I wish quite badly that the benefit of deactivating FB would outweigh the inconvenience, but FB has become such a mainstay that I'd lose touch with lots of people I really have no other way of contacting. I could say "good riddance," if there is no other way to contact them then perhaps they are not important enough to my life, but that's just not true. Or what about all the local forums (FB groups) in my city that have lots of immediate help about all sorts of things -- I'd immediately lose access to all that. I wish there was a better way, but I can't see myself getting rid of FB without a notable disruption to my life. #sad
Facebook’s Surveillance Machine
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Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine
#32Seeking advice: how do I tell friends and family about the negative aspects of Facebook without coming across as all “I don’t even own a TV” or “meat is murder”? Is that even possible?
instead of deleting my account, i wrote an email which i bcc’d to my “real” friends: i’m deleting our facebook friendship, i love you and expect we can stay in touch just fine without.
then i deleted all my fb connections, and left a public account with no friends and a publi message about how to find me.
if i want to spam a post to my people, i use the bcc email
Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you going to invade a foreign power when one of their sovereigns ignores your demand to forget?
Legally, I cannot collect any data and keep the source. So I do strip all the possible identification, until someone's effort to pin point to any personal data becomes economically unfeasible. I also tend to store as little as possible raw data and in some cases, I do data scrambling, where the data as in values is not important for the engine. A demand to forget has to show that I have data on that person. Without t…
> I do strip all the possible identification
"Anonymizing" data is a myth; stripped or hashed columns can usually be recovered by correlating the remaining data with other data sets.
> until someone's effort to pin point to any personal data becomes economically unfeasible.
Which admits that the data probably is recoverable, just "economically infeasible". Do you have proof of that claim? Unfeasible for who? In general, the difficulty of re-correlating data goes down as the amount of data grows.
> I do data scrambling, where the data as in values is not important for the engine.
DJB once described[1] hashing as "magic crypto pixie dust" that "takes personally identifiable information and makes it incomprehensible to the marketing department".
> A demand to forget has to show that I have data on that person.
So you're trying to launder data to circumvent the letter of the law. This kind of scofflaw, antisocial attitude is how you attract reactionary, heavy handed regulations.
[1] https://projectbullrun.org/surveillance/2015/video-2015.html...
Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine
#34The only reason this stuff is being reported on in this way is the president they successfully got elected sucks.
None of this is news. Facebook has _never_ been regarded as some kind of privacy-respecting entity. Users have been willingly participating in the exchange of privacy for convenience as far as I can remember.
Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine
#35Maybe i am misunderstanding something about this whole issue, but was there an exploit or a bug that allowed this to happen on Facebooks end?
I guess my confusion is that whenever someone grants third party access to your facebook, you can query that users list of friends (which i have seen used for things like games and high scores, etc). But you didn't get the full friends profile, instead you got a small subset of it. Did they find some way around that and managed to retrieve the full user profile?
If not then isn't Cambridge Analytica at fault here for misusing someones data? Facebook provides an API and users consented to allowing a third party to access their data. I guess you could remove the friends list, from the API.
Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine
#36“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
― Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked
Facebook and Google are not evil. They are made up of ordinary people with ordinary likes, dislikes, biases, histories, failings. Those people don't have to be evil or wrong or even misguided to give rise to this situation. No matter how much they try to (and want to!) do the right thing, they are just trying to make money. Everyone's economic incentive is to make more money. The shareholders demand it!
Economics is what underlies all of this, and it is completely inescapable. The market is rewarding those who track users and profile them in order to predict their behavior, jam ads in their face, or sell them stuff. Entities that do this make more money than entities that don't. Like, a lot more. $100billion/yr more. So. You are going to get more companies finding more ways to track and profile people to figure out how to make more money. Facebook and Google and Twitter and ad networks and everyone else can be absolute angels in their hearts, but the sheer mathematics of economics is like a pervasive wind that just keeps pushing them in this direction.
You either push back, HARD, with your feet and with the law, or you suffer the consequences along with everyone else.
Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine
#37I think it's time to finally close the FB account, move on to Firefox and disable 3rd party trackers and start using VPN routinely.
>move on to Firefox I can't trust them after the case when they installed the extension as an advertising company of the TV series. 21st centery, you can't trust anyone.
It certainly cannot be trusted given stuff like this happens on a regular basis. See the next one coming: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1446404
Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine
#38I wish quite badly that the benefit of deactivating FB would outweigh the inconvenience, but FB has become such a mainstay that I'd lose touch with lots of people I really have no other way of contacting. I could say "good riddance," if there is no other way to contact them then perhaps they are not important enough to my life, but that's just not true. Or what about all the local forums (FB groups) in my city that h…
If you haven’t already, I encourage you to try without it for 30 days: if you truly can’t find a way around it, fine, check it every second day. You might be surprised how unimportant it ends up being
Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine
#39“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” ― Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked Facebook and Google are not evil. They are made up of ordinary people with ordinary likes, dislikes, biases, histories, failings. Those people don't have to be evil or wrong or even misguided to give rise to this situation. No matter how much th…
I agree. In the end, incentives is what drives behaviour, not ideals.
Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine
#40Maybe i am misunderstanding something about this whole issue, but was there an exploit or a bug that allowed this to happen on Facebooks end? I guess my confusion is that whenever someone grants third party access to your facebook, you can query that users list of friends (which i have seen used for things like games and high scores, etc). But you didn't get the full friends profile, instead you got a small subset of…
I don’t think there was any exploit. My understanding is that a third-party app asked for access, and people gave consent, and CA mined data.
I’m the last person you’d see defending FB, but this just seems like the same thing everyone has been doing on FB as a platform since FarmVille launched years ago?