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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

#161

Post by dx034 »

jdietrich wrote: post #111
rabboRubble wrote: post #78

I lived through a major natural disaster that left me an evacuee for months. Facebook's safety check is the only reason I haven't killed my account and I've said this before in prior comments here on Hacker News. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14412146 Thank god the author hasn't lived through an event where everybody you know is affected by the event. The ability to say "I'm okay", say it once, and have everyb…

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…

> 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%.

I live in London but have friends around the world that haven't visited me yet and don't know where I live. After an event like yesterday I get a lot of messages asking if I'm ok, so using the safety check can help even though there was no remote risk that I could've been affected.

I think it's reasonable that the safety check area is that large, it helps for friends/family who don't know exactly where you are.

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

#162

Post by aaron-lebo »

jdietrich wrote: post #88
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…

Imagine if one-fifth of the entire global population read the same newspaper every morning. Imagine if that same newspaper also operated the largest espionage network in the history of humanity. Facebook doesn't receive nearly enough scrutiny and criticism. Western governments have been completely blindsided by the immense power that lies in the hands of Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook have a near-monopoly on social media…

Very well said. Hopefully more people will adopt this kind of skepticism and realism about the entities that affect our daily lives.

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

#163

Post by dx034 »

jdietrich wrote: post #88
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…

Imagine if one-fifth of the entire global population read the same newspaper every morning. Imagine if that same newspaper also operated the largest espionage network in the history of humanity. Facebook doesn't receive nearly enough scrutiny and criticism. Western governments have been completely blindsided by the immense power that lies in the hands of Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook have a near-monopoly on social media…

> Imagine if one-fifth of the entire global population read the same newspaper every morning. Imagine if that same newspaper also operated the largest espionage network in the history of humanity.

That's not a valid comparison since Facebook doesn't publish their own content. It can promote unfiltered news (that often turn out not to be true) but it's not as if the same news story would be read by 1bn people each day.

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

#164

Post by dx034 »

sergiotapia wrote: post #127
ghughes wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Probably because people in your area often celebrate birthdays there. You would've seen it without the conversation as well. And it was one of probably 100 ads you and your wife saw over the days, you didn't notice the ones that were targeted badly.

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

#165

Post by colordrops »

dx034 wrote: post #163
jdietrich wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine if one-fifth of the entire global population read the same newspaper every morning. Imagine if that same newspaper also operated the largest espionage network in the history of humanity. Facebook doesn't receive nearly enough scrutiny and criticism. Western governments have been completely blindsided by the immense power that lies in the hands of Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook have a near-monopoly on social media…

> Imagine if one-fifth of the entire global population read the same newspaper every morning. Imagine if that same newspaper also operated the largest espionage network in the history of humanity. That's not a valid comparison since Facebook doesn't publish their own content. It can promote unfiltered news (that often turn out not to be true) but it's not as if the same news story would be read by 1bn people each day…

You are missing the entire point of the analogy.

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

#166

Post by dx034 »

fratlas wrote: post #50
kevinwang wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

are you serious? Which app/phone?

We both had our phones (one iPhone, one android) and macbooks on with facebook (web/app) open.

With facebook web it's pretty easy to say as you have to give permission via your browser. Otherwise, for Chrome, you'd have to assume that Google works with Facebook to help them make more money. Rather unlikely.

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

#167

Post by duncan_bayne »

jbigelow76 wrote: post #17
duncan_bayne wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm busy shutting down a throwaway FB account that I used to sign up to Spotify back in the day. They don't make it easy. The process, according to Spotify support, is: + Create a new Spotify account + Contact Spotify support to migrate playlists etc. across. + Cancel my paid subscription on the old account. + Create a new paid subscription on the new account. + Migrate my family members onto the new account. This is…

Was there a time, and if so was this throwaway FB account part of it, when you could only sign up to Spotify with a FB account? I was a paying member of Spotify for about two years and my account wasn't tied to FB but Spotify had already been around for a few years prior.

I'm unsure - I think there was, based on forum chatter. Certainly if there was another way to sign up when I did, I was unaware of it.

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

#168

Post by ianamartin »

praneshp wrote: post #104
Analemma_ wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zuckerberg said plainly that people who trust him are "dumb fucks", so I have what I think is the natural response and don't trust him. It's not complicated.

I assume you also expect people who commit crimes to rot in jail forever, and do not support rehabilitation instead. Because the dumb fucks comment was in 2004. Edit: (In case you nitpick my analogy) I guess you would not hire a person that was jailed in the past, because you cannot trust them.

I've been to jail, and I'm a felon.

People still hire me and trust me because I fucking owned up to my mistake, paid my duty to society, made amends, and have never repeated that mistake.

To my knowledge, Zuckerberg has never so much as apologized for being a stalker or an assclown, let alone done anything to make up for it.

It's one thing to give some support to someone who admits they did something bad. It's entirely different to give support to someone who has never done so.

Most people are not all that inclined to give you a shot after you've done time for a felony and paid huge fines, and done everything in your power to make things better for the people you hurt.

It's hard to get a job. Every application is a ton of effort even more than normal because I have to disclose things, explain the situation, my guilt, my response, and what I've done since to make sure it doesn't happen again.

But I've been, thankfully, able to find people who are willing to trust me enough to keep me employed.

People are even less inclined to cut you some slack when you never even tried to apologize, make amends, and keep acting the same way. If I tried to treat my felony the way Zuckerberg treats his fuckups, no one would ever hire me for anything at all. And rightly so.

There's a lot to be said for admitting that you screwed up and working hard to make things better. Zuck has done neither. And I don't care if it was when he was 19. The prosecutors didn't care how old I was at the time.

Being a fuckhead isn't a criminal offense, but that doesn't mean that there should be a statute of limitations on it. Once a fuckhead, always a fuckhead until proven different. And when your platform is still a privacy fuckhead thing, I'm even less inclined to forgive you and pretend that everything is okay.

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

#169

Post by aaron-lebo »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #138
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…

But Facebook isn't a country. It's a free (as in beer) on-line service. It's completely opt-in, and its only claim to you is the strength of its network effect - which, as history shows, is something very fragile both on the local and global scale. What you're afraid of is evil CEOs doing mind control, not despotism.

I think Mark is the mostly benevolent dictator of 1.9 billion people who are using his service for various reasons.

If you were to show people exactly what Facebook knows about you and can figure out about you as well as the practices they engage in, many people would not use the service, but they don't know these things because Facebook keeps people ignorant. It's not in Facebook's best interests to have people know.

I can't blame Facebook for that, but when they are incompetent it impacts everyone else. I didn't opt in to racists getting jazzed up and going on killing sprees that they put on Facebook Live because of feeds that are mostly opaque and first and foremost designed to make money, and I didn't opt in to social media creating a generation of narcissists, but we all get to experience that.

I don't even believe Mark's evil, but when you have that much power, you have a ton of responsibility to use that properly and Facebook's response has mostly been to say sorry when they fuck up. There's nothing you can do to curtail that power because there are few entities that can actually sanction them.

That's scary and it's dangerous for society. It's the biggest social experiment ever conducted and there are no rules other than the ones that Zuckerberg makes.

If human existence is a long series of lucky rolls of the dice, is it really a good idea to roll the dice on a single individual who got lucky at 21, who now benevolently or not decides the algorithms that determine what almost 2 billion people see? That's nuts and it is something of our own making. Nobody did or would opt into that because people ultimately like to have agency over their own lives.

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

#170

Post by seanp2k2 »

fratlas wrote: post #160
HalfwayToDice wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Hacker…

Not wearing my tin foil hat, just reporting what I found when I tried to test it myself. Only our computers on the router, had never googled the topics.

See my updated post just above. I just tried it with my Nexus 7 and saw nothing around mic uploads. Install Fiddler and MITM your Facebook app and repeat your experiment. I'm very curious to see if you find something different from what I found.
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