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Facebook is terrifying

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Re: Facebook is terrifying

#121

Post by kafkaesq »

conistonwater wrote: post #92
kafkaesq wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd suggest a better question to ask would be: could you ever trust Zuckerberg to honestly tell you what his real policies will be -- as opposed to what he might say they are, in statements to the public -- when the government comes by to twist his arm?

Given the sheer number of people involved in Facebook's decision-making, I would believe it if they told me there was an internal consensus that differed from Zuckerberg's earlier college-age views. So I want to know if there is such a consensus, because if there is, then to my mind it would override that chat snapshot. Also, yes, you can generally trust people to tell you what their real policies are. They might not…

But there are very few people in the world who make it their business to lie and cheat every day.

Actually there are quite a lot of them.

Re: Facebook is terrifying

#122

Post by kafkaesq »

Kiro wrote: post #77
walterstucco wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, you are.

Even when I paint the worst possible scenario in my mind (I get killed because of my Facebook data) it's still not something I can be bothered about. I could just as well be hit by a car tomorrow but I don't worry about that.

I could just as well be hit by a car tomorrow but I don't worry about that.

I don't "worry" about getting hit by a car every day, either. But still I always look both ways before crossing a street. Even one-way streets.

Re: Facebook is terrifying

#123

Post by delecti »

jitbit wrote: post #67
mmjaa wrote: post #35

Its not just faces .. me and a friend had a little jam session recently and posted a picture of our cool little setup, consisting of a few pocket-sized machines (synthesizers and controllers) on our table in front of us. Just an innocent little picture of our jam setup. Within seconds of posting this picture of the machines, my friend was getting targeted ads from the manufacturers of those devices - within seconds!…

I had a similar moment (and ironically I'm a musician too). I went to a bar, where a band was playing on stage... After a while I realized I know the drummer. I played with him before, in another band, years ago. We had a beer, chatted a bit and went home. Now, we hadn't posted any pictures, nor statuses, we have no mutual friends on facebook, no connection at all... Heck, Facebook DIDN'T EVEN EXIST when I last saw h…

Facebook suggests a lot of people to me. Overwhelmingly they're people I don't recognize. Are you sure this isn't just confirmation bias making it seem like they're more successful than they really are? I'm not saying Facebook doesn't do some creepy things, but even at worst this is innocuous enough, and this has enough other really innocuous explanations that this would barely make me think twice.

Re: Facebook is terrifying

#124

Post by AnthonyMouse »

bastawhiz wrote: post #95
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The alternative is that when you share something with your friends, it goes from you to your friends without being decrypted by anyone in the middle. > If I can legally take a photo, should I not have the right to have a company analyze that photo on my behalf? They have algorithms analyzing your photo. The solution is to run the algorithms on your computer.

> They have algorithms analyzing your photo. The solution is to run the algorithms on your computer. Doesn't that defeat the purpose? The whole reason Facebook is able to do what they do is that they have existing tagged photos that I may not have access to. I don't need to train Facebook to know what my friends look like. If I have to do extra work to tag my photos, I'd might as well be manually tagging them.

Except that you do have a bunch of tagged photos with your friends in them, because they're your friends.

And the idea that someone who I haven't shared my photos with can still use them to tag me in other photos is not something that I would describe as a feature.

Re: Facebook is terrifying

#126

Post by digi_owl »

Facebook, Google, and likely others (observe Amazon with their Echo for instance) are effectively trying to build an electronic Jeeves. But in the process they are building up a dataset on every user that would make STASI look like the keystone cops.

Re: Facebook is terrifying

#128

Post by xapata »

zo7 wrote: post #51
jraines wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the sake of discussion, why is that scary rather than kind of nice? Unless you take the AdBlock route, aren't well targeted ads better than irrelevant ones?

It's scary because the system learned something about you automatically from an innocuous photo and told others about it, all without a human in the loop. Ads are pretty harmless, but you can imagine what might happen in a surveillance system or if a more malicious actor was behind the system.

Ok, so I'd like some way to get the benefits but protect from the harm. I don't want to throw out the convenience if that's possible.

Re: Facebook is terrifying

#129

Post by jayajay »

kordless wrote: post #49

I deleted my Facebook account in 2010 after appearing in the Times regarding technology addiction. It was my most time consuming social media application at the time. For the article, they had me install an application tracker to see how much time I spent in focus on a particular app. I was alarmed at how often I checked Facebook chat. Today, after much investigation, I've come to a hypothesis that technology's purpo…

We've built this new world where we are accustomed to leaving tiny traces of our minds in nooks and crannies, where they are waiting to be scraped up and analyzed. As those traces get larger and those nooks and crannies get unearthed, the default level of privacy will shrink. One day it might be that privacy itself becomes an antiquated concept.

I deleted my Facebook in high school in 2010 also, out of paranoia of this exact future. The problem is that if someone sums over the comments I make on other media, they could deduce my identity anyways. In the big picture Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, HackerNews, etc. are all in the same boat. I imagine there exists software which sums over many common sources (FB, TW, HN, IG, YT, RD, etc.) to find correlations in prose structure, post time patterns, topic similarity, sentiment similarity, etc. to identify people, or at least reduce the search space. The NSA would likely use such software, if it existed.

Re: Facebook is terrifying

#130

Post by xapata »

Kiro wrote: post #70
ardit33 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You probably never lived under communism. Often people got in trouble not because they were dissenting, but merely being associated with somebody that was a political dissenter. The usual term of accusation was called: "Agitation and propaganda" for the imperialist/capitalist regimes. So, why you might have been squeak clean, if your friend, or your cousin was not, then you were considered a problem just by associati…

If I start living in a dictatorship all of a sudden I feel my Facebook data will the least of my problems. It's such a minor issue in my mind that it's like worrying about whether the earth will be hit by a meteor.

Depending on where you live, a dictatorship might be plausible.
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