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What should you think about when using Facebook?

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Re: What should you think about when using Facebook?

#161

Post by rak00n »

alanfalcon wrote: post #146
germinalphrase wrote: post #140

Not long ago I was sitting with some long time friends I hadn't seen in a few years. It was one of those really great visits in which you remember exactly why someone is an important person in your life. One of the things we ended up talking about was physical photographs and how our families had developed a natural curation and annotation system. "Keepers" get sorted and labeled on the back with names, dates, brief…

I like it. My wife subscribes to a service that will automatically print and mail her a small printed photo book for every X photos she favorites on her phone. It doesn't have the nice tagging and dates and notes, but it creates a chronological hard copy series of photo books that are great to have around, without requiring much forethought.

What's the service?

Re: What should you think about when using Facebook?

#162

Post by antocv »

daemonk wrote: post #42
siegecraft wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like this idea (a sort of adnauseum for facebook) but I wonder how trivial it would be for facebook to filter out obviously random/fake/noisy data given the mammoth set of real data they already have. Maybe introduce some more subtle off-by-one errors into their data or just make it a tiny bit fuzzier? Hopefully one wouldn't need a detailed knowledge of their data structures to do something impactful, although the…

Yeah some kind of slow incremental behavior shift towards something would be more insidious. Maybe allow the user to define a rotating theme of the week. This week I like dinosaurs, so the plugin will slowly ramp up dinosaur related behaviors (whatever that may mean :)). Next week I like unicorns...etc.

This works.

What I do is randomly give shit data to them, some of my real friends confirm it who are in on it. Sometimes I just copypaste whatever random shit I had in another tab - then delete it, sometimes Like things I dont like, but not too often. Ive even uploaded my own pictures (nobody actually visible) from years ago with modified Exif data - its for shits and giggles as they say. Accept those weird friends, but not all, send some friend-requests myself. Comments no, no real messages initiated by me, most of the times try responding with other methods. Facebook only in incognito mode on full screen at all times with windows user-agent.

Been doing this for 3-4 years already. Was fun but now I visit it every other month or so.

Re: What should you think about when using Facebook?

#163

Post by antocv »

owlninja wrote: post #82
bigbugbag wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not public, privately own by facebook (and partners and clients) and aggregated with everything that is actually public and every other privately own data they could gather. Then used to target you in every possible ways.

I get most of the personal data concerns, but what exactly is the issue with targeted ads?

Changing your behaviour.

Ads are a hostile action.

Re: What should you think about when using Facebook?

#164

Post by netsharc »

siegecraft wrote: post #45

Does anyone have suggestions or best practices for using facebook securely (ie to maintain an account but not let it be linked w/ all of your other browsing activities)? I was thinking something like hosting a hardened/non-fingerprintable browser from a VPS/cloud provider somewhere and only using that to interact with the site.

Ghostery (they may be evil, it seems they've mutated into a company selling "insight" about 3rd party tracker blocking, insight they gather from their users usage of their browser extension!) blocks close to a thousand 3rd party trackers. Yes there are that many.

Even without an FB account, it's interesting how Fb probably has a profile of you from your friends. If you have 5 friends who use FB and they upload party pics of you 6, FB can probably nake a profile of that "ghost" through your friends' characters. E.g. All 5 like metal, all 5 checked-in to a metal concert/the FB app places them there, and there's a pre-concert photo of you 6, the machine can conclude the ghost (you) probably like metal too. And it already has your face in its face recognition database...

Re: What should you think about when using Facebook?

#165

Post by rolodato »

francamps wrote: post #76

There is a solution that can help you get here, and it worked for me: unfollow everyone and everything. By unfollowing everyone except a handful of boring sites that barely ever publish anything, my newsfeed has become very boring and I rarely feel the pull towards it or any of its addictive power. The end result is that when I do log in, I only see notifications for a couple of groups full of my friends or interests…

For anyone thinking of doing this, you actually have to manually unfollow everyone. There is no Facebook API method to unfollow friends or pages.

I ended up deleting my account anyway.

Re: What should you think about when using Facebook?

#166

Post by grahamburger »

afandian wrote: post #37

This is an excellent blog post, though it made me sick reading it. I recently made the switch. I went from trying to limit how much I log in (to once or twice a week), to actually not logging in. I've been cold-turkey for two months (except for a couple of times when I had a very specific reason to check something). I thought it would be difficult. Turns out it's not so hard, and it's the fear of reduced social conta…

These 'made the switch' stories always surprise me - seems like an over-reaction. I guess I've never been so 'in' to Facebook that I've felt a pressing need to get 'out'. Sometimes I go weeks/months without engaging much at all, sometimes I browse it daily just to see what everybody's yakking about. I don't really feel like it has a net-negative impact on my life.

Re: What should you think about when using Facebook?

#167

Post by scholia »

RodericDay wrote: post #61
anondon wrote: post #36

Genuine question : do you think a privacy oriented social network where users pay a small annual fee (around $5) would work? Think Whatsapp (use phone number as an id, no native discovery, only connect through phone contacts, encrypted user data only to prevent database leaks from causing damage) + Facebook (feed like feature, share photos, videos, direct messaging, group messaging). No user tracking, no ads, just a…

The opposite may work. Paying users to use your site. After all, the data is supposedly insanely valuable, we're doing unpaid work for FB in a very real sense.

Facebook publishes ARPU numbers every quarter. Users in the US and Canada were worth $19.81 each in 2017 Q4, with $4.83 being the worldwide average. [1] This pays for the programmers, storage, offices and other costs.

Facebook had a net income of $3.6bn from 1.86bn monthly active users, or $1.93 per user.

I don't think many users are going to work for what Facebook could reasonably pay out of that....

Worse, any remotely attractive payment might well lead to the rapid creation of billions of fake accounts.

[1] http://static2.uk.businessinsider.com/image/589259d8dd0895fb...

Re: What should you think about when using Facebook?

#168

Post by bgrohman »

Swenrekcah wrote: post #85
bgrohman wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Photos works well.

That's true, I'm currently using them. But of course Google comes with their own set of privacy concerns as well.

That's true. I've been considering the idea of building my own personal replacement for several Google services - Keep, Drive, and Photos mainly. Haven't decided it's worth the effort yet.

Re: What should you think about when using Facebook?

#169

Post by RodericDay »

scholia wrote: post #167
RodericDay wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The opposite may work. Paying users to use your site. After all, the data is supposedly insanely valuable, we're doing unpaid work for FB in a very real sense.

Facebook publishes ARPU numbers every quarter. Users in the US and Canada were worth $19.81 each in 2017 Q4, with $4.83 being the worldwide average. [1] This pays for the programmers, storage, offices and other costs. Facebook had a net income of $3.6bn from 1.86bn monthly active users, or $1.93 per user. I don't think many users are going to work for what Facebook could reasonably pay out of that.... Worse, any remo…

Why would you spread it out evenly? Of course that makes no sense.

It's more like, you pay out to the users that generate a lot of views, and after a threshold. If 1/100 users is a great content generator, the idea that they may make $100/mo is very attractive to switch (and take their followers with them).

As for fake accounts, you bundle in the proof-of-identity stuff and whatever else current networks use to keep bots out. It's its own engineering problem.

Re: What should you think about when using Facebook?

#170

Post by city41 »

rolodato wrote: post #160
city41 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I deactivated my account over a year ago. Facebook will not delete your account, deactivate is the best you can do. Interestingly I went to a Facebook event at their headquarters and when I signed in, there was my profile picture staring back at me. I thought pulling it out of my deactivated account was in poor taste. Anyway, I can say I'm happier without it. I'm now seriously considering deactivating my Twitter acco…

It is possible to permanently delete a Facebook account. It's not known whether this truly deletes it, but it's a more permanent measure than deactivation: https://www.facebook.com/help/224562897555674?helpref=relate... This is a nefarious dark pattern though - I don't think there's any way to find the delete option through menus, you have to search through Google or Facebook's help center.

Ah, I did not know that. As far as I know the UI only offers deactivate as an option.

Thanks, I just deleted my account.

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