Facebook's tentacles reach further than people think • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook's tentacles reach further than people think

#61

Post by y_u_no_rust » Sat, May 27, 2017, 12:32 AM UTC

vidoc wrote: post #54

killjoywashere wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The law will not crack down on this. The politicians stand to gain too much. See The Dictator's Handbook (which is as relevant to democrats as autocrats).

Recent BBC Panorama on the matter was pretty good: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08qgbc3 That said, I'm personally certain the laws will evolve rapidly in a favorable manner. Privacy issues resulting from Facebook/Google and co are becoming increasingly unacceptable for the society.

LOL well not in the united states at least

Re: Facebook's tentacles reach further than people think

#62

Post by Idontagree » Sat, May 27, 2017, 12:47 AM UTC

narag wrote: post #56

freeflight wrote: post #38

Google does some pretty scary stuff too. I made a point of never giving them my mobile number or any "real information" about me. When a friend of mine added me to his contacts, on his Android phone, he also added one of email addresses to the contact, which is the same one I used to register my Google account. The phone automatically connected the mail address to my Google account and now every time I call him the (…

I had a similar realization when I found a private photo, so private that I had deleted it from everywhere in some Google's "backup" sites. I am very careful disabling every feature that could mean that personal images or text from my phone will end up "in the cloud" and still it got there through an accident... and a lot of Google's disregard for my wills. It's almost impossible to stop them. The photo being private…

Which sites did you find it on and which did you delete it from?

Re: Facebook's tentacles reach further than people think

#63

Post by linkregister » Sat, May 27, 2017, 12:55 AM UTC

freeflight wrote: post #38

Google does some pretty scary stuff too. I made a point of never giving them my mobile number or any "real information" about me. When a friend of mine added me to his contacts, on his Android phone, he also added one of email addresses to the contact, which is the same one I used to register my Google account. The phone automatically connected the mail address to my Google account and now every time I call him the (…

I wonder if I could exploit this to make false associations, e.g. save an email address with someone else's number to make that profile pop up whenever that person calls someone.

Re: Facebook's tentacles reach further than people think

#64

Post by eanzenberg » Sat, May 27, 2017, 1:01 AM UTC

linkregister wrote: post #63

freeflight wrote: post #38

Google does some pretty scary stuff too. I made a point of never giving them my mobile number or any "real information" about me. When a friend of mine added me to his contacts, on his Android phone, he also added one of email addresses to the contact, which is the same one I used to register my Google account. The phone automatically connected the mail address to my Google account and now every time I call him the (…

I wonder if I could exploit this to make false associations, e.g. save an email address with someone else's number to make that profile pop up whenever that person calls someone.

Sure, I mean one way to combat this is through data warfare and sabotage. If enough people behave erratically and poison the well of data it will make it harder for these companies to infer as much as they do now.

For example, click, view, watch, like at random ads and if enough people do this inference will be harder.

Re: Facebook's tentacles reach further than people think

#65

Post by gub09 » Sat, May 27, 2017, 1:04 AM UTC

I read the Share Lab metadata report, based on an examination of the metadata in the headers of the emails exchanged between Hacking Team members. The level of detail this provides on the network and on the individual members of the team is extraordinary. Now in the case of Facebook, imagine that times 100, then add AI to slice and dice the data better than a team of the world's top 1000 data scientists working on the analysis of some tiny portion of the data for some particular purpose, for a year... Just one consequence: think of what Facebook and Google have on every politician in the United States, in the world.

Re: Facebook's tentacles reach further than people think

#66

Post by matt_wulfeck » Sat, May 27, 2017, 1:05 AM UTC

eanzenberg wrote: post #64

linkregister wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if I could exploit this to make false associations, e.g. save an email address with someone else's number to make that profile pop up whenever that person calls someone.

Sure, I mean one way to combat this is through data warfare and sabotage. If enough people behave erratically and poison the well of data it will make it harder for these companies to infer as much as they do now. For example, click, view, watch, like at random ads and if enough people do this inference will be harder.

On the other hand, whatever brings power away from large telecoms is good for all of us, even it means integration with Google makes calling simpler and easier.

Re: Facebook's tentacles reach further than people think

#67

Post by aikinai » Sat, May 27, 2017, 1:06 AM UTC

GuiA wrote: post #60

scottlamb wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you help me understand why you find that scary? It's not giving him any information which wasn't previously available to him. I think you're concerned that people are overlooking his screen, and you'd rather he explicitly choose everything that pops up when you call? Do you think he wouldn't have included any identifying information about you? As a user, I'd rather have not only a name but also a picture of a p…

OP desired to keep his Google associated email and non Google associated phone number separate, and behaved as such. That's a very reasonable thing to want and do. But Google used OP's friend's phone, bought from them, to surreptitiously acquire the connection between his email address and phone number. That was against OP's desire, and his friend never explicitly agreed to provide that information. I fully understan…

I think everyone is misunderstanding the complaint. Google does not link phone numbers to accounts based on being added to he same contact. The poster is just complaining that it shows the photo from his Google profile (attached the the email his friend already knows) and shows that when he calls from his phone number (that his friend also already knows and added to the same contact).

Re: Facebook's tentacles reach further than people think

#68

Post by tomcam » Sat, May 27, 2017, 1:07 AM UTC

narag wrote: post #56

freeflight wrote: post #38

Google does some pretty scary stuff too. I made a point of never giving them my mobile number or any "real information" about me. When a friend of mine added me to his contacts, on his Android phone, he also added one of email addresses to the contact, which is the same one I used to register my Google account. The phone automatically connected the mail address to my Google account and now every time I call him the (…

I had a similar realization when I found a private photo, so private that I had deleted it from everywhere in some Google's "backup" sites. I am very careful disabling every feature that could mean that personal images or text from my phone will end up "in the cloud" and still it got there through an accident... and a lot of Google's disregard for my wills. It's almost impossible to stop them. The photo being private…

I remember that picture. It was your "PHP programmer of the year award" that you didn't want your Haskell-hacking friends to see. Disgraceful!

Re: Facebook's tentacles reach further than people think

#69

Post by [deleted] » Sat, May 27, 2017, 1:08 AM UTC

narag wrote: post #56

freeflight wrote: post #38

Google does some pretty scary stuff too. I made a point of never giving them my mobile number or any "real information" about me. When a friend of mine added me to his contacts, on his Android phone, he also added one of email addresses to the contact, which is the same one I used to register my Google account. The phone automatically connected the mail address to my Google account and now every time I call him the (…

I had a similar realization when I found a private photo, so private that I had deleted it from everywhere in some Google's "backup" sites. I am very careful disabling every feature that could mean that personal images or text from my phone will end up "in the cloud" and still it got there through an accident... and a lot of Google's disregard for my wills. It's almost impossible to stop them. The photo being private…

[deleted]

Re: Facebook's tentacles reach further than people think

#70

Post by baddox » Sat, May 27, 2017, 1:09 AM UTC

ghughes wrote: post #22

jacquesm wrote: post #4

The bigger problem for me is how facebook tracks and identifies even people who do not have a facebook account. They simply infer such a person exists from photograps, contacts and other one sided activity and can start to track that person, tie all this information together and then target them with ads even though they never signed up for Facebook. Such shadow profiles are a much larger problem to me than people wh…

Nothing will change until the law cracks down on this. The people who work on these systems are smart enough to comprehend the wider consequences, but they do it anyway because money. Without significant external pressure, there will always be a long line of engineers willing to dial their cognitive dissonance up to 11 and build software that is clearly unethical in exchange for a fat paycheck.

Could you pretend I either disagree or have yet to form an opinion, and explain why this is "clearly unethical"?