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Facebook's tentacles reach further than people think

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Facebook's tentacles reach further than people think

#241

Post by ghughes »

singham wrote: post #214
ghughes wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're so close to what I am currently building that I feel like I have to chime in. I left Apple's security team a few months ago to go solo and build an app that is similar to Facebook/Instagram and Snapchat in terms of functionality and UX but uses the Olm protocol (similar to Signal) to protect all content. So, fear not - something is being done, and I'm sure I'm not the only one working in this problem space. I…

How are you going to recreate the main selling point of facebook, i.e. the Newsfeed ? If things are encrypted, how are you going to determine relevance, etc.

> How are you going to recreate the main selling point of facebook, i.e. the Newsfeed ?

When you post, the content is sent as an encrypted message that can only be decrypted by people who should be able to see it (either all of your friends or just a subset of them). The client automatically takes care of key management and is responsible for keeping track of sent & received posts, comments, etc; it renders a news-feed-like UI on top of that data. The end result is a familiar UX on the surface, but the underlying mechanism for transmitting data between users is far more secure than the traditional approach of using a monolithic database that contains everyone's data in plaintext.

> If things are encrypted, how are you going to determine relevance, etc.

The client is solely responsible for that. For now the "news feed" is strictly chronological, but I plan to augment it later by prioritizing posts that might be particularly interesting to the user. There are plenty of ways to make those decisions locally.

Re: Facebook's tentacles reach further than people think

#242

Post by ghughes »

bigbugbag wrote: post #226
ghughes wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both; there will be ads and the source will be publicly available, license TBD. Please get in touch, email is in my profile.

Ads means tracking a.k.a. no privacy.

Not necessarily: https://crypto.stanford.edu/adnostic/adnostic.pdf

Re: Facebook's tentacles reach further than people think

#243

Post by choward »

ghughes wrote: post #150
omnimus wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run design collective (group of designers and design students) we have been looking for social media projects to help. Is your project aimed to be opensource or it is comercial bussiness? We could might be able to help. Even just with small things like design analisys and testing.

Both; there will be ads and the source will be publicly available, license TBD. Please get in touch, email is in my profile.

Ads? Ha. I'm out.

Re: Facebook's tentacles reach further than people think

#244

Post by AnonymousPlanet »

baddox wrote: post #154
AnonymousPlanet wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would be more like Facebook, if you 1) would publish your observations or otherwise provide it to third parties 2) sit at nearly all streets all the time, e.g., observing whatever those house guests are up to the rest of their time. Imagine, you share your observations with, say, a PI who was hired by a paranoid spouse or by someone's employer. Facebook is like a vast and far reaching network of nosy neighbours o…

I'm a little surprised. Do people think that sharing that info with a private investigator would be unethical?

I used the private investigator here as a middleman, a third party. Just like law enforcement or a data broker would be. My concern (in this argument) is less that of the ethics of each single act, but rather the consequences of setting up such a service. You don't know what you are enabling.

Re: Facebook's tentacles reach further than people think

#245

Post by nmgsd »

ihm wrote: post #123
makecheck wrote: post #72

In computer security, every time machines become fast enough to breach the limits of an algorithm we invent something new so that “hard” problems remain “hard” and therefore encryption is still secure. There has been no corresponding increase in the difficulty of invading privacy. 30 years ago, even though you probably “could” observe somebody for a long time and eventually connect some dots about them, it would not…

I would love if someone made a Chrome extension that encrypted all the posts and messages you put on Facebook. That is, any post you made would be made as a ciphertext, the extension would swap keys with all your friends in the background, and would decrypt their posts when displaying them to you. Sure Marky Mark still sees when you post, who you send messages to, etc. but it's a much better situation than what's goi…

I agree strongly with you that the direction to be taken is independent messaging clients for existing messaging channels as long as those channels allow third party API use.

What channel would you use to share the keys on FB? The Facebook API simply will not let you do that anymore. Direct messages have a character limit and you can't just post to someone's wall anymore.

I tried working on something like this for seecret.io but was confounded by the Facebook API's limitations.

Twitter is much better for that. Probably other network too.

Re: Facebook's tentacles reach further than people think

#246

Post by killjoywashere »

zafiro17 wrote: post #204
jaskerr wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which "Dictator's Handbook"? There are two on Amazon. [1] The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Po... [2] The Dictator's Handbook: A Practical Manual for the Aspiring Tyrant https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Practical-Manual-A...

I'm the author of the second book. Happy to offer Hacker News readers the epub/mobi/pdf at no charge. zafiro17@gmail.com

I was referring to the first one, but your offer is quite generous.

Re: Facebook's tentacles reach further than people think

#247

Post by boomlinde »

tzs wrote: post #126
thr0waway1239 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unethical: lacking moral principles. Moral: of, relating to, or concerned with the principles or rules of right conduct or the distinction between right and wrong I think it is "clearly wrong" that Facebook creates shadow profiles, because it is violating the freedom of people who have not signed up for their service, in the same way that it is clearly wrong for me to take away your favorite pet for ritualistic sacri…

I doubt that he doesn't understand what "unethical" means. The question is how does what Facebook is doing qualify? You've said it is because it violates the freedom of people Facebook is making inferences about who are not users of Facebook's services. That just shifts the question to how does it violate their freedom? That is not at all obvious to me. (NOTE: this does not mean that I'm saying it is OK...just that I…

> If not, what is the fundamental difference between what I'm doing by observing people that walk or drive by on my street and what Facebook does by observing what its users do on its site?

The expectation of privacy. The window analogy may seem very clear to you, but a lot of people see Facebook as a sort of postal service carrying their enveloped messages to their friends, and they have to trawl through a pretty large document of legalese to find out how it isn't. Facebook is more like one-way mirrored glass.

Re: Facebook's tentacles reach further than people think

#249

Post by r3bl »

bigbugbag wrote: post #215
bduerst wrote: post #7

This reads like sponsored article for Share Lab, piggy backing off of big data phobia. >"Facebook has lots of data and we have no idea what they do with it, but here's what the smart people at Share Lab can do with data."

Is it ? I read the article and was pissed that there was no link to the actual charts or source. I'm not sure what you're referring to with big data phobia, computer related privacy concerns have been around for a couple decades before facebook beginnings, IIRC it was a thing a few years before zuckerberg's birth. Then privacy concerns about facebook have existed a little while before its conception with Facemash.

It's a multiseries one, and will take you hours to complete, but it's designed to the point where it's incredibly enjoyable to read. Here's one of the parts: https://labs.rs/en/the-human-fabric-of-the-facebook-pyramid/

labs.rs is the website of the SHARE Lab. They also have http://www.shareconference.net/ which is their foundation's website.

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