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Never Trust Facebook

wellpreparedmind.wordpress.com

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Re: Never Trust Facebook

#91
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there's any malicious intent. In my demographic, (almost) all events are set up through FB because your friend graph, mass-invites, and guest lists are built in. My flatmate's boyfriend is fond of throwing large house parties with hundreds of invitees, then hiring a doorman to check names off against the FB RSVP list. If you're not on it, you're not admitted. My closest friends remember me and send me i…

Since killing my account (because they kept resetting my privacy settings to public... bastards) I've outsourced my Facebook Birthday/Party monitoring to my girlfriend.

Not to be totally pessimistic, but that's probably potentially even more dangerous than trusting all that data to Facebook...

Re: Never Trust Facebook

#92
post #77

I find rants like this quite interesting, especially when they end with lines like this: > That is why I may delete my Facebook account. And that is why you should too. "May". In spite of this pretty egregious behavior/bug, it's still a " may delete my Facebook account". That alone says something about the longevity of the business.

I suspect they have a pretty good idea of exactly how far they can push it without losing significant numbers.

For every outcry they'll know the impact on usage, account deletions and so on and I suspect sadly for the most part it's negligible.

Re: Never Trust Facebook

#93
Regarding: >> Or is it? If Facebook doesn’t understand what should happen when I delete my wall posts, who’s to say that if I delete my account, it won’t come back too?

I thought I had deleted my account in 2009, but I was curious when I saw this. It turns out I can still log in. Curious...

Re: Never Trust Facebook

#94
post #89
post #7

FB has, over the years, gradually lost my trust until I deleted my account in November 2010 after having been a member since late 2004 when FB was college-only. As a 20-something living in SF, it's a daily thing now: I don't get invited to parties, I don't know about birthdays, I don't see my friends' photos, I don't have any contact with anyone from high school or college anymore. There is a real social cost for som…

This is how I've dealt with FB's negligent, frequent, and non consensual behavior: 1) No one can post on my wall 2) No one can tag me in pictures, post or places. 3) My profile picture excludes my face. 4) I post little to nothing. 5) I only friend a narrow group of people. Being an offline friend of mine for years is not enough. 6) People who make weird comments are unfriended quickly. 7) The list goes on, but it ca…

The last sentence resonates with me. My twitter account was started in 08 and largely unused until this year. I'm surprised how much I like it after it clicked for me one day. Twitter works (for me) by keeping the number of people I follow low and keeping the signal to noise high.

Re: Never Trust Facebook

#95

Facebook has value, but no matter what your privacy settings are set to, no matter what you delete, always assume that anything you write or do on Facebook - in any context - will be embarrassingly public. 1) Because it will and 2) because it just makes life easier. When my wife and I were first dating, for religious and cultural reasons her parents didn't know. Her parents are conservative Muslims and mine conservat…

> Facebook can't be blamed for the cultural and relationship issues at play here

Don't blame facebook, blame Canada. Facebookers just do their job :-)

Re: Never Trust Facebook

#96
Facebook lost me a while back when the Android app first came out. Logging into the site and finding contacts that had no account in my facebook "phonebook" felt like a breach of trust. I figured they'd act in good faith and enrich Android contacts with facebook data. I did NOT think they'd yank my contacts the other way, doing who-knows-what with it. Shame on me for not reading the app permissions with more scrutiny.

Leaving facebook removed a distraction I did not realize I was weary of. At risk of sounding dramatic, it felt like I got a few minutes a day of my life back.

Re: Never Trust Facebook

#98
post #80
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are way too easy on FB for destroying your girlfriend's relationship with her parents. Clearly, FB deserves at least some of the blame. Without your consent, they made private photos public. You didn't do that. You used their privacy settings which they created to prevent this type of situation. To have FB disregard their own privacy settings is 100% on them. But, instead of blaming FB, you blame yourself. In lig…

On the contrary I think that his view is far more realist than yours. Her girlfrind gave her private picture to a third source. If you want to keep information secret you never give it away, not on internet not on the real life. Is not like facebook went to her homea amd took the pictures from her camera. I don't think that facebook did a good job here of course. But it's more that it acted like a catalizer in a situ…

> If you want to keep information secret you never give it away, not on internet not on the real life.

How do you apply that seemingly unassailable stance to something like iPhone/iCloud, where photos you take with the only camera you have on you during once-in-a-lifetime-moments are immediately and automatically uploaded to a third party for safekeeping?

The solution to all of this data retention/spying stuff is not "start being meticulously paranoid with all of your data", not the least of which is because that won't scale to the majority of the population (and it must, if we are to retain a free society). Furthermore, communications metadata (such as email envelopes with your residential IP and timestamp, cell tower logs that reveal your location, or call logs that reveal your social graph) can't be kept secret unless you _stop communicating with people_. It's a non-starter.

The solution is to alter the legal environment such that these large troves of centralized data are much harder to exploit for evil, both by service providers and military intelligence organizations.

Re: Never Trust Facebook

#99
I bet when you "delete" something facebook (and many others) just marks it as "hidden" so you will think it is gone.

The same happen to me but with yahoo, I had an old account that was long unused, because I didn't want to lose any contact that could happen I redirected it to another email, then, after a couple of years, I decided to delete the account because only spams were being redirected. A year later I notice that emails started to come from this "deleted" account again and so I tried to login and for my surprise it was active.

So don't expect to "delete" anything, and I think we shouldn't expect to have our rights respected, these companies provide a service that is not really for us.

Re: Never Trust Facebook

#100
post #13

Perhaps the way to delete the information in the account is to replace the status posts, comments, photos with junk. Words and sentences that don't mean anything; photos that are noise. Perhaps there's a way to do that in an automated fashion. I'd use that.

I'm sure that any edit is really a new version which is then displayed. =/

You're probably right.

Then what about replacing it with junk? THen doing it again? Then again? Then again?

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