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Reasons not to use Facebook

stallman.org

341–350 of 376 posts

Re: Reasons not to use Facebook

#341
post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not a valid way of judging RMS or his claims. He isn't complaining about the concept of a technology that allows people to talk while on the go. Rather, he is complaining about the specific implementation of mobile tech with which we're currently saddled. To answer seriously, however, the largest effect of reduced cell phone use would be that automobiles would be much safer, for their passengers and for every…

Then again, in the case that an auto accident does occur, there might not be someone with a cell phone to immediately call emergency services.

Just to point out a bit of an overly binary comparison: There is a middle ground here — consider a powered-off, pre-paid phone. No constant texting and so on, but also there for emergencies (in which instance, you turn it on exactly when you actually want to be tracked — by emergency personnel).

Re: Reasons not to use Facebook

#342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mobile app turns on the damn mic I checked my iphone privacy settings because this sounded preposterous, and the Facebook app is not listed as having requested microphone permissions. Is it able to turn on the microphone without requesting permission?

Are you talking about the regular facebook app or the messenger app.

Neither one has requested permission to use the microphone.

Re: Reasons not to use Facebook

#343
post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

99.9% of people dont care about all that. They want an easy way to connect with friends/family and even strangers. They dont want to pay for it though so they're willing to be served ads. The model works just fine. And I keep hearing this all the time, if there are better alternatives than what are they? Facebook has thousands of employees, most just like you and me. They are not an army of evil people planning destr…

> "What are they taking from you without your consent?" Most people don't understand the privacy settings nor do they comprehend the ToS (because the reading-skill level required is too high). So what does 'consent' actually mean in this context? I feel you're being completely disingenuous in your comments here, so I guess you'd probably just blame the user for not educating themselves.

Consent = posting something publicly means it's public. It's the same as if you spoke aloud in a room, the people around you can hear it. Facebook is just a bigger room, but comes with privacy controls if you're interested. Nobody is stealing your thoughts and filling out your profile, it's all done willingly.

Re: Reasons not to use Facebook

#344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly is a "problem"? I don't live in US. Ordering books online and shipping them to my house used to be slow and expensive process. Now I can buy books from Amazon, for a half the price than printed books (3x the price if I account the shipping). Yeah, I can't read that book on anything except Kindle (device or Kindle app). But I know what I'm buying, and I'm ok with that. I enjoy the option to have my books…

This. Exactly. I'm sure Stallman absolutely HATES services such as Spotify. However the as I mentioned in the parent comment, the world is not black and white, and thus viable solutions will always be in a middle-ground. Nothing he could ever say would bring me from playing music with ridiculous ease in Spotify to downloading "free" ogg files and playing them in GNU Mediagoblin, or something similar. As a side note:…

Instead of Spotify, I just listen to http://www.gnu.org/music/free-software-song.ogg on repeat

Re: Reasons not to use Facebook

#345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't let people use two factor auth, they bitch about your lack of security. If you let people use two factor auth, they bitch that you're collecting phone numbers. Can't win.

The problem is scope. TFA is nice. Maybe mandatory when you're providing a service that passes a certain threshold? But that permission obviously isn't the right answer. FB should ask for permissions to read _all_ SMS to make TFA via SMS a tiny bit more comfortable? No. TFA solutions exist. Google Authenticator (I wouldn't trust Google with anything, but that's "open" as far as I know) or the Yubico aequivalent are p…

> FB should ask for permissions to read _all_ SMS to make TFA via SMS a tiny bit more comfortable?

If Android had a permission called "Only read one text message to verify your phone number" maybe Facebook could use it.

Honestly, I don't know what Facebook is trying to do, but similar arguments come up frequently with Android apps. The permission model is IMO broken, because it requires upfront permission for everything the app may ever want to do. There's no way to install something, minus SMS permission.

Maybe Facebook is evil and does want to read all of your texts and upload them to advertisers. Maybe they don't. It's hard to determine that simply from the requested app permissions, given the poor granularity of those permissions.

Re: Reasons not to use Facebook

#346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Of course phones were used to track people 10 years ago\ "In 1996, a detailed description of ECHELON was provided by New Zealand journalist Nicky Hager in his 1996 book "Secret Power – New Zealand's Role in the International Spy Network"" * This was common knowledge in the 90's ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON

It wasn't common knowledge at all. When I tried telling people about ECHELON I was told it was a crack-pot conspiracy theory, despite the evidence being available. There were a few people who actually extrapolated the technical abilities to their possible extents and realized what was possible, indeed probable, but they were not the majority. Despite Nicky Hager's testimony before the European Parliament in 2001, her…

"Saying this was common knowledge in 1996 is attributing your specialist knowledge to the entire population, who couldn't, and still can't, really be bothered by said knowledge."

Bad effects from smoking were know for years, same with the effects of asbestos, DDT. These days, it's fracking, global warming, junk-food and lack of exercise.

These ideas were all and are currently in the media. People being the irrational beings they are pick and choose what they want to believe. Belief doesn't change the truth.

Re: Reasons not to use Facebook

#347
I've never understood why people insist on enumerating reasons why not to use facebook.

There's already a lack of reasons to use it (unless you count funny games and cat pictures), shouldn't that be enough in itself?

Re: Reasons not to use Facebook

#348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who interacted closely with RMS for several days recently, I think I should set the record straight on one important fact. RMS absolutely uses cellphones. He just doesn't own one himself. Instead, he borrows the phones of the people around him, and his assistant collects those people's phone numbers in order to call him. What this says about his philosophy probably depends significantly on how irritating y…

I guess the question is, what would happen if everybody actually listened to RMS and stopped using cell phones?

It'd probably inconvenience him because he wouldn't be able to borrow one from people next to him.

Re: Reasons not to use Facebook

#350
post #211
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People value Stallman’s opinions on these matters so highly because he has a remarkable history of being right about them ten or fifteen years before it becomes clear to everyone else that he was right, and he takes the risk of saying what he sees even when it will offend people. In fact, that’s why he’s famous; he’s certainly a good hacker, but the world has quite a number of good hackers who aren’t famous because t…

Stallman's work has enabled a vision almost exactly the opposite of what he wanted - the gratis nature of free software has been a far greater impact than the libre. It's enabled cloud computing by making OS and software licenses scale out affordably, letting everyone leverage low-cost commodity hardware in the place of big iron. In terms of libre, though, the closed-source PCs that ran Windows that Stallman still wa…

That's a very interesting point that you're making. Especially when you look at recent events with critical infrastructure software, and the numerous people who were surprised to see how underfunded those developers were. After the paltry sums donated to some of these small projects from companies that make billions thanks in part to their software, one has to wonder how much they value open source software's intrinsic libre value, or just the pure monetary value.
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