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Facebook’s Surveillance Machine

nytimes.com

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Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine

#191

Post by lancesells »

vor1111 wrote: post #161
mwarkentin wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read the article? They paid several hundred thousand people via Mechanical Türk to download their poll app and then harvested 50M users data for political targeting.

Data they could have acquired directly from FB anyway? It seems like they found a way to make the data acquisition process more efficient (while also violating FB's TOS, which is the actual problem here). But the point is, the methods CA used to influence voters weren't significantly different from Obama's 2012 campaign.

There is a giant difference here in the fact that the data acquired for CA was through a third party. Data obtained through the Obama campaign was through the Obama app.

Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine

#192

Post by lancesells »

Born_Again wrote: post #167
krrrh wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What's the advantage of this over a private or incognito window?

Private or incognito mode doesn't do all that much. Better to use Ghostery in addition.

Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine

#193

Post by TheCoelacanth »

therealmarv wrote: post #93

Close a FB account is no option... ever lived in a country where FB is essential? It's maybe not USA or many bigger Europe countries but if you go to smaller countries (where Google Maps is even bad) you will loose a lot (groups, buying/selling, advices).

Just because you don't have a Facebook account doesn't mean they don't have data about you. They create a shadow profile for people whose existence they have inferred from other people's accounts.

Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine

#194

Post by munificent »

bambax wrote: post #163
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...…

You're right. What upset me though was the conclusion that it's "impossible" to leave Facebook. Everything is possible, including walking instead of driving, not eating meat, etc. Some things are more inconvenient than others, but if convenience trumps everything and you can't accept to make any sacrifice whatsoever then maybe you deserve to be taken advantage of.

I wish there was a name for this fallacy because it comes up so often. When you have a systemic problem, you do not have a viable solution if your solution requires the conscientious choices of every affected individual.

If that worked, we would have already solved car accidents (obey all the traffic laws!), suicide (don't kill yourself!), obesity (don't eat too much unhealthy food), debt (don't spend more than you make), and basically every other social ill.

Effective solutions are ones that can be enacted by humans while fully taking human fallibility into account. It's poor engineering to design a system that requires every part to function perfectly with zero tolerances.

Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine

#195

Post by freehunter »

Chardok wrote: post #151
cyphar wrote: post #94

> Should we all just leave Facebook? That may sound attractive but it is not a viable solution. It's the only sane response, and has been the only sane response, for the past decade. The only counter-argument given by NYT is that in some countries Facebook has a stranglehold. I don't see how that's relevant to people who don't live in those countries. As for organisers of political groups exclusively using Facebook (…

It seems incredibly bizarre to me that the author says that. She lists all the privacy and user trust violations, future social health concerns, but then says leaving Facebook isn't viable? I have little faith in the US government regulating Facebook's privacy and data mining and even less faith that Facebook would take any action on behalf of its users privacy. Leaving Facebook is the only viable solution.

"Leaving" Facebook is close to impossible. They track you and keep a profile on you no matter what.

Other than that, there's no competitor to Facebook that exists in the same market. My favorite stores and restaurants downtown have events and sales and information that is only on Facebook. Saying "just quit Facebook" is like saying "just stop making phone calls" or "just get rid of your mailbox" or "just stop reading emails". Entirely possible, sure. But depending on your life situation, you might be giving up more than you're getting back.

Like it or not, for some people there are things on Facebook that are only on Facebook, can only exist on Facebook, and have only been enabled by Facebook. Anything else can replace it, but currently nothing like that even remotely exists.

Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine

#196

Post by root_axis »

soylentcola wrote: post #179
root_axis wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Untethered standalone VR devices are likely a prerequisite to any mainstream adoption and are shipping this year Not good ones though. Any VR headset without positional tracking is essentially a google cardboard.

Sure, but when the iPhone came out I'd already been using Palm and PocketPC smartphones for a few years. At the time I thought "any smartphone without the ability to install third party software, send MMS messages, use a GPS radio to locate me accurately, copy and paste, or even change the ringtone is essentially just a feature phone". Things start out simple, limited, clunky, and expensive. Occasionally they become…

Yeah, I think it's pretty safe bet that it will get there, I just haven't seen any announcements regarding an upcoming standalone tetherless headset with positional tracking.

Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine

#197

Post by freehunter »

tjr225 wrote: post #184
popee wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never used fb, so it's scary to see comments like this.

Right? As if those of us who haven't used facebook for years are living these inhospitably inconvenient lives? I have friends all over the world and we keep in touch...we don't really need a central platform to do so either. I can honestly say that I could really easily drop any of the platforms that I do use (telegram, snapchat, flickr, hackernews) in an instant and it would probably have such a minimal impact in my…

Arguments like yours are extremely tired, and have a strong smell of "look how sad your life is compared to mine".

I could easily make the same argument about email. You know the last time I emailed a friend? Literally never. I don't even know my friends email addresses. I don't even know if they use it.

I could make the same argument about letters. I don't know the addresses of my friends. I know where their houses are and I can drive to them, but I've never sent them a letter.

I could make the same argument about phone calls. I know my friends numbers, but only so I can text them. If I called one of my friends on the phone, I imagine they'd be very confused as to why I didn't just text them. Their first question would probably be "are you driving or what?"

Oh how sad the lives must be of people who call, write letters, or write emails. What inhospitably inconvenient lives they lead. I'm glad you've evolved to more advanced forms of social interaction. Now please stop judging everyone else who chooses a different method of social interaction than you.

Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine

#198

Post by freehunter »

antocv wrote: post #76
bgarbiak wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not only Facebook though. If you look for a restaurant at Google it will show you a link to that restaurant's website, opening hours, etc. but also: how popular the place is at any time, and how much time people spend there. All thanks to tracking phones. In case of Google you can disable that in the phone's settings (and trust that opt-out works), but you can't really do that with your phone operator. Or with t…

> Some were terrified, but - sadly - most of them didn't and don't mind being tracked. For those friends, I ask them if they can just carry this nickle of mine for me, it will track them and Ill know where they are if I need them. They all refuse to be tracked by me. Then I ask them if they want a raspberry pi or a router from me, with ads blocked and personal access to my virtual private network with access to all m…

>an entity they dont even know or have a relationship with

That's the important point. Google and Facebook don't give a shit about me. I'm one of many data points, in a vat with hundreds of millions of other people.

How many people will search Google for porn, sometimes really embarrassing stuff? And no one cares. Google certainly doesn't care. But you'd find less people asking their friends for porn or sharing their porn preferences with their friends, because my friend can and likely will judge me for it. But Google doesn't give a shit. Google's not going to tell my other friends how weird I am.

Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine

#199

Post by [deleted] »

mliker wrote: post #153
gfodor wrote: post #141

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 secon…

VR hasn’t taken off as promised and the hype is dying down now. The headset is too clunky in its current incarnation. People view it as a novelty item rather than a useful tool, so I’m inclined to believe this won’t be the massive surveillance tool VR proponents think it’ll be.

[deleted]

Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine

#200

Post by mr_spothawk »

TAForObvReasons wrote: post #186
bambax wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right. What upset me though was the conclusion that it's "impossible" to leave Facebook. Everything is possible, including walking instead of driving, not eating meat, etc. Some things are more inconvenient than others, but if convenience trumps everything and you can't accept to make any sacrifice whatsoever then maybe you deserve to be taken advantage of.

I think there are two senses in which it is "impossible" to leave Facebook: 1) Even if you actively decide to deactivate or delete your account, nothing guarantees that Facebook won't retain the data. Nothing guarantees that they don't continue to build a profile of you by scanning photos your friends share. It's a Hotel California of personal data. 2) Even if you personally decide to leave, the rest of society may b…

instead of deleting my account, i wrote an email which i bcc’d to my “real” friends: i’m deleting our facebook friendship, i love you and expect we can stay in touch just fine without. then i deleted all my fb connections, and left a public account with no friends and a publi message about how to find me. if i want to spam a post to my people, i use the bcc email.

i still have an account for logins. i could technically make messages happen.

i don’t have to eject all my pictures, or delude myself about the efficacy of “deleting” my fb account, but i can be sure nobody is going to benefit from selling my social graph to my “friends” or frienemies

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