like that, disable that feature, or complain to Facebook if it is not something you can disable yourself (or don't use Facebook). It can't hurt to raise some awareness of what you are invisibly broadcasting in terms of data on-line. (I always liked how this feat…

I suppose it would be even easier to make a script that blocks facebook from sending this information? Does it already exist?

There's always the tried and true method: Type your message in notepad, then copy and paste it into wherever when ready.

Re: A Facebook Sixth Sense

#53

So, as a code example, fine---but I'd caution against actually using this with your friends unless you know they're okay with it. They will be acting under certain social expectations with regard to when and how people can see their typing notifications based on when and how they were able to see them before, and if you tweak your way into getting more access without your conversation partners knowing it beforehand,…

Psychic mode is/was amazing. I used to love freaking people out when I saw the 'You feel a disturbance in the force...' message and quickly type 'Hi!'.

I love Pidgin so much. It's such a shame to see things move from "one client to rule them all" to hundreds of isolated, willfully incompatible clients.

Re: A Facebook Sixth Sense

#55
post #50

Fun article! I appreciate the author taking the time to go through the details, like formatting the source of the javascript, and figuring out the module system. Hacking on other peoples' websites is great fun. Everyone should try it, and I hope this article encourages a few people to! I hack on Slack, which is complex enough that even small UI changes require hideous hacks. And since the javascript and CSS changes o…

I'm crossing my fingers that this, or a comment like it about hacking, remains the top comment in this thread, rather than some warning... please be true to your name, please be true to your name, ... ;-). Just kidding I don't care. Fun article indeed.

Re: A Facebook Sixth Sense

#57

  And there’s nothing like that excruciating feeling when you watch it disappear, never to be seen again.
True honesty here, that has never elicited that response in me unless I held a sexual and/or romantic interest in the person on the other end. Other times, it's usually annoyance and or ambivalence.

Re: A Facebook Sixth Sense

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is this really a contrarian opinion? i feel like this is a pretty obvious fact that it's easier to read network requests to scrape a website than parsing html

Is there a specific tool you would recommend for doing this?

To read network requests? Charles proxy is great!

Re: A Facebook Sixth Sense

#59
post #56

Neat tool! Are you able to make it record who/when for when the notification occurs but no message follows? It'd turn it from neat to useful imo.

That's a great suggestion! If you'd like to see this implemented, please open an issue. https://github.com/Morhaus/facebook-sixth-sense/issues

Re: A Facebook Sixth Sense

#60
post #7

Fascinating article, and thanks for taking the time to research it and write up the results. This kind of thing makes me think that Facebook et al will eventually push for a way of having closed source client-side scripting.

Or maybe they'll build this out as a feature themselves. They implemented the dots in the first place; this is only a slight extension of the idea.
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