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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

#101

Post by VMG »

diydsp wrote: post #81
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…

You present a compelling case for having profiles on major social network platforms, with you controlling the shared information.

I also don't know why I should desire to work at company $q which is has a completely incompetent hiring department.

And governments are pretty good at progroms and determining ethnicities without using social media platforms - they've done this literally since dawn of time. If you add this scenario, you'll need to add the increased sharing of information about the government that is happening through facebook and the fact that governments are banning access to social media whenever they are up to something shady.

> the right to privacy as simply the right to not be known before someone actually meets you

Then you need to ban gossip as well.

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

#102

Post by jiggy2011 »

dreamdu5t wrote: post #63
jerrya wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that's how modern privacy invasion works. After Facebook scanned Jane's phonebook, and made the invites Jane asked, Facebook should have deleted your phone number.

Define privacy. If I tell my mother what my girlfriend's name is, that's not an invasion of privacy. If my friend tells Facebook what my phone number is, that's not an invasion if privacy either. If I share my phone number with my friend, under the agreement that my friend will not share it with others, and he shares it with Facebook, then my friend has violated my privacy... not facebook.

Isn't the issue that people aren't really aware of how much they are sharing of their own or other peoples data and that UI doesn't really reenforce this.

It's normally considered somewhat rude to give another persons phone number out without a reasonable reason.

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

#103

Post by kintamanimatt »

pessimizer wrote: post #100
kintamanimatt wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree that there's no profit potential in it a privacy-focused social network, but a lack of profit potential doesn't mean a social movement is doomed. The anti-smoking campaign wasn't designed to fatten a bottom line, it was designed to create a positive social change, and it worked.

I think anti-smoking was done to fatten a bottom line. It was largely a money grab by the states, and state/federal/tobacco money continually poured into anti-smoking organizations. The reason why nobody cares anymore is because the money dried up (lawsuits ended, settlements happened), and now tobacco companies themselves are using the laws to keep smaller/foreign competitors and safer alternatives (such as Swedish…

You certainly live up to your screenname!

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

#104

Post by jiggy2011 »

GauntletWizard wrote: post #39
mason240 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are going to be in for a real shock if you ever see a phone book. Pages upon pages of names matched with phone numbers!

It's a relatively new idea, the modern expectation of 'privacy', and one that's completely out of touch with reality. It's only within the past hundred years that most people did not know everyone in their town - Even in cities, you probably shopped at a small set of stores and were known by name by the clerks. Technology has caught up, and now it's possible for shopkeeps to know your name again.

This is somewhat different though, rather than having various small communities where everyone knows each others you have a handful of large companies who know everyone.

Google probably knows more about me than my local shopkeeper for example.

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

#105

Post by mpyne »

pessimizer wrote: post #88
fsckin wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

Re: Godwin, which solution is more "brittle"?

Keeping the next fascist government from gaining control of the state, or somehow managing to keep all people and companies from retaining any extra data about you?

This isn't to say that we should allow companies to maintain extra data, but if that is your defense against the next Nazis you're screwed before you start, for the same reason that we say writing secure code in C and most C++ is a Bad Idea. It's impossible to do even for well-trained, very smart people who are trying to do the right thing.

On that note, doesn't the state already have the majority of PII on you just for tax purposes alone?

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

#106

Post by webvictim »

npsimons wrote: post #31
xpose2000 wrote: post #13

Let's think of a typical use case where a "shadow profile" is useful. Let's say my friend Jane is on facebook. She has my phone number on her phone with my first name. Facebook notices that this phone number is not linked to any other accounts, therefore I must not be registered. Fast forward two months, and I decide to sign up for facebook. I put my phone number in (as a form of password recovery I believe) and it a…

Fast forward two months, and I decide to sign up for facebook. And this is where your use case fails: some of us already know about Facebook and will never, ever sign up. Don't track us until we ask you to, full stop.

If you don't want to use the service, nobody says you have to. Facebook having your name and phone number doesn't actually mean anything until you sign up and so if you never do, the situation doesn't change.

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

#107

Post by kamjam »

wouterinho wrote: post #64
kamjam wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the same feeling about LinkedIn! I only recently signed up for LinkedIn, about a year ago, using my GMail address I use for job-hunting purposes. I've had this account since circa-2008 but I ONLY use it for work purposes (since it's a bit more professional sounding). I also have another GMail account which I have had for much longer and shared amongst friend and some old colleagues. When I signed up for Linked…

Probably based on your IP (range). If 5 people from IP address X work at company Y, chances are you work there as well.

This was long after (4 years) I had left the company in question, so nothing to do with IP range. Besides, it was a BIG company, and it fairly accurately found my colleagues that I worked most closely with.

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

#108

Post by webvictim »

pessimizer wrote: post #43
kamjam wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you tag someone if they don't have a Facebook account? AFAIK it's not possible to tag someone with an email address or telephone number? Certainly you can "tag" someone if they are not on Facebook and not in your friends (of friends) list, but it is then just tagged as text, not associated with an account... maybe I missed an option somewhere...

>it is then just tagged as text, not associated with an account... Not associated with a non-shadow account.

I would suggest that the noise from associating free-typed tags (subject to spelling errors and without a user account attached) with photos would be way higher than the signal you'd gain. I even have irritating friends that tag people who aren't even present in photos just because they want them to receive a notification about it. All of that is total garbage input to any machine learning model or otherwise.

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

#109

Post by smackfu »

dmead wrote: post #49
argumentum wrote: post #26

The main invasion of privacy here is your friend(s) agreeing to give Facebook (a 3rd party) your information without asking or informing you. This is analogous to Facebook giving the government (a 3rd party) your information without asking or informing you.

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.

OTOH, any of the good family tree sites will hide full names of living people from public view.

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

#110

Post by kamjam »

reinhardt wrote: post #96
kamjam wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the same feeling about LinkedIn! I only recently signed up for LinkedIn, about a year ago, using my GMail address I use for job-hunting purposes. I've had this account since circa-2008 but I ONLY use it for work purposes (since it's a bit more professional sounding). I also have another GMail account which I have had for much longer and shared amongst friend and some old colleagues. When I signed up for Linked…

LinkedIn's "people you may know" is notorious for its creepy accuracy. Not only colleagues, current and past, but friends, acquaintances, ex girlfriends, university professors, landlords, hairdressers and more.. The least paranoid explanation is that, unlike me and you, many others click "find my friends" and let LinkedIn slurp their thousand-entries address books.

I imagined so too, but what were they basing this match on? The people they were suggesting did not, or at least should not, have had this particular email address since it was created after I had worked with them. They only ever emailed (for group meetups/drinks) on my "personal" email address.

Now I can recommendations for other people in the same company, previous colleagues who were at the same company at the same time, "friends of friends" and all that makes sense. But creepy as you say. Maybe the guys who wrote the algorithm now work for the NSA...

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