Hacker News Reader

Comment by DrSprout | Hacker News Reader

I suspect they didn't realize how many people, when faced with the mangling of their profiles, replacing all of their interests with poorly and inconsistently guessed 'likes,' would simply get rid of all that data.

It's really interesting looking at Facebook in Spanish, their localization with these roll-outs is pretty slipshod. "Mark as read" showed up in English for over a month after the big PHP-compiling to C++ shift, which otherwise was pretty good.

Likewise, though my profile is written in English, Facebook took it upon itself to guess what everything meant, and translate it into actual books and such. The result was actually remarkably effective, but still imperfect, and plain text is simply a better data model for what should be a simple "here's who I am."

View on HN

I replaced my interest with SQL injection statements.

> plain text is simply a better data model for what should be a simple "here's who I am."

I disagree. Plain text is ambiguous. Links to pages aren't. The links also create a graph of people and their interests, which could have useful applications.

The changes that Facebook has made will make it more useful. Other than Instant Personalization, the privacy implications of the changes have been clearly communicated, and it's easy to choose what you do or don't want to share. The parts of the profile that can't be made private weren't very private in the first place.

They're only ambiguous to machines. Humans can read it just fine.

If someone lists "curling" as an interest, it's ambiguous even to humans. Weightlifting or obscure winter sport?

Even if it were only ambiguous to machines, there are probably useful things that can be done by machines with the data that will now be disambiguated, which sounds like a plus to me.

They linked LaTeX to a page for fans of latex. What was that about ambiguity?

My point wasn't that their auto-linking would be great. My point is that after the changes sort themselves out and people fix things that Facebook got wrong, the data will be more useful to work with than plain text.

I'm not sure there could be two more different interests...

You're wrong about too many people getting rid of their data. [I work at Facebook]

[citation needed]

You know that he probably can't provide that info, right?

Of course. But that's the GPs whole point, he can't be providing info, either to confirm or to deny so it is relatively moot. We can choose to believe him because he's a HN'er of long and good standing (which I am inclined to do) or not (because there is no way to prove it and he does work for the company mentioned and that is not always the best source of information for things like this).

I'm quite sure he speaks the truth in an absolute sense. Maybe 50,000 or 100,000 people have canceled, maybe even only 10,000. But that was how every other social network that preceded facebook died off, by the first relatively large group of users that said 'enough'. What goes up quickly can go down just as fast, if any social network that is perceived as 'more secure' and 'less evil' in combination with 'nice to the users' gains traction with those leaving now then this could very well follow the exact same graph that caused FB to grow so fast.

This is not a 'sure thing' by any means, though probably the effect will be limited. Once it starts feeding back on itself or if facebook has one or two more security booboos all bets are off.

Seriously? Aside from a minority fraction of the techies, do you really think facebook users care about this?

Those small pebbles and chunks of ice sliding down the mountain could be normal erosion or the first signs of an impending avalanche. Facebook is firmly in the "evil" category for many outspoken techies (e.g. those people every Facebook employee runs into at parties who no longer think they are working for a cool company but who instead mention how they are now working for Sauron) and even among the general populace the company is widely considered to be bit creepy. If things continue the current trajectory I think a serious backlash and government regulation is not out of the question.

Fantastic point. We all want the respect of our peers. Even if this doesn't affect FB's public status, their ability to attract great people will be severely diminished.

The NYT thinks people who read the NYT care about it. My opinion last week was firmly in your camp on the general population. Now I'm not so sure.

I saw a feature in Consumer Reports recently about Facebook privacy issues.

I don't know if you are informed how facebook overtook the marked leader in Germany, StudiVZ: StudiVZ got a lot of bad press for privacy violations that were pretty harmless compared to what Facebook is doing now. Subsequently, a significant share of their customers left towards Facebook. Sweet irony...

What kind of citation could it possibly be? A log snapshot taken under oath in presence of a notary, whose PGP key you happen to have verified in person?

Just pointing out here that citations are not a means to an end. You still have to trust the citation - since apparently you don't believe the guy claiming to be from facebook, who would you believe?

I've tried deleting my connections under Music and TV multiple times now to no avail. (The bands I am only fans of bc my friends are in them, I don't actually like. I'm not into the TV shows listed anymore)

When I first went through the initial flow of you guys making all of these linked connections. It took me at least 20 minutes trying to get these TV Shows and Bands deleted.

A handful of days later, I was revisiting all of my privacy settings because I don't trust you. Low and behold there are all the TV Shows and Movies that I thought I had deleted still present on my profile.

It turns out I can't remove these connections at all.

I think a lot more people might have gotten rid of their data if they could, if they knew how, or if they knew that: "These settings only control the information people can see on your profile. This information, such as your Pages and list of friends, is still public, so it could appear elsewhere on the site and be accessed by applications you and your friends use."

But I guess duping people with obfuscated engineering and design, coupled with bad (or no) communication with users is just the rule nowadays for you all.

The worst part is--I resisted joining Facebook for so long, didn't join until well after the Beacon fiasco, because I didn't trust the company one bit. It is sad that I was right about this and should have stuck to my guns.

Side note: While typing this I decided to pop over and re-audit my settings for pry the 4-5 time in the past couple weeks. What do you know some values were not the same as what I had made them previously. Seems like the only time I ever have problems with Facebook from an application point of view is when I am trying to delete or change settings.

Can you explain to me (to my email if you want, it's in my profile) exactly where you're finding these connections you've removed, how you removed them (and with your userid)? If you do so, I can try to look into it.

I don't know what you're talking about in your side note -- if you haven't seen big dialogs popup or messages on the front page, your settings shouldn't change magically. I know we don't always do a great job of communicating exactly what has changed, but we certainly don't change things behind your back, and certainly not maliciously.

Sure thing. I'll drop you an email in a few about the connections.

As for the side note, no clue what happened exactly. It was the settings for my email field. It should have been friends only, but it was friends of friends instead.

It could be a user error, maybe I inadvertently switched it one of the handful of times I have been checking everything lately. Or some error on your side, I just don't know.

It may have came off conspiratorial, but a few friends and I have both commented on how the only times we run into issues with the Fbook application is when we are trying to delete data or modify settings.(Aside of the chat early in its history) And I was attempting (badly) to convey that observation

Something everybody at Facebook needs to note though: viewing intent as malicious or not is pretty relative to the person and where you are standing. Something a strictly opt -in model can address quite well.

ex: A legitimate business acquires an email list, let's say it is even targeted to people who might want/need their product. They blast out an sales email. To them the intent is not malicious--they are just trying to provide a potential customer with a product or service that might address a need/problem/want in their life.

From a recipients perspective, let's say me, this is a violation of my inbox, my privacy, even my values. Now, regardless of the senders intent or whether the product is good, not only do I not trust them--but I question intent and motives.

Your points are well taken.

How do you know?

I left Facebook a long time ago, and because I didn't trust you (correctly as it turned out) to delete the account, I shoved bad data in there instead. You have no way to know what proportion of other users have done the same.

If I were doing data mining for them, any accounts that had had at least 80% of their core information altered within a year (after their initial configuration) would be thrown out of the dataset.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com