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Never Trust Facebook

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Re: Never Trust Facebook

#131

Post by a3_nm »

baddox wrote: post #107
yid wrote: 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.

It says something about the immense social utility that Facebook provides.

... because everyone is using it. It says nothing about the difference in social utility between the current state of the world and an alternate state of the world in which everyone would be using a federated social network. Facebook is a local optimum from which it will be hard to move away.

Re: Never Trust Facebook

#132

Post by sgrenfro »

My name is Scott Renfro, and I’m a software engineer at Facebook working on security and privacy. I thought I'd post the comment I submitted on the original blog post here as well. We’ve put a lot of work into making deletions permanent, so I can imagine how frustrated you must be. I’m pretty sure those story deletions are permanent, and I can’t think of any place where we can or do automatically restore user-deleted content months later.

If you happen to have any more details about specific stories that reappeared, I’d love to try and figure out exactly what happened. Admittedly, that may be difficult now that several months have passed.

As one of the other commenters mentioned, your Activity Log is a better place to get a full list of your activity and delete it item-by-item. It also shows posts that Timeline omits and includes other types of content such as likes and comments. This help page may be useful https://www.facebook.com/help/activitylog and you can find your Activity Log at https://www.facebook.com/me/allactivity?privacy_source=activ...

I couldn’t tell from your description, but one possibility is that you only saw and deleted the stories rendered on your Timeline, which is just a summary of your activity.

Re: Never Trust Facebook

#133

Post by baddox »

a3_nm wrote: post #131
baddox wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It says something about the immense social utility that Facebook provides.

... because everyone is using it. It says nothing about the difference in social utility between the current state of the world and an alternate state of the world in which everyone would be using a federated social network. Facebook is a local optimum from which it will be hard to move away.

I completely agree. However, when my mother wants to locate an old friend from her childhood, my description of a currently non-existent widely-used federated social network is of little use to her, but Facebook seems to serve her quite well.

Re: Never Trust Facebook

#134

Post by EGreg »

baddox wrote: post #104
sneak wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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? I apply it equally. The same goes for VPS, EC2, etc., and (especially given recent revelations) it's clear it should apply even to unencrypted communications over…

Do you think if you pay an ISP specifically to not divulge your data to others, and they do, then you should be able to get restitution legally, since they broke the contract?

At what point can you actually have a basis for legal recourse?

Once again the problem is that we don't have decentralized technology that would store our data encrypted and serve it only to those who we have granted access. But we will. Actually the new MegaUpload is encrypted.

Re: Never Trust Facebook

#135

Post by Steuard »

sgrenfro wrote: post #132

My name is Scott Renfro, and I’m a software engineer at Facebook working on security and privacy. I thought I'd post the comment I submitted on the original blog post here as well. We’ve put a lot of work into making deletions permanent, so I can imagine how frustrated you must be. I’m pretty sure those story deletions are permanent, and I can’t think of any place where we can or do automatically restore user-deleted…

As long as you're here, any comment on the (current) top-rated comment by lukejduncan? How can we trust that our private information today won't be similarly exposed by a settings change tomorrow? (I hope that nothing I've posted would endanger my relationship with my family, but I know others aren't as safe.)

Re: Never Trust Facebook

#136

Post by hnriot »

lukejduncan wrote: post #23

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…

Maybe FB can help bring some cultures into the modern era where women are treated a little better.

Re: Never Trust Facebook

#137

Post by johnjlocke »

I always think back to that time when Zuck was on stage a couple of years ago, and he was talking about user-generated content, and he slipped, and referred to it as Facebook's. There you go. Anything you put on their site is their property, to do with as they like. I really think their days are numbered. Not anytime soon, but eventually, they are going to become as obsolete as Friendster, Bebo, and MySpace are now, but first a new social network that is built in that same style must emerge.

Re: Never Trust Facebook

#138

Post by inthewind »

AJ007 wrote: post #89
novum wrote: 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…

Sounds like you are a Facebook leech! Community involves active participation!

You just have to learn to ignore some posts - gloss over them.

If you swapped Facebook out for say a private email list - would you be more inclined to participate? And if that is the case - why don't people just use mailing lists?

Re: Never Trust Facebook

#139

Post by sgrenfro »

Steuard wrote: post #135
sgrenfro wrote: post #132

My name is Scott Renfro, and I’m a software engineer at Facebook working on security and privacy. I thought I'd post the comment I submitted on the original blog post here as well. We’ve put a lot of work into making deletions permanent, so I can imagine how frustrated you must be. I’m pretty sure those story deletions are permanent, and I can’t think of any place where we can or do automatically restore user-deleted…

As long as you're here, any comment on the (current) top-rated comment by lukejduncan? How can we trust that our private information today won't be similarly exposed by a settings change tomorrow? (I hope that nothing I've posted would endanger my relationship with my family, but I know others aren't as safe.)

I'd like to think we wouldn't need to make such a fundamental change again in the future, but if we did decide it was necessary, I hope that we would give everyone plenty of time to make whatever change to their account was necessary to avoid painful outcomes like that.

Re: Never Trust Facebook

#140

Post by claudius »

grandalf wrote: post #75

I think this is far more likely due to incompetence on the part of Facebook than malice.

I tend to be more lenient of malice than incompetence. If your goals don’t align with mine, fine, maybe we can still work something out. But if you are in the data-handling business (Facebook, Google etc. are) and you fail to handle data properly, you should rather die today than tomorrow.
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