WhatsApp co-founder tells everyone to delete Facebook • Hacker News Board

Re: WhatsApp co-founder tells everyone to delete Facebook

#131

Post by freejulian » Wed, Mar 21, 2018, 3:14 AM UTC

aptwebapps wrote: post #109

fareesh wrote: post #86

Despite the barrage of negative stories that would have ended nearly every other Presidential campaign - ranging from accusations of racism, misogyny, treason, incompetence, mental instability - despite all of it, tens of millions of Americans absolutely love President Trump. I cannot imagine how utterly frustrating it must be for them to watch the media bounce from story after story in some convoluted attempt to exp…

The election was won by a very slim margin. The core of Trump's support may have been with him regardless but they weren't enough to win. It's the actions on the margin that matter here. Also, as other's have pointed out, there are a lot of other problems with social media in general and Facebook in particular. Russian meddling in the election is the spark that is lighting the fire but the fuel was already there. (Th…

There was no “Russian meddling” in the election. Stop parroting nonsense without evidence.

Hillary did cheat though. Her campaign directly collaborated with correct the record - last time I checked coordinating with a super pac was illegal. She also directly worked with the media to spread progaganda.

Thank god Trump won. Hillary would have been more of the same.

Also, it’s hilarious that we’ve all stopped caring about Citzens United now. Corporations influencing our elections is A-OK!

Re: WhatsApp co-founder tells everyone to delete Facebook

#132

Post by Gigablah » Wed, Mar 21, 2018, 3:14 AM UTC

djsumdog wrote: post #99

walrus01 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you ssh into your own trusted openbsd system, run bitchx and connect to efnet, just like the good lord intended back in the days when dinosaurs roamed the earth. i am only partially sarcastic here.

I do miss the mad west of the IRC/NNTP days. I also miss multiple search engines. Yahoo/Lycos/Hotbot/Dogpile/AltaVista all give you different results and you could have fun searching around. The current Internet is a monoculture

You do realize that DDG is the modern incarnation of Dogpile?

Also, why are we pretending that Bing, Yandex and Baidu don't exist?

Re: WhatsApp co-founder tells everyone to delete Facebook

#133

Post by cmac2992 » Wed, Mar 21, 2018, 3:14 AM UTC

bb88 wrote: post #61

danjayh wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's more, I suspect that if this exact same thing had been done by a company working for Obama's or Hillary's campaigns, nobody would have batted an eyelash. PS - the reason that the regs wont happen during the trump years has nothing to do with the collusion investigation. He's put a mandate in place that for every reg to go into the federal register, two have to come out. His administration is in general very an…

> nobody would have batted an eyelash. Doubtful, considering the number of scandals from this list that made major media attention: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Obama_administration_...

Quite literally his campaign invented the tactic of scraping your friends list as a way to persuade voters. The important difference was CA used data that was gathered under the misleading guise of a personality quiz.

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/23/magazine/the-obama-campai...

Re: WhatsApp co-founder tells everyone to delete Facebook

#134

Post by cabaalis » Wed, Mar 21, 2018, 3:14 AM UTC

culturestate wrote: post #128

cabaalis wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"In 2012, the Obama campaign encouraged supporters to download an Obama 2012 Facebook app that, when activated, let the campaign collect Facebook data both on users and their friends." [0] The only real difference between what was done here and then was how it was represented to the users. [0]: https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/facebook-data-...

> The only real difference between what was done here and then was how it was represented to the users. That is an incredibly important distinction. There is a vast gulf between "these people asked for my data and I consented to its use" and "these people surreptitiously collected my data for purposes other than those which they disclosed."

A couple issues with that statement:

(1) The issue is not getting the data of the people who used the app, it's the millions of their friends who were included. This is what's being implied should be thought of as a "breach" (with the media trying its darndest to make it look like Trump himself downloaded all the data into a big CSV file while laughing)

(2) Regardless of the reason for the permission being asked, the resulting dataset was collected in both instances. So I equate the outcome in my mind.

Re: WhatsApp co-founder tells everyone to delete Facebook

#135

Post by jimmies » Wed, Mar 21, 2018, 3:14 AM UTC

ramphastidae wrote: post #51

justboxing wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We've knows Facebook tracks everything Not disputing this, but when you say 'we' I think you mean the The rest 95% either don't know, or could care less even if they know. I've told my non-techie fam and friends about data harvesting, privacy, and how facebook tracks everything, only to be ignored or outright ridiculed ("Oh you techies are so paranoid"). Many of my friends in India (where I was raised) and elsewher…

Yep. I’ve been explaining this stuff to friends for years. Even the most intelligent and rational dismiss it as paranoia or say, “I don’t care, I have nothing to hide anyway.”

I know many people who care but they think they can "outsmart" Facebook by having workarounds for its annoying and evil nature. They do it by not giving it their permission to access the address book, location, nude pictures, etc. They told me to "just deny Facebook's request to..." It bugged the fuck out of me and I wrote about it last year [1].

They think they can befriend an evil person who they know too well would stab them in the back. They think that they are stronger and more intelligent than the evil friend.

The proper answer is that if you think a friend of yours is a shitty person, then don't befriend them anymore. If you don't like what the fuck Facebook does, then just don't have a Facebook account. It's an inconvenience in the short term because you can't talk to some of your friends, sure. But if you have it and invent those workarounds and ask me to install that piece of shit so I can talk to you, then you complicit with it and make my life shitty too. When I realized that, I realized that's exactly what Stallman meant when he talked about proprietary software -- which is what he doesn't agree with.

1: http://www.tnhh.net/posts/just.html

Re: WhatsApp co-founder tells everyone to delete Facebook

#136

Post by 77ko » Wed, Mar 21, 2018, 3:15 AM UTC

Brian Acton's post[0] about the Signal Foundation[1] makes it sound like they could play in the same space as Facebook:

> Of course, this is just the beginning. There is a lot of work to be done to make our dream a reality and we will continually be asking our peers, our community, and ourselves if there are more effective ways to serve the public good. In the immediate future we are focused on adding to our talented-but-small team and improving Signal Messenger. Our long-term vision is for the Signal Foundation to provide multiple offerings that align with our core mission. That will come in time.

The tagline on the foundations splash page, To develop open source privacy technology that protects free expression sounds like it could mean a facebook type thingamajig, since what is FB but providing free expression to the masses?

[0]: https://signal.org/blog/signal-foundation/ [1]: https://signalfoundation.org/

Re: WhatsApp co-founder tells everyone to delete Facebook

#137

Post by samstave » Wed, Mar 21, 2018, 3:15 AM UTC

walrus01 wrote: post #49

justboxing wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We've knows Facebook tracks everything Not disputing this, but when you say 'we' I think you mean the The rest 95% either don't know, or could care less even if they know. I've told my non-techie fam and friends about data harvesting, privacy, and how facebook tracks everything, only to be ignored or outright ridiculed ("Oh you techies are so paranoid"). Many of my friends in India (where I was raised) and elsewher…

> The rest 95% either don't know, or could care less even if they know. I've told my non-techie fam and friends about data harvesting, privacy, and how facebook tracks everything, only to be ignored or outright ridiculed ("Oh you techies are so paranoid"). pretty much exactly my experience with Canadian and American family. People didn't give one iota of a fuck when the Snowden revelations came out because they just…

It’s a socioeconomic awareness. If you’re worried about food you don’t care. Facebooks 99% are the poorest and least educated.

I’ve always wondered why face book, a platform which could unify teachers from mit with the poorest students across the globe has never done shit to do so.

They claim to “connect the globe” but the haven’t connected anything.

Where is the teacher hosting a class where any single person from fbs vast user base can connect?

Fucking unreal.

Facebook could have become the global educational foundation with their platform at this point.

But it’s just a circlejerk.

Re: WhatsApp co-founder tells everyone to delete Facebook

#138

Post by omarforgotpwd » Wed, Mar 21, 2018, 3:16 AM UTC

fareesh wrote: post #86

Despite the barrage of negative stories that would have ended nearly every other Presidential campaign - ranging from accusations of racism, misogyny, treason, incompetence, mental instability - despite all of it, tens of millions of Americans absolutely love President Trump. I cannot imagine how utterly frustrating it must be for them to watch the media bounce from story after story in some convoluted attempt to exp…

Wow, what a spot on comment.

Re: WhatsApp co-founder tells everyone to delete Facebook

#139

Post by tree_of_item » Wed, Mar 21, 2018, 3:17 AM UTC

freejulian wrote: post #131

aptwebapps wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The election was won by a very slim margin. The core of Trump's support may have been with him regardless but they weren't enough to win. It's the actions on the margin that matter here. Also, as other's have pointed out, there are a lot of other problems with social media in general and Facebook in particular. Russian meddling in the election is the spark that is lighting the fire but the fuel was already there. (Th…

There was no “Russian meddling” in the election. Stop parroting nonsense without evidence. Hillary did cheat though. Her campaign directly collaborated with correct the record - last time I checked coordinating with a super pac was illegal. She also directly worked with the media to spread progaganda. Thank god Trump won. Hillary would have been more of the same. Also, it’s hilarious that we’ve all stopped caring abo…

We've established beyond a doubt by now that there was, in fact, "Russian meddling" in the election. It's incredible that someone could still deny this.

Re: WhatsApp co-founder tells everyone to delete Facebook

#140

Post by Consultant32452 » Wed, Mar 21, 2018, 3:17 AM UTC

ggg9990 wrote: post #122

sergiotapia wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So again, you attempt to hand-wave reasons why people would vote for Donald Trump.

Not really, I think that for a certain subset of the electorate, voting Trump was highly rational from a game theoretic perspective, and the worse Trump is, the better he serves this purpose. So I don’t need to hand Wave the emotional reasons.

I'd like you to elaborate more on the game theory aspect. My personal opinion along those lines is that people looked to Trump as a bull in a china shop. The "system" was so corrupt that the only solution was to send someone in who would wreck it from the inside. It would be disingenuous to be upset now that he's broken some plates. While I don't think this is the majority of Trump voters it anecdotally appears to be a significant portion of the avid/vocal supporters. I still think most of his votes came from the people who show up and vote R no matter what. But there was definitely a shade of, "FUCK YOU" from the voters to the government this election.