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You Might Have an Invisible Facebook Account Even if You Never Signed Up

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Re: You Might Have an Invisible Facebook Account Even if You Never Signed Up

#81

Post by diydsp »

Raphmedia wrote: post #67

Serious question here. Why should I care? Convince me why I should close my facebook account. Why I shouldn't purposely feed google with infos. Why I shouldn't answer to phone surveys. Hell. I /like/ having accurate ads on the web. I like reading meaningful spam that sells me the products I want for half the price. Anybody can already look up my name on 411 and get all my infos. Why should I care if the big corps als…

You meet $g at a caffeinated yogurt startup tasting party. You want to form an intimate relationship with person $g. $g looks you up on SureEros.com and finds a bogus profile for you claiming you actually don't like milk products or stimulants. $g figures you lied to get into $g's pants and you look like a lamer.

Race or religion $x takes over a large portion of the local government. You belong to race or religion $y. All of your friends tell facebook you're a $y and their clever algorithm confirms it based on your last name, which you actually only acquired when your father remarried into your stepmother's caffeinated yogurt family enterprise. Local, infiltrated gov't decides to launch a pogrom against $x. They come and get you.

You apply for a job at $q. All of your friends have been telling linkedin you're good at $r. You have no profile at linkedin. You show up at the interview. They say, "Well you have lots of $r experience, but we consider that wasted time, you probably picked up bad habits doing $r. We want someone who's spend more time on $q than $r and who doesn't lie about fermented dairy and alkaloids."

How do I come up with these scenarios? What is my formula? It's based on an article I once read by a Canadian politician who described the right to privacy as simply the right to not be known before someone actually meets you, to have no false representations before you. (And then I added details about yogurt and caffeine b/c that's what I'm consuming this morning and afternoon.)

Re: You Might Have an Invisible Facebook Account Even if You Never Signed Up

#82

Post by kintamanimatt »

novum wrote: post #79
kintamanimatt wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We work with technology and love to see cool new things developed and released in the world, but like anything, it can be used for evil too. There shouldn't be any cognitive dissonance and it's good that you're cognizant of the possible downsides. I wish more people would think of the possible negatives before they lay finger to keyboard and start coding. What can you do? Keep talking about it; don't give up. Most pe…

I admire your positivity. However, is it not the case that this: Don't code bad shit and compete against those that do. Make the privacy destroyers lose. ...has been disproved by facebook? They are (one of the larger) privacy destroyers. They are not -- at present -- losing.

Facebook made MySpace lose. MySpace made Friendster lose. Facebook isn't invincible, it's just that nobody has created the next Facebook.

People are growing tired of Facebook and it's becoming passe. People are leaving and new generations are failing to sign up because it's not longer cool. Teenagers give a shit about Tumblr, Instagram, and Twitter, and less about Facebook. A growing number of people are getting tired of it and becoming less active or leaving. It's becoming cool to deactivate your Facebook account, and that's the most hazardous thing to Facebook's longevity.

All brands die. Facebook isn't immune from this law.

Re: You Might Have an Invisible Facebook Account Even if You Never Signed Up

#83

Post by deltaqueue »

tjr wrote: post #2

When you install the Facebook app on your phone it requires permission to read your contacts, call log, location, accounts, and application data. Is this true?

Yes, but this shouldn't come as a shocker to anyone that uses Facebook and Android. You can arrange to have contacts synced in Android so that you can see updates / photos / phone numbers merged with your Google contacts. NSA access notwithstanding, Facebook is in the business of making it easier to interact and socialize with people.

Alternatively, you can use the app "Tinfoil" for Facebook, which is essentially a locked-down web browser that provides a watered down Facebook experience.

Re: You Might Have an Invisible Facebook Account Even if You Never Signed Up

#84

Post by novum »

kintamanimatt wrote: post #82
novum wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I admire your positivity. However, is it not the case that this: Don't code bad shit and compete against those that do. Make the privacy destroyers lose. ...has been disproved by facebook? They are (one of the larger) privacy destroyers. They are not -- at present -- losing.

Facebook made MySpace lose. MySpace made Friendster lose. Facebook isn't invincible, it's just that nobody has created the next Facebook. People are growing tired of Facebook and it's becoming passe. People are leaving and new generations are failing to sign up because it's not longer cool. Teenagers give a shit about Tumblr, Instagram, and Twitter, and less about Facebook. A growing number of people are getting tire…

You are correct. Facebook was not the first social network and they will not be the last.

I guess I'm more concerned about the precedent they've set, in terms of (mis)handling user data, and how other companies seem to be falling over themselves to add 'social' features. Very few companies begin with a commitment to user privacy.

My fear is that FB has done some kind of irreversible damage, even if only as measured in terms of the attitudes other companies are adopting towards privacy.

Re: You Might Have an Invisible Facebook Account Even if You Never Signed Up

#85

Post by sp332 »

fsckin wrote: post #65
dmead wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i brought this up when my family using the "family tree" app a few years ago. they kept marking their familial relations online for all to see, for free and in great detail. needless to say, i was met with blank stares when i brought this up.

You're worried about family tree data? Births, marriages, deaths, etc are all public information. This data should be free and open instead of behind pay walls or locked away in a records office or library. Google combinations of your full name, father/mother and birthdate in various formats and you might be pleasantly surprised how much is out there.

If they made the data available for free, it might be OK. But really you're just doing free work for a company who's going to lock up the data and sell it.

Re: You Might Have an Invisible Facebook Account Even if You Never Signed Up

#86

Post by jfb »

pessimizer wrote: post #40
jfb wrote: post #12

I find this very creepy, but I think that fundamentally, the idea that my contact info isn't mine, once it's "public", is correct.

What if that info became "public" because it was conned out of one of your friends, a friend hypothetically fully aware of your distaste for facebook and also someone who would never put any of your info into it consciously, when that friend allowed facebook to access their email/phone contact list to find people on facebook that they knew?

Well, right, which to me points out that we have to learn to cope with the difference between "private" and "public" being fuzzy.

Re: You Might Have an Invisible Facebook Account Even if You Never Signed Up

#87

Post by kintamanimatt »

novum wrote: post #84
kintamanimatt wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook made MySpace lose. MySpace made Friendster lose. Facebook isn't invincible, it's just that nobody has created the next Facebook. People are growing tired of Facebook and it's becoming passe. People are leaving and new generations are failing to sign up because it's not longer cool. Teenagers give a shit about Tumblr, Instagram, and Twitter, and less about Facebook. A growing number of people are getting tire…

You are correct. Facebook was not the first social network and they will not be the last. I guess I'm more concerned about the precedent they've set, in terms of (mis)handling user data, and how other companies seem to be falling over themselves to add 'social' features. Very few companies begin with a commitment to user privacy. My fear is that FB has done some kind of irreversible damage, even if only as measured i…

I see your point, but I disagree. There will always be those that just don't give a shit, but I get the feeling that people generally are better educated about privacy and the consequences of freely giving up information online.

People not respecting their own privacy is a marketing problem. Teach people it's cool to respect their privacy and people will be more careful. It used to be cool to smoke too, after all.

Re: You Might Have an Invisible Facebook Account Even if You Never Signed Up

#88

Post by pessimizer »

fsckin wrote: post #65
dmead wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i brought this up when my family using the "family tree" app a few years ago. they kept marking their familial relations online for all to see, for free and in great detail. needless to say, i was met with blank stares when i brought this up.

You're worried about family tree data? Births, marriages, deaths, etc are all public information. This data should be free and open instead of behind pay walls or locked away in a records office or library. Google combinations of your full name, father/mother and birthdate in various formats and you might be pleasantly surprised how much is out there.

>You're worried about family tree data? Births, marriages, deaths, etc are all public information.

Not databased and internetted they're not. The lion's share of that data on living people (not to mention dead people) is probably only on paper, and to get pieces of it often required a written request.

Not to Godwin too hard here, but that's exactly the information that the Nazis and IBM used to detect Europeans who were descended from Jews but who didn't self-identify as Jewish.

Re: You Might Have an Invisible Facebook Account Even if You Never Signed Up

#89

Post by pessimizer »

kintamanimatt wrote: post #87
novum wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are correct. Facebook was not the first social network and they will not be the last. I guess I'm more concerned about the precedent they've set, in terms of (mis)handling user data, and how other companies seem to be falling over themselves to add 'social' features. Very few companies begin with a commitment to user privacy. My fear is that FB has done some kind of irreversible damage, even if only as measured i…

I see your point, but I disagree. There will always be those that just don't give a shit, but I get the feeling that people generally are better educated about privacy and the consequences of freely giving up information online. People not respecting their own privacy is a marketing problem. Teach people it's cool to respect their privacy and people will be more careful. It used to be cool to smoke too, after all.

>Teach people it's cool to respect their privacy and people will be more careful.

There is no profit in this, and the government makes facebook privacy-encroaching look trivial, so looking to them to regulate it is a non-starter.

Re: You Might Have an Invisible Facebook Account Even if You Never Signed Up

#90

Post by junto »

ddalex wrote: post #76

Oh my god, this is it. I posted a story a while back saying that I receive messages from a FB account created with my email. I suspected that somebody may have made an account with my email by mistake, but FB keeps on sending messages with "you know this guys?" etc, and it's about people I know. So I had a FB shadow account created, it inferred my email (probably through looking up some of my friends address books on…

You need to make sure you mark every single email like this as spam. Eventually, f we all do this, they will be permanently marked as spammers.
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