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Facebook’s Safety Check is a stress-inducing flip of social norms

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Re: Facebook’s Safety Check is a stress-inducing flip of social norms

#121

Post by toomanybeersies »

bbarn wrote: post #7

I've said it before here, and I'll say it every time it's relevant: Stop using Facebook. Start telling your friends and family to do the same. As the "smart computer person" in many people's lives, you can be the voice they need to hear.

For all its flaws, there's nothing that can actually replace the functions of Facebook, especially if you have a lot of friends and family all over the world.

It's a centralised platform where I can message almost everyone I know, and put people in group chats.

It's also very useful to be able to tell at a glance where people are, and get updates as to what people are doing or where they are going, and also to be able let other people know where I am or what I am doing.

It does have its fair share of issues, like too many posts from pages showing up, or people tagging other people in posts showing up. It also has its ethical issues, but for me they are outweighed by the power and convenience of the platform.

Re: Facebook’s Safety Check is a stress-inducing flip of social norms

#122

Post by seanp2k2 »

Cyph0n wrote: post #118
King-Aaron wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not sure I would consider 6 miles a 'small area.' If you're like me, living in Australia... 6 miles is considerably tiny :P

In the context of the London fire, it's definitely not a small area. A similar fire in, say, Sydney wouldn't magically make a 6 mile radius "tiny".

This. It seems pretty irresponsible for Facebook to be running this out in the open with an algorithm which is clearly not doing very well. It should have human approval for each "safety check" event and use that to tune the algos until they're VERY confident that it's doing the right thing. I'm guessing that the radius is so large in order to catch people who might have gone / been in the area. I do wonder if they even have enough tracking / loc data to ensure that they'd pick up a useful % of affected individuals. It seems like they went for "cast a wide net", but in this case it has quickly-diminishing returns.

Re: Facebook’s Safety Check is a stress-inducing flip of social norms

#123

Post by rabboRubble »

bogomipz wrote: post #116
rabboRubble wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do you know they haven't? Just because you have and feel one way doesn't mean they haven't. Point taken. That said, his entire essay reads to me as a man unaffected by hardship. > I'm not sure I would consider 6 miles a 'small area.' Point taken. That said, let's compare the area affected in New York City on 9/11 to the London apartment fire. WTC's disaster would have benefited from FB's safety check feature. T…

>"Had FB's safety check feature been around in those days, I think that particular situation would not have been so chaotic for the families." Would it have helped the families of first the first responders like NYFD/NYPD/EMTs? Are first responders supposed to take time to "check in" on FB? Would it have been any less chaotic for their families? And honestly I find it really disturbing to compare tragedies, especiall…

I was comparing geographic size, the 6 miles referenced by the poster above me. Both events were in a small geographic area.

I guess I feel I have the right to make the comparison. I wasn't there in NYC, but I had "some skin in the game" on 9/11 so to speak. From that experience, and from later ones, I can put myself into the shoes of somebody wondering if their loved one was mixed up in the London fire. To them, it doesn't matter that the fire affected only one apartment building in London.

Re: Facebook’s Safety Check is a stress-inducing flip of social norms

#124

Post by thinkfurther »

taneq wrote: post #86
bogomipz wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Ok, I had to make a throwaway for this because apparently its a heated debate." I am curious why do you feel the need to make a throwaway account because something is a "heated debate."?

Can't risk losing internet points, can we? Although it's also somewhat an indictment of the chilling effect of online lynch mobs on open discussion.

It is also an indictment of Facebook, where such a thing is not even (supposed to be possible).

I had an account for ten years, my real name from day 1, my real pictures from day one, lots of RL friends plus friends I basically casually made on Facebook. I had a great time posting about whatever and hating on Facebook, until one day it greets me with "we have to confirm your identity", because some people who surely did not show their ID clicked "fake profile" enough to basically shut me up. It's not even paranoia that makes me not upload a photo of my ID (with everything but name blacked out), it's the principle. I do have email or phone numbers of my close friends, I don't need FB, but for pretending to be inclusive it's pretty fucking sinister.

It's like I wouldn't hate a piece of chewing gum per se. But when it's advertised as a full meal it becomes something entirely differently.

For those who can't stand others complaining about FB, strap yourself in, I can't stand you still using it, and unless FB changes drastically, that will remain so. I'm Momo, you're the people who got abducted into day cares. And hey, I even went inside with you just so we could keep playing. What a waste of time that was.

Re: Facebook’s Safety Check is a stress-inducing flip of social norms

#125

Post by HalfwayToDice »

fratlas wrote: post #29
whatevthrow31 wrote: post #20

Ok, I had to make a throwaway for this because apparently its a heated debate. Why does everything Facebook do have to be so heavily criticized? Safety Check is a wonderful feature. If I remember correctly, it started off as an internal hackathon project that got turned into a full feature. They get shit if they turn it on (here), and if they don't turn it on (past tragedies where they failed to turn it on). Why does…

I agree with you up until the mic comment. I ran a few tests with friends. We talked about very obscure topics repeatedly (and nothing else) that we would otherwise would have never messaged, and after scrolling 2 mins, targeted ads appeared for those topics. Happened for multiple topics.

It embarrasses me to see such conspiratorial nonsense on this website.

There are many reasons why such things happen: coincidence, someone google the topic from the same router IP address, ad tracking on Googled websites, etc etc

The idea that one of the worlds largest companies would risk their entire business by secretly recording their users for ad revenue is absurd on almost every level.

Yet some people on HackerNew, a forum that self-selects to a highly educated/intelligent part of the community actually believes it.

It's mind-boggling.

Re: Facebook’s Safety Check is a stress-inducing flip of social norms

#126

Post by simongray »

idibidiartists wrote: post #62
aaron-lebo wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't just have lots of users, they have more users than any country in the history of the world (that's 1.9 billion monthly users). Therefore there are potentially massive, world-changing consequences to everything they do, and even those who don't use it can't opt out of the effects. Do you really feel like a non-democratic oligarchy (or more inflammatory language, a dictator) should have that much power? edit…

China has more people than Facebook has users.

China has just shy of 1.4 billion people. That is not more people than Facebook has users according to this statistic》 https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-net...

Re: Facebook’s Safety Check is a stress-inducing flip of social norms

#127

Post by sergiotapia »

ghughes wrote: post #65
fratlas wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you up until the mic comment. I ran a few tests with friends. We talked about very obscure topics repeatedly (and nothing else) that we would otherwise would have never messaged, and after scrolling 2 mins, targeted ads appeared for those topics. Happened for multiple topics.

I just don't buy this theory until I see some evidence. It wouldn't be hard for a talented individual to reverse engineer the Facebook client app to find out if it's either a) continuously recording and uploading raw audio to their servers, or b) continuously recording and locally processing audio before sending information about the content to their servers. Until I see an analysis of their code that indicates eithe…

I had it happen to me too. Why would I lie about something like this? This is my real account, I'm a real guy.

My wife and I were talking about celebrating my kids birthday party at Arcade Foobar. A day later she started seeing ads on Facebook about Arcade Foobar.

It's grotesque and one of the many reasons why my wife and I no longer have facebook accounts.

Re: Facebook’s Safety Check is a stress-inducing flip of social norms

#128

Post by jfoutz »

btown wrote: post #117
jdietrich wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About 500 people were directly endangered by this incident. The Safety Check alert seems to extend well beyond Greater London, so at least 9 million people. That gives us an approximate false positive rate of 99.995%. Is that reasonable or proportionate? Does it actually provide useful information? Is it likely to quell unfounded fears and provide genuine reassurance? As tragic as this incident was, it affected a sin…

I have to disagree. "Not safe" became the default as soon as the concept of social media hit; if there's the slightest chance you may have been affected by an incident, anyone who would check your social postings to see if there was any "word from you" would assume the worst in the absence of such a posting. The human mind is evolved for both empathy and "what-if" scenarios, but not for probability; it will snap to "…

That's not an unreasonable stance. I lean the other way. I think, that there is an opportunity, if not a requirement, for fine grained tuning. FB knows a lot about it's users, and can do a better job of predicting who needs the i'm safe button.

Clearly there's a geographic component. Someone in the area, around the time, or in the area regularly. There's probably a fancy combination of, how bad the event was, how widely the event was reported, how close you are to friends, are you traveling to the area, and a bunch of other factors.

Clearly they can handle it dynamically. If you get the "are you ok?" messages, they can add you to likely events, and offer the i'm safe. They can make it easy to add yourself to a disaster event.

There are a lot of people in London. They have the social graph, coupled with location and messaging data. They can do a better job at targeting.

Again, i respect your opinion, but your needs, and my needs are different. I think they can do a better job at meeting both of our needs.

Re: Facebook’s Safety Check is a stress-inducing flip of social norms

#129

Post by seanp2k2 »

ghughes wrote: post #65
fratlas wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you up until the mic comment. I ran a few tests with friends. We talked about very obscure topics repeatedly (and nothing else) that we would otherwise would have never messaged, and after scrolling 2 mins, targeted ads appeared for those topics. Happened for multiple topics.

I just don't buy this theory until I see some evidence. It wouldn't be hard for a talented individual to reverse engineer the Facebook client app to find out if it's either a) continuously recording and uploading raw audio to their servers, or b) continuously recording and locally processing audio before sending information about the content to their servers. Until I see an analysis of their code that indicates eithe…

The tools are there for you to try it:

https://www.charlesproxy.com/documentation/faqs/using-charle...

http://docs.telerik.com/fiddler/Configure-Fiddler/Tasks/Conf...

You could probably also do it with the emulator. You may need to do something like https://www.bettercap.org/blog/sslstripping-and-hsts-bypass/ or it could be even harder: http://docs.mitmproxy.org/en/stable/certinstall.html#certifi...

There are of course ways around this: https://serializethoughts.com/2016/08/18/bypassing-ssl-pinni...

If you need some more hints: https://github.com/ac-pm/SSLUnpinning_Xposed

https://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=3034811

https://eaton-works.com/2016/07/31/reverse-engineering-and-r...

If you do this, please write it up. I'm sure that many people would be interested in this research if it hasn't already been done.

EDIT: In the spirit of POC||GTFO, I got curious and did it myself. I don't see any evidence of any mic uploads. The worst thing I see is it posting your current location. Here's a screenshot of the typical stuff I was seeing (this particular one is for the messenger portion of the app, and it looks like it's pulling in assets for stickers. I have the Pusheen pack because it's hella adorbs): https://i.imgur.com/dVekldx.png

It's POSTing to graph.facebook.com as you scroll to get more data. It's just JSON and pretty easy to figure out what's going on. I just followed http://docs.telerik.com/fiddler/Configure-Fiddler/Tasks/Conf... . I guess they're not pinning their certs, at least on my Nexus 7 and the version of the FB app that I used (v26.0.0.22.16 on Android 5.1.1 on the 2012 Nexus 7, since that's what I had laying around to mess with easily).

This literally took about 5 minutes to set up and get working. I encourage those curious to try it and see for themselves. I just read http://www.portero.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-gucci-infogra... aloud (I never shop for Gucci handbags, so seeing ads for them would be the tell) to test. I'm not some forensics expert but again, looks like nothing I wouldn't expect, definitely not uploading audio streams to Facebook as I'm speaking or +/- 5 minutes. Again though, check it out for yourself.

EDIT 2: I searched for a few unique strings from some of the decoded JSON my N7 was sending to FB and found https://github.com/macliu010/android_facebook_decomplied , which should be interesting for those following along at home.

Re: Facebook’s Safety Check is a stress-inducing flip of social norms

#130

Post by jdietrich »

btown wrote: post #117
jdietrich wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About 500 people were directly endangered by this incident. The Safety Check alert seems to extend well beyond Greater London, so at least 9 million people. That gives us an approximate false positive rate of 99.995%. Is that reasonable or proportionate? Does it actually provide useful information? Is it likely to quell unfounded fears and provide genuine reassurance? As tragic as this incident was, it affected a sin…

I have to disagree. "Not safe" became the default as soon as the concept of social media hit; if there's the slightest chance you may have been affected by an incident, anyone who would check your social postings to see if there was any "word from you" would assume the worst in the absence of such a posting. The human mind is evolved for both empathy and "what-if" scenarios, but not for probability; it will snap to "…

Safety Check wasn't a carefully planned and considered effort by Facebook, it was a hackathon project that went into production. There are many other ways that Facebook could have responded to that issue. Given the size, influence and profitability of Facebook, Safety Check seems extraordinarily half-assed.

I'm not in any way convinced that Safety Check does actually dampen fear. It provides information of very poor quality ("not marked as safe" or "safe") in a very poorly targeted way, without any kind of meaningful context. That kind of uncertainty is rarely reassuring.

If Facebook took the issue seriously, they could easily address many of these shortcomings. They could provide this kind of information in a relevant and contextual way, counteracting the cognitive biases that lead us to worry. They could deeply examine how social media can stoke fears and engineer reassurance into the fabric of their network, rather than bolting on a crude alert system that was hacked together in a weekend. I doubt that they will, because fear and misinformation is clearly very profitable for them in all sorts of ways.

I'm reminded of the AMBER Alert system - a well-meaning but highly ineffectual response that has greatly contributed to the climate of fear.

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0887403407302332 http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0734016808316778

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