Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Stalking Your Friends with Facebook Messenger

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 190 posts

Re: Stalking Your Friends with Facebook Messenger

#161

Post by discardorama »

jsaxton86 wrote: post #109
CookieMon wrote: post #91

I use this facebook app now: http://i.imgur.com/Iyd43n6.png (Android) It's either a well written FB app, or a no-permissions jail around Facebook's own hybrid-app/mobile-site. GPS no longer turns on, and messaging works for me.

If you root your android device, you can install AppOps, which allows you to toggle the individual permissions on every application.

> If you root your android device,...

Not to hijack a thread, but: this is is why Apple's iOS is such a compelling case. They make it so easy to control access to the location/microphone/etc. in one tab: Settings -> Privacy -> Location Services

I don't know what Google is thinking, but given the current snooping climate you think they'd err on the side of the customer... but they don't.

Re: Stalking Your Friends with Facebook Messenger

#162

Post by LLWM »

pdkl95 wrote: post #135
kosei wrote: post #4

I'm not sure what value add this serves as an opt-out solution rather than opt-in. For people who have a strong desire to show their location, sure. But what possible reason could Facebook have to make this readily accessible to anyone you chat with on an opt-out only basis?

They could give the user a button or something to send their location into to whomever they are currently chatting with (to one person in person-to-person chat, or to the group in multi-user chat. This would give the user complete control over their data while still allowing most of the utility. Of course, this wouldn't give facebook a detailed map of their user's movements.

As long as you don't manually revoke the app's permission to know about your location after you send it, what would stop them from building that map?

Re: Stalking Your Friends with Facebook Messenger

#163

Post by untog »

Fuxy wrote: post #33
paganel wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on the culture. When I hear "I'll be late 5 minutes" that usually means 10 or 15, "10 minutes late" means an actual 20 or 30 minutes, while everything higher than 20 minutes could mean an actual hour. I live in Romania.

That's why i set myself a rule of whenever somebody says I will be there in 5 minutes I translate it to give me 5 minutes to show up if i don't forget about it. And I hold everyone to it. If you don't show up in the amount of time you specify I'm gone. I'm Romanian too I just hate wasting my time. My friends learned that really quickly.

What if they get stuck on the train? There are other, non-lazy reasons for being late.

If I'd taken a 30 minute train ride to come and see you, been delayed by 10 minutes, then find you're gone when I arrive I don't think our friendship would last very long.

Re: Stalking Your Friends with Facebook Messenger

#164

Post by harryh »

orthoganol wrote: post #43

I find it hard to grasp why any intelligent individual who knows what goes on with Facebook would still voluntarily remain on Facebook. "Ah but the social ostracization!", seemingly the main reason why otherwise intelligent, informed people do stay on Facebook, just doesn't hold up anymore, as too many cool, socially active 20-somethings I know or are acquainted with have moved off of Facebook, mostly in last 1-2 yea…

The fact that you find this hard to grasp says a lot more about your intelligence than it does of the average Facebook user. It's not exactly a mystery.

Re: Stalking Your Friends with Facebook Messenger

#165

Post by wtracy »

discardorama wrote: post #161
jsaxton86 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you root your android device, you can install AppOps, which allows you to toggle the individual permissions on every application.

> If you root your android device,... Not to hijack a thread, but: this is is why Apple's iOS is such a compelling case. They make it so easy to control access to the location/microphone/etc. in one tab: Settings -> Privacy -> Location Services I don't know what Google is thinking, but given the current snooping climate you think they'd err on the side of the customer... but they don't.

They released an App Ops-like feature in an Android beta (I think it was KitKat, but don't quote me) and pulled it because it broke compatibility with so many apps.

(It caused an exception to be thrown whenever an app tried to access something that had been locked down by the user. Legacy apps obviously couldn't catch the exception, so typically the app would just crash.)

Re: Stalking Your Friends with Facebook Messenger

#167

Post by discardorama »

wtracy wrote: post #165
discardorama wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you root your android device,... Not to hijack a thread, but: this is is why Apple's iOS is such a compelling case. They make it so easy to control access to the location/microphone/etc. in one tab: Settings -> Privacy -> Location Services I don't know what Google is thinking, but given the current snooping climate you think they'd err on the side of the customer... but they don't.

They released an App Ops-like feature in an Android beta (I think it was KitKat, but don't quote me) and pulled it because it broke compatibility with so many apps. (It caused an exception to be thrown whenever an app tried to access something that had been locked down by the user. Legacy apps obviously couldn't catch the exception, so typically the app would just crash.)

It seems easy to fix: can't they test the app in the app store and see if it can handle the exception or not, and if it can't, return a dummy (0,0) coordinate?

Re: Stalking Your Friends with Facebook Messenger

#168

Post by pdkl95 »

LLWM wrote: post #162
pdkl95 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could give the user a button or something to send their location into to whomever they are currently chatting with (to one person in person-to-person chat, or to the group in multi-user chat. This would give the user complete control over their data while still allowing most of the utility. Of course, this wouldn't give facebook a detailed map of their user's movements.

As long as you don't manually revoke the app's permission to know about your location after you send it, what would stop them from building that map?

Honor? Politeness? Wanting to cultivate a healthy, respectful relationship with their users by not going behind their back? Not being creepy stalker who spies on everybody just because you might be able to make a profit from it?

Of course, this is Facebook, which has been fighting with Google for the title of "most creepy, intrusive, privacy-destroying business model". With their ethics, the answer to "what would stop them" is obviously "nothing".

There is a significant PR difference - reporting the GPS location at regular intervals is currently "just part of the regular status update", where Facebook gets to act as a passive man-in-the-middle who records those updates. If sending the location data as seen in all user visible situations is a manually-triggered event, extra code to hand that data off at regular intervals only to Facebook wouldn't be able to hide under the assumption that "it's a feature". In an ideal world, this would be criminal access to unauthorized data. In the current environment of legalized spyware, we are back to "nothing" mentioned previously.

(The terrible granularity in the permission models in these environments is a huge problem. As it affects far more than just location data, that is a topic for another day)

Re: Stalking Your Friends with Facebook Messenger

#169

Post by kosei »

lucaspiller wrote: post #19
kosei wrote: post #4

I'm not sure what value add this serves as an opt-out solution rather than opt-in. For people who have a strong desire to show their location, sure. But what possible reason could Facebook have to make this readily accessible to anyone you chat with on an opt-out only basis?

I'm guessing it's advertising / marketing related. Maybe they aren't doing anything yet with the data, but I'm sure the terms and conditions allow them to do whatever they want with it in the future. Being able to stalk your friends is how they make people willing to give them the data.

Here's the thing, though: they absolutely could do that without the user knowing (I'm sure plenty of companies do). By showing the location information to everyone, it makes this much more readily apparent to users and gives individual users way more information than is necessary. If Facebook wanted to get your location data through Messenger, they absolutely could do that fairly easily without notifying all of your friends of your whereabouts with every message.

Honestly, and maybe I'm in the minority, showing that information readily to my friends is MORE of a red flag than if Facebook solely had that data. Because let's be honest... they already have that data from my usage on the FB app (albeit at a lower frequency).

Re: Stalking Your Friends with Facebook Messenger

#170

Post by at-fates-hands »

personlurking wrote: post #23
dmak wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I do agree with being able to make small lies, but why would you tell someone whose waiting for you that you are 5 minutes away if you are clearly not. Maybe it's just me, but when someone says 5 minutes, I don't expect 10, 15, or 30. I expect 5 minutes. This is especially true in Asian cultures.

One of the worst offenders is Brazil. When living there, it was common to hear "I'm on my way" (to an agreed meeting point at a specific time) but that could mean they actually are on their way or that they've just got up from the couch and will go take a shower, choose what to wear, maybe have a bite to eat and then think about transportation. Knowing this, the trick was either to not take specific times seriously o…

When I was in college, my Native American roommate introduced to "native time" which is the same as you related it while you were in Brazil.

If he had no set time to meet, he'd say he would be there around "native o' clock" which meant he would be there at the time +/- 30-45 minutes. If we agreed to a specific time, he would be there on time. It really helped me and I learned a lot about how Native American culture operated while we were roommates.

Post reply on HN