Are We Really Dumb Zucks? | Hacker News Reader

Are We Really Dumb Zucks?

tweetagewasteland.com

58 pointsgreatjackie40 comments

The author is presuming that the IMs that an anonymous person on the internet claims they have access to are real. The article that this came from won't even state where they came from. Was it the person in the chat themselves? Was it someone who "discovered" Zuck's hard drive?

http://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg-ims...

Even if they aren't legit, it says a lot about his public persona that people automatically assume they are.

The author is presuming that the IMs that an anonymous person on the internet claims they have access to are real.

Why quibble about whether he said those words, when he has expressed them so damningly in his actions.

I can't believe how many people subscribe to the "guilty is as guilty does" mantra. Because FB tried to profit to forcefully from user data these adolescent comments has to be Zuck's. Or he has to be a sociopath, or worse.

Assuming these IMs indeed are his, I find it amusing how people who complain about FB making their info public have no qualms about totally jumping on private comments made by another.

I don't complain about FB making my info public, as I have never chosen to share any with them. However, I've been told on this site more than once that over-30's "don't get" Facebook and should ask young people to explain it to them, and should refrain from even making comments about FB.

So I find it a little amusing that one of the reasons I may not get it is because I am not a "dumb fuck". Regardless of the comment's provenance, I smiled when I heard it.

Speaking of the "under 30" cool crowd behaving in "dumb fuck"-y ways, check out Formspring. Endless hours of morbid entertainment.

FWIW, facebook actually responded to this article. They did not suggest that the IM conversation was fake. Only that it was unrelated to the goals of the company and their commitment to privacy.

Nor did they suggest it was real.

If it weren't real, they would be denying it like very strongly, almost as if their future depended on it.

If Obama weren't born in Kenya, he would be denying it very strongly, almost as if his future depended on it.

No, wait, things do not work that way.

Got a link/ref to their response?

I keep hearing this 'don't post it if you'd never want it public' mantra; but surely there should be a way for us to post thoughts/content to friends with an expectation that only they will ever be able to see it?

The need to trust the person on the other side will always be there (people have always been able to pass on letters and repeat conversations) - but that doesn't change Facebook's role.

"... but surely there should be a way for us to post thoughts/content to friends with an expectation that only they will ever be able to see it?"

Eliminating the for-profit middleman seems like a good first step, this is what Diaspora is all about. Of course not everyone is going to have the technical acumen to host their own node, but there should be a number of node providers to choose from.

The very first of Email Policy that our General Counsel communicated to us:

"Only put in email what you are prepared to see in the front page of the New York Times"

You may suggest that was an overblown policy, but in 1997, Eric Bradley (who worked about 3' away from me in Building 4 on Middlefield) sent an Email to _a lawyer_ at Netscape - venting about how much "I really do hate that company " when Lawrence Lessig had asked about his application preferences being switched over to IE.

His email (and venting) appeared soon thereafter in the New York Times.

Around here - if you have even the _slightest_ doubt about whether something should appear on the front page of the NYT you either:

o Communicate in person, audibly. o Print it out and hand deliver/email/fax (with the expectation that it will be shredded)

This last suggestion is illegal. Lawyers generally counsel to not say much in email because email is subject to discovery in legal proceedings. Many laws also require retention policies that are subject to audit, which makes shredding problematic.

You clearly don't work in Silicon Valley. Every building has dozens of Garbage Cans marked "Shred" - The default for anything on your desk is to toss it into one of those.

Nobody (except for HR, Finance and legal) keeps paper files anymore, so if you don't want a permanent record - just deliver it on paper and it will disappear. I've been through several discovery procedures, and all that anybody has ever been interested in was email. Nobody even _thought_ to ask for paper files.

Yeah, just run a phpBB forum on your own personal webserver, and give only your friends access to it.

While I don't like the direction Facebook has been going in regarding privacy, I am one of the folks of the position that it is not wise to put stuff on the Internet you don't want being made public. It's not like it takes even super-uber-hacker levels of skill to get somebody else's "private" data on the web. All it takes is for somebody who is granted access to your "private" data to look at your web page or email, and then copy-and-paste, or take a screenshot, take a photograph, screenshare, or have someone else be looking over their shoulder at the time. And once that initial copy/fork is made, the copied data can live forever and is infinitely sharable/viral.

When I first learned of MySpace and Facebook, and what people were doing on them and uploading to them I thought, "This will not end well." Turns out, I was right.

While I don't like the direction Facebook has been going in regarding privacy, I am one of the folks of the position that it is not wise to put stuff on the Internet you don't want being made public.

The whole problem is that Facebook takes your Internet visibility out of your hands, and puts it in the hands of your "friends." Meaning, people who don't realize that you might not want photos of underage drinking or that summer camp in Pakistan posted in public and tagged with your name.

"Don't post it if you don't want it to be public" surely implies that email is a public broadcasting medium. Technically this is true, but that's not how most people think of email, including businesses and legal entities.

This is the crux of the issue. Where's the line between email and Facebook? "If you don't want it public, don't put it on the web," they say. But that's way too simplistic. Webmail's on the web, and we (and the law) certainly have different expectations of it. So where's the line? And how evil is it to pull a Facebook-style privacy bait-and-switch? There's a privacy spectrum between email and Twitter, and FB is somewhere in between.

Don't get me wrong -- I haven't taken sides, and can't be arsed to care, having never gotten involved with FB.

I think the inclusion of that IM chat is about the metaphor. Anything you say can eventually be public.

So we should all run our own email servers, then?

No, but we should assume that someone working at the company where our mail is hosted could look at it. And more important, we should assume that the recipient could publish it someday.

I can't speak for ya'all, but my email stays stored on my IMAP server on my personal box. If somebody wants my email, they'll have to get it from me. All of my mail filtering rules work on the server side, and I get a consistent view of my inbox and folders from all of my IMAP clients.

The thought that software is groveling my email in order to send targeted advertisements to me I find repugnant. Perhaps it's because I formed my ideas about how the Internet should work before it was commercialized.

Ding ding ding! I do the exact same thing, though my mail filtering server side was more of a side effect of Android's mail clients not being able to do filtering and me being tired of my phone buzzing every 30 seconds alerting me of new spam.

19 years old and millions of dollars before. People change. I know I have over time and money - especially money, more money makes you more tame.

does any one cares for privacy as much as media would presume?

I'm tired of the implications that users are dumb and are the only people to blame for this debacle. My privacy settings were altered to be more public after this latest round of changes. Instant Personalization added half a dozen apps (some of them literally compromising personal information based on various websites I visited that automatically got access to my data) without my consent.

There are tons of stupid users that don't bother to check their privacy settings but I swear to God, I've edited and locked down mine 4-5 times in the last six months and I have to be vigilant about it because THEY SILENTLY CHANGE THE PRIVACY POLICY & TOS AND RESET MY PRIVACY SETTINGS.

Let's all go against the flow and defend Facebook. Right.

Wow, I didn't read this as an attack on users or as a defense of facebook at all. Seems to me it's just the opposite and suggests that you can't trust anyone with your personal information.

His point is that the expectation of privacy on the internet is not wise. Despite the privacy settings on your account, you've already handed data over to a (in this case) for-profit company.

If you wouldn't want to share it with the clerk at the grocery store, don't put it on the internet. Period.

If I have a contract with the clerk at the grocery store, I would trust him. If he broke the contract, changed the terms, added new sections, etc, then I would have a reason not to trust him/her.

That's literally like telling me I shouldn't trust my employers with my direct deposit info and my social security. Or that I shouldn't trust the insurance company with the same information, etc.

How is a privacy policy, changed behind users backs, with blatantly offensive auto-opt-in/out features not a violation of a reasonable expectation?

How often do you email confidential business data? Or log into a company intranet or VPN? How often do you send love letters or personal notes to a (potential) significant other? etc.

There are lots of uses for the internet where privacy is expected. Perhaps a better thing to say is "If you don't want it shared, don't put it on a social networking website".

It's true that once digitized, content can be very difficult to contain, but there _are_ ways to communicate over the internet and maintain a reasonable expectation of privacy.

The thing with Facebook is that they've promised certain things, like that you'd have to authorize anyone before they had access to any of your data, or that certain things would remain friends-only, or whatever, and then they've renegged on these promises. They betrayed and jeopardized their users for their own immediate profit. Do you think that's something we should just write off as "well, don't put things on the internet"?

It's not like a bunch of nude photos that someone uploaded to a server in a public directory and hoped no one would ever stumble across them. For that, you can say "well, be careful what you put on the internet, because it's just as accessible to everyone else as it is to you", but when a company makes a covenant not to share certain data and then breaks it, I don't think it's really fair to expect users to expect that behavior.

But even that's not acceptible. If a TOS/PP says that my privacy settings will be honored, I upload content assuming that only X people can see it, my settings are changed behind my back and now Everyone can see it.... something is very wrong. If Facebook blocked my profile until I had a chance to review the new settings and their new more open defaults, that would be fine. If Instant Personalization had been opt-in, that would be fine. If the god damn Applications page would let me block applications that would be fine. If I could visit Queerty without seeing that some god damned Queerty app was added to my profile CERTAINLY WITHOUT MY CONSENT, that would be okay.

The IM conversation that started this whole topic was not a social service, yet it, too, is public.

If you don't want it shared, don't put on the internet.

(Well, at least, not until my startup is shipping its product. Then you'll be fine.)

>I'm tired of the implications that users are dumb

>There are tons of stupid users

What is your opinion on consistency?

The implication from the end of the article is that anyone who is outraged is dumb for not taking their privacy into their own hands. I grant that many users fall into that category.

More important though, are diligent users like me, who still managed to have private data shared with third parties against my will with absolutely no notification that it would be occurring.

No, more importantly are the users who don't have a clue how privacy works on FB or even why privacy matters at all. Diligent users like you who review their privacy settings a half-dozen times a year are in the vast minority.

If we expect around 10 tons of people we would be talking somewhere over 100 people.

Facebook is just another place where I have 'contacts'. I rarely comment on anyone's picture, status etc., I never post anything, never initiate conversation unless the person I know is only available via Facebook.

I do not need any graph to see how FB screwed up its privacy policies over the years. I have been there and seen all that. Call me a security freak, but doing all of the above has saved me so far.

And above all, my wife has already deleted the account. :)

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