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Followup to "I bought more than 1 million Facebook data entries for $5"

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Re: Followup to "I bought more than 1 million Facebook data entries for $5"

#81

You 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.

If they actually will "delete your life" instead of keeping and mining it I wonder if messing with the "Facebook police" might not become an acceptable roundabout way of effectively wiping the online record clean for people who'd care to.

Similar to the "nuclear option" - post as much racist / homophobic / misogynistic hate speech and fetish porn as possible while adding as many strangers as you can.

A friend mentioned this as an option back at the beginning of the "you can't delete - only disable your account" change a few years ago when Facebook made you go through a click maze and a waiting period before terminating your account.

Idiotic, but illustrative of how frustrating Facebook's polices can be.

Re: Followup to "I bought more than 1 million Facebook data entries for $5"

#83
post #40

Is not that a good thing that fb is taking this issue seriously and going after the people who sell this information? On the other hand, they are trying to solve this issue secretly, no disclosure. And we dont yet know if they are taking any privacy measures to prevent this kind of data leak.

It becomes much harder to track down a leak when the leakers know they're being chased.

Re: Followup to "I bought more than 1 million Facebook data entries for $5"

#84

You 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.

It's possible not to use it. Maybe someday it will be like not having a phone, or email, but in my experience, it's still not like that.

Warning: According to Facebook you are not allowed to read this post, so beware.

WTF

Re: Followup to "I bought more than 1 million Facebook data entries for $5"

#85

You 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.

I think we make Facebook to me more than they really are - After using them for 5+ years, and accumulating the regular collection of 500+ friends and 40 or so family members, I finally got a little weirded out over how detailed the timeline was regarding my life. So, one day, I deleted my facebook account.

I'm happy to report not a single thing changed in my life. No fewer parties, snowboarding events, burning man engagements, or family connections. Everyone who was my friend (Defined as "People who will come and help me move or visit me in hospital") remained my friend and keep in pretty much the same amount of contact.

Re: Followup to "I bought more than 1 million Facebook data entries for $5"

#86
Is selling such information even illegal? Is it against Facebook's terms?

By using an app you are giving them access to a whole bunch of your personal information. I always assumed that many were scraping data from my profile. This is why I have never use Facebook for authentication.

When I read the original post I figured Facebook would want the data so they could narrow down who the probable culprit is. I would have thought finding a common app among a million users probably wouldn't be too difficult.

That said the nature of this conversation is ridiculous.

Re: Followup to "I bought more than 1 million Facebook data entries for $5"

#88

You 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.

You really don't want to mess with the Facebook police. They'll delete your life.

Isn't that the risk of putting your personal data up on Facebook? If you fear them so much, why would you trust them with your online identity?

Re: Followup to "I bought more than 1 million Facebook data entries for $5"

#89
post #69

I 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.

I'm not able to verify this right now, but facebook stores user identification information using EXIF in JPEGs? If so, I wonder whether image hosts delete this info before hosting your file.

Actually, the user ID is in the photo URL. Well, at least it was some time ago.

Re: Followup to "I bought more than 1 million Facebook data entries for $5"

#90
post #25

Earlier 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…

I really don't understand what everyone is moaning about. You all entrusted companies like Facebook (and remember, companies are there to make money for their shareholders) with a massive portion of your social lives and now you're complaining about the fact that those same companies could shut your social life down in an instant. Well guess what, they do indeed own all "your" data. The moment you agreed to their TOS…

According to that same TOS, users outside the US and Canada are giving their data to Facebook Europe in Ireland. So they have to follow Irish law, which they don't.

Europe's Data Directive applies to all users outside of the US and Canada. The data directive gives me the right to ask them all data they have on me, and the right to have them remove it.

As a European they have given me that right by setting up a company in Ireland.

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