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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

#211

Post by Sephiroth87 »

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 partner still get worried calls from her parents any time there ANY accident going on in the UK, and we live in London, so you might be underestimating the impulse of people worrying about their loved ones...

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

#212

Post by pdkl95 »

seanp2k2 wrote: post #129
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…

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…

While I applaud any attempt to gather real and first-person observations...

> I don't see any evidence of any mic uploads.

... I am somewhat concerned at what seems to be a common assumption that Facebook (or any other remote server) is sending the same software to everybody. I find that unlikely when "AB testing" and similar practices are are commonly used. Facebook is very strongly involved with "targeted" services which suggests they are more likely than most to send different versions to different audiences. Obviously that isn't proof, but it's a good reason to extrapolating from a single example.

Version numbers and hashes of the installer or binaries from all parties would help a lot.

> I encourage those curious to try it and see for themselves

That's always good advice.

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

#213

Post by intoverflow2 »

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.

> 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?

Yes from the early beta Spotify had it's own account system, then it switched to all new accounts must be FB but legacy accounts could still sign in. This was a while ago though around the time I stopped using it.

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

#214

Post by aedron »

seanp2k2 wrote: post #129
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…

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…

How would you know if it is tunneling out the data, concealed as any other kind of traffic, and at some future point after recording?

I am pretty sure it would be undetectable if done right, given no access to the source code of the multiple Facebook components running on your device (some pre-installed by the manufacturer and unremoveable).

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

#215

Post by jamesrcole »

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…

> technology should be moving people away from animalistic fears and desires, not pushing them towards it.

Do you have a suggestion for how that could be practically done?

> The easier thing to do would be to realize those odds and realize you can't control these things instead of relying on a social network as a crutch.

Easier? What the easy way you're suggesting for changing these attitudes and beliefs among the general population?

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

#216

Post by jamesrcole »

jondubois wrote: post #206
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…

You're an outlier. These accidents never happen. Facebook is just spreading fear to make people more docile and suggestible. It's just like terrorist attacks and winning the lottery. Sure, these things happen but they don't happen to you. Facebook and the media love to pick out single unusual cases to make the world seem smaller and more dangerous than it is. The world is massive, there are more people in it and more…

> While that one tower was burning in London there were probably hundreds of other buildings of the same size burning in other places around the world at the same time

Hundreds sounds like a massive overestimation to me. You're saying that every single day there are hundreds of comparable building fires around the world. If we conservatively take "hundreds" to be 200, that would be 200*365 every year. That's 73000 every year!

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

#218

Post by brightball »

brightball wrote: post #80
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.

My wife and I did the same test with the same results. It's the reason I took the app off my phone and just use the mobile web.

For clarification on what we did for our test, I live in the south east. We don't watch professional baseball at all...so we started talking about going to a Cincinnati Reds game.

And then we saw ads for the Reds and MLB.

I'm not trying to go full tin foil hat here, but it was a pretty strong coincidence for that to happen.

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

#219

Post by jnty »

corobo wrote: post #178
an_account wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could also just post on Facebook, "I'm okay, I survived [the event]" if you would find value in telling all your friends. Why does Facebook need to prompt?

I thought it was well known and well complained about that when you post something not everyone sees it. The way my timeline seems to be right now if someone posted they're safe right this moment I wouldn't see it until tomorrow night.

If you were concerned about someone's wellbeing surely you'd check their page directly?

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

#220

Post by corobo »

jnty wrote: post #219
corobo wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought it was well known and well complained about that when you post something not everyone sees it. The way my timeline seems to be right now if someone posted they're safe right this moment I wouldn't see it until tomorrow night.

If you were concerned about someone's wellbeing surely you'd check their page directly?

Fair point
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