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Facebook claims it does not track users, but files patent to do same

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Re: Facebook claims it does not track users, but files patent to do same

#61
I wonder how many Facebook and HN readers are using Spotify along with FB's auto-publish feature?

I used it and forgot it was auto-publishing my tunes to FB. I went back to FB and was embarrassed to see it had published a song I wish no one knew I was listening to. Since then I updated Spotify and only listen in "Private Listening," mode.

Spotify is great, but automatically sharing everything I do/listen to is out of the norm. We as humans share when we want and been doing so since well forever.

Re: Facebook claims it does not track users, but files patent to do same

#63
post #48
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"hear their words"? Easier said than done. Here's a blog post I wrote about how the things they say aren't very consistent. http://blog.arunbalan.in/2011/09/28/hey-facebook-ive-got-a-q...

That's precisely the point. To adapt the lawyer joke: Q: How do you tell that a Facebook spokesperson is lying? A: Check to see if his lips are moving. Facebook has demonstrated on numerous occasions from the earliest days of the product that it holds user's privacy in contempt. What else do you need to know?

The f_c_book brigade will be here soon to downvote you.

They really hate to be called out as creeps and liars.

Re: Facebook claims it does not track users, but files patent to do same

#65
post #8

Its getting to a point where I will have a dedicated virtual machine just to check Facebook.

Way ahead of you! I use the IE9 one of these.

For the sake of accuracy, here's what I should have included:

https://github.com/xdissent/ievms/blob/master/ievms.sh

Easy way to set up a Microsoft (IE7/8/9) browser for testing in VirtualBox, if you are running on Mac OS X. Beware though, these are quite large images.

Re: Facebook claims it does not track users, but files patent to do same

#66
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's precisely the point. To adapt the lawyer joke: Q: How do you tell that a Facebook spokesperson is lying? A: Check to see if his lips are moving. Facebook has demonstrated on numerous occasions from the earliest days of the product that it holds user's privacy in contempt. What else do you need to know?

The f_c_book brigade will be here soon to downvote you. They really hate to be called out as creeps and liars.

[deleted]

Re: Facebook claims it does not track users, but files patent to do same

#69
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fair, but you can see why everyone is skeptical that is the reason behind this patent filing? Shame on me, but I don't follow Facebook's announcements about privacy enough - it never even occurred to me they'd deny something like thi Just like Google started out monetizing the semantic graph (and providing them an superior search engine in exchanges is their goal. I thought that was the whole point, and the re…

Last week, everyone lost their shit about Facebook's logged out cookies. Your traditional megacorp is going to say "oh well, so it goes, repeat the party line" and move on. Internally though, this spurred some engineers to actually investigate it, which lead to an audit, which lead to the discovery that we'd forgotten to delete the user id out of the cookies, which lead to a fix and a blog post and a clarification of…

If you think Zuckerberg is evil and that we're all just going to try to screw you, there's nothing I (or anyone else) can tell you that is going to change your mind.

Nothing you can say, perhaps, but here's something Facebook can do: establish a years-long history of having new privacy options/controls default to the setting which reveals the least information to other users. Doing that for several years should help Facebook overcome their reputation for not doing so (a reputation which it has for a reason).

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