211–220 of 233 posts
From a comment I had left on a related thread, > Though very uncanny, this is rather easy to extrapolate even using the basic facets FB has available. But the most overlooked is photos. They are offline beacons and are to offline tracking what websites are to online tracking. For example you and a group of 10 other people took photos at the same location which FB sees as a small gathering of intimate friends. It will…
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Is something being created for profit scarier/worse? I'm personally far more concerned about government surveillance programs that I have no option but to participate in.
I'm always confused by comments like this. Not only is corporate surveillance always one NSL away from being used by the government, but corporations aren't democracies. As a user I can't vote on what data Facebook choses to collect. Facebook's shadow profiles also put to rest the idea that you get to choose whether or not to participate in corporate surveillance.
By the way, do you see the issue of NSA carpet surveillance coming up on the ballot very often? Democracy sucks. Consensual liberal markets are the secret sauce to the free and prosperous societies humanity has produced, NOT the utter sham that is democracy.
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> the UN has declared Internet access and access to information and dissemination a basic human right ISPs are a utility. Facebook is not.
How about Google?
The commodity factor is important because it allows for fragmentation. That controls the power balance between the utilities (important: plural) and the public as a whole.
Imagine being at a bar, and a guy engages you in conversation. You try your best to indicate you're not interested, and your friends help shoo him away. Then, that night when we gets home Facebook tells him your name and suggests you connect. Creepy AF (and not the guy)
I don't see that happening... ever. Even if it were possible (I'm pretty sure dust and scratches on a camera lens aren't in focus...).
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> Friends you May Know is really cool! I've got over 9000 suggestions and not a single accurate one. Maybe they have the best technology and all the data out there, but I'm skeptical they can really use all the data they supposedly have on me. Same goes for any targeted advertisement, not just Facebook. Some come close (based on simple topic preferences), but in all those years I've yet to see any large number of the…
I take it a kind of weird 21st century compliment that my machine learnt ad suggestions are so poor. I think it indicates Google/Facebook don't have that much data for me. Sometimes it's fun game trying to work out how the algorithm possibly thought I would know people from other countries with no mutual friends. > subscribe to Grammarly Oh my god. I considered installing it just to stop the ads, but I see that doesn…
uBlock Origin works wonders in that sense.
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If you are paranoid about your location data and security patches you should consider lineageOS and microg [1]. Awesome projects. You can have your location data stored in your phone and not rely on google. [1] https://lineage.microg.org/
This is just not enough. I want to control the baseband and I want hardware switches on microphones, location and cameras. Also there is F-Droid (only open source apps for Android) and the Yalp Store (alternative to Google Play with faked account so you don't have to own one). Hacking my device like with jailbreak (iOS) or rooting (android) is not the way I want to have to go to feel secure and it's nothing I want to…
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I take it a kind of weird 21st century compliment that my machine learnt ad suggestions are so poor. I think it indicates Google/Facebook don't have that much data for me. Sometimes it's fun game trying to work out how the algorithm possibly thought I would know people from other countries with no mutual friends. > subscribe to Grammarly Oh my god. I considered installing it just to stop the ads, but I see that doesn…
> Oh my god. I considered installing it just to stop the ads, but I see that doesn't help. I have mixed feelings about Grammarly. It's a perfect example of a thing that should not be an on-line service, but a fully off-line product. In its current form, it's essentially a keylogger.
Wish their browser extensions would have a non-invasive on-demand mode, where the user has to click the toolbar icon to initiate the verification explicitly.
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> Friends you May Know is really cool! I've got over 9000 suggestions and not a single accurate one. Maybe they have the best technology and all the data out there, but I'm skeptical they can really use all the data they supposedly have on me. Same goes for any targeted advertisement, not just Facebook. Some come close (based on simple topic preferences), but in all those years I've yet to see any large number of the…
Interesting! It works pretty well for me. At worst it's usually people I don't know but logically could: friends of friends, people who worked somewhere I worked before or after me, people who went to my high school I never really knew. Occasionally it's full of apparent shady accounts: usually fake looking accounts of attractive women I have no friends in common with, then they'll disappear. I'm guessing scammers up…
I've recently moved to a different country, and now I get suggestions of some random people supposedly from here - even though I don't know anyone here yet. Well, except a few coworkers and a landlord, who - if they have Facebook accounts - aren't in the suggestions, even though Facebook knows where I live and work (I don't advertise it, but that's not private either).
Paired with the fact that Facebook intentionally spams daily with "you have 20 new notifications", they just train me to filter and ignore their notifications. If someone's going to message me there, I won't see them until the routine monthly check.
I'm not really sure if that's a scary facebook thing or merely just an inconvenient reality of the world we live in now. There's quite a few papers out on fingerprinting/identifying cameras from images taken with them using intrinsics (dust, scratches, slight offset of image sensor with respect to lens).
Scary? I think that's pretty cool actually. The more ways we have to implicitly correlate/extract data using these techniques, the more accurate model of the world we can build. It reminds me of this pretty cool research about extracting audio from silent videos: http://news.mit.edu/2014/algorithm-recovers-speech-from-vibr...
Where it gets scary, I guess, is where it upends the standard norms and expectations of privacy. As the tools proliferate, forensic reconstruction type analysis becomes available to almost everyone, which totally opens the doors for new levels of creepiness from all sorts of actors...
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Have you heard of Bump? They were doing something similar until they were acquired by Google: https://www.theverge.com/2013/9/16/4736860/bump-acquired-by-...
They're basically the Google Photos team, now. Have you seen the ads about face recognition and auto-sharing? They've been working on the problem of photo sharing ever since they figured out that people didn't want to share contact info with Bump, they wanted to share photos.