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

Facebook is terrifying

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 300 posts

Re: Facebook is terrifying

#201

Post by rhizome »

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!…

The most hilarious part of this is that he's already a customer! They don't need to target him!

Advertising is such a racket.

Re: Facebook is terrifying

#202

Post by rhizome »

delecti wrote: post #123
jitbit wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

80% of those people are the next-door neighbor of someone I was in marching band with 30 years ago.

Re: Facebook is terrifying

#203

Post by makecheck »

What made me stop caring about Facebook is how damn sneaky they try to be to keep you from logging out or turning pretty much anything off. It's really easy to accidentally leave things on, and stuff like chat can decide to turn itself back on.

Awhile back I noticed that fewer and fewer Facebook pages offered any of the top menu items (including "log out"), requiring you to be more and more explicit about which Facebook page you were viewing to even see a way to log out. I am sure the idea is to have you "accidentally" stay logged-in and then view half the Internet so they can track you.

The final straw for me is that now I see no log-out link AT ALL, not even if I reenter the root facebook.com into my browser to go to the home page (which used to restore the links on top). There is now no apparent way to log out without killing my browser so I am done with them.

Re: Facebook is terrifying

#204

Post by Inconel »

l33tbro wrote: post #158

I can't get into my Facebook account right now because it's prompting me with a request to provide government-issued ID (eg, drivers license, passport) to verify me. Suffice it to say, I am no longer on Facebook.

I don't have a FB account and I'm not very savvy when it comes to photoshop, but wouldn't it be pretty easy to create a fake ID to email them?

FB might not be worth the trouble for you, but assuming someone really wanted to continue using it under a fake name, isn't this a viable option?

Re: Facebook is terrifying

#205

Post by jayajay »

bigtunacan wrote: post #164
jayajay wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Based on what I've seen you should assume most nation states have this ability. Take the NSA's back door into Cisco routers as an example. The NSA made use of this exploit for years before it was exposed. In all likelihood they are still making use of it as there are likely unpatched routers still in the wild. Now sidestep to phones. Nation states can tap into your calls and to your location through the GPS info tied…

To slightly bastardize the term "burner", people might think they don't have any burners, but everyone's got burners. I started to notice that one of my professors, around every ~25 sentences, he would capitalize the first two letters of the sentence. I mean it's a dead giveaway, because most people do this a lot less frequently.

But these figurative "burners" are everywhere. Little, tiny, seemingly untraceable ticks, invisible to the naked eye. Computers are telescopes in the bit world, eyes on us at all times. People don't seem very concerned. You can't just pour water and sand over your digital footprints to erase them... I would not be surprised if FB held on to my data 7 years after I deleted my account.

Re: Facebook is terrifying

#206

Post by lutusp »

dump121 wrote: post #186
lutusp wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is the proposed recourse? Ban Facebook from analyzing data that users give it? I think the answer's obvious -- replace Facebook with an entity, hypothetical at present, that's controlled by its users, not a corporate board of directors whose loyalty is to themselves and to stockholders, people for whom subscribers are a product being offered up for sale. I'm obviously speaking hypothetically -- there's essenti…

Communism would't work, without some benevolent AI running it. People incharge of managing the system will have reason in billions to be corrupt. Such useful info, will always be monetised, right now we can follow the money, take away the legal way and a backdoor will open which will be more difficult to tame.

> Communism would't work ...

That's an example of a false choice. It's not a choice between corporate ownership of our information on one hand, and a failed governmental system on the other (which Communism certainly is). People being in control over their information isn't the same as eliminating capitalism. Those issues are orthogonal -- one can have freedom of opportunity alongside respect for personal privacy.

As an example, consider medical information and the rules for its dissemination. No imaginable corporate entity is so potentially rapacious as a hospital, yet the rules for dissemination of medical information are very strict, such that to reveal patient information to a third party without the patient's consent is grounds for immediate dismissal.

Re: Facebook is terrifying

#207

Post by aianus »

Sir_Substance wrote: post #88
mason55 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it's one of the tenets of capitalism. Competition results in lower prices.

Most of the US banking sector is owned by a small number of companies[1]. Now I don't live in the USA so I can't speak for the USA in particular. However, I have lived in Australia, where the banking competition is so bad that the consumer protection agency is having to explain in baby words to the national banks why they can't gang up on apple pay[2]. I have also lived in Iceland, a nation in which essentially all i…

There are 6,799 federally insured banks in the US; it's an extremely competitive market compared to anywhere else in the world. They're also constantly competing against non-bank lenders and P2P lending marketplaces.

If you have a better algorithm of determining credit risk you can make a lot of money undercutting the competition on the right borrowers.

Re: Facebook is terrifying

#208

Post by moonshinefe »

hacker_9 wrote: post #18
wellpast wrote: post #6

Anyone know this technology well enough to know if sunglasses and a scarf of some sort would prevent my being recognized if not making me look somewhat silly or suspicious.

You may be interested in the movement against facial recognition [1]. [1] https://cvdazzle.com/

The irony here is that if you look like the people in the photos, i.e. a 80-90s era post-modernist hipster in the year 2017, you'll probably draw far more attention to yourself than you would otherwise.

Re: Facebook is terrifying

#209

Post by naranana »

l33tbro wrote: post #158

I can't get into my Facebook account right now because it's prompting me with a request to provide government-issued ID (eg, drivers license, passport) to verify me. Suffice it to say, I am no longer on Facebook.

You are on Facebook. All your data is there. You simply can not log in any more.

Re: Facebook is terrifying

#210

Post by Kiro »

dwaltrip wrote: post #192
Kiro wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean?

The point is to not only consider how such dynamics would affect you personally. There are 7.4 billion humans on this Earth, and not all of them have the opportunities you do.

The point of what? The discussion is strictly about my personal situation. I 100% understand that other people may be much more affected and I'm supporting their cause. But that's off topic.
Post reply on HN