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Comment by haggy | Hacker News Reader

You say "I am sensitive to privacy and secrecy. I will fight for it every chance I get" but then contradict with "I willingly share my life on facebook and enjoy the content shared with me". That's the problem. The government has never had a tool like this before and because of the social graph that facebook created, will likely not have another one like it anytime soon. Unfortunately for the average user (and even very advanced users) leaving Facebook altogether is the only option to maintaining secrecy of any kind. FB updates ToS far too often and nobody bothers to stay up to date with it. Using the service is admitting that you are willing to give up all secrecy and privacy (thanks to their chat being completely centralized). IMO, using Facebook implies you don't care about secrecy or privacy.

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> You say "I am sensitive to privacy and secrecy. I will fight for it every chance I get" but then contradict with "I willingly share my life on facebook and enjoy the content shared with me".

This is not a contradiction. Someone with privacy has the right to decide what they do and don't want to share publicly. Like you, I am concerned by how Facebook is used, and some of its societal implications, but this sort of extremist attitude helps nothing.

> Unfortunately for the average user (and even very advanced users) leaving Facebook altogether is the only option to maintaining secrecy of any kind. FB updates ToS far too often and nobody bothers to stay up to date with it.

This isn't true at all. While Facebook is somewhat sketchy about changing their privacy rules, if you don't want certain information made publicly available, you can just not put that information into Facebook (and yes, that includes Messenger). Any non-technical person can understand this.

The article contends that this isn't actually true - or, more accurately, that Facebook's heavy instrumentation, both of the web and of its own properties including mobile apps, combine with some pretty sketchy behavior and ToS language to make "not put[ting] that information into Facebook" nearly impossible without stringent, conscientious, and perfectly applied opsec.

> This is not a contradiction. Someone with privacy has the right to decide what they do and don't want to share publicly. Like you, I am concerned by how Facebook is used, and some of its societal implications, but this sort of extremist attitude helps nothing.

What you call an "extremist attitude" I call "info security common sense". Companies like Facebook are well known to lull their users into a false sense of being in a "safe, governed social utopia" all while profiting from vast amounts of data both explicitly provided by users and implicitly provided through data analysis. Anyone even remotely close to fields like infosec, cyber security, or data engineering know that Facebook is quickly becoming a giant spider web for its users. While I agree with you that an extremist attitude is not helpful, it's come to a point where I just know too much about the background of companies like Facebook to simply ignore these issues.

> Anyone even remotely close to fields like infosec, cyber security, or data engineering know that Facebook is quickly becoming a giant spider web for its users.

Exactly. Everytime I see a person using Facebook (so basically every day) I think: Gosh, again a guy or girl not getting paid and yet eager to work. What a world do we live in?

Please. Everyone who has their entire life on Facebook put it there voluntarily. You are completely ignoring the people who put and small amount of information on Facebook and retain a large amount of privacy. And despite your not so subtle implication that you are smarter than anyone who disagrees with you, you have completely failed to defend your premise that using Facebook is fundamentally incompatible with privacy.

So your stance is that as a competent, technically savvy person, you are able to maintain your secrecy and/or privacy on Facebook? Are you aware of the vast amount of implicit data they receive just by you logging in and viewing your friend's posts? The amount of resources FB has dedicated to tech like fingerprinting (both browser based and behavioral) is enough to harvest vast amounts of data from even the most technically savvy people such as yourself.

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