This (and the GDPR - even though my company is in the US) are why I now tell the developers on my team to not collect info unless they have a definitive use case as to why to store it. And make sure to delete delete data as soon as it is no longer needed. It helps that my business doesn't monetize via advertising. My guess is what actually happened here is that they had a use case to store it for a few hours or so (i…
> I can't imagine this being intentionally. Even if I try to consider malicious use cases I can't think of any where it would be beneficial for Facebook to actually store this data besides being too lazy to clean it up.
Nope. They wrote a routine that makes the video invisible to the actual user but refrained from deleting it right away. That is intentional.
This reminds me of the long conversations that I used to have with family members and friends several years ago. With their continuous requests to create my own Facebook profile so I can keep in contact with them and with their activities as well as to share my whereabouts. I always used the same argument to reject these suggestions — "I don't want Facebook to have too much data about me, more than the data that you…
I always tell people to treat Facebook as if every person you ever meet will be able to see it. It's more or less my public persona. Twitter is more anonymous.
> Twitter is more anonymous.
How did you arrive at that conclusion? I assume Twitter retains everything as well (even "deleted" tweets) and it's all associated with an email address. Or did you mean it in the sense that far fewer people have a Twitter account?
I think a great way to explain privacy limitations to a non-tech-savvy person is to walk them through using GPG. Once someone understands public and private keys, and webs of trust, there really isn't much left to learn. For someone who understands keypairs, the limitations of Facebook/Twitter/etc., DRM, etc. are obvious. It seems most of us are afraid our non-tech-savvy friends and family won't be able to wrap their…
> Once someone understands public and private keys, and webs of trust Nobody in the general public wants this.
Okay, don't assume people won't be interested in interesting things. Who is this general public, anyway? It's not an homogeneous group; it's made up of physicians, mechanics, teachers, lovers, Doomsday preppers, engineers, preachers, and all kinds of people who have special interests. The thing I see is that if you show them how it matters to them in their special role, rather than to them as members of this general public, they may well take an interest. Some of them may become very deeply interested indeed, if they needed such a thing but didn't know about it until you showed them!
This reminds me of the long conversations that I used to have with family members and friends several years ago. With their continuous requests to create my own Facebook profile so I can keep in contact with them and with their activities as well as to share my whereabouts. I always used the same argument to reject these suggestions — "I don't want Facebook to have too much data about me, more than the data that you…
I always tell people to treat Facebook as if every person you ever meet will be able to see it. It's more or less my public persona. Twitter is more anonymous.
Unless it's encrypted and ephemeral, treat every bit sent out to the internet, a public network, as your public persona.
> Once someone understands public and private keys, and webs of trust Nobody in the general public wants this.
That doesn't mean they shouldn't.
I'm assuming you do everything you should right? So... perfect body? Saving account? great family life? Work is flawless?
Life doesn't happen in a vacuum and specialization is a thing. People spend their time on different things.
Everyone should do A LOT of things but don't. You can't hold a billion people accountable for that. They thought for whatever reason this was a reasonable trade off. Turns out... maybe not.
Instead of being a fucking nerd about it, lets work to help people move to better services.
"ummmmm... actually, you should learn about GPG encryption for your files".
This reminds me of the long conversations that I used to have with family members and friends several years ago. With their continuous requests to create my own Facebook profile so I can keep in contact with them and with their activities as well as to share my whereabouts. I always used the same argument to reject these suggestions — "I don't want Facebook to have too much data about me, more than the data that you…
> expecting a non-tech-savvy person to understand how data moves around the Internet Then we - the people that do have the necessary technical knowledge - have a duty to teach them what they need to know. This isn't necessarily "how data moves on the internet". Yes, this can be difficult and tedious, but understanding the risk profile for data/networks is increasingly important as networks become involved in everythi…
> ... instead tailoring an explanation to their personal situation and knowledge.
I’ve used this with success several times. Though you generally have to know the person well enough to know their “secrets”.
I always tell people to treat Facebook as if every person you ever meet will be able to see it. It's more or less my public persona. Twitter is more anonymous.
Unless it's encrypted and ephemeral, treat every bit sent out to the internet, a public network, as your public persona.
Amen. Once you upload it, you should just assume it’s out there forever. It’s probably worth assuming that virtually all anonymity can be pierced, if not now then within a decade or two.
With a few exceptions, anonymity online is ephemeral at best, subject to the motivation of the person/org trying to deanonymize you.
> Once someone understands public and private keys, and webs of trust Nobody in the general public wants this.
That doesn't mean they shouldn't.
I'm fairly tech savvy (ok, I'm an expert compared to my non-tech family and friends, but not compared to people here). I even had a copy of pgp on my Windows 3.1 machine shortly after Phil Zimmerman created it. I didn't understand it then, and I don't want to understand it now. The better and easier solution has been to avoid putting stuff I don't want anyone to know about me on the internet.
This reminds me of the long conversations that I used to have with family members and friends several years ago. With their continuous requests to create my own Facebook profile so I can keep in contact with them and with their activities as well as to share my whereabouts. I always used the same argument to reject these suggestions — "I don't want Facebook to have too much data about me, more than the data that you…
I think a great way to explain privacy limitations to a non-tech-savvy person is to walk them through using GPG. Once someone understands public and private keys, and webs of trust, there really isn't much left to learn. For someone who understands keypairs, the limitations of Facebook/Twitter/etc., DRM, etc. are obvious. It seems most of us are afraid our non-tech-savvy friends and family won't be able to wrap their…
> great way to explain privacy limitations to a non-tech-savvy person is to walk them through using GPG.
Have you ever actually successfully done this? More than once? And they continue to use it?
Just an anecdote. I had a day set aside to purging my Facebook entries a year or two back. I manually deleted comments and posts. Of course there was too many to do and it was very boring so I only spent a couple of hours at it. But that's nots what's interesting. What happened was that I got a huge uptake of people commenting on some old post I made, like a profile picture change. I think Facebook saw I was purging…
If you're worried about FB analyzing/selling your data then "deleting" does nothing. It effectively just sets a boolean flag on a record in a database which is more like 'hiding'.
It may not appear anymore in the frontend but you can be pretty sure it's still being used by FB. Now that may change after GDPR but who knows...