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Facebook won’t let you opt out of its phone number ‘look up’ setting

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Re: Facebook won’t let you opt out of its phone number ‘look up’ setting

#81

Post by jzl »

potatofarmer45 wrote: post #14

This will make keeping your social media private during recruiting much much harder because rather than trying to search for your name on FB or your email, an interviewer can just search your listed contact number. Names are often not unique but phone numbers are. This matters because creating a new email account for recruiting is trivial, yet creating a new phone number for recruiting is not. Most phones are not dua…

If you apply to work at Facebook do they look at non-public content in your Facebook account? Let's assume you're not even keeping your Facebook profile a secret.

Re: Facebook won’t let you opt out of its phone number ‘look up’ setting

#82

Post by tobr »

If you are a Facebook employee, or are close to one, please help me understand. How does it feel to see reports like this being released almost weekly? I realize people are very good at dealing with moral dissonance when their paycheck depends on it, but surely you must be thinking, talking to your colleagues, about what your personal responsibility in this is?

Re: Facebook won’t let you opt out of its phone number ‘look up’ setting

#83

Post by iliketosleep »

Using security to further weaken privacy (quote from Zeynep Tufekci in the article) aptly sums up the method countless companies have been using to violate user privacy. It's essentially a form of fraud - obtaining private information on a false premise. It'll be a good test for GDRP - let's see if there's actually some accountability.

Re: Facebook won’t let you opt out of its phone number ‘look up’ setting

#84

Post by bwann »

cbzbc wrote: post #45
potatofarmer45 wrote: post #14

This will make keeping your social media private during recruiting much much harder because rather than trying to search for your name on FB or your email, an interviewer can just search your listed contact number. Names are often not unique but phone numbers are. This matters because creating a new email account for recruiting is trivial, yet creating a new phone number for recruiting is not. Most phones are not dua…

You can set it to be searchable by friends only, which should avoid recruiters being able to do this, unless they are adding themselves as friends first.

I totally get people want a "only me" option here, but really how bad is "friends-only" here? If I'm "friends" with you, you probably already know my phone number in real life.

Re: Facebook won’t let you opt out of its phone number ‘look up’ setting

#85

Post by tomhoward »

superkuh wrote: post #75
tomhoward wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may not be a great loss to you, but for many people, deleting Facebook would come at a great cost. Facebook has done a sufficiently good job of intertwining itself into people's lives, so that to abandon it would mean losing touch with family and friends, missing out on invitations to events, excluding one's self from valued discussion groups and more. What people resent is that Facebook seems to hold people to ra…

I'm aware how dependent many people are. I imagine that's why suggesting they take responsibility for themselves triggers such emotional responses. I recall one academic study showed people would have to be paid ~$1000 before they'd consider stopping for just a year. But that only makes it all the more important. If people don't like the way things are then they have to be the change. Facebook is not going to change…

I mean, yep, that's all valid and I'm with you on personal responsibility.

But you just don't stimulate constructive discussions by asserting that the only rational path is the quitting, whilst not factoring in the costs.

This is not a simple case of "watching someone stick their hand on a hot stove and complain over and over that it hurts", because the alternative action you advocate just causes pain of a different kind.

Most of what you're saying is valid, except for the fact that it's simple and obvious to fix.

If it were that simple, we wouldn't need to have this discussion at all.

Re: Facebook won’t let you opt out of its phone number ‘look up’ setting

#86

Post by no_identd »

arcturus17 wrote: post #55
on_and_off wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are also a non negligible number of people using an alias on facebook because they have good reason. Apparently when a woman uses a pseudonym on facebook, it is not unlikely that it is because of a nasty/stalkerish ex that she would rather get away from. I am actually in favor of a transparent society (a la david brin) , but we have to grown up a lot and handle such cases before the advantages that come with it…

> in favor of a transparent society I suggest you read The Transparent Society by Byung-Chul Han. It’s a brutal 50-page indictment of the hypercult of transparency and its effects on the human soul, on the political discourse, and on traditional values like truth and beauty. Might change your view on the costs of transparency.

The Hypercult of Transparency[nice choice of words!] exists because people keep falling for the Transparency=Accountability meme. And until the rather recent advent of homeomorphic encryption, that meme did have some rather humongous amounts of truth to it. However, given the existence of homeomorphic encryption, this no longer rings true.

Speaking of homeomorphic encryption and Facebook:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19288633

Re: Facebook won’t let you opt out of its phone number ‘look up’ setting

#87

Post by paul7986 »

potatofarmer45 wrote: post #14

This will make keeping your social media private during recruiting much much harder because rather than trying to search for your name on FB or your email, an interviewer can just search your listed contact number. Names are often not unique but phone numbers are. This matters because creating a new email account for recruiting is trivial, yet creating a new phone number for recruiting is not. Most phones are not dua…

Why would you ever use your real number vs. a throwaway google voice number designated for spam?

Re: Facebook won’t let you opt out of its phone number ‘look up’ setting

#88

Post by simonh »

paul7986 wrote: post #87
potatofarmer45 wrote: post #14

This will make keeping your social media private during recruiting much much harder because rather than trying to search for your name on FB or your email, an interviewer can just search your listed contact number. Names are often not unique but phone numbers are. This matters because creating a new email account for recruiting is trivial, yet creating a new phone number for recruiting is not. Most phones are not dua…

Why would you ever use your real number vs. a throwaway google voice number designated for spam?

Because you don't know about or use Google Voice, or you live in a country it doesn't serve?

Re: Facebook won’t let you opt out of its phone number ‘look up’ setting

#89

Post by nuclear_eclipse »

jzl wrote: post #81
potatofarmer45 wrote: post #14

This will make keeping your social media private during recruiting much much harder because rather than trying to search for your name on FB or your email, an interviewer can just search your listed contact number. Names are often not unique but phone numbers are. This matters because creating a new email account for recruiting is trivial, yet creating a new phone number for recruiting is not. Most phones are not dua…

If you apply to work at Facebook do they look at non-public content in your Facebook account? Let's assume you're not even keeping your Facebook profile a secret.

No. This would be a violation of our data privacy policies and would result in immediate termination of all employees involved.
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