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Reasons not to use Facebook

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Re: Reasons not to use Facebook

#251

Post by Moru »

forthefuture wrote: post #230
karmacondon wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook doesn't invade anyone's privacy. They aren't going into your house and rifling through your things. People post things on facebook because they want other people to see them. If you don't want to do that, then don't use facebook. You can't stop other people from talking about you, or from taking pictures of you or relating stories that involve you. That's always been a part of social life. If you consider th…

I'm surprised that more people don't agree with this. When the first articles came out that said facebook saves everything you type in messages and status' even if you don't press save, I stopped using facebook for anything other than nondescript one line responses to groups I'm in. It's just so easy to realize that if you don't want incredibly personal things to be saved online for eternity, don't write those things…

I can't control what others write about me.

Re: Reasons not to use Facebook

#253

Post by lotsofmangos »

Daishiman wrote: post #171
_ak wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course phones were used to track people 10 years ago. And it wasn't even a secret. Location-based services were the hot shit back then for mobile carriers (at least in Europe). Making that to be a big conspiracy to infringe upon everybody's freedom and privacy is what makes Stallman's position so ridiculous. It always sounds like the rambling of a technophobic. No, that's not entirely true. Like the rambling of an…

> Of course phones were used to track people 10 years ago. And it wasn't even a secret. Location-based services were the hot shit back then for mobile carriers (at least in Europe). Bullshit; I remember trying to instill the same point to techies 7 years ago and a majority of technically competent people would say that, while possible, is not certain . Hindsight is 20-20.

It is a radio that ids itself with local towers. How would you build a cellphone that you could not track easily?

Re: Reasons not to use Facebook

#254

Post by Morgawr »

karmacondon wrote: post #227
SeanDav wrote: post #218

There seems to have been a sea change in opinion of many HN posters here, especially among the more recent visitors to HN. A couple of years ago Facebook was considered by many here to be an invasion of privacy and just not worth the effort. That general opinion seems to have changed for some. A lot of newer posters seem to be of the opinion that lack of privacy is a cost worth paying for convenience and will apologi…

Facebook doesn't invade anyone's privacy. They aren't going into your house and rifling through your things. People post things on facebook because they want other people to see them. If you don't want to do that, then don't use facebook. You can't stop other people from talking about you, or from taking pictures of you or relating stories that involve you. That's always been a part of social life. If you consider th…

I'm not saying I disagree with you here, because what you said is entirely correct, however there have been various instances in the past of social network companies tracking people with the usage of cookies (those "share on X" buttons every website has) even outside their own domain.

And on top of that, you have companies like Facebook doing data analysis on your personal aggregate data and then feeding it to advertisement companies even without your direct consent (although it is implied, either by the user's ignorance or negligence). This is obviously true for other companies as well, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc etc.

Obviously, the main problem here is not the company, it's the people using the company and the peer pressure on everybody else to join in. But that's another story.

Re: Reasons not to use Facebook

#255

Post by sseveran »

pckspcks wrote: post #247
karmacondon wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook doesn't invade anyone's privacy. They aren't going into your house and rifling through your things. People post things on facebook because they want other people to see them. If you don't want to do that, then don't use facebook. You can't stop other people from talking about you, or from taking pictures of you or relating stories that involve you. That's always been a part of social life. If you consider th…

There is no way to not use Facebook. Let me repeat that: THERE IS NO WAY TO NOT USE FACEBOOK. Everyone's photos: Mine, yours, Stallmans, get posted to Facebook, annotated with our names (which is increasingly becoming easy enough to do with ML -- the human component will increasingly decline). If at least one of your friends uses Facebook, Facebook has profile information on you. Stallman doesn't have a Facebook acco…

Uh...Yes there is. I don't have a facebook account. I did for 8 years. Its possible my life would be different if I used it, but I suspect not.

Re: Reasons not to use Facebook

#256

Post by throwawaykf05 »

spain wrote: post #98
paulsecwhatt wrote: post #45

I honestly don't understand why people value Stallman's opinions on these matters so highly. I completely disagree with him on essentially everything he writes about these topics. Granted, he's an incredible programmer who contributed immensely to the development of our modern operating systems and the tools we use, and people here love to bring that up ("what - you DON'T KNOW WHO STALLMAN IS? SHAME? HOW DARE YOU CRI…

>Just like I wouldn't listen to Usain Bolt if he were trying to teach me the biological mechanisms behind doping, I can't see why Stallman's opinion is considered so correct in these matters. That's a false analogy. Stallman has been fighting for our digital rights for ages and has actually been right most of the time. That doesn't make him right all the time, but it does make me more inclined to believe he isn't jus…

> has actually been right most of the time

That is a matter of opinion, and I think that is where most disagreement stems from. In the HN echo chamber it may seem like everyone agrees he was right, but the rest of the world is not nearly as much in agreement.

Re: Reasons not to use Facebook

#257

Post by maxerickson »

lotsofmangos wrote: post #253
Daishiman wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Of course phones were used to track people 10 years ago. And it wasn't even a secret. Location-based services were the hot shit back then for mobile carriers (at least in Europe). Bullshit; I remember trying to instill the same point to techies 7 years ago and a majority of technically competent people would say that, while possible, is not certain . Hindsight is 20-20.

It is a radio that ids itself with local towers. How would you build a cellphone that you could not track easily?

Yeah, in 2000, after a car accident, I was surprised that the 911 dispatcher couldn't locate me using my cell phone.

I guess people are talking about 2 different things though, one discussion is about the implications of a radio (you and others are talking about this) and the other is about government capacity to gather the information revealed by using a cell phone.

Re: Reasons not to use Facebook

#258

Post by higherpurpose »

karmacondon wrote: post #227
SeanDav wrote: post #218

There seems to have been a sea change in opinion of many HN posters here, especially among the more recent visitors to HN. A couple of years ago Facebook was considered by many here to be an invasion of privacy and just not worth the effort. That general opinion seems to have changed for some. A lot of newer posters seem to be of the opinion that lack of privacy is a cost worth paying for convenience and will apologi…

Facebook doesn't invade anyone's privacy. They aren't going into your house and rifling through your things. People post things on facebook because they want other people to see them. If you don't want to do that, then don't use facebook. You can't stop other people from talking about you, or from taking pictures of you or relating stories that involve you. That's always been a part of social life. If you consider th…

Facebook absolutely violates people's privacy. But you're conflating Facebook's privacy violations with people's "over-sharing" on Facebook. But those two are actually not the same.

Let me give you an example:

1) Friend shares when he went to the toilet. Is that a privacy violation by Facebook? If it's public, then it's not. If it was private, and then Facebook makes it public by changing the default settings, as it's done many times before, then that would be a privacy violation. But forget about pooping. What if you get drunk and post your drunk pictures to your friends and then Facebook makes them public so your boss (or future boss) can see them?

2) Here's a much worse example than that. Facebook is tracking people through the Like button without them even clicking on it. They never gave Facebook the permission to do that (and I mean in a very "opt-in" way, not just by automatically agreeing with Facebook's ToS). Even worse than that, Facebook has been caught tracking people who don't even have a Facebook account and building "shadow profiles" of them. How is THAT not a privacy violation?

So I think people who say "Facebook doesn't violate people's privacy - they just choose to overshare", are either oversimplifying all the issues and conflating them into a convenient one, or are not too educated about the topic.

Oh and if you want even more real examples, Facebook has just been found to infringe people's privacy in Europe, where the privacy right actually exists, unlike in US, where "digital privacy" seems to be treated as an abstract almost non-existent thing, and the laws protecting it are orders of magnitude weaker than the laws protecting "physical world" privacy - even though there shouldn't be any difference between say law enforcement getting your printed pictures and getting your digital pictures:

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/23/facebooks-...

Re: Reasons not to use Facebook

#259

Post by Istof »

pckspcks wrote: post #247
karmacondon wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook doesn't invade anyone's privacy. They aren't going into your house and rifling through your things. People post things on facebook because they want other people to see them. If you don't want to do that, then don't use facebook. You can't stop other people from talking about you, or from taking pictures of you or relating stories that involve you. That's always been a part of social life. If you consider th…

There is no way to not use Facebook. Let me repeat that: THERE IS NO WAY TO NOT USE FACEBOOK. Everyone's photos: Mine, yours, Stallmans, get posted to Facebook, annotated with our names (which is increasingly becoming easy enough to do with ML -- the human component will increasingly decline). If at least one of your friends uses Facebook, Facebook has profile information on you. Stallman doesn't have a Facebook acco…

I agree with you but I think that you used the wrong term... "use" should probably be replaced with "be cataloged by"... for example they do face recognition on all pictures, they harvest contact information from other people installing the FB app, they collect non-facebook browsing information using the "share to facebook" code that might get linked to your real identity somehow (third party sharing of information between companies?) even if you aren't "using" Facebook.

Re: Reasons not to use Facebook

#260

Post by msh »

anigbrowl wrote: post #108
Frondo wrote: post #33

My problem with essays like this is that they don't address the more critical underlying point: most people don't recognize privacy as a human right, and most people don't realize why privacy is important and worth protecting. To most people, "if you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide" sounds reasonable . That's the deeper problem at work here. With more people on board to why privacy matters, articles l…

~400 million people in EU disagree with you; that's one jurisdiction where privacy is a human right, and this is not just some abstract concept but the basis of legislation you can invoke to force companies to cough up the data they have on you and/or demand it be scrubbed from their databases, even if you originally shared it voluntarily.

Well a lot of people in the eu, maybe even most, still buy into the "if you have nothing to hide" argument. That's at least my personal experience in Scandinavia and the UK, might be different in other countries.
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