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Facebook is terrifying

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Re: Facebook is terrifying

#251

Post by grzm »

uranian wrote: post #244

I am still totally amazed by what people share from their private life FOR FREE on Facebook. If you want to beat Facebook you only have to make a similar platform that actually pay people for posting their private stuff. Would be a nice startup :)

That's one way to look at it. I think you'd admit that this isn't how a lot (if not most) people look at it. Facebook and other platforms provide them a convenient way to share their parts of their lives with their friends and family. Reasonable people can view this same situation differently.

You're almost assuredly right that there are still opportunities out there in this space. I do think paying people to post would change the dynamic: it would change what and how often people would post. It's definitely an interesting problem!

Re: Facebook is terrifying

#252

Post by giancarlostoro »

jitbit wrote: post #67
mmjaa wrote: post #35

Its not just faces .. me and a friend had a little jam session recently and posted a picture of our cool little setup, consisting of a few pocket-sized machines (synthesizers and controllers) on our table in front of us. Just an innocent little picture of our jam setup. Within seconds of posting this picture of the machines, my friend was getting targeted ads from the manufacturers of those devices - within seconds!…

I had a similar moment (and ironically I'm a musician too). I went to a bar, where a band was playing on stage... After a while I realized I know the drummer. I played with him before, in another band, years ago. We had a beer, chatted a bit and went home. Now, we hadn't posted any pictures, nor statuses, we have no mutual friends on facebook, no connection at all... Heck, Facebook DIDN'T EVEN EXIST when I last saw h…

If they looked you up that could be part of the why and how. Facebook knew where you both were, and the fact they looked you up initiated this. Totally creepy either way.

Re: Facebook is terrifying

#253

Post by giancarlostoro »

cJ0th wrote: post #249
jitbit wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a similar moment (and ironically I'm a musician too). I went to a bar, where a band was playing on stage... After a while I realized I know the drummer. I played with him before, in another band, years ago. We had a beer, chatted a bit and went home. Now, we hadn't posted any pictures, nor statuses, we have no mutual friends on facebook, no connection at all... Heck, Facebook DIDN'T EVEN EXIST when I last saw h…

Another musician here: One day I got ads for Waves Plugins. I still haven't figured out how they have learnt about me being into producing. My FB friends are (afaik) non-musicians from school days and I don't open FB in my regular browser. Furthermore, I block almost anything µblock has to offer in my normal browser. Maybe they derived something from my e-mail address. Pretty scary stuff!

I don't think it's impossible for them to see your financial (Credit Card?) records and use that too? Advertising companies are after all, advertising companies... They get anything they can, even the old way of finding things out. I used to buy cigars online, to this day I still get mail from websites / companies I never bought cigars from.

Re: Facebook is terrifying

#254

Post by junto »

buro9 wrote: post #83

I am not on Facebook. But that doesn't mean that I believe I am not on Facebook. I am pretty sure that Facebook are able to construct most of the shell of me from fragments provided by less careful friends or just strangers. I imagine, and do not believe I am wrong, that Facebook have a ghost profile already with photographs of me already associated, some preferences and interests already in place. A montage almost i…

Any friends of yours who have installed any FB application will have uploaded your contact details. All FB needs to do is merge all of those profiles of you from each of your friends and they will have a pretty accurate informational profile. Since many people have also added a photo of you to their phone contact entry, FB gets that too. Any time you visit a website that uses an FB Plugin, for commenting or sharing, FB drop a ghost profile cookie against you. If at any point you somehow leak your email address or cell number on one of those sites, they can now tie that ghost profile to a real person, thanks to your friends using FB, even when you don't.

Re: Facebook is terrifying

#255

Post by IshKebab »

bastawhiz wrote: post #36

What is the proposed recourse? Ban Facebook from analyzing data that users give it? I use Facebook's automatic tagging because I find it useful. Should it be illegal for me to use this feature because someone might unintentionally be identified in a photo that I took? Is the argument that Facebook--or any other company--should never be allowed to develop software that could process data that could identify folks, eve…

Well in the EU Facebook can't do the kind of face recognition described in the article.

Most people in Europe actually still think face recognition is useless (like how speech recognition was useless until very recently) because they haven't experienced it on Facebook.

Re: Facebook is terrifying

#256

Post by giancarlostoro »

jitbit wrote: post #71
Rainymood wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isnt this just location based matching?

But I didn't touch my phone that night... I'm not sure what happened exactly, the fact is - it made me super uncomfortable.

I had once looked up someone I knew from college on Facebook, and their name appeared immediately, weeks later I realized they were trying to find me before I was trying to find them! The other person probably looked you up, and other factors pushed Facebook to suggest them.

Re: Facebook is terrifying

#257

Post by macns »

nerflad wrote: post #243
jayajay wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To slightly bastardize the term "burner", people might think they don't have any burners, but everyone's got burners. I started to notice that one of my professors, around every ~25 sentences, he would capitalize the first two letters of the sentence. I mean it's a dead giveaway, because most people do this a lot less frequently. But these figurative "burners" are everywhere. Little, tiny, seemingly untraceable ticks…

I recently accidentally re-activated my old FB account from high school (deactivated 2010). It's all still there. It's more like "unpublishing" your account than really "deactivating" it.

Where are you from? Not sure if that's just in Europe but there's an option[1] to permanently delete everything from fb, though I'm sure it wasn't available a few years ago. Now it is though and I'm guessing fb is obligated to provide this b/c of some european law.

[1] Sorry for the google ref link but I have fb hosts blocked and couldn't find an easy way to just copy the actual link: https://www.google.gr/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd...

Re: Facebook is terrifying

#258

Post by kafkaesq »

p49k wrote: post #224
freehunter wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But... why? When? How? I joined Facebook in 2006 when it opened to the public and it never asked for my social security number. Did they used to ask that prior to 2006? I mean, "people just submitted it" only works if it was asked for. Unless we're presuming people posted their SSNs on their wall for their friends to see. I really doubt that's the case.

This isn't about Facebook though, it's about some prototype he created earlier. I'd say he probably had SSNs because lots of universities used SSNs as student IDs before it became universally clear why that was a terrible idea, and he probably required your student ID number to use the service.

Yes, it was from an earlier prototype of FB. But the bigger point is that it was Zuck who was saying that. And it tells you everything you need to his real attitude toward your privacy -- no matter what his "policies" say.

As well as attitude towards his users as human beings generally.

Re: Facebook is terrifying

#259

Post by giancarlostoro »

buro9 wrote: post #83

I am not on Facebook. But that doesn't mean that I believe I am not on Facebook. I am pretty sure that Facebook are able to construct most of the shell of me from fragments provided by less careful friends or just strangers. I imagine, and do not believe I am wrong, that Facebook have a ghost profile already with photographs of me already associated, some preferences and interests already in place. A montage almost i…

It's not just Facebook, Amazon? Google? Microsoft? They all advertise too, and many others. I've deleted my Facebook profile a couple of times, I've only kept it this long for family. I may change that soon enough too. Especially if anyone ever asks me for my password for it that will be the end of that.

Re: Facebook is terrifying

#260

Post by DjangoReinhardt »

altern8tif wrote: post #214
gumby wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know you have an account anyway, right? FB makes and manages profiles of people who don't have accounts, even of people who have never had accounts. They use this for their ad network, among other things. LinkedIn does this as well. I don't know about others.

How does that even work? Where does FB (or LinkedIn) get the information from that they can determine who you are even if you've never signed up for an account?

It's called shadow profiling[0].

Even if you haven't signed up for a facebook account but someone you know has an account, they by proxy, you have an account. Merely existing as a contact in their address book is enough to create a shadow profile with facebook. Their deep-learning algos can collate such data from all your friends and serve you correspondingly appropriate ads.

In fact, I just thought of an experiment that you could try sometime.

1. Buy a new cellphone number and store a small number of contacts (say, about 5) in your phonebook. Make sure all 5 of them have functional & active FB accounts.

2. Install the FB app on the phone and grant it access to your phonebook.

3. Open the app, create a new user and check out the list of suggested friends.

I think you'll be surprised.

[0] http://www.dailydot.com/news/facebook-shadow-profiles-privac...

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