Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Facebook’s Surveillance Machine

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 240 posts

Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine

#141

Post by gfodor »

I was one of the co-founders of an early social VR startup and observed first hand the technical capabilities that these applications will afford bad actors to use for surveillance. You can easily capture voice, body tracking, and interaction data, and basically record a full view of the world through the eyes of another human being. It's quite remarkable being able to record and play back a copy of yourself in seconds from a remote server, but the potential for abuse is immense.

Facebook's made a move, probably the biggest move of any company, into VR. They bought Oculus for $2B while everyone else was scratching their heads. Social VR is their focus at Facebook proper, and they are leaving the entire rest of the VR ecosystem to their subsidiary Oculus. Isn't it obvious why? VR, if it becomes the dominant form of human communication, will make their current surveillance machine look like a joke. Facebook would be in a position to be an intermediary for every human interaction on earth that doesn't take place in physical space. It's nice to see the public become aware of what they've done before they are able to take it to the next level of nearly being inside of our heads.

This is the primary underlying motivation for why we are working on building an alternative open communication platform for Mixed Reality at Mozilla. We're heads down building stuff now but you can expect to see us shipping things soon.

https://blog.mozvr.com/enabling-the-social-3d-web/

Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine

#142

Post by krrrh »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #122
fortythirteen wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Should we all just leave Facebook? That may sound attractive but it is not a viable solution. Leaving not just Facebook, but Twitter, Instagram, and all other social media of its ilk is an extremely viable solution. It's like quitting smoking. For the first month or so you feel off-kilter, but, after a while, you can't imagine going back. Life is quantifiably better without it. Realizing that I don't need up to the…

Right on. Another thing that works for me is not watching any news at all on TV except for occasionally NPR. Instead, I like the text only feeds of NPR and CNN, and I try not to read those every day. I do still look at Facebook once a week for about 10 minutes. I do so in a private browser tab, and routinely try to delete FB cookies.

Set up a site specific browser, which makes it easier to sequester all FB cookies and browsing to a separate environment. I use Fluid on macOS, but there are other approaches.

http://fluidapp.com

Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine

#143

Post by m_ke »

thanatropism wrote: post #128
capnrefsmmat wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And you just figured this out now? This is like saying "wow, who knew we would get so fat by feeding only on pizza, hamburgers and coke, aren't those companies evil". No. Zeynep Tufekci (the author of the article) has written about this for years, including a book about social media in political movements ( Twitter and Tear Gas ), a popular TED talk ( https://www.ted.com/talks/zeynep_tufekci_we_re_building_a_dy...…

I just said this in another comment but it so belongs here, I'll try to say it in just one sentence: there was a feel-good narrative to Obama that's just impossible now.

Obama had the Obama 2012 app (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nafYT7_i4as). Anyone downloading it knew that the goal of it was to help get Obama elected.

CA (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpbeOCKZFfQ) tricked people into giving up their data and used it to spread targeted propaganda.

How is this the same?

Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine

#144

Post by krrrh »

whoisjuan wrote: post #126
roadbeats wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can stay in touch with relatives via mobile phone. You can text them and ask how they do. Personally, I created a Whatsapp group for my extended family. Some of them don't use Facebook by the way. It doesn't make any sense to complain about Facebook's business model and also not want to sacrifice a worthless personal account noone cares about. We choose what we use and they choose how they make money. You can exp…

"I created a Whatsapp group for my extended family"... You're just changing one poison for another one. Don't forget who owns Whatsapp.

It’s not perfect to still be sharing your social graph, but at least chats are e2e encrypted by default.

Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine

#145

Post by anonu »

gotofritz wrote: post #99
anonu wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happened to good ol' emails? Serious question... Can't you organize amongst friends with emails? I hate to suggest Slack as well... But there are alternatives is the point... What about Meetup.com for bigger groups?

How old are you? I am asking because I remember full well the pre-facebook days when people would send around 'funny videos' to groups of friends, with no chance of opting out, getting your email address shared with people you don't know, filling your inbox with crap, etc... Something like FB is hundreds times more convenient

Lol.. good point. I like to think I was one of the first million people on Facebook when I got it in college... Maybe users who were initiated to Facebook earlier have it more ingrained in their lives.

Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine

#146

Post by zzzcpan »

bambax wrote: post #66

> Facebook makes money, in other words, by profiling us and then selling our attention to advertisers, political actors and others. These are Facebook’s true customers, whom it works hard to please. And you just figured this out now? This is like saying "wow, who knew we would get so fat by feeding only on pizza, hamburgers and coke, aren't those companies evil". Well, yes, companies are evil. They don't work for you…

> It's the only solution.

How is this a solution? Leaving Facebook doesn't remove ad industry's, political and state surveillance incentives. Literally anyone who wants to participate in a market economy or any political system fuels surveillance incentives. I don't think it's possible to remove such incentives, but theoretically could be possible to limit the scope of surveillance capabilities by distributing and disallowing concentration of power and wealth, capping the size of corporations and so on.

Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine

#147

Post by tn_ »

Not that this would ever happen..probably, but if Amazon were to offer users a $20 amazon store voucher to get users to disable their FB account and port all their pictures to a social media solution they build, I could see myself doing that. This platform would only be accessible to users with Amazon Prime accounts and that would be a way for them to keep it ad-free.

Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine

#148

Post by Angostura »

1337biz wrote: post #137
thanatropism wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just said this in another comment but it so belongs here, I'll try to say it in just one sentence: there was a feel-good narrative to Obama that's just impossible now.

It is such an eye opening experience to see how media frames things when they try to support or sabotage somebody. This seems so far the clearest demonstration for anyone remotely interested in the topic.

So could you educate us by showing the comparable actions of the Obama campaign?

Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine

#149

Post by astura »

rufugee wrote: post #105

They collect browser histories? Shouldn't that technically be impossible unless they're using their ad partners across multiple sites?

I thought it was fairly well know those Facebook "like" and "share" buttons you find places were also trackers. At least I recall reading that several years ago, things may have changed.

Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine

#150

Post by vor1111 »

Angostura wrote: post #148
1337biz wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is such an eye opening experience to see how media frames things when they try to support or sabotage somebody. This seems so far the clearest demonstration for anyone remotely interested in the topic.

So could you educate us by showing the comparable actions of the Obama campaign?

Didn't Obama's campaign hire Droga5 to do precisely the same sort of ad targeting that CA was involved in? Ultimately, it doesn't seem that CA did anything out of the norm for any marketing analytics company (from what I've read, correct me if I'm wrong).
Post reply on HN