81–90 of 160 posts
I know everyone on HN loves to hate on Facebook, but the fact that HN's servers are getting crushed when FB is down perhaps shows a revealed preference.
I find it hard to find fault with people expressing disgust with how knowingly predatory and exploitative the company's leadership have proven themselves to be.
Exhibit A: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-58678332
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> everything I used to be able to get in a phone book Fair, although you could opt out of the phone book. (And I don't think they had location/address, though it's been so long now that I can't remember for sure.) > I think people are grappling with the fact that the Internet just makes data scraping and processing possible on a scale previously unimaginable This is it right here. The scale and ease of access are ter…
> And I don't think they had location/address, > though it's been so long now that I can't remember for sure Same here. initially i too couldn't remember for sure. Then i remembered the scene from Terminator 2 (1991) in which it looks up Sarah Connor's phone-number and home-address in a phone-book! :-)
I feel like we need to start differentiating between "public" personal information and more sensitive personal information (like social security numbers or other government ID numbers). The breach lists this info: Name Email Location Gender Phone number User ID So basically, everything I used to be able to get in a phone book. Honestly, at this point all of that information should just be considered public, because i…
I tend to think that there should be a publicly accessible, unique, and more or less immutable ID number for every citizen or resident. This ID would have pointers to our name, birth date and a few other identifiers that shouldn't really be considered secret.
My concern is that the absence of such a unique ID leads to a mess of overlapping systems in which only large organizations with the resources to track everyone will be able to uniquely identify people. So we'll have a degree of anonymity from random other individuals, not not from banks, tech corporations or the government. Computing power is becoming too cheap and ubiquitous to effectively hide information that isn't explicitly confidential. That is, as a society we need to adjust to a paradigm in which it is more expensive to keep information confidential than to allow it to be public. Especially keeping information private from those with deep pockets.
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It's not just Facebook. Your phone is tattling on you 24/7. ALPRs are recording where you drive. Browser fingerprinting is creating a profile on you even if you block ads and trackers. Short of never using a computer, there is no opt out anymore.
That's a little different thought and I think you know it. There's a difference between information that government and big tech is scraping and storing, vs information that is publicly available to literally any random person online to scrape. Both are problems, but those are different discussions and we started with talking about the issue of truly publicly available information. I think that's an interesting topic…
I honestly ask myself how the f Zuck has the guts and ego to still talk about a "metaverse" with a company and product so wrong, so poisonous and evil to humanity. I really can't wait to see him in jail already.
I'm not a big fan of Facebook but the hatred toward that company here is getting out of hand. You want to see Zuck in jail for what crime exactly? How is Twitter, Youtube, TikTok or Reddit any better than Facebook when it comes to being "poisonous" or "evil"? Youtube was literally financing terrorist groups with ad money 10 years ago. Twitter gives a platform to anti-Semites and the Taliban.
Why do you think it is out of hand, and what exactly do you mean by that? I will have a careful, lengthy discussion with you, if you'd like.
I'll open with the claim that what is moral is not necessarily what is legal.
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Couldn't a social security number be easily bruteforced anyway
Yes. SSNs are distributed by year in blocks that are granted to hospitals. If you know a person's year and place of birth you can brute force them. For example if you wanted to generate plausible identities you could just use a common Jewish last name and get the SSN block from a major hospital in NYC for a high birth year. Say, 1955. The odds that you will be able to guess the SSN for Abraham Goldstein born in Manha…
The freely available databases of pii in the wild can be used to infer anything missing from releases like this, and that stuff can be used to inform probabilistic password guesses, and so on. It's only a matter of time before deep learning models make most common password based security measures completely transparent and obsolete.
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> everything I used to be able to get in a phone book Fair, although you could opt out of the phone book. (And I don't think they had location/address, though it's been so long now that I can't remember for sure.) > I think people are grappling with the fact that the Internet just makes data scraping and processing possible on a scale previously unimaginable This is it right here. The scale and ease of access are ter…
All listed numbers in the White Pages had street addresses. Having an unlisted number was a premium service — you had to pay to be private.
I feel like we need to start differentiating between "public" personal information and more sensitive personal information (like social security numbers or other government ID numbers). The breach lists this info: Name Email Location Gender Phone number User ID So basically, everything I used to be able to get in a phone book. Honestly, at this point all of that information should just be considered public, because i…