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Comment by dasyatidprime | Hacker News Reader

So, as a code example, fine---but I'd caution against actually using this with your friends unless you know they're okay with it. They will be acting under certain social expectations with regard to when and how people can see their typing notifications based on when and how they were able to see them before, and if you tweak your way into getting more access without your conversation partners knowing it beforehand, you're at least being sneaky, and possibly creepy or rude depending on the attitudes of your circle. The flow of the machine transmissions doesn't currently constitute something visible enough to hang social norms off of, so be careful not to treat it as the anchor for them by mistake. (This applies to other implementations of similar things, as well, such as "Psychic Mode" for Pidgin.)

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Facebook users are apparently broadcasting the fact that they are typing to their conversation partners, why should you ignore that information? If you don't like that, disable that feature, or complain to Facebook if it is not something you can disable yourself (or don't use Facebook).

It can't hurt to raise some awareness of what you are invisibly broadcasting in terms of data on-line.

(I always liked how this feature could be disabled in Gaim and Pidgin.)

I suppose it would be even easier to make a script that blocks facebook from sending this information? Does it already exist?

Yes, "Facebook™ Chat Privacy" Chrome extension:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/facebook-chat-priv...

Anyone else get an error when trying to add this extension?

>Package is invalid. Details: 'Could not load background script 'tracksy/tracksy.js'.'.

There's always the tried and true method: Type your message in notepad, then copy and paste it into wherever when ready.

There's one called Facebook Unseen that works well. It's a Chrome extension that gives you a toggle.

Well, firstly, because they are not in a similar position to yours with regard to this fact unless they are of a similar attitude and skill for promoting these transmissions to human-side visibility. (If you know that they do have the same attitude as the one you expressed, then the "you know they're okay with it" exception applies.) There are a lot of things people "broadcast" in the physical world which are socially expected to be politely ignored as well.

Put another way, your statement makes perfect sense if you assume all software is actually a User-Agent in the traditional, ideal sense. But this isn't so, because even programmers don't generally have the spare cycles to rewrite everything they come in contact with, and non-programmers have an even more vanishingly small chance to do anything about it. Agency in the digital world is inevitably shaped by other people's decisions as represented in software, and social agency is shaped by how that software presents itself not just to you but to the people you're communicating with through it. When the state of the software doesn't exactly match the state as visible to the participants, the latter state prevails in a social context, and it's the responsibility of a polite conversation partner to not mess around behind the curtain unless you already know you're welcome.

Psychic mode is/was amazing. I used to love freaking people out when I saw the 'You feel a disturbance in the force...' message and quickly type 'Hi!'.

I love Pidgin so much. It's such a shame to see things move from "one client to rule them all" to hundreds of isolated, willfully incompatible clients.

Agreed. I would do the same thing.

Thanks Dad.

Not a fb user, but I partially agree with you here, in that you should already send this information to all your fb friends, so they can learn that their "social expectations" are not backed by what facebook gives away about them to tech-savvy users.

I mostly agree with that, yes, though I worry about message saturation too early on. Currently there's very little many users can do about it. If they have the idea shoved into their faces too many times while that's true, will they keep the information around and be more willing to change habits later if that will help, or will the shock just get muted to a dull roar so that they get used to it? Or will they decide to believe that this is okay in order to avoid the current-day social consequences of trying to act according to the opposite?

This reminds me of how people get arrested for pointing out security flaws in important systems, trying to help. Let's don't shoot the messenger.

I think there's a big difference between being arrested and being considered to be acting rude. There's also a big difference between pointing out a security flaw and continuing to actively exploit it. That's why I said I think it's fine as a code example, and I think it's fine to raise awareness. Just be careful about keeping this around in your main browser while you're chatting with many people; you might be risking trust if they find out.

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