[deleted]
Followup to "I bought more than 1 million Facebook data entries for $5"
41–50 of 98 posts
Re: Followup to "I bought more than 1 million Facebook data entries for $5"
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
And you can get more data by making a request under data protection laws.
My understanding was that this is only applicable if you are domiciled in the applicable area. Is this not correct? Has anybody tried this?
I'd be great if the US implemented some sensible privacy laws.
I'm in the UK, and Europe has a nice set of data protection laws. Enforcing those laws is sub-optimal.
Re: Followup to "I bought more than 1 million Facebook data entries for $5"
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
20 years old. No Facebook account. I 'deleted my life', and y'know what? Nothing changed. I still have the same friends I talked to before Facebook, still meet up for drinks on their birthdays, still arrange nights out, and still share what's going on in my life. The best thing about no Facebook? I know what information is out there, and nothing personal that Advertising Inc. can buy.
You have a much easier story. I'm 47. Because of the network effect, using Facebook I've connected with people I knew and cared about that I haven't seen in 30 years. Dozens of them. I barely remembered person A and B, found them and became friends. Then they knew person C and D. E and F were close behind. Pretty soon I have 200 friends from places scattered all over the world. Life sneaks up on you, and people stop…
if I were 20 and still had a cell phone with all my friends from 4 years ago
I think that's the key here. Smart phones which you use like a database.
If you had that when you were 20, you might have hundreds of contacts in your smart phone today. People rarely change both emails and phone numbers at the same time.
Re: Followup to "I bought more than 1 million Facebook data entries for $5"
#44You really don't want to mess with the Facebook police. They'll delete your life. I wish I had something more substantive to say here, but the problem is that we give Facebook an extraordinarily huge power in our personal lives. It's not just some random web service.
For all the folks out there that are completely, and emphatically, 100% --ambivalent-- about Facebook and hardly use it, I say: Meh!
Sincerely, A non-anti, non-pro barely-occasional, FB user :)
Re: Followup to "I bought more than 1 million Facebook data entries for $5"
#45You really don't want to mess with the Facebook police. They'll delete your life. I wish I had something more substantive to say here, but the problem is that we give Facebook an extraordinarily huge power in our personal lives. It's not just some random web service.
This makes me remember a thought I was having a while ago. I'm not a fan of regulation on the internet, but there's some regulations i'd really like to see for the purpose of creating a more competitive atmosphere. They're probably too extreme today, but in the future I can see them being necessary as our lives increasingly become more digital. One of them is that all data I create, which is stored, I should have acc…
The actual data is of lesser significance than the network effect in my opinion. You already can pull your data out, at least to some degree, but a ban resulting in the loss of social amplification that services like fb provide is probably what would impact even moderate users the most.
To paraphrase Joel Spolsky from his Startup School session, "grandma's gonna be calling".
Re: Followup to "I bought more than 1 million Facebook data entries for $5"
#46I know someone who generated thousands of links to facebook profiles, including non-linked ones. They crawled for images with facebook meta data, pulled the facebook IDs, and used those to generate the profile links.
Re: Followup to "I bought more than 1 million Facebook data entries for $5"
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
My understanding was that this is only applicable if you are domiciled in the applicable area. Is this not correct? Has anybody tried this?
I'd be great if the US implemented some sensible privacy laws. I'm in the UK, and Europe has a nice set of data protection laws. Enforcing those laws is sub-optimal.
The prevailing argument against regulation is usually cost. "It would be expensive to implement this! MILLIONS OF DOLLARS!" and to the uninformed outsider this has a ring of truth to it. However any cost figure would be largely overstated as facebook and other big providers are already complying with European data laws. As such the fundamental architecture and implementation have already been done for a non-trivial segment of the internet population. All it would really take is rolling out that infrastructure to the US. Not to say it would be a completely painless process, but they already established a lot of knowhow.
Re: Followup to "I bought more than 1 million Facebook data entries for $5"
#48It looks like FB is really unhappy about people stealing their profits, selling user's information.
Re: Followup to "I bought more than 1 million Facebook data entries for $5"
#49I recently had cause to log in to facebook (first time in 6 months) because my account had been compromised and was used to place a bunch of ads ("find hot guys in your area") which they had apparently approved (and ran to ~$100 in a few hours). I was impressed with the account recovery process ("you entered an old password -- do you want to recover your account?"), but I felt like they were completely optimized for…
FYI Facebook has two-factor auth as well: https://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150172618258920 .
I'm not very keen on those two-factor approaches like this that use text messages to your phone. The text message often does not arrive. And in some places you have to pay to receive text messages so it can cost money to log in.
It would be preferable if they could just use the Google Authenticator app like a few other sites do.
Re: Followup to "I bought more than 1 million Facebook data entries for $5"
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
This makes me remember a thought I was having a while ago. I'm not a fan of regulation on the internet, but there's some regulations i'd really like to see for the purpose of creating a more competitive atmosphere. They're probably too extreme today, but in the future I can see them being necessary as our lives increasingly become more digital. One of them is that all data I create, which is stored, I should have acc…
There's a few practical problems with creating that kind of legislation though. How do you decide who has to comply with it? Every time I build a website that collects any data from users at all, do I have to also create an API for accessing that data? Bigger companies such as FB and Google would most likely just move stuff offshore to get around this anyway.
It doesn't necessarily need to be a full API. How about a database dump, or even a .csv? Just some way to get the data out of one system and into another.