Facebook’s Safety Check is a stress-inducing flip of social norms • Hacker News Board

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

#181

Post by tluyben2 » Thu, Jun 15, 2017, 7:10 AM UTC

aaron-lebo wrote: post #157

matt4077 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the problem is that peoples' worries depend not on what Facebook knows, but what those people know: I, for example, know several people in London, but have no idea where in London exactly they life. Now I didn't actually worry because that just didn't make sense considering the numbers involved, but it seems like a very understandable, human mistake to still get alarmed. That could mean displaying people safe…

The odds of any given event impacting someone you know is so small as to be incomprehensible. Do you get worried because you heard there was a shooting in a city and it might have included your friends? You probably don't, and before Facebook you wouldn't have given it a second thought. Your friends are more likely to get hit by a car or have a heart attack and you and Facebook would never know and that's ok. Those a…

My grandfather has always (my mother has identical stories from when she was young) been deadly afraid when, on tv or newspaper, a city or even country was named and I was there. Like when I was in Seattle and in the news there was some big fire somewhere in the US, he would panic and start calling my mother.

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

#182

Post by phewvvg » Thu, Jun 15, 2017, 7:16 AM UTC

I grew up in a town about 80 kilometers north of London and used to go there pretty frequently, until I moved to Amsterdam last summer, so it was pretty surprising when I opened Facebook yesterday evening and was asked if I was safe from the fire in London.

I think Facebook's Safety Check is a good feature, but the implementation is pretty dreadful.

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

#183

Post by eatsfoobars » Thu, Jun 15, 2017, 7:18 AM UTC

afro88 wrote: post #143

seanp2k2 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If this is a genuine public safety feature, if Facebook really are using Safety Check out of concern for their users welfare, then they should fully accept the concomitant responsibility. They should expend real resources to liaise with the relevant agencies and ensure that Safety Check is deployed only when appropriate, that it is accurately targeted and that it helps rather than hinders relief efforts. If Facebook…

Simple solution: have a "ask X if they're safe" button that friends/family can press. If someone presses it, that person gets a push to mark themselves safe. They don't get a push otherwise.

Actually, this button already exists [1].

[1]: https://www.facebook.com/help/516656825135759

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

#184

Post by donkeyd » Thu, Jun 15, 2017, 7:19 AM UTC

afro88 wrote: post #143

seanp2k2 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If this is a genuine public safety feature, if Facebook really are using Safety Check out of concern for their users welfare, then they should fully accept the concomitant responsibility. They should expend real resources to liaise with the relevant agencies and ensure that Safety Check is deployed only when appropriate, that it is accurately targeted and that it helps rather than hinders relief efforts. If Facebook…

Simple solution: have a "ask X if they're safe" button that friends/family can press. If someone presses it, that person gets a push to mark themselves safe. They don't get a push otherwise.

That will have the flip side of family members getting extra worried if not marked safe, because Facebook wasn't checked for example.

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

#185

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jun 15, 2017, 7:22 AM UTC

tluyben2 wrote: post #181

aaron-lebo wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The odds of any given event impacting someone you know is so small as to be incomprehensible. Do you get worried because you heard there was a shooting in a city and it might have included your friends? You probably don't, and before Facebook you wouldn't have given it a second thought. Your friends are more likely to get hit by a car or have a heart attack and you and Facebook would never know and that's ok. Those a…

My grandfather has always (my mother has identical stories from when she was young) been deadly afraid when, on tv or newspaper, a city or even country was named and I was there. Like when I was in Seattle and in the news there was some big fire somewhere in the US, he would panic and start calling my mother.

[deleted]

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

#186

Post by seanp2k2 » Thu, Jun 15, 2017, 7:27 AM UTC

dcsommer wrote: post #175

seanp2k2 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cour…

This would make an interesting blog post.

Thanks. I don't keep a blog anymore or I'd do it. They have also recently denied doing this: http://www.businessinsider.com/is-facebooks-app-spying-on-me... so if anyone can show evidence otherwise, it would likely be A Big Deal.

EDIT: Sounds like they might pin certs on newer versions of the iOS app. https://github.com/Naituw/HackingFacebook might be useful to get around that. I haven't tried it.

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

#187

Post by bryanrasmussen » Thu, Jun 15, 2017, 7:30 AM UTC

I like to complain about everything Facebook does as well as the next guy, but in the rare case when they seem to have done something for promoting a social good I'm going to give them a pass.

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

#188

Post by DanielBMarkham » Thu, Jun 15, 2017, 7:39 AM UTC

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…

In the last couple of weeks, I have been notified on Facebook by friends about:

- An abduction that involved the dad taking the kids against the mother's will for a few days -- three states away

- A triple murder-suicide -- 300 miles away

- A woman arrested for being cruel to her animals, complete with pictures -- in a city 150 miles away

And this is with my blocks as high as I can make them.

I am constantly being bombarded by news that affects a very small segment of the population in communities far distant from the one I live in.

This does not provide any sort of public service to me. Emotional-laden content such as this and the "I'm safe" buttons exist for Facebook's purposes far, far more than they do for the user's purposes.

This is the way of the new PC crowd: do something that benefits you but can be spun as a kindness to the community. Then shout down anybody who points out that you're only acting in your self interest.

I do not doubt that this has a benefit for that small number of people actually trapped in a large-scale natural disaster (Although I would wonder what, exactly, in a world of billions of people constitutes "large scale"?) But if you waste five minutes of ten million people's lives with a notification like this? That's 5 minutes X 10 million = more than 2,200 man-years. It's the equivalent of 30 people's lives simply to make a few people feel better. In addition, because of the numbers involved, overall it actually creates much more stress than it reduces. There is a not-insignificant healthcare cost associated with things like this.

The old-time capitalist pigs were easy to understand: they made stuff in order to make money. The new guys on the block are full of a lot more bullshit than the older guys -- and people who aren't paying attention are easily suckered into the schpiel and the concomitant pathos.

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

#189

Post by ThrustVectoring » Thu, Jun 15, 2017, 7:42 AM UTC

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…

The comparison is friendly for Facebook, IMO. If Facebook pushes an agenda, the most obvious way to do so is through manipulating the order and appearance of items in the news feed. Facebook pushing an agenda will look like particular kinds of political content becoming more important to your friends.

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

#190

Post by Someone » Thu, Jun 15, 2017, 7:56 AM UTC

rabboRubble wrote: post #100

bogomipz wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Thank god the author hasn't lived through an event where everybody you know is affected by the event." How do you know they haven't? Just because you have and feel one way doesn't mean they haven't. >"If he's feeling stressed out because of FB opening the "I'm okay" service in that small area for that catastrophic fire," I'm not sure I would consider 6 miles a 'small area.'

> 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…

I doubt it. I bet lots of people in either tower would have triggered the "I'm OK" feature a few minutes after the first plane hit, as would firemen who would only later get called in to help.

Should Facebook have created a 'please reconfirm' feature? If so, how often should hey have triggered it? For 9/11, there are at least four main events: two plane hits and two building collapses, but there were more: additional buildings, etc.