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Comment by ploggingdev | Hacker News Reader

When I see posts like these, they creep me out. Another reminder that Facebook and all other online services, ad companies know way too much about their users and can deduce more information about you (in truly creative ways) than you imagined would be possible.

When I show these posts to people who resemble the average internet user, they just don't care. This is something that is saddening and baffling for me. I think it's just that most people don't understand why this is an issue to begin with and people need to be made aware of what is going on. The easiest way to start would be to discuss privacy issues with your closest family and friends.

Worth mentioning RMS' blog post: https://stallman.org/facebook.html

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Why should I care? For most of human history, most people lived in villages. Everyone they met would know this kind of information about them ("it's obvious to everyone except the couple themselves that x and y are into each other" is a literary trope for a reason). People survived, thrived even - in fact there's a strong argument our psychological welfare was much better in those conditions than it is in anonymous cities.

And they were making money of it and selling the information to to everyone that wants to pay for it. Exactly like in a small village /s .

People wouldn't mind as much if they had the same kinds and amounts of data on the their observers as their observers have on them.

I kind of work in this field, and it's easy to know a lot more about a stranger than they know about themselves. Given the law of large numbers, I can make lots of accurate predictions of a person's future behavior, and I'm not amazingly smart. I'm also careful to not spy on people because that's just creepy. But, I'm certain that there are people out there using similar types of data who are 1) way smarter than me, 2) creepy, and 3) devious.

(BTW, the data that I use has all PII removed, but it's trivial to identify individuals, if one is motivated)

https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-8034-build_your_own_nsa#video&t=...

It is really easy to identify a majority of users of such a dataset.

> Everyone they met would know this kind of information about them

Everyone in the village would have had detailed spending habits, knowledge of every website browsed, media preferences, political views, porn habits, location history and more all backed up in giant databases that are easily search-able?

Spending Habits: Yes - you could easily observe what your village neighbors are buying.

Websites Browsed/Media Prefs/Porn Habits: No, these things didnt exist for most of human history. I guess "Media Preferences" would be known if we're talking books vs. newspaper.

Political views: Yes, assuming the person isn't a hermit.

Location History: Yes, presumably you'd know where village-mates are/have been.

Backed up in a database that's easily searchable? I guess that depends on how good your brain is at remembering things.

Not trying to nitpick too hard, but all your viable examples listed are in fact things your fellow villagers would know about you in a close-knit community.

I'm going to highly disagree with you.

Yeah, you might have a rough idea of spending habits for a handful of people, but not everyone, and not to the same detail.

Books/newspapers/etc sure, you'd know some of it, but you wouldn't have a record of what they consumed in their home unless they told you.

You might know some of their political views, but only the ones they share openly.

If a co-villager wandered off for a week, you wouldn't likely have any idea where they went. You'd have to rely on what they told you, and where others said they went, which isn't necessarily accurate. Additionally, you wouldn't get the level of detail FB can.

No brain is capable of storing even half of the location that FB's DB can. I don't care how good someone's memory is.

They would know some of the above sure, but it'd be at a high level, and not nearly as accurate.

You make some good points, but i have to slightly disagree with some of them :)

"Yeah, you might have a rough idea of spending habits for a handful of people, but not everyone, and not to the same detail."

The shopkeeper does. And as someone who grew up in a small town, the gossip is real.

"ou might know some of their political views, but only the ones they share openly"

Facebook doesnt know my political views? Though I dont openly share them on fb. More to avoid flamewars.

"If a co-villager wandered off for a week, you wouldn't likely have any idea where they went"

Depends how well you know them. You might know they like that spot by the lake for example. And if I leave my phone at home, no one would know where I went.(which sounds like a good reason to carry my phone, safety)

There's a big difference between your neighbours knowing all your secrets, and Facebook knowing all your secrets. And I think which you find worse says something about you.

People who care more about what the neighbours think, might consider the village having access to all their behaviour a bigger problem than some distant, faceless corporation.

For people who care about power imbalance, a single corporation knowing everything about everybody is much more serious than people in villages knowing about their neighbours.

Coming from a small city in the country, I can tell you this is exactly reason #1 why people leave the small village for the anonymous big city: privacy. BTW people are often wrong on their assumptions, data is usually not.

* The Stasi were terrifying enough in a non-networked age - with smartphones, facebook, etc. they'll have so much more data on us.

* IMHO the political climate we live in could easily produce another Stasi within a generation.

* If that we get something like that again they'll have a decade or more information on you, and information you are leaking right now could be used to coerce, blackmail and threaten you.

Does accuracy of information really make a difference there? The Stasi were terrifying because they had no accountability - you could be taken away in the middle of the night on a whim, or because a disgruntled neighbour had accused you of treason. A Stasi who had accurate information about who was opposing the state would in some ways have been less terrible.

The "everyone" that you speak of was scoped for the village. And that "everyone" was not a specific someone.

[& p.s. your anonymity and privacy shot up as soon as you stepped away from your village.]

I grew up in a community legally titled "village" (<400 people at the time); digging into your neighbors lives for any topic was highly frowned upon.

It's almost as if social norms have changed since the days of tight knit hunter-gathering, wicker shanty peoples roamed the Earth.

Shocking.

In a country where having the "wrong bumper sticker" gets people driven off the road, or riding my bicycle nearly sees me pushed into parked cars by folks driving lifted Dodge Rams, your ideas make little sense.

Interesting viewpoint.

The difference is that in the village case, the information distribution was much more symmetric. People knew about you and you knew about them, and you knew about each other's knowledge and presumably acted accordingly. So for instance, if being gay was going to be a problem in your village, you hid it well.

With Facebook, they have all the information about you, and you don't even know what they know about you. So in the best case scenario, you are hoping that they are going to be a "benevolent dictator" with their asymmetric knowledge, and not exploit you.

"When someone wants to do X they start showing pattern A" is bad enough, but "when you show someone pattern A, they will be 30% more likely to want to do X" is the true disaster. And it is going to happen [more often].

When you show somebody how much Facebook knows about them they will be 30% more likely to quit Facebook.

source?

Well the source is really me being snarky, but there is this http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2423713/Faceb... which as the source of any authoritative figure would be laughable given the small sample size, but maybe something to build on.

The way I see it, it's kinda like a bank, yeah sure my bank has enormous control over me, and can on a whim ruin me with my financial, purchase info and control over my assets. But they have a very, very strong incentive not to do so, because doing so would cause them to lose lots and lots of money.

Similarly facebook could abuse our information, but they stand to lose a lot if they do. Either way, this is the future and there really isn't much we can do about it. Businesses are going to track us, and save going off grid and living in the woods, I don't think there's any real escape.

The bank is regulated. Facebook isn't.

True, but is it regulations that keep the bank from stealing your money and using your financial transactions against you - or is it the prospect of losing billions through loss of customer trust. I would guess it's the later because banking regulations are fairly toothless and bank lobbies are extremely strong.

I would say both. The MERS[0] registry could not be set up because the banks thought it is sort-of-gray legally, and they would be able to work it. Then, it turned out that it is actually against black letter law, so we had the robosigning scandal, which they somehow managed to weather unscathed.

Banks have foreclosed on wrong houses etc, and didn't suffer (enough) for it from either the hand of the law or the hands of customers, so they don't care (enough) to make sure they're doing it properly.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortgage_Electronic_Registrati...

I believe you're mistaken. Look into the "wildcat banking" era in the US for numerous examples of banks stealing or defrauding customers when there were no federal regulations on banks.

Yea, I would be much more worried about smaller companies that gets more information about you than Facebook or google. Like a lot of "free" browser plugins.

There was a talk at 33c3 about just that(Build your own NSA).

What if FB gets hacked, and lose your data? Or a government requires them to hand it over? It doesn't have to be malicious. Additionally, what if they were going under and wanted to sell your data to help compensate for that. Do you really think they'd put your privacy above their profit?

I don't understand why Facebook always gets 100% of the blame in cases like these. Don't get me wrong, I get the concern, but what happened to the old adage of "if you don't want something on the internet, don't put it there"? Are people never responsible for what they voluntarily share on Facebook? Whenever we put the blame on Facebook for the data they collect, aren't we just saying people can't be trusted to protect their own privacy on the internet? And if yes, shouldn't we change the conversation to how to educate people better on the dangers of the internet, rather bashing Facebook?

True, There was this from a few years ago: http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targe...

As far as facebook, I don't use their apps and when accessing through a browser don't let the browser share my location. I may have to consider accessing FB through an anonymous vpn service at some point...

There is a problem though.

What about people that had no choice?

For example when a parent post a picture of their newborn baby and continues over the years, for example pictures of their sports events and training, movies of choir presentations and whatnot until the child is savy enough to use Facebook themselves. Don't those people deserve privacy too?

What about significant others that maybe don't even have an account, but have their counterpart share their shared stories and media?

Because Facebook actively encourages people to post more than what is necessary, or even a good idea. It's to Facebook's advantage that most people don't understand the depth of data being collected or the possible consequences of oversharing, so they do everything in their power short of outright deception to get people to post more.

Of course, not 100% of the blame lies directly with Facebook since they're not actively holding guns to people's heads forcing them to use the service, but I see it as more akin to predatory lending where the business profits by exploiting their customers.

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