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Facebook Lies

iain.learmonth.me

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Re: Facebook Lies

#101

Post by pwinnski »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #73
659087 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And besides, they take nothing that you don't give them. This isn't true, at all. Facebook collects plenty of data that users and non-users don't directly give them.

I think it's important to make a couple of distinctions here. 1. Facebook collects on you when you interact with their systems 2. You can purposefully interact with facebook systems by requesting content from a Facebook registered IP (eg, FB.com, whatsapp, IG, Messenger, comment widget etc...) 3. You can passively interact with facebook systems by accessing a website that posts metadata/telemetry to a Facebook regist…

My account is deactivated now, but once upon a time I was an active FB user. I did not tell Facebook my birthday. However, friends who knew me would still post Happy Birthday messages on my birthday, and FB would auto-populate my birthday as a result. So I would go in every year and delete my birthday again.

Then they stopped allowing me to clear it out. Since people--without prompting--had wished me a happy birthday, FB was sure it was my birthday, and that was that. I could leave the year blank, but the month and day were literally unmodifiable.

That's when I started clearing all the personal data out of FB I could. No likes, no group memberships, nobody allowed to "check me in," and so on. They were collecting data on me I had no provided, against my expressed will.

Re: Facebook Lies

#102

Post by ksk »

I think Google does the same with everything (email, web history, searches, ad profile, etc) but I believe their reasoning was that there is no way to guarantee that your data will be deleted from the backups, other redundant caches and whatnot, so they don't claim to be able to.

Re: Facebook Lies

#103

Post by AndrewKemendo »

pwinnski wrote: post #101
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's important to make a couple of distinctions here. 1. Facebook collects on you when you interact with their systems 2. You can purposefully interact with facebook systems by requesting content from a Facebook registered IP (eg, FB.com, whatsapp, IG, Messenger, comment widget etc...) 3. You can passively interact with facebook systems by accessing a website that posts metadata/telemetry to a Facebook regist…

My account is deactivated now, but once upon a time I was an active FB user. I did not tell Facebook my birthday. However, friends who knew me would still post Happy Birthday messages on my birthday, and FB would auto-populate my birthday as a result. So I would go in every year and delete my birthday again. Then they stopped allowing me to clear it out. Since people--without prompting--had wished me a happy birthday…

Yea good example of how network effects really work.

In this case your network opted in to Facebook and opted your data in - so again "guilty by association."

Re: Facebook Lies

#104

Post by thefifthsetpin »

imustbeevil wrote: post #80
wpietri wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it? "I'll leave them alone and they'll leave me alone" seems like a pretty normal thing to think. Me, I think it's weird to think: "It's perfectly reasonable that if you once give somebody your email they will bother you until the end of time unless you jump through any arbitrary hoops they set up."

If every email they send has an unsubscribe link and you don't click it, you're kind of losing the reasonable grounds to expect them to stop emailing you. I've done this before, just let myself keep getting emails and hoped they stopped. Then I just clicked all of the unsubscribe links they are legally required to put in every email, and I never got an email again. You don't have to hope for what you want, you can ac…

The advice I got was to never click any links in spam email. I think the rationale was three part:

1) Clicking "unsubscribe" confirmed that you received the spam mail, so spammers would activate your email address on their other lists, thereby increasing the amount of spam you received. Otoh, acting like /dev/null increased the chance that spammers culled your address to increase their apparent delivery ratio.

2) Following those links gives the spammer access to your web browser, along with tracking cookies, and chances to exploit any plugin vulnerabilities.

3) Your chances of getting phished are way higher if you follow mail that looks like it's from ICQ than if you just go directly to icq.com and find their unsubscribe settings. (I didn't say I got that advice recently....)

Re: Facebook Lies

#105

Post by godelski »

mcny wrote: post #57
imustbeevil wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a weird thing to think. You can turn off all notifications and they'll never contact you, ever. I stopped using Facebook 6 years ago and haven't gotten a single email / sms from them since then, because I used the settings properly. Yeah, if you just ghost them and never click "update your email settings" at the bottom of every email they send, they'll keep sending them.

If you think that is weird, consider what I have done. I manually went through 1100+ friends on facebook and unfollowed them all because facebook won't show me everything in the activity feed but rather tries to guess what I like best. My activity feed is now perfect because it is pretty much just me.

Funny thing, I used to use Facebook for messenger and a news feed. Then they switched to this whole thing about forcing friends posts to come up first. Unfortunately this means now I get news I'm not interested in (memes, my grandma's crazy internet news, conspiracy theories from that guy I went to high school but have had 0 interaction on facebook with, etc). I also unfollow people that post crazy stuff and I keep getting their content. I've been trying to find that feed that you have, but good lord does facebook not want me to have it.

Re: Facebook Lies

#106

Post by Chaebixi »

imustbeevil wrote: post #80
wpietri wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it? "I'll leave them alone and they'll leave me alone" seems like a pretty normal thing to think. Me, I think it's weird to think: "It's perfectly reasonable that if you once give somebody your email they will bother you until the end of time unless you jump through any arbitrary hoops they set up."

If every email they send has an unsubscribe link and you don't click it, you're kind of losing the reasonable grounds to expect them to stop emailing you. I've done this before, just let myself keep getting emails and hoped they stopped. Then I just clicked all of the unsubscribe links they are legally required to put in every email, and I never got an email again. You don't have to hope for what you want, you can ac…

> If every email they send has an unsubscribe link

On Facebook, the unsubscribe link is very fine-grained, and is specific to the exact type of notification the link appeared on. I don't think you can fault anyone for giving up on them if you use one but still get Facebook spam.

In fact, those unsubscribe links are the only fine-grained way to control notifications. You can't only preemptively subscribe to the specific notifications you want. The options you get are all, nothing, or dick around with dozens of unsubscribe links for weeks.

Facebook is all dark UI patterns. It's so bad to the point where I don't think any user can be faulted for not knowing how get it to do what they want.

Re: Facebook Lies

#107

Post by kirbypineapple »

I've been locked out of my facebook account for almost a year because they didn't believe I legally changed my name to "Captain Hook Pope Mobile". I sent my revised birth certificate, drivers license, everything. No response on the support ticket for 8 whole months...

Re: Facebook Lies

#108

Post by mikeash »

brownell wrote: post #96
mikeash wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The help page about deactivating or deleting (they are two separate actions) makes it quite clear that your data will be gone , not merely rendered inaccessible, when you delete: https://www.facebook.com/help/250563911970368 That page uses the phrase "permanently delete[d]" multiple times, says there's "no option for recovery," and calls out some information they do keep because it's not actually part of your count,…

Did you even read the comment you replied to? Years ago they did not delete accounts. They would deactivate it and never delete the data. They do now (apparently), but in the past they were very openly not deleting anything.

Yes, I read it. I took it as meaning that they either read something else which was unclear, or just deactivated the account, or misremember what Facebook said at the time.

Do we know that Facebook actually deletes accounts now?

Re: Facebook Lies

#110

Post by dorfsmay »

Even if you've never used Facebook, you have a "shadow" account, it is a well known fact. Every time somebody you know upload their contacts into FB, they link them with your shadow account, or create it if not already there, as a strong possible match.

I have started to use Facebook recently as I needed an account for work so decided to explore a bit, my biggest problem with Facebook is that your "feed" is made up of things that your "friends" liked or posted etc... but in what seems a random order, and not all of them appear. One has to wonder what kind of weighting they apply to each post to decide if it will make it to your feed or not.

Twitter has brought something similar recently, but at least you can disable it and get a sane timeline - Just tweeted about this today (check my profile for account).

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