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Facebook’s Surveillance Machine

nytimes.com

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Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine

#121

Post by roadbeats »

gotofritz wrote: post #101
roadbeats wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the point of staying in contact only in Facebook ? If someone is important for me, I'd be in contact with them in real life or another platform. Also, lots of people seem to be unaware of that you can delete your Facebook account. They don't have a link to the delete page from settings menu though. It's here: https://facebook.com/account/delete

This is one of those 'soooo obvious but untrue' statements I use it to keep in touch with far away or unimportant people. Second degree aunts, ex schoolmates, etc. Without FB it's a nightmare keeping in touch the few times I want to (people change email addresses all the time). Also, many groups are useful

You can stay in touch with relatives via mobile phone. You can text them and ask how they do. Personally, I created a Whatsapp group for my extended family. Some of them don't use Facebook by the way.

It doesn't make any sense to complain about Facebook's business model and also not want to sacrifice a worthless personal account noone cares about.

We choose what we use and they choose how they make money. You can expect them to be ethical but they have no responsibilities to meet your expectations, as they have never promised to be a platform that respects privacy.

Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine

#122

Post by mark_l_watson »

fortythirteen wrote: post #115
bambax wrote: post #66

> Facebook makes money, in other words, by profiling us and then selling our attention to advertisers, political actors and others. These are Facebook’s true customers, whom it works hard to please. And you just figured this out now? This is like saying "wow, who knew we would get so fat by feeding only on pizza, hamburgers and coke, aren't those companies evil". Well, yes, companies are evil. They don't work for you…

> Should we all just leave Facebook? That may sound attractive but it is not a viable solution. Leaving not just Facebook, but Twitter, Instagram, and all other social media of its ilk is an extremely viable solution. It's like quitting smoking. For the first month or so you feel off-kilter, but, after a while, you can't imagine going back. Life is quantifiably better without it. Realizing that I don't need up to the…

Right on. Another thing that works for me is not watching any news at all on TV except for occasionally NPR. Instead, I like the text only feeds of NPR and CNN, and I try not to read those every day.

I do still look at Facebook once a week for about 10 minutes. I do so in a private browser tab, and routinely try to delete FB cookies.

Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine

#123

Post by inanutshellus »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #116

Better than average article about long term dangers posed by Internet super-companies like FB and Google. The author is a professor of information and library science. The only way, I think, that we in the USA can solve this problem is to pass user rights and privacy laws similar to those in Europe. Given our corrupt political system this will be difficult but I think possible if enough individuals keep contributing…

> Given our corrupt political system

This is an unhelpful "truism" that encourages us all to lose faith in a system entirely built on trust. It's a sentence easy to bandy about--especially unqualified--and impossible to counter (in any government).

It also fails to bolster your argument. Your post without those words would be just as effective.

Please reconsider.

Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine

#124

Post by hellofunk »

anonu wrote: post #85
hellofunk wrote: post #31

I wish quite badly that the benefit of deactivating FB would outweigh the inconvenience, but FB has become such a mainstay that I'd lose touch with lots of people I really have no other way of contacting. I could say "good riddance," if there is no other way to contact them then perhaps they are not important enough to my life, but that's just not true. Or what about all the local forums (FB groups) in my city that h…

What happened to good ol' emails? Serious question... Can't you organize amongst friends with emails? I hate to suggest Slack as well... But there are alternatives is the point... What about Meetup.com for bigger groups?

Email addresses come and go all the time, get changed, deactivated, or people start using different emails and never check the old ones. But FB messages are always seen. Email is just not a reliable long-term "address" for someone.

Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine

#125

Post by thanatropism »

bambax wrote: post #66

> Facebook makes money, in other words, by profiling us and then selling our attention to advertisers, political actors and others. These are Facebook’s true customers, whom it works hard to please. And you just figured this out now? This is like saying "wow, who knew we would get so fat by feeding only on pizza, hamburgers and coke, aren't those companies evil". Well, yes, companies are evil. They don't work for you…

This is one of the better side-effects of Trump.

We wouldn´t be having this conversation if Hillary or Bernie had used these powerful resources to tilt the odds and get elected.

Because almost no one with a platform likes Trump, it gets exposed. If this happened under Obama (like, uh, Assange and Snowden and Manning and massive data centers in Utah happened), it would be completely swept under the rug in favor of a feel-good progress narrative that's completely impossible in current conditions.

---

Maybe this was Thiel's true play: a shit government is a watched government, a hostilized-against government, a true Libertarian's government.

Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine

#126

Post by whoisjuan »

roadbeats wrote: post #121
gotofritz wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of those 'soooo obvious but untrue' statements I use it to keep in touch with far away or unimportant people. Second degree aunts, ex schoolmates, etc. Without FB it's a nightmare keeping in touch the few times I want to (people change email addresses all the time). Also, many groups are useful

You can stay in touch with relatives via mobile phone. You can text them and ask how they do. Personally, I created a Whatsapp group for my extended family. Some of them don't use Facebook by the way. It doesn't make any sense to complain about Facebook's business model and also not want to sacrifice a worthless personal account noone cares about. We choose what we use and they choose how they make money. You can exp…

"I created a Whatsapp group for my extended family"... You're just changing one poison for another one. Don't forget who owns Whatsapp.

Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine

#127

Post by hellofunk »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #98
hellofunk wrote: post #31

I wish quite badly that the benefit of deactivating FB would outweigh the inconvenience, but FB has become such a mainstay that I'd lose touch with lots of people I really have no other way of contacting. I could say "good riddance," if there is no other way to contact them then perhaps they are not important enough to my life, but that's just not true. Or what about all the local forums (FB groups) in my city that h…

Are you unable to ask those people for alternative contact information?

Many dozens or even hundreds of people, not to mention the thousands on the groups that are helpful strangers? And even if I got all that contact information, email and other contact stuff changes pretty quickly, easily a lot of it would got out of date within a year or two. But people keep their FB accounts active so you can always contact them through there.

Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine

#128

Post by thanatropism »

capnrefsmmat wrote: post #114
bambax wrote: post #66

> Facebook makes money, in other words, by profiling us and then selling our attention to advertisers, political actors and others. These are Facebook’s true customers, whom it works hard to please. And you just figured this out now? This is like saying "wow, who knew we would get so fat by feeding only on pizza, hamburgers and coke, aren't those companies evil". Well, yes, companies are evil. They don't work for you…

> And you just figured this out now? This is like saying "wow, who knew we would get so fat by feeding only on pizza, hamburgers and coke, aren't those companies evil". No. Zeynep Tufekci (the author of the article) has written about this for years, including a book about social media in political movements ( Twitter and Tear Gas ), a popular TED talk ( https://www.ted.com/talks/zeynep_tufekci_we_re_building_a_dy...…

I just said this in another comment but it so belongs here, I'll try to say it in just one sentence: there was a feel-good narrative to Obama that's just impossible now.

Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine

#129

Post by gambiting »

anonu wrote: post #85
hellofunk wrote: post #31

I wish quite badly that the benefit of deactivating FB would outweigh the inconvenience, but FB has become such a mainstay that I'd lose touch with lots of people I really have no other way of contacting. I could say "good riddance," if there is no other way to contact them then perhaps they are not important enough to my life, but that's just not true. Or what about all the local forums (FB groups) in my city that h…

What happened to good ol' emails? Serious question... Can't you organize amongst friends with emails? I hate to suggest Slack as well... But there are alternatives is the point... What about Meetup.com for bigger groups?

I only go on facebook to talk to other car enthusiasts for a particular brand. Some of them are on some online forums, but most aren't. They are also not my friends - so I don't really want to share emails. The group is also non-English speaking - so services like Meetup or Slack are out of the question. It's a tough one. I think reverting back to standard post-based online forums is the best, but they have more friction and they are hard to discover for some.

Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine

#130

Post by rahoulb »

Azeralthefallen wrote: post #74
rovek wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A major part of Facebook's culpability here is that they knew for 2 years that tens of millions of their users were being profiled as part of a political propaganda war on their platform and their response was practically nothing. Edit: FB also knew the data was collected under an academic license and was being processed, outside that license, for financial gain.

I guess my question is from a security standpoint, how do you prevent something like this if you were facebook? Do you ask any company who does a huge number of API requests requesting peoples friends lists? To verify how they are using the data? How do you actually confirm they are doing what they said? According to the article only ~200k people installed the app and consented. Unless there was an exploit, you get a…

As I understand it, originally the Facebook API allowed you to access friends of friends - hence the millions of records. They changed this a couple of years ago (but apparently after CA had accessed the data).

It was also against the terms of service to download and store the information retrieved from the API. They also changed this many years ago, in the name of developer convenience.

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