141–150 of 275 posts
You can replace "Facebook" with thousands of other companies. Everyone is doing this because the cost is low, its easy, and the return is massive. The sole service my roommate's company does is match your customer with data about them from countless other sources. If you want a peek into a small section of this type of data, go build a facebook ad. You can see all the targeting options. You can upload a list of email…
With it being so rampant, why is it so difficult to discover what people know about you. And what are the barriers to changing this?
You can replace "Facebook" with thousands of other companies. Everyone is doing this because the cost is low, its easy, and the return is massive. The sole service my roommate's company does is match your customer with data about them from countless other sources. If you want a peek into a small section of this type of data, go build a facebook ad. You can see all the targeting options. You can upload a list of email…
Apple, for example, seems quite committed to competing on the fact that they do not do this...
> Of the 92 brokers she identified that accepted opt-outs, 65 of them required her to submit a form of identification such as a driver's license. In the end, she could not remove her data from the majority of providers. So what exactly was the problem? She doesn't have a driver's licence?
It's creepy how much companies know about you. When I got married my husband pretty much immediately showed up as my spouse on my transunion credit report as my spouse. How did they know that? Our names are different. At the time we didn't have any loans together. We lived together but so do siblngs and roommates. We didn't register for any wedding registries or send out any announcements. Our wedding consisted of si…
Marriage is a legal agreement, the fact that you "signed some paperwork at City Hall" is not at all a minor thing. The records are of course made available to credit reporting agencies. I don't know why you think this would be a creepy thing, social security and credit scores are stongly connected to the legal and taxation system. Its only obvious that the information gets connected. If tomorrow you were to divorce a…
Transunion is a private for-profit company; it has nothing to do with Social Security or the legal or taxation systems. Transunion gets its records from institutions that voluntarily report to it, as a business arrangement, (credit card companies, mostly) or they pull from publicly available sources. They don't have direct access to any private government (or non-government) databases unless the owner lets them have access. The reason they collect information about you is for their own business purposes. We aren't talking about the IRS here.
In other words my spousal information got in some company's database somewhere which was relayed to transunion, probably through a few other company's databases. It was surprising that information got to Transunion that fast because, as I said in a reply to a sibling comment, marriage records do not appear to be publicly available in my state. It's creepy to know how fast, far, and wide random information about you spreads. It's also scary to think about how false information about you can spread.
After reading this article it seems like that information almost could have indirectly come from Facebook (we did update our status!)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They sell ads by offering this information in the form of targeting.
I've worked at an ad-serving company. Clients couldn't get our data out , it's behind the scenes to them. Business-wise, it would be undermining our own product to offer anyone's personal information. There are other companies that do this focusing just on the collection side, which sounds like what FB is buying - but for FB to protect their position they're going to try to keep lids on that. The companies that try t…
There must be many HNers who work at Facebook. Anyone willing to make a throwaway account and tell us how it feels from the inside for Facebook to be one the wrong side of so many ethical issues? It just seems like in so many dimensions they've been caught saying wrong things or appearing to outright lie, and I'm curious how developers who work for them think about aiding a company that seems to be so compromised at…
SoftGooFace: We can easily double your current salary. Engineer: Oh SoftGooFace: You don't have to worry about employment ever after Engineer: Oh Soft: We are so powerful, we can dump unwanted OS upgrades on people Goo: We are so powerful, people are terrified of linking to other sites Face: We are so powerful, even heads of state better watch out before criticizing us Engineer: Uh.. SoftGooFace: Every time someone m…
It's worth remembering that ethics go beyond software rights.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you’re an EU citizen, by law, all data about you is owned by you, and only by you. That includes personal data, but also any intellectual property you create, and is irrevocable (you can sell usage rights, but never the ownership rights). So, yes, they have a legal responsibility to not have that data about you, and you can at any point require any company to delete any and all data they have about you, or created…
That seems particularly absurd (which isn't to doubt you, but as much as I like the EU, they have some absurd policies). If you take a very narrow view of data as just bits on a hard drive somewhere, then this seems reasonable. But if the ownership right to your data is centered on the information itself, and not the company part, that raises issues. I can't simply destroy the memory of reading the message you wrote…
In fact, that is required automatically – all recordings have to be deleted as soon as possible, the maximum retention periods unless there is specific evidence against you is usually a few weeks or months.
> And last but not least, how on earth would this stance on data ownership not ruin data retention?
That’s literally what happened. The European Court of Justice has ruled that data retention unless technically required is illegal.
It's creepy how much companies know about you. When I got married my husband pretty much immediately showed up as my spouse on my transunion credit report as my spouse. How did they know that? Our names are different. At the time we didn't have any loans together. We lived together but so do siblngs and roommates. We didn't register for any wedding registries or send out any announcements. Our wedding consisted of si…
>Our wedding consisted of signing some paperwork at city Hall. They are constantly checking public records like this and that's how they would have found out. Still a little creepy though.
I can't see if my friends are legally married but I can easily see what they paid for their house.
Divorces are public though and very easy to find on the court's website.
Is there anyone out there making a paid, zero advertising/data collecting social network? What if this service allowed you to buy access for 50 of your closest friends and family? I would think if it was executed properly and you provided a standard "I'm deleting Facebook and here is why, apply to join my paid for network group" post people would consider making the jump. I know there's a lot to Facebook and I wouldn…
There's still email and personal web pages.