Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

whatsapp.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 319 posts

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

#301

Post by avar »

type0 wrote: post #250
avar wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> E.g. it benefits you that Google uses TCP internally But they didn't modify TCP to prevent interoperability did they?

So what if they did? How are we any worse off than if they'd written their own TCP replacement from scratch to begin with?

Maybe someone outside Google gains nothing, but presumably their engineers will spend less time reinvesting the wheel, which is a net gain for humanity in less time wasted.

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

#302

Post by derekp7 »

gavinpc wrote: post #299
derekp7 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The app would run on the user's local PC or phone, and it would access data directly from their mailbox (and create a local DB from that data). So no backend server to worry about.

Without a third-party managing associations, how do you maintain that "friendship" is consensual? In other words, how do you prevent "I have your email address" from meaning "you're my friend now."

When you send a friend request to someone, their stuff is shared with you only if they accept the request on their end. If they reject the friend request, then anything coming from you that they don't want can be handled as spam (the client side software would just filter the content itself in that case).

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

#303

Post by mercer »

Joeboy wrote: post #286
mercer wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oddly enough I expected to run into that problem, but in practice it's hardly ever been an issue. I think in my particular case it helps that I generally insist on using email or telegram for communication where it's important to find it again later. But you're right. At times I've had to search for information because I didn't remember which communication tool we used.

I work on lots of projects with lots of people, and I end up with hundreds of conversations spread over Email, SMS/Signal, Facebook, Skype and WhatsApp. It frustrates the hell out of me. The great thing about Signal for me is that it also handles SMS so there's no extra app to check. But yeah, no group chats, no desktop client, most conversations are unencrypted anyway because normal people don't care about privacy.…

Yeah, in your situation I understand the frustration.

By the way, if you're using a Mac you might like 'Franz': http://meetfranz.com/

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

#304

Post by herbst »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #34

Man, remember the late 90s and early 2000s, when the IM scene was a mess of incompatible networks like ICQ and AIM and MSN Messenger, and people were like "fuck this" and came up with this protocol that was interoperable with all the others through gateways and also it was extendable, and we could all be happy together?... /grump The worst part is that WhatsApp is actually based on Jabber >:(

as is (original) hangout, facebook chat and probably much more.

in the early days both worked with external clients/servers too.

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

#305

Post by herbst »

saint_fiasco wrote: post #125
iklos89 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding negative social consequences ... Today I switched phones and wanted to transfer my Whatsapp contacts to the new phone. What Whatsapp did: Somehow they managed to delete me from each and every group I had been in, deleted every chat and I cannot access this anymore. I already had to explain to three friends why I left our group as they were furious because we had talked about important things in those groups…

> deleted every chat Whatsapp never stores the chat history anywhere. All conversations are encrypted end to end.

many, but afaik still not all. when they released encryption it only worked when all involved clients were android (or ios i dont remember)

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

#306

Post by herbst »

nicolas_t wrote: post #21

My problem with whatsapp is that there's no way to use it without giving access to my entire contact list to the app. And that's out of the question for me.

some austrian lawyer recently argued that this is even illegal in the EU. not necessary for whatsapp but for the user who is stupid enough to willingly upload data that does not belong to him.

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

#307

Post by behnamoh »

nostrademons wrote: post #203
krisa wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you will try to actualy delete your fb account (at least when i did it some time ago). Its a minefield of dark patterns. First you need special link, because you can only deactivate from settings. Then you will have to go through pile of emotionaly draining photos of friends with claims that they will mis you and you wont be able to see what they are doing with their lives. Then few traps with agreeing about del…

I've heard that rather than deleting your FB account, it's better to turn it into a piece of obviously-fictitious performance art. Don't try to remove your data from the Internet (which is futile; you know Facebook still has it on some archive somewhere anyway). Instead, replace it with nonsense. Set your interests to your competitors so that you get notifications everytime they release a new feature, and full inform…

Sorry, I'm new to Markov Chains, but recently I've been thinking about a way to "beat" ML algorithms of GOOG, FB, etc. So that the information stored about me is NOT true. For example, if someone keeps searching for "LGBT" while he/she is not one, GOOG will assume he IS one, or at least, interested in the topic. My question is, is there a general method for beating ML/AI algorithms and stay hidden from them? Thank you.

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

#308

Post by drusepth »

mst wrote: post #238
nostrademons wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard that rather than deleting your FB account, it's better to turn it into a piece of obviously-fictitious performance art. Don't try to remove your data from the Internet (which is futile; you know Facebook still has it on some archive somewhere anyway). Instead, replace it with nonsense. Set your interests to your competitors so that you get notifications everytime they release a new feature, and full inform…

Sounds like you could achieve this easily by feeding your facebook account's updates from a markov chain bot set to train on the @realDonaldTrump twitter feed.

You can use this API for that: http://www.retort.us/markov/create?identifier=realDonaldTrum... :)

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

#309

Post by nostrademons »

behnamoh wrote: post #307
nostrademons wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard that rather than deleting your FB account, it's better to turn it into a piece of obviously-fictitious performance art. Don't try to remove your data from the Internet (which is futile; you know Facebook still has it on some archive somewhere anyway). Instead, replace it with nonsense. Set your interests to your competitors so that you get notifications everytime they release a new feature, and full inform…

Sorry, I'm new to Markov Chains, but recently I've been thinking about a way to "beat" ML algorithms of GOOG, FB, etc. So that the information stored about me is NOT true. For example, if someone keeps searching for "LGBT" while he/she is not one, GOOG will assume he IS one, or at least, interested in the topic. My question is, is there a general method for beating ML/AI algorithms and stay hidden from them? Thank yo…

Markov chains aren't really relevant here - they're a way to generate random but "seemingly plausible" data - but yes, there is a way to fool the type of convolutional neural networks used in image recognition. Paper here:

http://www.evolvingai.org/fooling

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

#310

Post by saint_fiasco »

herbst wrote: post #305
saint_fiasco wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> deleted every chat Whatsapp never stores the chat history anywhere. All conversations are encrypted end to end.

many, but afaik still not all. when they released encryption it only worked when all involved clients were android (or ios i dont remember)

My grandmother uses a Nokia C3. Until she switches, every group in which she participates will not be encrypted.

It says on the Nokia C3 version of the app that Whatsapp won't support that device next year, possibly because of that.

Post reply on HN