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Why Facebook will win the Internet & why that scares the shit out of me

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Re: Why Facebook will win the Internet & why that scares the shit out of me

#31

Post by bad_user »

noelchurchill wrote: post #5

It’s called ad re-targeting, and it’s the most effective innovation online ads have seen in a while. And no one will be able to do it better than Facebook. Well, Google already does it better, but Facebook might be able to catch up.

I think Google will always have better data ... Google knows what you're really searching for.

By contrast on Facebook it's just a vanity contest.

One example ... I'm sometimes searching for interesting articles in an area, but without having anything specific in mind. Delicious provides way better results than browsing Reddit ... that's because on Delicious the rating is not a conscious choice.

Re: Why Facebook will win the Internet & why that scares the shit out of me

#32

Post by Tycho »

What I wonder about Facebook is the effects of sharing information with people you don't really want to share information with. For instance, the older generations are all signing up for Facebook now; it's an phenomenon for 'all the family.' Therein lies its problem: teenagers, tweenagers, don't want the grown-ups to know everything about their social lives. It starts to get awkward.

I predict some migration of young people to newer, trendier social networks because of this issue.

Re: Why Facebook will win the Internet & why that scares the shit out of me

#33

Post by jrconlin »

ewjordan wrote: post #25
sunchild wrote: post #16

The problem with Facebook is and will always be this: when you signed up, you signed away your rights to privacy. If you think publishing into their social graph is worth letting them spy on you, go for it. If you want access to their social graph so you can unearth long-lost friends, feel free. Personally, I don't see how any of it adds up to a fair deal in anyone's mind, but I very often am unable to understand why…

Personally, I don't see how any of it adds up to a fair deal in anyone's mind, but I very often am unable to understand why people do things that are against their own best interests. You've listed the upsides, which for some people (I dare say even most people, at least outside of these circles) are quite significant - most people I know absolutely love Facebook, and feel it adds a lot to their lives. They're defini…

One of the potential issues is that companies tend to leak information. To your point, while you may not want your old fellow high school students finding you, a quick bit of data mining on your profile could probably guess fairly quickly and present your profile to those individuals without your consent. (Obviously, mileage will vary depending on how much information you've elected to share, but it's fairly disturbing how easy it can be to isolate individuals in a fairly large group off of only a few small traits.) Just look at how the Netflix Challenge data was matched to individuals based off of very meager information.

The bigger issue at hand is that when you start adding up all the various public bits of information, things can get rather scary. Did you know that in Canada, a credit card company could determine potential credit risk based off whether or not an individual bought a drink in a particular bar in a particular city with fairly impressive accuracy? http://consumerist.com/2009/05/your-credit-card-company-is-b... I could easily imagine that an insurance company may want to determine risk profile for customers based off of browsing history and age, or possibly an online retailer may alter prices slightly because they know you have more income to spend and a history of not checking prices that aggressively.

The larger a presence you have, the easier it is to do that sort of thing.

Re: Why Facebook will win the Internet & why that scares the shit out of me

#34

Post by pyre »

sliverstorm wrote: post #30
SamAtt wrote: post #10

Unless this guy doesn't have any Credit Cards or specialty cards (Grocery, Gas, etc...) I think he's probably already in the position that he's scared Facebook will put him in. It's just not being run by Facebook. Really what he's doing is freaking out over Facebook because they've been open about what info they're collecting. While the Grocery store tricks him with a discount and then takes all his info on the back…

I still don't understand why people are so worried about grocery store discount cards. Ok, so they know my address. That's alright by me; my address exists so everyone can know it. So they know my name correlates to my address; that's alright too, they can find this info in public records. The only possibly sketchy thing is they can correlate my food purchases to me and my address. However, this doesn't bother me per…

There was an instance of someone being arrested because he purchased rope from a Safeway around the time that his wife disappeared. The police were able to obtain the guy's details from his Safeway card and used his purchasing habits to try and make him the prime suspect in the investigation. I think that it turned out that he wasn't guilty of anything either.

[ This is all IIRC, btw. My memory could be waaay off, but it paints a picture of something is not that far-fetched from possibly being the truth in a 'it could happen to you' sort of way. ]

Re: Why Facebook will win the Internet & why that scares the shit out of me

#35

Post by pyre »

toby wrote: post #28

I'm genuinely curious -- I've never been particularly concerned about privacy on the internet, and it seems like the author's main concern is better ad targeting (which I see as beneficial, although I may be in a minority). What are some other dangerous scenarios that people can imagine?

In order to create this 'targeted advertising,' they create huge databases of information on people. People called this creepy when the FBI was doing it, but it's ok when a private corporation does it? It's not like the FBI/CIA/MI6/etc doesn't just send a request to the company and get your data anyways... So I'm not really seeing the difference between any company having access to this information and the government having access to it.

In some cases, it may be that the government has better controls over who can internally access the data. Not that I necessarily trust the government to create such oversight, but the sheer amount of bureaucracy can prevent things from happening. On the other hand, there are plenty of companies that have 'organically' grown from a point were everyone was trusted, and now they have poor controls in place or they just have the bare minimum 'government mandated' controls in place to comply with the law.

In general though, I don't really think that anyone can be trusted with that sort of information.

Re: Why Facebook will win the Internet & why that scares the shit out of me

#36

Post by pyre »

Tycho wrote: post #32

What I wonder about Facebook is the effects of sharing information with people you don't really want to share information with. For instance, the older generations are all signing up for Facebook now; it's an phenomenon for 'all the family.' Therein lies its problem: teenagers, tweenagers, don't want the grown-ups to know everything about their social lives. It starts to get awkward. I predict some migration of young…

Or there is a big push for Facebook for create/fix publishing controls? (i.e. 'publish this post to everyone except mom & dad')

Re: Why Facebook will win the Internet & why that scares the shit out of me

#37

Post by pyre »

thwarted wrote: post #7
hugh3 wrote: post #2

This is enough to make me want to use a separate browser just for facebook, to make sure that facebook doesn't know anything about me that I don't consciously decide to tell it. Hmm, startup idea: a browser designed specifically to keep facebook in its place.

This is called "New Incognito Window" in chrome/chromium, or a separate profile in Firefox. What would be really nice, though, is the ability to have a bookmark open in an incognito window. The separate profile in Firefox is better because it'll keep cookies between sessions so you don't need to keep logging into facebook.

I also use this:

  #!/bin/sh
  
  test -n "$CHROMIUM_COMMAND" || CHROMIUM_COMMAND=`which chromium-browser`
  test -n "$CLEAN_CHROMIUM_TMPDIR" || CLEAN_CHROMIUM_TMPDIR="/tmp"
  USER_DATA_DIR=`mktemp -d "$CLEAN_CHROMIUM_TMPDIR/clean-chromium.XXXXXXXX"`
  
  case "$1" in
      cleanup)
          (cd "$CLEAN_CHROMIUM_TMPDIR" && find . -name "clean-chromium.*" -print0 2>/dev/null | xargs -0 -r rm -rv    )
          ;;
      *)
          chmod 700 "$USER_DATA_DIR"
          echo "CLEAN_CHROMIUM_TMPDIR = $CLEAN_CHROMIUM_TMPDIR"
          echo "USER_DATA_DIR = $USER_DATA_DIR"
          echo "CHROMIUM_COMMAND = $CHROMIUM_COMMAND"
          echo "Running '$CHROMIUM_COMMAND' --user-data-dir='$USER_DATA_DIR' $@"
          "$CHROMIUM_COMMAND" --user-data-dir="$USER_DATA_DIR" $@
          find "$USER_DATA_DIR" -type d -print0 | xargs -0 -r chmod 700
          find "$USER_DATA_DIR" -type f -print0 | xargs -0 -r chmod 600
          ;;
  esac

Re: Why Facebook will win the Internet & why that scares the shit out of me

#38

Post by pyre »

ewjordan wrote: post #25
sunchild wrote: post #16

The problem with Facebook is and will always be this: when you signed up, you signed away your rights to privacy. If you think publishing into their social graph is worth letting them spy on you, go for it. If you want access to their social graph so you can unearth long-lost friends, feel free. Personally, I don't see how any of it adds up to a fair deal in anyone's mind, but I very often am unable to understand why…

Personally, I don't see how any of it adds up to a fair deal in anyone's mind, but I very often am unable to understand why people do things that are against their own best interests. You've listed the upsides, which for some people (I dare say even most people, at least outside of these circles) are quite significant - most people I know absolutely love Facebook, and feel it adds a lot to their lives. They're defini…

What happens when the insurance company sees that you've been browsing swingers sights? Maybe they raise your rates because you're into 'high risk' activities?

You browse for 'sexual' things in 'private browsing mode' you say? What about the insurance company finds out that you're on a rock-climbing mailing list or that you frequent a rock-climbing forum? Up goes your rates!

Access to these kinds of information need to come with a set of rules regarding how the information can be used. The problem is that hindsight is 20/20 on what rules will work the best (i.e. which are too strict, which are not strict enough, which don't do anything, which have loopholes, etc), too bad foresight isn't.

I personally don't think that private B2B contracts can get everything right, nor do I believe that the government can/will pass any laws that will fix this. Personally, I don't think that anyone can be trusted with the vast quantities of data that are out there.

Re: Why Facebook will win the Internet & why that scares the shit out of me

#39

Post by jodrellblank »

toby wrote: post #28

I'm genuinely curious -- I've never been particularly concerned about privacy on the internet, and it seems like the author's main concern is better ad targeting (which I see as beneficial, although I may be in a minority). What are some other dangerous scenarios that people can imagine?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNJl9EEcsoE

Re: Why Facebook will win the Internet & why that scares the shit out of me

#40

Post by Psyonic »

Psyonic wrote: post #4
hugh3 wrote: post #2

This is enough to make me want to use a separate browser just for facebook, to make sure that facebook doesn't know anything about me that I don't consciously decide to tell it. Hmm, startup idea: a browser designed specifically to keep facebook in its place.

There's an app for that.

Are you guys kidding me? The guy above me even said he only browses facebook on his iphone. Using a dedicated app solves the privacy problem!
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