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I ‘Liked’ Everything I Saw on Facebook for Two Days

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Re: I ‘Liked’ Everything I Saw on Facebook for Two Days

#61

Post by lucb1e »

TheCoelacanth wrote: post #56
lucb1e wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get why people recommend VPNs so much. I never bothered to look for a free one because I didn't think it'd have a decent speed and all ports opened, but doesn't Tor basically do the job?

Free ones probably suck, but even a very cheap (<$50/year) VPN will be much faster than TOR.

It still feels double to pay for an internet connection and then a second time for a VPN, but yeah it might come in handy. Still think I'd go for a VPS instead and, if I need a VPN, just tunnel it through, but that's just me.

Re: I ‘Liked’ Everything I Saw on Facebook for Two Days

#62

Post by logn »

iamthepieman wrote: post #37
eumenides1 wrote: post #6

I was thinking of a way to destroy my facebook account because you can't actually delete it, this is pretty much it, like everything. Also I guess you could check-in every where at once all the time. I didn't think about the collateral damage it could cause to others, which is to bombard your "friend's feeds". This is also interesting because, well you can destory facebook in this manner. If enough people are peeing…

When I deleted my account I first unfriended everyone, unliked everything I had liked, deleted all my pictures and posts and changed my name and personal details to fake information. Then I waited a couple of days and went through the official Facebook deletion process. I don't know if any of this worked but it made me feel better and like I did more than just stop logging in or rely on Facebook to stop using my acco…

And to cap it all off:

- create a new email address with a long random password

- change your FB account to use this new email

- destroy your copy of the email password

- change your FB account to have a long random password and don't keep a copy of it

Re: I ‘Liked’ Everything I Saw on Facebook for Two Days

#64

Post by ggreer »

longb4 wrote: post #28
icebraining wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A VPN + Incognito should be enough. Not to truly anonymize you, but probably enough to disable the personalization layers. It doesn't make economic sense to waste engineering hours and computing time trying to show ads to the 0.0001% of paranoid users, which are likely blocking them anyway, even if the data is there. Of course, there's no such thing as the vanilla user. You'll still be targeted on generic features (l…

The EFF has a service called Panopticlick[1] that gives you a sense of how unique your browser looks to the sites you visit. My result: "Within our dataset of several million visitors, only one in 886,262 browsers have the same fingerprint as yours." [1] https://panopticlick.eff.org

While it can be an issue, browser fingerprinting isn't as powerful as the EFF claims. Any change to your user agent (browser updates), plugin list, time zone, or screen size makes Panopticlick think you are a different user.

Re: I ‘Liked’ Everything I Saw on Facebook for Two Days

#65

Post by gutnor »

jerf wrote: post #57
protonfish wrote: post #22

So if you like everything on Facebook, the result is political extremism and the most insipid pop culture trash. What frightens me is what if this has nothing to do with Facebook, but is instead about human nature? Does this also describe what happens to a person's life when they stop caring, when they are no longer motivated to put forth the effort to be discerning, when they give up trying to make anything but the…

"So if you like everything on Facebook, the result is political extremism and the most insipid pop culture trash." Bear in mind that "extremism" is the expected result of any reasonable algorithm that you abuse like this. If you like X, the algorithm will focus around X. If you like everything the algorithm suggests, you'll end up liking a "bigger target", and it will start suggesting stuff yet further away from your…

What's rather surprising though, is the speed of it. Sure if you like everything right you will eventually hit the limit. However, it happened in 1 day !

Facebook is supposed to be this big brother that knows everything you like, knows your whole circle of friend and acquaintance even maybe your inner thoughts. But in reality, it will forget everything if you have one day out of the ordinary.

Very quickly, the monetization model that Facebook uses is basically taking over the social aspect of the website. If you like it, chances are Twitter or even Reddit will give you a much better experience. That's a bit like if Google decided that you like ads so much you only want to see that and not the search result anymore. That's certainly something that Facebook investors should look at.

Re: I ‘Liked’ Everything I Saw on Facebook for Two Days

#66

Post by protonfish »

jerf wrote: post #57
protonfish wrote: post #22

So if you like everything on Facebook, the result is political extremism and the most insipid pop culture trash. What frightens me is what if this has nothing to do with Facebook, but is instead about human nature? Does this also describe what happens to a person's life when they stop caring, when they are no longer motivated to put forth the effort to be discerning, when they give up trying to make anything but the…

"So if you like everything on Facebook, the result is political extremism and the most insipid pop culture trash." Bear in mind that "extremism" is the expected result of any reasonable algorithm that you abuse like this. If you like X, the algorithm will focus around X. If you like everything the algorithm suggests, you'll end up liking a "bigger target", and it will start suggesting stuff yet further away from your…

Your idea that it was due to his pre-existing politics could be tested if others wanted to repeat the experiment, but the fact that he ended up with both extreme left and extreme right political news seems to be disproof enough.

The expected outcome of liking everything the algorithm suggests indiscriminately should be more moderation, not more extremism. If (as a oversimplified example) you like colors so the algorithm asked if you like, blue, green, yellow or red and you select them all, one would not expect it to eventually lead to a community that believes green is the best color and all others should be destroyed.

Re: I ‘Liked’ Everything I Saw on Facebook for Two Days

#68

Post by DINKDINK »

eumenides1 wrote: post #6

I was thinking of a way to destroy my facebook account because you can't actually delete it, this is pretty much it, like everything. Also I guess you could check-in every where at once all the time. I didn't think about the collateral damage it could cause to others, which is to bombard your "friend's feeds". This is also interesting because, well you can destory facebook in this manner. If enough people are peeing…

I'm guessing there are legal requirements that prevent them from truly deleting your content.

Abusive ex-husband posts pictures of himself making threatening remarks to his wife. Other potentially incriminating documents. If he was able to delete it, then that evidence is lost. My only thought of how to preserve privacy rights is to have the "deleted"-not-deleted user files sent to a legal-compliance department and out of facebook's user database (where I have no doubt they're using the "deleted"-not-deleted user's files in analysis.

Re: I ‘Liked’ Everything I Saw on Facebook for Two Days

#69

Post by moyix »

DINKDINK wrote: post #68
eumenides1 wrote: post #6

I was thinking of a way to destroy my facebook account because you can't actually delete it, this is pretty much it, like everything. Also I guess you could check-in every where at once all the time. I didn't think about the collateral damage it could cause to others, which is to bombard your "friend's feeds". This is also interesting because, well you can destory facebook in this manner. If enough people are peeing…

I'm guessing there are legal requirements that prevent them from truly deleting your content. Abusive ex-husband posts pictures of himself making threatening remarks to his wife. Other potentially incriminating documents. If he was able to delete it, then that evidence is lost. My only thought of how to preserve privacy rights is to have the "deleted"-not-deleted user files sent to a legal-compliance department and o…

In the US, at least, I believe there is no such legal requirement unless the party doing the deleting is aware of pending legal action relevant to the documents being deleted. I'm not a lawyer though and may be wrong.

Re: I ‘Liked’ Everything I Saw on Facebook for Two Days

#70

Post by icebraining »

lucb1e wrote: post #43
icebraining wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A VPN + Incognito should be enough. Not to truly anonymize you, but probably enough to disable the personalization layers. It doesn't make economic sense to waste engineering hours and computing time trying to show ads to the 0.0001% of paranoid users, which are likely blocking them anyway, even if the data is there. Of course, there's no such thing as the vanilla user. You'll still be targeted on generic features (l…

I don't get why people recommend VPNs so much. I never bothered to look for a free one because I didn't think it'd have a decent speed and all ports opened, but doesn't Tor basically do the job?

Well, I said VPN has a catch-all for using a remote gateway. I actually use a VPS as well (with sshuttle).
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