Facebook Wants You To Snitch On Friends Not Using Their Real Name • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook Wants You To Snitch On Friends Not Using Their Real Name

#131

Post by vidarh » Sat, Sep 22, 2012, 4:01 PM UTC

JasonFruit wrote: post #112

psbp wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now imagine a whole generation socializing under these artificial restrictions. Can you imagine how stifling being raised under an umbrella of constant surveillance by your peer group, family, future employers and advertisers would be to your personality and relationships? We're developing a society of sociopatic egotists.

That would possibly be true if people had no other way to socialize. Just because Facebook exists doesn't mean that older ways of communicating have all died; the real world is still real, and you can talk in it.

People may have other ways to socialize, but there are plenty of social groups where Facebook has become the way that a lot of social activity is coordinated, and where standing outside means you simply won't find out about a lot of thing in time.

Re: Facebook Wants You To Snitch On Friends Not Using Their Real Name

#132

Post by minikites » Sat, Sep 22, 2012, 4:04 PM UTC

kstenerud wrote: post #128

minikites wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't an even better question be: how do we build the kind of society where people can express their thoughts attached to their names without fear of reprisal?

A noble sentiment, but until it can be proven with solid evidence that such a thing is possible, it would be dangerous and irresponsible to force such an experiment upon people. History is rife with examples of people imposing what they just KNEW was right upon others, with disastrous consequences.

That's an interesting point, perhaps the goal I described is impossible. It just seems like aiming for anonymity is aiming low and solving the wrong problem.

Re: Facebook Wants You To Snitch On Friends Not Using Their Real Name

#133

Post by kstenerud » Sat, Sep 22, 2012, 4:22 PM UTC

minikites wrote: post #132

kstenerud wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A noble sentiment, but until it can be proven with solid evidence that such a thing is possible, it would be dangerous and irresponsible to force such an experiment upon people. History is rife with examples of people imposing what they just KNEW was right upon others, with disastrous consequences.

That's an interesting point, perhaps the goal I described is impossible. It just seems like aiming for anonymity is aiming low and solving the wrong problem.

Or perhaps it is aiming high and solving the right problem. Unless one can back up their claims with good evidence, they're merely engaging in conjecture. Thus far, the only evidence we have points in favor of preserving the right to privacy and anonymity.

Re: Facebook Wants You To Snitch On Friends Not Using Their Real Name

#134

Post by jodrellblank » Sat, Sep 22, 2012, 5:22 PM UTC

psbp wrote: post #67

prodigal_erik wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What Facebook and Google+ gain in politesse, they lose in depth and honesty. I can't assume I'll be held "accountable" in a just way by every prospective employer, apartment manager, or lover I'll ever meet, so these venues get empty pleasantries from me, certainly nothing controversial in any way.

Now imagine a whole generation socializing under these artificial restrictions. Can you imagine how stifling being raised under an umbrella of constant surveillance by your peer group, family, future employers and advertisers would be to your personality and relationships? We're developing a society of sociopatic egotists.

We are basically under constant surveillance by our peer group and family, just not in an Orwellian sense.

It's incredibly common for people to grow up afraid to say many things, having massive restrictions on some parts of their personalities due to those kinds of pressures.

We see it most obviously with the single big things such as "I can't tell my religious family I'm an atheist" or "I got ostracised for dating someone from another culture" or whatever, but it's almost certainly going on for a huge range of smaller personality facets - or ones which were blanked out before they developed.

Who would you be if you'd never had any restrictions on what you could say other than moral ones? If any interest you had, you would have been supported in following up, any comment you made would have been taken seriously and never laughed at, any attempt to better yourself was encouraged not mocked.

Maybe more and more surveillance such as you imagine will actually make it more obvious that others opinions are their largely their own problem and don't affect you all that much, and you should develop more confidence sooner.

Re: Facebook Wants You To Snitch On Friends Not Using Their Real Name

#135

Post by jrabone » Sat, Sep 22, 2012, 5:25 PM UTC

raverbashing wrote: post #111

psbp wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now imagine a whole generation socializing under these artificial restrictions. Can you imagine how stifling being raised under an umbrella of constant surveillance by your peer group, family, future employers and advertisers would be to your personality and relationships? We're developing a society of sociopatic egotists.

You can tune Facebook's privacy settings to whatever you want. So you don't need to share everything to everybody.

But if you do, be aware that occasionally they get reset to the defaults, just for shits'n'giggles. As happened to my partner this morning. Facebook simply cannot be trusted with anything of consequence - it's up to you to decide what that is, and whether it matters that you're telling everyone you know, plus all their friends, plus having that information sold to any company that wants it badly enough.

Re: Facebook Wants You To Snitch On Friends Not Using Their Real Name

#136

Post by jodrellblank » Sat, Sep 22, 2012, 5:59 PM UTC

Karunamon wrote: post #31

quesera wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not a website. This is a massive web of communications, past and present. This is not a wire tap without a permit, this is a permanent archive of every sniffle. Guys with warrants and/or guns get what they want, and Facebook has what they want. Does Mark Zuckerburg strike you as the kind of fella who will go to prison to fight for your privacy?

This is not a wire tap without a permit, this is a permanent archive of every sniffle Uploaded willfully by the people concerned. What is hard to understand about "don't put something online you don't want others to have access to"? (Values of "others" change with the service involved.. but you'd have to be frankly, moronic to put something on a social network site and not expect it to be accessible to others, as wel…

What's so hard about it is that few individual things feel like "something you don't want others to have access to", yet in aggregate the individual things and the connections between them can become such.

On top of that you are putting the responsibility on people to "think of every bad use of this information which could happen, and if you are still happy, then post it". Which is an impossible task. Much better to enumerate what can happen, what it will be used for, which can be made a limited set of things, and then if you are happy with that, post it.

Re: Facebook Wants You To Snitch On Friends Not Using Their Real Name

#137

Post by spindritf » Sat, Sep 22, 2012, 6:40 PM UTC

Karunamon wrote: post #115

prodigal_erik wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What Facebook and Google+ gain in politesse, they lose in depth and honesty. I can't assume I'll be held "accountable" in a just way by every prospective employer, apartment manager, or lover I'll ever meet, so these venues get empty pleasantries from me, certainly nothing controversial in any way.

>so these venues get empty pleasantries from me, certainly nothing controversial in any way. Is nobody familiar with the privacy settings? Facebook has lists, G+ has circles. One for family, one for acquaintances, one for close friends, one for business. Guess who gets to see the pictures from the house party and who doesn't?

> Guess who gets to see the pictures from the house party and who doesn't?

Google gets to see all of them. The proper way to compartmentalize is to actually compartmentalize.

Re: Facebook Wants You To Snitch On Friends Not Using Their Real Name

#138

Post by nacker » Sat, Sep 22, 2012, 6:41 PM UTC

civilian wrote: post #98

chris_wot wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd make a great persecutor in a totally liberal regime. Honestly, I don't think that. But could you try to focus on the argument and not the person? Your ad hominem attack has contributed nothing - just like my first sentence contributed nothing either!

It came out as an ad hominem but what I said does attack the argument. Karunamon puts the rule of law above all other considerations, and that's a bad position to hold. People better their lives every day by breaking laws, and when laws at senseless and when your action is not hurting anyone, then breaking the law should be considered as a real option. Let's take illegal immigration. Yes, there is legal immigration,…

"Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion." Oscar Wilde

Re: Facebook Wants You To Snitch On Friends Not Using Their Real Name

#139

Post by prodigal_erik » Sat, Sep 22, 2012, 7:36 PM UTC

Karunamon wrote: post #115

prodigal_erik wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What Facebook and Google+ gain in politesse, they lose in depth and honesty. I can't assume I'll be held "accountable" in a just way by every prospective employer, apartment manager, or lover I'll ever meet, so these venues get empty pleasantries from me, certainly nothing controversial in any way.

>so these venues get empty pleasantries from me, certainly nothing controversial in any way. Is nobody familiar with the privacy settings? Facebook has lists, G+ has circles. One for family, one for acquaintances, one for close friends, one for business. Guess who gets to see the pictures from the house party and who doesn't?

> Is nobody familiar with the privacy settings?

I'm not, and neither are you unless you work there. They routinely add new settings with recklessly chosen defaults; there's no way to be confident about may be publicized while we aren't looking.

Re: Facebook Wants You To Snitch On Friends Not Using Their Real Name

#140

Post by Meist » Sat, Sep 22, 2012, 7:37 PM UTC

I work with Matt at Facebook and wanted to reaffirm his comment below. This survey was a small anonymous test designed to improve the systems we use to keep the site safe for everyone. And, we have already confirmed that the responses collected will have zero impact on people's accounts.

We believe a real name culture is core to our mission of making the world more connected and helps us to provide the best possible experience for our users.

PS One thing I did want to note is that we offer Pages where the individual admins are not listed and have been effectively used in the past by a wide variety of groups, movements, brands, and individuals.