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

Facebook Doesn’t Tell Users Everything It Really Knows About Them

propublica.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 275 posts

Re: Facebook Doesn’t Tell Users Everything It Really Knows About Them

#221

Post by nashashmi »

zippoxer wrote: post #165
allemagne wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NSA recruiters came to a class I had in college. I imagine Facebook employees would have the same sort of party line drilled into them. Yes the NSA takes privacy very seriously. The NSA spies on everyone else but doesn't spy on Americans, period. Oh, well yeah of course we collect data from Americans but if we find out we are looking at an American's data we're supposed to throw it away immediately. Throw in a harmle…

I never got why HN are angry at NSA since they spy on Americans. Spying on me (non-American) is okay, but spying on an American is wrong? I feel just as violated as any American by the thought of NSA spying me.

1. An American is anyone living in America, (?citizen or not?).

2. A US entity is tasked with info collection on the rest of the world (and is good at it).

3. US entities funded by the US have rules that prevent them from spying on those who fund them.

Completely understandable and predictable.

Re: Facebook Doesn’t Tell Users Everything It Really Knows About Them

#222

Post by ryanSrich »

MarkMc wrote: post #138
ForrestN wrote: post #39

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…

Not a Facebook employee, but I don't see any particular ethical problem with the company. There's nothing in the law or Facebook's terms of use that obligates the company to release data they buy from third-party sources.

Facebook has created a product that feeds an entire generation of low self esteem digital addicts their drug of choice. It perpetuates the idea of instant gratification without any substance. Facebook is digital cancer.

Re: Facebook Doesn’t Tell Users Everything It Really Knows About Them

#223

Post by Chos89 »

rimantas wrote: post #160
pipio21 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not wrong when you benefit from it. This is a human trait, people do not see the wrong on the things you benefit from. For example, did you ate beef or fish lately? When was the last time you thought about the animals that were killed in order for you to eat them. Have you seen the sacrifice of an animal needed for eating it. In Mongolia or Middle East nomads will sacrifice the animal in front of you before eat…

> When was the last time you thought about the animals > that were killed in order for you to eat them. I don't think of them often but I grew on the farm so I could witness (and sometimes particpate) in the whole process. I see nothing wrong with that. I could even see more wrong in the attitude where people become veg(etari)ans for "ethical reasons". That's some fucked-up ethics, if you ask me.

So you think people who avoid unnecessary killing are ethically fucked up? Hitler, is that you?

Re: Facebook Doesn’t Tell Users Everything It Really Knows About Them

#224

Post by esert »

username223 wrote: post #205
esert wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have ads: https://developer.apple.com/app-store/search-ads/

Search advertising doesn't require massive data collection, just bidding on search terms. Anyways, I bet anything Apple makes on app store ads is a rounding error compared to their hardware business. They probably don't care that much, and certainly have no need to go into the surveillance business.

They have audience options for ads (like age/gender/location, see http://searchads.apple.com/how-it-works/#features), meaning they collect data about their users as well.

Also, they colluded with other companies to, effectively, keep employees' wages down. Amount of money they saved was probably a rounding error for them in this case too.

Re: Facebook Doesn’t Tell Users Everything It Really Knows About Them

#225

Post by mungoid »

I cant speak for other countries, but why do American people seem to trust companies more than they do the government? I mean, it is completely known that companies are here to make money, and publicly traded companies are here to please their investors so they will do whatever it takes to do that. They study us, classify us, categorize us, manipulate us. They spend billions in research so they can make that 'perfectly tailored' ad to get us to buy their product. They are constantly buying our data and selling our data, JUST to make their investors happy, and we seem to always just shrug it off.

'Meh.'

I am honestly more ok with the government having this data to keep tabs on me than these hundreds of other companies treating my personal info like it's a trading card.

Re: Facebook Doesn’t Tell Users Everything It Really Knows About Them

#226

Post by Chos89 »

walterstucco wrote: post #185
pipio21 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not wrong when you benefit from it. This is a human trait, people do not see the wrong on the things you benefit from. For example, did you ate beef or fish lately? When was the last time you thought about the animals that were killed in order for you to eat them. Have you seen the sacrifice of an animal needed for eating it. In Mongolia or Middle East nomads will sacrifice the animal in front of you before eat…

cows are even more stupid than you think. Your view probably comes from interacting with them as a child, being not very smart yourself. I've grown up in the italian country farming animals and I've seen cows stupidity literally kill them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K38nFsZyY8Q

Re: Facebook Doesn’t Tell Users Everything It Really Knows About Them

#227

Post by pschastain »

I haven't had a Facebook account for years, and my phone number was never associated with it. Yesterday I visited the site on my laptop to look up the page for a tavern that's re-opening. 1/2 hr later I got a text from 32665 with a Facebook confirmation code. WTF; creeped the hell outa me. I replied with "stop" and received verification that "Texts from Facebook are now turned off." I visited their site again to request whatever data they have on me, but even though I checked the "I don't have a Facebook account" button for the request they insist that I log in to finish the process. Not sure where to go from here with it.

[edit] grammar

Re: Facebook Doesn’t Tell Users Everything It Really Knows About Them

#228

Post by chrischen »

mungoid wrote: post #225

I cant speak for other countries, but why do American people seem to trust companies more than they do the government? I mean, it is completely known that companies are here to make money, and publicly traded companies are here to please their investors so they will do whatever it takes to do that. They study us, classify us, categorize us, manipulate us. They spend billions in research so they can make that 'perfect…

I think the reason is that government is vastly more powerful than any single company.

Re: Facebook Doesn’t Tell Users Everything It Really Knows About Them

#230

Post by drunken-serval »

lithos wrote: post #193
closeparen wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easy to forget on HN, but there is far from universal buy-in for the notion that having or collecting data on people is unethical. Some may even consider it noble to optimize and perfect the world and its institutions (including commerce, via efficient advertising) using large-scale personal data. The impulse to make something better by applying a database engine that you might feel for business processes, can j…

The US doesn't have the privacy parts is WWII in memory. Where govt workers had to scramble to destroy what data they could before it was seized, where fire fighters let document storage burn as long as possible because it had census data, where others where forced to go through govt. Data to sentence neighbors to death, and similar hero/horror stories. I feel that the IT world is irresponsible in its collection of d…

> I feel that the IT world is irresponsible in its collection of data, and doesn't treat it as the liability it is.

A lot of that is due to a lack of training. There's two major ways new people come into programming.

1. Go to college, get a computer science or engineering degree.

2. Self taught.

Neither of those prepares you to deal with the ethics of information storage.

I happened to have an entire course on the topic but only because I took an Information Science minor with my Computer Science major. That course wasn't even an optional elective for me otherwise.

A computer science degree trains you for thinking how to do something. It doesn't teach you how to figure if you should do something.

Post reply on HN