Facebook is terrifying. Bit of a leading statement...
Facebook is terrifying
281–290 of 300 posts
Re: Facebook is terrifying
#282That's why I ask my friends to tag themselves as me periodically and I tag myself as them. The neural network is all confused and now it tries to tag the wrong people.
More people should do this. And be thorough, agree to consistently tag the same people with the same wrong tags.
Re: Facebook is terrifying
#283Try Lyra instead! We're a nonprofit focussing on control and a respect for language and conversation. www.hellolyra.com
Re: Facebook is terrifying
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
You know you have an account anyway, right? FB makes and manages profiles of people who don't have accounts, even of people who have never had accounts. They use this for their ad network, among other things. LinkedIn does this as well. I don't know about others.
How does that even work? Where does FB (or LinkedIn) get the information from that they can determine who you are even if you've never signed up for an account?
They definitely use your contact lists. I have done multiple experiments with this. I first noticed about a year ago, people popping on my FB's "People you may know..." list, and sure enough, the _only_ way they could link them to me was through my iPhone contacts. People like a guy who once fixed my roof, whose number I still had from years ago.
As the original commenter said, LinkedIn seems to be even worse with this, creating those spooky empty default accounts for your grandmother or your child's best friend's dad.
I think there will be a backlash against all this - surely it is a case of diminishing returns for the social media corps, combined with an ever-growing sense of _unnecessary_ intrusion by their users?
Re: Facebook is terrifying
#285> a little privacy tip: use Facebook in mobile Safari, with an adblocker, and delete the iOS native app — helps a lot AND saves you from tons of ads and 3rd party cookie tracking. Not to mention wonders for the battery. I’m sure there’s a similar solution for Android.
This is how I use it on my phone. I don't use the app because the app cannot be trusted with any specific permissions I provide with the belief that it won't be misused or that more data won't be collected.
> On a desktop — use an extension like Disconnect to block 3rd party cookie tracking.
On a desktop/laptop, I have it a lot better. I use Firefox with uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger and a few more extensions (like removing the Facebook link redirector PHP script from links within FB).
Re: Facebook is terrifying
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
You know you have an account anyway, right? FB makes and manages profiles of people who don't have accounts, even of people who have never had accounts. They use this for their ad network, among other things. LinkedIn does this as well. I don't know about others.
Is there any evidence to back this up?
Not that I can quote but I have friends at LinkedIn, Facebook (and Yahoo who does it too) who specifically work on this feature. I would be shocked if Doubleclick (google) et al weren't doing the same thing.
Re: Facebook is terrifying
#287Anyone 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.
If all you want to do is prevent the credit bureaus from knowing you hang around with poor people then massive mirrored aviators, a ball cap and the kind of beard that would make Osama jealous are your best bet. Facial recognition works primarily on mapping the distances between key features, kind of like a bitmask. The more features you have the longer the bitmask and the fewer matches. It's not about being "un-matc…
>>If you want to stay under the radar of the analytics companies then license plate scanning should worry you a lot more than facial recognition (in the US at least).
Can you elaborate on this?
Re: Facebook is terrifying
#288I can tell you what is wrong with the world and Facebook. It is that you all think that you are a bunch of animals waiting to die. And all you can do is to squeeze that tomato to get as much pulp as possible until you hit the fan. It is your faith or lack thereof that makes you worry about everything because you feel so helpless facing a world that is trying to rip you off on every possible level.
Re: Facebook is terrifying
#289I 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…
It's more that the social network platforms themselves are naturally atomizing forces of capitalism itself. And you might wonder how this applies to the elimination of self? Simply put, in capitalism all things need to be a commodity to be traded/sold for a price. Be it physical goods like food and houses or non-physical goods like music or personal data. Ultimately, to ensure you're good at consuming these goods, capitalism will invariably find means to erode the sense of self which is driven more by social needs (family, friends, church, etc) to place you squarely into a new set of identities precisely crafted for consumption (Trekkie, Star Wars fan, Clinton/Trump voter). These identities are meant to feel like you chose them but in practice we're all indoctrinated to these identities to some capacity. It's all part of the larger push to ensure you're alone, afraid, and always ready to do whatever is asked of you so long as you can have your trinkets. Because if some people find out it's all a scam then the whole system falls apart when enough of them refuse to consume. If there's anything the last few years has illustrated is that there is a subculture in the current generation that isn't buying what the capitalists are selling. So they're grasping desperately for more ways to pull on heartstrings or to further alienate us from each other and seek goods/commodities to find comfort in. This I think will fail very quickly once the facts sink in for those not clued in right now. When you can't pay anymore or that the goods bought bring no more comfort then the crisis will set in. Identity or self, as you mentioned, will be the center of that crisis. What comes of it, I can't be sure. But I fear a regression from technology would prove a disaster. We're cyborgs, we're meant to use technology to enhance ourselves but not for the sake of enhancement itself.
Re: Facebook is terrifying
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your true self can't be expressed unless you have a separate online identity?
Are you okay with the whole world, every person you meet on the street, your boss, your parents, your ex, the guy who serves you coffee, that thug you bumped into in the subway, the guys who work at your company's competitors, the guys who live in that country at war with yours, knowing every detail of your personality and your life? Or do you maybe think putting up your information on that open and permanent graveya…
Much like life before the internet, I don't see why you're required to share all that info in the first place. It's up to you to decide what others see, even when you don't have a secret online alter ego.