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WhatsApp co-founder tells everyone to delete Facebook

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Re: WhatsApp co-founder tells everyone to delete Facebook

#421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trump received billions in free advertising in the form of “earned media”. I don’t know if one could even account for all the third party spending. Money is not speech, corporations are not people. Any one who cares about free speech would advocate for restoring the Fairness Doctrine, so we know that angle is just rhetoric.

> Money is not speech What does this even mean? It costs money to put advertisements in mass media. Either you believe everybody should be able to do that, or you believe that only some people should be able to address the public at large.

Why do you assume public political discourse should cost money?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine

Re: WhatsApp co-founder tells everyone to delete Facebook

#422
post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I am confused with all the data collection that is going on (and it obviously costing them $ and some reputational risks) is not really helping them to produce decent ad targeting. I am not even surprised by how bad FB ads are most of the time but even Amazon that has 20 years of my purchase history is amazingly bad: I already bought 4 Elixir programming books and looking to buy new books when they come out…

You actually want Amazon to show you different search results? If I'm starting a new hobby or wanted to buy a present for someone with different interests, I would be very annoyed if results were hidden from me because of a name clash with a product from my purchase history. A good product search isn't personalized, and doesn't try to predict what I want. It just shows the results in a sensible manner, and lets me us…

I want it to show me Elixir programming books in addition to strings not 50 string products and 0 books.

Re: WhatsApp co-founder tells everyone to delete Facebook

#423

I find it very hypocritical of all these people who already have vested their shares in Facebook coming out and criticizing the company. As someone else mentioned on this thread, this is the guy who contributed to the concentration of all things social into Facebook by selling Whatsapp. I'm pretty sure most people are not fond of Facebook basically monopolizing people's private data and monetizing, but you don't get…

I wouldn't call it hypocrisy, more like having to deal with the unintended consequences of your action.

He and others that have come out to publicly criticize Facebook knew what they were building, they just didn't see how powerful Facebook would eventually become in programming people en masse. The way the last election turned out was the wake up call.

Sean Parker himself admits as much in an interview with Axios:

"When Facebook was getting going, I had these people who would come up to me and they would say, 'I'm not on social media.' And I would say, 'OK. You know, you will be.' And then they would say, 'No, no, no. I value my real-life interactions. I value the moment. I value presence. I value intimacy.' And I would say, ... 'We'll get you eventually.'""I don't know if I really understood the consequences of what I was saying, because [of] the unintended consequences of a network when it grows to a billion or 2 billion people and ... it literally changes your relationship with society, with each other ... It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains."

"The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them, ... was all about: 'How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?'""And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that's going to get you to contribute more content, and that's going to get you ... more likes and comments."

"It's a social-validation feedback loop ... exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you're exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.""The inventors, creators — it's me, it's Mark [Zuckerberg], it's Kevin Systrom on Instagram, it's all of these people — understood this consciously. And we did it anyway."

[0] https://www.axios.com/sean-parker-unloads-on-facebook-god-on...

Re: WhatsApp co-founder tells everyone to delete Facebook

#424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Because Yandex and Baidu give your data to some of the worst governments in the world.

Re: WhatsApp co-founder tells everyone to delete Facebook

#425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you log in to AirBnB using Google credentials? Perhaps they use an undocumented feature to broadcast the dates to GCal without mail harvesting.

They scan emails. I have had airline ticket reservations that my friends emailed to me added on my Calendar.

Yikes. That would prove it...

Re: WhatsApp co-founder tells everyone to delete Facebook

#426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the exception of big evil things like Comcast, you might be surprised how few ISPs keep detailed logs like this. The effort to correlate them with customers is generally not worth it unless you get a subpoena, and only then is it done manually.

(UK) The new surveillance law requires web and phone companies to store everyone’s web browsing histories for 12 months and give the police, security services and official agencies unprecedented access to the data. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/29/snoopers-chart...

While the UK is still part of the EU, will there be a case to have your history removed under the new GDPR legislation?

Re: WhatsApp co-founder tells everyone to delete Facebook

#427
post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You actually want Amazon to show you different search results? If I'm starting a new hobby or wanted to buy a present for someone with different interests, I would be very annoyed if results were hidden from me because of a name clash with a product from my purchase history. A good product search isn't personalized, and doesn't try to predict what I want. It just shows the results in a sensible manner, and lets me us…

I want it to show me Elixir programming books in addition to strings not 50 string products and 0 books.

Then you may have found a bug in their search algorithm. On Amazon.de I get guitar string and books (and some sort of cologne), and when I click on 'Fremdsprachige Bücher' (for example), I get only books on programming in Elixir.

Surely that's fine?

Re: WhatsApp co-founder tells everyone to delete Facebook

#428

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.”

Everybody's got something to hide, just not from everybody else. As much as we share with friends what we would not share with strangers, we have things that we would enthusiastically share with strangers that we would never share with our friends. Something similar applies here: everybody would absolutely do mind if someone in their personal sphere could browse their search term history, but the same data as one of billions of profiles on some corporate datacenter does not appear in that threat model. Ultimately, "nothing to hide" is short for "nothing to hide from them", and the main difference is wether the possibility of leaks is taken into account or not.
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