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Facebook is an attack on the open web

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Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#111

Post by Jach »

criddell wrote: post #95
nnfy wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My problem with an idle Facebook account is at least twofold: my activity is still being tracked against my will, and out of principle I refuse to support an organization which so blatantly disregards personal space.

Sign out of Facebook and delete the cookie. You should be fine after that.

I'm sure Facebook will still track you (this applies even if you don't have a Facebook account). You'd need to block their domain and any ad domains that may be related. (Edit: Also mentioned here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14463127)

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#112

Post by id122015 »

I closed my FB in 2013 and time passes so quick. I created a dummy account to have access to certain pages but I dont use it. But a lot of people have created thousands of dummy accounts to show how many friends they have. They sell on the market fake accounts/followers.

And I dont want to be part of such a group. Plus other reasons like the ones in the article like this.

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#113

Post by nnfy »

patrickaljord wrote: post #96
nnfy wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My problem with an idle Facebook account is at least twofold: my activity is still being tracked against my will, and out of principle I refuse to support an organization which so blatantly disregards personal space.

> I refuse to support an organization which so blatantly disregards personal space. I suppose you have no cell phone and live in a place with no government then, because Facebook can't hold a candle to telcos and governments when it comes to disregarding your personal space.

Some forms of intrusion are more difficult to avoid than others; obviously that doesn't make it irrational to avoid as much as you realistically can.

Also, Facebook holds a significantly broader type of information than uncle Sam or T-Mobile. And Facebook also provides an avoidable vector for government surveillance. Analogy: no machine is totally secure, that doesn't mean we give up, turn off all security software and stop patching exploits.

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#114

Post by nnfy »

criddell wrote: post #95
nnfy wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My problem with an idle Facebook account is at least twofold: my activity is still being tracked against my will, and out of principle I refuse to support an organization which so blatantly disregards personal space.

Sign out of Facebook and delete the cookie. You should be fine after that.

There is no question that Facebook is tracking you by other means, including IP. Even non-social media companies do so.

Why, you may ask? Because mining data about the pages you visit after Facebook allows for targeted advertisement, at the very least.

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#115

Post by iamatworknow »

steveadoo wrote: post #52
Tossrock wrote: post #19

I deactivated my Facebook account several months ago, and it's been about 90% great, 10% frustrating. It's great for all the obvious reasons (less timesuck, less compulsion to endlessly scroll your life away, no notification interruptions). The frustrations are real, though. Primarily it's around events and photos. There are some communities I participate in that regularly organize events through Facebook, and now I…

Can't you just have Facebook and only use it for the events/photos? I've got a Facebook but never use it for posting/looking at other people's posts. Every now and then I'll get an invitation to an event which is really all I use it for.

I do this as well. No app on my phone (including messenger) and I purposely only use the site in one browser on one device (Safari on my Macbook), and only check it maybe once per day. Added bonus is that Facebook isn't getting all of that tracking cookie info from me (or at least not as easily) since I don't use Safari for anything else.

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#116

Post by giobox »

Tossrock wrote: post #46
tobyjsullivan wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've enjoyed roughly the same experience but without the downsides. As far as events go, the neckbeard in me hasn't actually minded. I still get invited to "high quality" events (things my real-life friends are going to) and haven't really missed the lower quality events. Photos I just conveniently had solved by having all my photos on Google Photos anyways (I stopped trusting offline storage long ago). I think my Fa…

Putting my old photos on Google Photos is a good idea and I think I'll do that - thanks. Although it doesn't fully solve the issue of photos that had me tagged but were uploaded by someone else, which FB doesn't give you a copy of when you download your data (afaik). Funnily enough, I found Messenger to be the worst of all their offerings. The lack of searchable history, the terrible ( terrible ) scroll-back, the def…

A long time ago I used to setup IFTTT to automatically backup Facebook photos with me tagged to a Dropbox folder. This included photos posted by others with me tagged.

I've long since abandoned Facebook, but I wouldn't be surprised if a similar IFTTT feature exists to export tagged photos into Google Photos. If I recall this only works for 'new' photos posted that you are tagged in, it doesn't appear to pull images from before you enabled the IFTTT service. At any rate, this lets you see photos you are tagged in without ever having to actually use your Facebook account.

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#117

Post by adtac »

5ilv3r wrote: post #83
adtac wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure Facebook is still tracking you in some way. Some low hanging fruits: IP address, user agent, screen resolution, network speed based tracking, geo location, presence of various web technologies. With all this and Facebook's backend data, I'm absolutely sure they'll be able to narrow you down to at most 5-10 people.

I went to a great talk at linuxfest with a mozilla developer talking about ways you could prevent tracking, and some of the means were mind blowing. For example, they can process an audio clip using your audio hardware without playing it to you, and then based on the artifacts introduced, they can figure out if you are using the same sound card as a previous sample they collected. The firefox property that allows thi…

That's insane. http://webkay.robinlinus.com/ has some more interesting methods. One of my favourites is querying every IP address in your local network and seeing which ones are up to generate a profile on you.

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#118

Post by linkmotif »

MachinShinn- wrote: post #74

I'm baffled by some of the comments here... Is it so difficult for you guys to just have a facebook account that you don't check in on? You can still sign into random sites that require it that way, arrange meetups, etc but without 'scrolling your life away' I expect people like me who spend most of their day on the computer to have at least as much digital self discipline as I have, but perhaps that's a poor assumpt…

This is a good question. I bet some people can control their degree of engagement of with FB without deactivating. And I think I, too, could achieve this with some effort.

But my experience has been that peak FB enjoyment is simply not having FB. Everything about FB feels toxic to me, not just the service itself but its pervasive tendrils throughout the web. Complete, total exclusion of FB and related services—including social sign on, etc—has really improved my QOL.

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#119

Post by jessaustin »

MikusR wrote: post #98
jbigelow76 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However, what I haven't figured out yet is if this is actually an evil-Facebook issue or just a user issue. I have a side rant that has been bubbling in me for a long time on this issue. My city's alternative weekly paper, The Dallas Observer, switched from Livefyre to Facebook's commenting system about two years ago. Livefyre was bad but the Facebook comment system is worse. With Facebook forcing "real" people accou…

Probably had nothing to do with them being liable for the content of comments, need for moderation, spam.

"Liable"? Are you an attorney? Has anyone been sued because they used Livefyre rather than FB?

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#120

Post by mysterydip »

aeorgnoieang wrote: post #56
gthtjtkt wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook was great in the early years. No ads, no political spam, no viral garbage, no pictures of what your friend ate for dinner, no psychologically manipulative algorithms. Just people talking to their friends and posting pictures of themselves hanging out. If someone made a new social network like that, I'd sign up today.

Excluding the "ads", how would you prevent users from posting "political spam", "viral garbage", and "pictures of what your friend ate for dinner"?

Remove the like, and let the feed be the actual feed and not an algorithmically-filtered list, would be a great start IMHO.
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