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“How do I choose not to share my account information with Facebook?”

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Re: “How do I choose not to share my account information with Facebook?”

#151

Post by caseysoftware »

0xmohit wrote: post #68
kristianc wrote: post #63

This is an incredibly ugly dark pattern. The 'share information with Facebook' nugget is hidden behind a toggle at the bottom of the screen, and will be guaranteed to be missed by the 99% of users who just want to talk to their friends. Then, once you've agreed to the terms and conditions, you've got a completely arbitrary 30 days to read an online article which tells you what you've signed up for before WhatsApp is…

Most don't like hearing this: if you don't want your personal information to be shared, don't use these "social media" tools. I suspect that you'd be familiar with LinkedIn dark patterns [0] too. [0] https://medium.com/@danrschlosser/linkedin-dark-patterns-3ae...

That doesn't work because it's not just what you share with the social networks but what others share about you and how they're able to link those little facts to create a full picture. (Or what the social networks collect on you from other places.)

Facebook had a leak ~3 years ago that showed it: http://www.zdnet.com/article/anger-mounts-after-facebooks-sh... but there have been darker efforts to do this since at least 2006 or so that I've found.

Re: “How do I choose not to share my account information with Facebook?”

#152

Post by SixSigma »

kristianc wrote: post #63

This is an incredibly ugly dark pattern. The 'share information with Facebook' nugget is hidden behind a toggle at the bottom of the screen, and will be guaranteed to be missed by the 99% of users who just want to talk to their friends. Then, once you've agreed to the terms and conditions, you've got a completely arbitrary 30 days to read an online article which tells you what you've signed up for before WhatsApp is…

> You can build an incredibly accurate picture of people's lives from metadata

Or as former Director of the National Security Agency, Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, and Director of the Central Intelligence Agency., Gen. Michael Hayden, said :

"We kill people based on metadata"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdQiz0Vavmc

Re: “How do I choose not to share my account information with Facebook?”

#153

Post by bad_user »

Sylos wrote: post #74
gonehome wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not clear to me why anyone would use Telegram over Signal.

Signal has a Google Play Services dependency and through that makes meta-data visible to Google.

Almost all apps on Android are signaling push notifications through Google's play services, because keeping your own connections open keeps the phone from going in standby and thus it leaks battery. I doubt that Telegram doesn't use it.

And on push notifications, the app only receives a signal that there's fresh content to be requested. There shouldn't be any metadata leaked. Source?

Re: “How do I choose not to share my account information with Facebook?”

#155

Post by ffggvv »

throwanem wrote: post #137
ffggvv wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's your fault too, you know? Why give the fault to a corporation when we are giving them pieces of our lives? Fights aren't easy, but this fight is important for our society and our children. > Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. This is a fight, our fight. For freedom, free speech and privacy. > I mean, yeah, that's easy to say and a…

It's nice to live in a world where everything is simple. I wish I did.

I wish it too. But it's your choice. Also don't write stuff like this....

> Put another way, we find ourselves in a situation where a single, rather secretive corporation mediates the interactions of a significant fraction of the species, and has already been known to manipulate the perception of its users in ways which might be to its benefit. When I was a kid, this would've been no more than fodder for third-rate dystopian sf which even fans of the genre mostly wouldn't take seriously. And yet, somehow, here we are.

...because you don't really care.

Re: “How do I choose not to share my account information with Facebook?”

#156

Post by pfg »

tdkl wrote: post #108
eatbitseveryday wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Signal doesn't even have a desktop client for any OS! [1] https://whispersystems.org/blog/signal-desktop/

> Signal Desktop is a Chrome app So yeah, the statement from parent still stands.

The line between desktop and web apps is becoming more and more blurred these days, so this seems like an inconsequential argument.

Re: “How do I choose not to share my account information with Facebook?”

#157

Post by ed312 »

treebeard901 wrote: post #147
0xmohit wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most don't like hearing this: if you don't want your personal information to be shared, don't use these "social media" tools. I suspect that you'd be familiar with LinkedIn dark patterns [0] too. [0] https://medium.com/@danrschlosser/linkedin-dark-patterns-3ae...

"Don't use these tools if you value privacy" is not that far off from "If you have nothing to hide, why are you afraid of surveillance?" An observed life is not a free life. Many people have to use social media to communicate with family, work associates, etc... In many cases, facebook messaging has replaced methods of communication that did not rely on the content or metadata of messages for profit. All that really…

Is email not sufficient to communicate with family, work associates, etc.?

Re: “How do I choose not to share my account information with Facebook?”

#158

Post by avar »

bad_user wrote: post #150
SamWhited wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

XMPP isn't an "open federation protocol" it's just a protocol that includes a means to federate; doing so is a matter of server preference. It would be great if more large services federated, but I'd rather have them use XMPP and not federate than build more custom protocols and not use XMPP at all so that I can't write a third party client for them. My point is that being based on XMPP is still a good thing, regardl…

The whole point of XMPP is interoperability, so saying some proprietary service uses it internally is useless for the rest of the world without interoperability. Can you connect with third party clients? Can they federate? Are they contributing to the protocol? No. So what's good about it?

Big proprietary users of protocols tend to discover bugs in them, that they feed upstream, even if they run otherwise closed networks.

E.g. it benefits you that Google uses TCP internally, even if you can't get on their network? Why? Because they've submitted patches to Linux to make it work better.

Re: “How do I choose not to share my account information with Facebook?”

#159

Post by bad_user »

geofft wrote: post #104
makomk wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably not, but the hilarious thing is that a year or so after attacking Telegram for that, the developers of Signal took a substantial chunk of cash from Google to promote Allo as using Signal Protocol and end to end encryption, even though it's disabled by default so Google can mine your chat history for ad targeting (and enabling it has the inconvenient side effect of disabling your own local chat history). Basi…

> charge everyone to licence it What? The protocol is publicly described. They've blogged about it. I can imagine people being able to reconstruct it from memory. The first Google result for "signal protocol license" is https://whispersystems.org/blog/license-update/ , clarifying that it's under GPLv3 (i.e., patent grant) with an exception for the App Store. Has anyone paid money to license the protocol? Has Signal a…

GPLv3 is cool as open source goes, but is pretty restrictive. Basically you can't link to it and distribute your app without it being open source. A company like Google can probably not use it.

Re: “How do I choose not to share my account information with Facebook?”

#160

Post by et-al »

> the discussions are large and come from three different perspectives

The discussions have ballooned, but having read the other two in the morning, this one just feels like a rehash of the same privacy concerns folks have raised. And for anyone reading about possible solutions to their concerns, they'd have to jump between 2-3 different threads now.

I'm glad there's at least WhatsApp thread is on front page for everyone's sake, but personally I felt like the Looking ahead for WhatsApp discussion covered much of what's being said here. The difference is that poster didn't have as good of a title and submitted it when much of the West Coast was still asleep.

Also, while this site doesn't have the resources to comb and diff each new thread to make sure it's not a dupe, I wish more users would point this out when it does happen. At the very least, thanks for pointing out the two existing threads, but we shouldn't be afraid of merging threads to make it easier for future users to reference (if they do).

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