Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

groovypost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 182 posts

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

#151

Post by RougeFemme »

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…

That "lion's share" is rapidly shrinking, I think. If you're remotely related to a Mormon or someone with an affinity for ancestry.com, your birth and marriage(s) are probably databased and internetted. And soon enough, your death.

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

#152

Post by RougeFemme »

bennyg wrote: post #123
AJ007 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if FB also has deep facial recognition data sets for these shadow profiles?

How many people have a picture with their contact information for friends and family? My guess is a metric fuckton. Since they're allowed to access "contact information" then a few cross references of a different picture of you along with your name and phone number should be more than enough to add facial recognition data to your shadow profile. They can already guess who is in a picture of your friends. Why would th…

And add in the number of times you're tagged - often against your will - in others' photos. . .

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

#153

Post by scotttobejoking »

VMG wrote: post #101
diydsp wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thi…

>>Then you need to ban gossip as well.

That's precisely the thing - effective society does ban gossip. Sure, it doesn't get rid of it 100%, but it recognizes it as a harmful thing and stigmatizes it. It does not meekly accept that because some gossip exists and cannot be eradicated, all should be free to gossip however much they like.

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

#154

Post by skeletonjelly »

RexRollman wrote: post #131
mh- wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

on Android, yes

I use iOS, and don't use Facebook, but you can't selectively disallow Facebook access to things like the address book? It's all or nothing?

It's all or nothing, that's correct. Either you install it and accept it's access conditions or don't install it. A popular mod for Android (CyanogenMod) has an extension to the OS that has a toggle button to block any elected app from accessing personally identifiable information, this includes sending the app (say Facebook) an empty address book when asked, and fake details like IMEI, GPS location etc. It should be part of every mobile OS in my opinion. A feature I'm scared to live without.

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

#155

Post by skeletonjelly »

JanezStupar wrote: post #140

I joined Facebook last year and my profile was 80% done and waiting for me to claim it. It was beyond creepy.

That is creepy. To be fair that 80% metric is something that Facebook has "measured" and told you, and is probably gear to coax people into finishing things that are unfinished. Some smart social engineering.

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

#157

Post by a3n »

hyperplane wrote: post #129
kintamanimatt wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook has nothing to do medicine, exploration, or improving the human condition. Facebook isn't a business created to fund biomedical research or somehow make the world a better place, Facebook exists to collect personal data and serve advertising.

According to Facebook[1], they exist to "give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected." I think it is arguable that Facebook has improved the human condition based upon anecdotal evidence of it mostly being positively regarded in our culture for exactly the mission statement above. Whether we personally agree or disagree with this, right now, most of the world's population still seems to…

> According to Facebook[1], they exist to "give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected."

Yup, and the Morlocks feed the Eloi. They might even post signs saying so, if only the Eloi could still read.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_Machine

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

#158

Post by kamjam »

dougbarrett wrote: post #144
webvictim wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It'd be easy when editing the tag for the server to say "Does this name match this user in the imported contact list? Yes? Ok, it's most likely that person then."

I have a lot of noise in my contacts list though. Very rarely do I have a surname, mostly it's suffixed with "home", "mbl" or "work" or even city name as surname sometimes. I'm sure a "best guess" would be possible, I'm not sure of anyone that religiously stores first/last name aside from pure business contacts.

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

#159

Post by Jupe »

hyperplane wrote: post #119
novum wrote: post #60

Is this it? This is our brave new world of pervasive data gathering, social network analysis, and the dying gasp of any shred of privacy? This is the future we've built for ourselves? I haven't had a facebook account for 3 years. I'm certain FB has a shadow profile for me today and there's nothing I can do about it. My friends don't understand (or don't care about) the implications of everything they do online being…

You think your cognitive dissonance is bad? You're heaps ahead of where the people that "don't care" are. I try to evangelize privacy to friends and family all the time, and 60-80% of the time I am written off or ignored. Most people don't seem to want to accept the fact that something terrible may ever happen to them, and will gladly drown out the pain of dealing with a potential future threat to prolong happiness i…

I have the same issue with the 60-80% - trying to convince others of the deep evil that can (and when there's a bad quarter probably will) be done.

I generally let people know how absolutely permanent this stuff really is... More permanent than a tattoo. The information people put on facebook will, like it or not, outlive your grand kids.

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

#160

Post by quantumpotato_ »

otakucode wrote: post #114
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…

While your recommendations are great - keep talking about it and DON'T CODE BAD SHIT (if you do, no matter if you think its just to feed your kids or whatever, you're a bad person).... there's more we can do. The NSA and their ilk think they can take the knowledge of CS, and other aspects of information science, and use it against us. But what is preventing us from defending ourselves with that same knowledge? Surely…

Personally, I don't give a shit about a politican adultering. How did they vote when it came to my rights?
Post reply on HN