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Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

I agree that it sucks.

Just a logic check to make sure you are being consistent: when HackerNews does something that people complain about, are you one of those people who say the customer comes first? Or one that says that people who visit free sites shouldn't complain?

I'm hoping you're consistent. I know I've long said that if I visit your site, whether I pay you anything or not, a social contract has been created. I have certain expectations. Others, however, take a much different view. If you had a list of articles on HN where folks complained about stuff, you'd find a lot of arguing on the other side. I challenge those folks to either be consistent with their previous position or change their mind. (I don't think this applies to you, but since you were the first to comment I'm using you as a bit of a straw man. Hope that's okay)

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> are you one of those people who say the customer comes first?

In this case, the customer is the advertiser, Facebook is the broker, and the users (and their data) are the product. With its recent action, Facebook is clearly saying "the customer comes first."

> Or one that says that people who visit free sites shouldn't complain?

Facebook may be free in the sense that I'm not giving them my credit card number and they are not charging me a monthly monetary fee, but the price of admission onto Facebook is your private information. Even if you don't enter anything in your profile, your friends will start to form the links (by searching for you and sending friend requests (even if you don't accept them) or tagging your face, etc.) that any marketing person pays big money for.

Facebook is not free and the customer is definitely coming first.

That made my head hurt. Somebody's doing a little bit of pretzel logic here.

Let's put this more simply, if that is even possible.

You visit a site. You do not pay anything, but you log on.

You put stuff on the site.

Regardless of the business model, do you have any sort of reasonable expectations?

That's Facebook. That's HN. That's LinkedIn. That's any site that the visitor does not pay for yet is able to store things on there. Simple question.

Not that simple. You visit FB, then visit some other site. Your visit to that other website causes FB to subscribe you to an app of the site that has access to your data. How much profiling and tracking is reasonable to expect? Are other services doing this?

Are other services tracking you across sites?

Well, any sort of javascript that loads in on a page that comes from a central location could track you across sites. Advertisers have long tracked you. Google tracks you on the search, their browser tracks you on each page you visit, and Analytics tracks all site activity. A lot of browsers track you and provide feedback like PageRank.

All of these are free applications.

Perhaps this is the special case of 1) It being a web app, and 2) changing terms without notifying the user

I dunno. But I know lots of free services that you can sign up for (or not) track you in a lot of places you wouldn't expect. The difference is that you don't have this nifty little page to go to where you can see it all happening.

In this case, Google is even worse because you don't even have to use google to be tracked by their systems. You can avoid facebook's privacy violations by not using facebook, but you can't avoid google's privacy violations even if you don't use google. You have to explicitly block their ad servers to do that and they have lots and relatively noone knows how to do it.

You sir are correct.

There is a bit of distorted thinking and mob mentality going on here. It's beginning to seem like every other week the tech community is out with torches and pitchforks. Kind of a "burn the witch!" thing going on.

I use FB, but I think it's model is about as evil as it can get, and that was before this happened. I'll be happy when we have some options.

I don't mind everybody piling on, but it is interesting to note the vast amount of inconsistencies in people's thinking. For me, I can handle the app stuff -- it's the use of my friends to make me act against my own interests that I find truly diabolic.

I think you picked a poor target, since tokenadult was clearly implying that (s)he is seriously considering abandoning Facebook, implying the acceptance of the "take it or leave it" action set.

(For myself: Take it or leave it, and I've never liked Facebook's options so I never took it. It hasn't gotten any better. But if they want to monetize their user base right out of existence, they have my blessing; I don't see why someone should point guns at them and make them stop.)

I'm not sure I understand where my mistake is. My question is not whether you are "take it or leave it". My question is whether or not there are expectations set up when you upload something, anything, to a free site.

I don't think anybody is advocating some sort of half-measure, like bringing a lawsuit or something. My question is about expectations. HackerNews voting doesn't work as I like. So I complain. I'm told it's a free site so stfu (just making this up and using HN as an example). Is it reasonable for me to expect something from HN since I put stuff on there? If I leave my car keys at the front desk at a hotel, I reasonably expect them to take care of them and put them in the safe. This is a reasonable expectation of people who visit a hotel. If I upload naked pictures of me and a chicken to Facebook and make them private, regardless of TOS, should I have that same type of expectation?

More to the point in this case, for a million years mankind has always thought that the list of who his friends were and his memories of interacting with them were an innate part of his being. Nobody could take this from him. Now Facebook is saying that this is property that they can trade in. Which side makes the most sense? And because it is free, does that change the equation?

Make no mistake, I've long thought Facebook was the devil.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=974281

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