Facebook’s Safety Check is a stress-inducing flip of social norms
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14412146
Thank god the author hasn't lived through an event where everybody you know is affected by the event. The ability to say "I'm okay", say it once, and have everybody you know on FB see it is a huge stress reducer. It cuts back on the number of "are you okay?" messages you receive during the event when you may not have a lot of battery or a lot of spare brain to dedicate to answering lots of bullshit inquiries.
If he's feeling stressed out because of FB opening the "I'm okay" service in that small area for that catastrophic fire, he's being a self centered jerk. I guarantee that FBs service is helping some poor soul mixed up in that mess.
Edit: The Facebook safety check feature is not unique to Facebook. In many ways it mimics Japan's disaster message board feature. Every teleco in Japan offers this service:
https://www.nttdocomo.co.jp/english/info/disaster/disaster_b...
I really think the author has lived too lucky a life in a place that has not suffered overmuch from disasters. He can't see beyond his own narrow vision.
How do you know they haven't? Just because you have and feel one way doesn't mean they haven't.
>"If he's feeling stressed out because of FB opening the "I'm okay" service in that small area for that catastrophic fire,"
I'm not sure I would consider 6 miles a 'small area.'
Point taken. That said, his entire essay reads to me as a man unaffected by hardship.
> I'm not sure I would consider 6 miles a 'small area.'
Point taken. That said, let's compare the area affected in New York City on 9/11 to the London apartment fire. WTC's disaster would have benefited from FB's safety check feature. That day/evening I manually called (a lot) of people based on their work address in my contact list. Everybody checked out okay. Some days later, I find out a associate was at a Risk Waters risk conference in the Windows of the World restaurant. He died. Because the conference attendance was (of course) handwritten and only in the building, nobody knew who was there and who wasn't. Had FB's safety check feature been around in those days, I think that particular situation would not have been so chaotic for the families.
Would it have helped the families of first the first responders like NYFD/NYPD/EMTs? Are first responders supposed to take time to "check in" on FB? Would it have been any less chaotic for their families?
And honestly I find it really disturbing to compare tragedies, especially so in the context of their value to a FB feature.
I guess I feel I have the right to make the comparison. I wasn't there in NYC, but I had "some skin in the game" on 9/11 so to speak. From that experience, and from later ones, I can put myself into the shoes of somebody wondering if their loved one was mixed up in the London fire. To them, it doesn't matter that the fire affected only one apartment building in London.
This difference is my problem with the Safety Check system and, I believe, the authors. If there is an event where my safety is indeed in a majority questionable state (Typhoon takes out my town) then prompt me with a check #ThankYou. If there was an event which doesn't swing to a majority question then leave it to the individual case.
2 side notes: 1. Why do I personally take issue? Well, I was a student during the following: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Ohio_State_University_att... and felt "forced" to provide my answer to the Safety Check as I know my one crazy aunt would go loony if I didn't. In no way did the event warrant this switch from perceived safety to opt-in safety (it was 13 students hurt of >50,000).
2. As other commenters have noted "With great power, comes great responsibility!". If they're going to deploy this technology make sure it provides value and effects, changes safety to opt-in, for the smallest possible subset. Additionally, as you pointed out in your original post allow individuals to add themselves to the Safety Check list if you are getting spammed with messages.
Sorry for the long post but, like the author, I was very taken aback when I first encountered this feature on Facebook. While I understand the good intentions. Personally, it fell into the area of prompting a world where we need that instant knowledge, text back, response, etc. which frankly isn't that healthy...
After reading all the comments my observations kicked off, your's actually caused me to think outside of my own set of experiences. I kinda see your point. That said, I still stand by my original position that FB's service fills a purpose at the Katrina / regional earthquake & tsunami level. However perhaps they need to work on the fine tuning. Personally glad I don't work in this area inside FB! They are going to be criticized for setting the threshold too high or too low regardless.
Hypotheticals about how 9/11 would have played in the presence of a safety notification by facebook are conjecture, and seem pretty far fetched to me.
The reality is the vast majority of people are getting drawn in, dishonestly, into interaction with FB.
It happened in my city also, a underground subway was getting constructed, not even used by people yet, and a small portion collapsed. Almost everyone in the city got a safety check notification, hundreds of thousands of people, for an event that killed no one, and only affected a handful of workers. Why is it necessary to notify the city of that? It's irresponsible and dishonest.
Should Facebook have created a 'please reconfirm' feature? If so, how often should hey have triggered it? For 9/11, there are at least four main events: two plane hits and two building collapses, but there were more: additional buildings, etc.
If you're like me, living in Australia... 6 miles is considerably tiny :P
Needs to be some blend of proximity at that time/frequency of visit. Facebook probably stores all of this in any case, so a bit more tweaking on their part will make it easier to deal with.
I do recollect that the FB safety check was launched, in large part, because of the 3/11 disaster. Maybe for commercial reasons, but I do recall companies doing whatever they could to help the people of Japan at the time.
https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2014/10/introducing-safety-chec...
Is that reasonable or proportionate? Does it actually provide useful information? Is it likely to quell unfounded fears and provide genuine reassurance?
As tragic as this incident was, it affected a single building. Safety Check might be a useful feature in some very specific circumstances, but it's abundantly clear that Facebook is using it inappropriately. People hundreds of miles from the incident are having their profiles show "not marked as safe".
The article makes a quite reasonable point - that Safety Check strongly implies that "not safe" is the default, contrary to long-established social norms. Unless used very carefully, this feature could cause completely unnecessary fear; it is easy to envision a scenario where Safety Check could prompt a dangerous mass panic.
If this is a genuine public safety feature, if Facebook really are using Safety Check out of concern for their users welfare, then they should fully accept the concomitant responsibility. They should expend real resources to liaise with the relevant agencies and ensure that Safety Check is deployed only when appropriate, that it is accurately targeted and that it helps rather than hinders relief efforts.
If Facebook wish to rely on their usual excuses of "move fast and break stuff" and "it's not our fault, it's the algorithm", then we should see Safety Check in those terms - as a careless and cynical effort to boost engagement metrics.
Clearly there's a geographic component. Someone in the area, around the time, or in the area regularly. There's probably a fancy combination of, how bad the event was, how widely the event was reported, how close you are to friends, are you traveling to the area, and a bunch of other factors.
Clearly they can handle it dynamically. If you get the "are you ok?" messages, they can add you to likely events, and offer the i'm safe. They can make it easy to add yourself to a disaster event.
There are a lot of people in London. They have the social graph, coupled with location and messaging data. They can do a better job at targeting.
Again, i respect your opinion, but your needs, and my needs are different. I think they can do a better job at meeting both of our needs.
I, for example, know several people in London, but have no idea where in London exactly they life. Now I didn't actually worry because that just didn't make sense considering the numbers involved, but it seems like a very understandable, human mistake to still get alarmed.
That could mean displaying people safe without their input, based on location data. But that wouldn't have an impact on the problems the author is concerned about.
I think it's essentially a good feature, but this incident may just not have been a good fit.
Yeah, it's a human mistake, but technology should be moving people away from animalistic fears and desires, not pushing them towards it. The easier thing to do would be to realize those odds and realize you can't control these things instead of relying on a social network as a crutch.
That may be cynical, but Facebook isn't doing this because they care about you, they're doing it because it's yet another way to get people attached so Facebook can make advertising dollars. That's cynical.
Do you have a suggestion for how that could be practically done?
> The easier thing to do would be to realize those odds and realize you can't control these things instead of relying on a social network as a crutch.
Easier? What the easy way you're suggesting for changing these attitudes and beliefs among the general population?
I'm not in any way convinced that Safety Check does actually dampen fear. It provides information of very poor quality ("not marked as safe" or "safe") in a very poorly targeted way, without any kind of meaningful context. That kind of uncertainty is rarely reassuring.
If Facebook took the issue seriously, they could easily address many of these shortcomings. They could provide this kind of information in a relevant and contextual way, counteracting the cognitive biases that lead us to worry. They could deeply examine how social media can stoke fears and engineer reassurance into the fabric of their network, rather than bolting on a crude alert system that was hacked together in a weekend. I doubt that they will, because fear and misinformation is clearly very profitable for them in all sorts of ways.
I'm reminded of the AMBER Alert system - a well-meaning but highly ineffectual response that has greatly contributed to the climate of fear.
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0887403407302332 http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0734016808316778
FWIW, this wasn't the case in my (very large) extended family my entire childhood. Depending on how widespread coverage of the event was, a family member get calls or texts asking if I was okay whenever something dangerous happened
For those of us who do not use social media [yep, looks like I have to be "that guy" today], it's in no way the default. I can tell you that if people I know don't hear from me over social media, they are not going to bat an eye, because it is normal not to hear from me over social media.
It's an interesting question though: Does frequent use of something like Facebook lead to an expectation of future frequent use of it from your peers? I'm not sure if that's true. Try it as an experiment. Don't log into social media for 3 months. See how many "friends" actually try to contact you through some other means to check if you're OK. My guess is that fewer than you think will. I know when I jumped ship on social media, I just stopped logging in without telling anyone, and exactly zero people panicked. They just started E-mailing me when they had something to say.
100% agree. I think it's a well-intentioned effort gone wrong because the tuning is so off. I know a few engineers at Facebook who work on algorithms + related tooling, I'll make sure they see this.
This is especially problematic when you consider Facebook’s business model benefits from increased engagement with its platform. Add to that, it also recently stepped into the personal fundraising space. And today, as chance would have it, Facebook announced that Safety Check will be integrating these personal fundraisers (starting in the US).
An FAQ for Facebook’s Fundraisers notes that the company levies a fee for personal donations of 6.9% + $.30, while fees for nonprofit donations range from 5% to 5.75%.
I live in London but have friends around the world that haven't visited me yet and don't know where I live. After an event like yesterday I get a lot of messages asking if I'm ok, so using the safety check can help even though there was no remote risk that I could've been affected.
I think it's reasonable that the safety check area is that large, it helps for friends/family who don't know exactly where you are.
It's nuts.
This looks like yet another case of nerds assuming the entire world thinks and acts like we do. Yes, worrying about someone just because they live in the same major city as a disaster that affects a couple hundred people is irrational. Yes, your adds of being killed by a bus while crossing the street are far greater. Yes, just about any event which makes the news is unlikely by definition. No, none of this actually influences how normal people think and act.
If my friend is going overseas for a month (and there aren't any terror attacks or plane crashes or whatever), I will probably assume they're doing just fine, haven't been mugged or gotten lost in the woods or anything unless I specifically hear otherwise.
I probably wasn't involved, and they'd have heard if I was.
Well that's bloody stupid and innumerate of them. Surely, enabling such vices can't be good in the long-term.
... and how, again, are these people able to acquire positions of power such that we still have to care-about/interact-with them?
Stop arguing about why the average person, or even the average powerful person, ought to have an excellent understanding of these things, and start exploring why they don't. You'll come out of it more informed.
The fire in London was not a catastrophe of the scale of a tsunami or a major terrorist attack, but the pictures were frightening and impressive, and it is still a huge tragedy. So I can imagine many residents of London got worried messages from friends and family abroad.
If a bomb goes off in Baltimore, I don't call all my DC friends.
On 9/11 I was a kid living in Germany, but had relatives in California. My teachers were incredibly concerned and treated my like I was wrapped in cotton, or as if I had lost somebody personally. It's a weird thing.
However, the problem is its application to a much wider spectrum of incidents. So the chance of lives saved is being drastically reduced, while the collateral damage is massive.
We all have those extremely nervous and neurotic friends who jump to conclusions about things that would have no affect on you whatsoever.
I've had people just today ask me if I was ok based on the fact that the UPS shootings occurred in San Francisco and I'm currently in the Bay Area.
Now with Facebook able to unilaterally decide that I might have been affected, so they send out a systemwide alert, that confirms or creates everybody's worst fears. If I am affected, I'll reach out when I'm able to. If I'm not affected, why waste cycles calming people down that I didn't alert?
He does make valid points, and furthermore, as others have said, a 6 mile radius in a city like London covers hundreds of thousands of people.
I can and would argue until infinity that there is absolutely no need whatsoever for a 6 mile radius warning in the event of 1 (one) single building on fire. Weather you like it or not or agree with FB or not, this was a completely localized event of minimal or no impact (other than maybe traffic for a couple of blocks??) to such an area.
The same is clearly not true for events of other nature (natural disasters, nuclear, maybe manhunts but I already find that one questionable.., etc.)
That is to say, the service is not evil or a bad idea. The criticism is more on the execution and the unnecessary, rather opportunistic, abuse of such an event.
If the author is indeed biased because he did not live through such an event, then you are most definitely also biased because you did live through one; and you certainly seem to be not only receptive and even defensive, but apparently offended.
This was more of yet another case of attention grabbing, manipulative and opportunistic behaviour with a good samaritan cover.
Make no mistake: salesmen, media (in all formats), advertisers, politicians and companies of all sorts have been doing this for centuries.
I understand you lived through an instance where this helped, but a single building on fire does not equal a natural disaster. The scale and impact is just very different, there is no arguing that.
It's pretty simple actually: there is (should be) an appropriate level of response and a corresponding correct setting. In this particular case, it was way way off. Don't let your personal experience prevent you from recognizing that, for it's the same thing you accuse him of.
And again, even acknowledging that, you may still not agree that it was done with an opportunistic intention; and that's fine, but it shouldn't prevent you or anyone from openly discussing where the correct boundaries are.
My read from the author's article was that because the event was too inconveniencing for him because FB chose to response to this singular somewhat small event, with arguably too wide a net, that safety check isn't needed anywhere for anything.
Of course I used my personal experiences to refute his entire article.
No, it covers MILLIONS of people.
>other than maybe traffic for a couple of blocks??
Yeah you're underestimating the impact here, I live half a mile away and it was carnage yesterday. They've closed one of the major routes out of London (the Westway) and two tube lines which affected most of central London.
Thankfully things have _mostly_ returned to normal now.
(Honest question; I don't use FB, and this feature seems about as useful as being woken up by a 2AM Amber Alert on my cell phone here in the US)
As OP, I lived through a major natural disaster, and I posted that I was safe on my timeline, and most of my friends that were connected with the disaster did.
- An abduction that involved the dad taking the kids against the mother's will for a few days -- three states away
- A triple murder-suicide -- 300 miles away
- A woman arrested for being cruel to her animals, complete with pictures -- in a city 150 miles away
And this is with my blocks as high as I can make them.
I am constantly being bombarded by news that affects a very small segment of the population in communities far distant from the one I live in.
This does not provide any sort of public service to me. Emotional-laden content such as this and the "I'm safe" buttons exist for Facebook's purposes far, far more than they do for the user's purposes.
This is the way of the new PC crowd: do something that benefits you but can be spun as a kindness to the community. Then shout down anybody who points out that you're only acting in your self interest.
I do not doubt that this has a benefit for that small number of people actually trapped in a large-scale natural disaster (Although I would wonder what, exactly, in a world of billions of people constitutes "large scale"?) But if you waste five minutes of ten million people's lives with a notification like this? That's 5 minutes X 10 million = more than 2,200 man-years. It's the equivalent of 30 people's lives simply to make a few people feel better. In addition, because of the numbers involved, overall it actually creates much more stress than it reduces. There is a not-insignificant healthcare cost associated with things like this.
The old-time capitalist pigs were easy to understand: they made stuff in order to make money. The new guys on the block are full of a lot more bullshit than the older guys -- and people who aren't paying attention are easily suckered into the schpiel and the concomitant pathos.
Facebook is just spreading fear to make people more docile and suggestible.
It's just like terrorist attacks and winning the lottery. Sure, these things happen but they don't happen to you.
Facebook and the media love to pick out single unusual cases to make the world seem smaller and more dangerous than it is.
The world is massive, there are more people in it and more things happening than anyone can really appreciate.
While that one tower was burning in London there were probably hundreds of other buildings of the same size burning in other places around the world at the same time. Why does FB focus so much on that one small incident at the expense of all other incidents which actually add up to more? Cold statistics are just not as interesting as emotionally-charged outlier stories.
Hundreds sounds like a massive overestimation to me. You're saying that every single day there are hundreds of comparable building fires around the world. If we conservatively take "hundreds" to be 200, that would be 200*365 every year. That's 73000 every year!
There is generically a far wider use in the US of combustible materials in buildings (compared to Europe) and this is probably only mildly balanced by the low density of housing (with the obvius exception of the relatively few big cities).
If we use these data:
https://www.usfa.fema.gov/data/statistics/fire_death_rates.h...
They are better than before: https://www.usfa.fema.gov/downloads/pdf/statistics/v12i8.pdf but not enough.
Between 3000 and 4000 deaths per year (out of a population of around 330 millons) is 0,001 % or 1 every 100,000,which is still very, very high.
Honestly I'd have thought this situation would call for a lot more than an "I'm ok" checkbox. Something like the recent London terror attacks (disaster in a public place, not just one specific building) seems a decent fit for I'm ok but a disaster where you lose your home seems like the opposite of ok.
At the same time he was attempting to watch his show, I was at work dealing with a flooded basement lab and wondering if my home, which was close to the path of the storm, was still standing.
Some people are very self-centered.
Followed by an adrenaline crash. Followed by all the little muscles around my knees and spine giving up. For the next months, sleeping on other people's guest beds, these little muscle pulls ached. I was mentally drained and physically in low-moderate pain for about a year afterward.
My strong recommendation for everybody's emergency supply kit: pack a jumbo bottle of ibuprofen. Being homeless physically hurts.
Why does everything Facebook do have to be so heavily criticized?
Safety Check is a wonderful feature. If I remember correctly, it started off as an internal hackathon project that got turned into a full feature. They get shit if they turn it on (here), and if they don't turn it on (past tragedies where they failed to turn it on).
Why does everything Facebook do turn into a riot? After years in the industry, 95% of things that are "bad" that come out of big companies end up being well meaning and just look malicious without context. Hanlon's razor is real.
Yeah, Facebook has to fund all this somehow. Yeah, they are going to make their ad space extremely valuable with all the information they have. They don't sell your raw data. They sell access to you like the rest of the industry.
Those creepy ads that you saw based on some conversation you had? Turns out that they're NOT listening to your mic or whatever. It's either confirmation bias or something you're not thinking about.
Those friends that they suggest with a new account? Turns out your friends posted pictures of you on Facebook, and Facebook knows how to do facial recognition.
It feels like everything Facebook is overblown on HN. What am I missing?
Edit: I should have said this originally, but I'm a former Facebook employee, now at another big tech company. I try not to be too controversial in writing, which is why I made a throwaway.
They have an enormous target on their back and could never do anything right. They got ripped for not enabling safety check recently too. https://techcrunch.com/2015/11/15/facebook-says-it-will-enab...
Them implementing a feature so poorly that it tells people 6 miles away to confirm they're safe from a building fire is a "perfect storm for HN shitposting" because of the success of the company, privacy issues, and the founder? And not because the feature is a failing in ways causing false alarms and unnecessary stress?
I bet if Techcrunch didn't write about it, we wouldn't even have this story. If I posted it on my personal blog, I'd be rightly laughed out of the room.
Proof?
My position does ignore the positive aspects of Facebook like finding old acquaintances, coordinating social events etc, but then even cannibalism has its bright sides.
> is not your problem
You're wrong on both counts. Having an opinion regarding a social media platform, particularly one that can affect the fabric of society, is totally reasonable on a discussion forum hosted on Y Combinator.
It's no more living the life of others than having an opinion on war, politics or famine.
My wife and I were talking about celebrating my kids birthday party at Arcade Foobar. A day later she started seeing ads on Facebook about Arcade Foobar.
It's grotesque and one of the many reasons why my wife and I no longer have facebook accounts.
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=786909
https://www.cnet.com/news/samsungs-warning-our-smart-tvs-rec...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/03/09...
https://www.facebook.com/business/help/164749007013531
Arcade Foobar want to draw in new customers, and so generate a lookalike audience based on data they have from existing customers. The modelling algo then compares data points for people who 'look like' their customers, and those people can then be targeted with a high probability that they will also be interested in the same thing.
This is a perfectly plausible explanation that doesn't require FB to be listening to you through your phone mic.
https://www.charlesproxy.com/documentation/faqs/using-charle...
http://docs.telerik.com/fiddler/Configure-Fiddler/Tasks/Conf...
You could probably also do it with the emulator. You may need to do something like https://www.bettercap.org/blog/sslstripping-and-hsts-bypass/ or it could be even harder: http://docs.mitmproxy.org/en/stable/certinstall.html#certifi...
There are of course ways around this: https://serializethoughts.com/2016/08/18/bypassing-ssl-pinni...
If you need some more hints: https://github.com/ac-pm/SSLUnpinning_Xposed
https://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=3034811
https://eaton-works.com/2016/07/31/reverse-engineering-and-r...
If you do this, please write it up. I'm sure that many people would be interested in this research if it hasn't already been done.
EDIT: In the spirit of POC||GTFO, I got curious and did it myself. I don't see any evidence of any mic uploads. The worst thing I see is it posting your current location. Here's a screenshot of the typical stuff I was seeing (this particular one is for the messenger portion of the app, and it looks like it's pulling in assets for stickers. I have the Pusheen pack because it's hella adorbs): https://i.imgur.com/dVekldx.png
It's POSTing to graph.facebook.com as you scroll to get more data. It's just JSON and pretty easy to figure out what's going on. I just followed http://docs.telerik.com/fiddler/Configure-Fiddler/Tasks/Conf... . I guess they're not pinning their certs, at least on my Nexus 7 and the version of the FB app that I used (v26.0.0.22.16 on Android 5.1.1 on the 2012 Nexus 7, since that's what I had laying around to mess with easily).
This literally took about 5 minutes to set up and get working. I encourage those curious to try it and see for themselves. I just read http://www.portero.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-gucci-infogra... aloud (I never shop for Gucci handbags, so seeing ads for them would be the tell) to test. I'm not some forensics expert but again, looks like nothing I wouldn't expect, definitely not uploading audio streams to Facebook as I'm speaking or +/- 5 minutes. Again though, check it out for yourself.
EDIT 2: I searched for a few unique strings from some of the decoded JSON my N7 was sending to FB and found https://github.com/macliu010/android_facebook_decomplied , which should be interesting for those following along at home.
EDIT: Sounds like they might pin certs on newer versions of the iOS app. https://github.com/Naituw/HackingFacebook might be useful to get around that. I haven't tried it.
> I don't see any evidence of any mic uploads.
... I am somewhat concerned at what seems to be a common assumption that Facebook (or any other remote server) is sending the same software to everybody. I find that unlikely when "AB testing" and similar practices are are commonly used. Facebook is very strongly involved with "targeted" services which suggests they are more likely than most to send different versions to different audiences. Obviously that isn't proof, but it's a good reason to extrapolating from a single example.
Version numbers and hashes of the installer or binaries from all parties would help a lot.
> I encourage those curious to try it and see for themselves
That's always good advice.
My point is that guessing without actual data isn't evidence. It's easy to speculate and guess at what we think is going on, but it's a bad idea to assume any particular speculation is right in the best situations. It's foolish when the subject of the investigation's core business model is based on sending different things to specifically targeted groups.
> just turn on these features
Perhaps. There are many ways a feature like this could be implemented. See the various obfuscated code contests for extreme examples of how functionality can be hidden in a program. This just means network logs from different clients are also needed, in addition to hashes of binaries.
I am pretty sure it would be undetectable if done right, given no access to the source code of the multiple Facebook components running on your device (some pre-installed by the manufacturer and unremoveable).
And then we saw ads for the Reds and MLB.
I'm not trying to go full tin foil hat here, but it was a pretty strong coincidence for that to happen.
There are many reasons why such things happen: coincidence, someone google the topic from the same router IP address, ad tracking on Googled websites, etc etc
The idea that one of the worlds largest companies would risk their entire business by secretly recording their users for ad revenue is absurd on almost every level.
Yet some people on HackerNew, a forum that self-selects to a highly educated/intelligent part of the community actually believes it.
It's mind-boggling.
I'm with you on the skepticism, but they are one of the largest companies in the world because of ad revenue. It's not putting their business at risk, it is their business.
Whether they record ambient audio or not, how is it implausible or out of character with everything else they do? Facebook and many other companies collect countless dimensions of data on users to profile them for marketing. Audio is just one more. It's not even really that disturbing or far fetched. Why would they ignore such a lucrative data source when they've already tapped so many others?
It's a direct business plan with Amazon's echo for christ sake. What is so hard to comprehend about this?
Right[1]. Nobody makes risky[2], ethically challenged[3] decisions[4] in business[5]. Ever[6]. Doesn't happen[7].
[1] https://www.recode.net/2017/5/11/15628924/alphabet-waymo-law...
[2] https://www.yahoo.com/news/hampton-creek-serves-another-vega...
[3] http://fortune.com/2016/07/08/rise-fall-elizabeth-holmes-the...
[4] https://www.inc.com/business-insider/inside-lending-club-sca...
[5] http://fortune.com/2016/08/14/fraud-allegations-hud-skully/
[6] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/01/technology/a-silicon-vall...
[7] http://www.businessinsider.com/fbi-us-attorney-could-look-at...
It's not about "startups vs. market leading companies." It's this audience knowing the immense power and control companies like Facebook can (and do) exert over us all.
It's compelling to talk about the effects, clearly people care about it, so it will be written about.
How long in the past does something like that need to be before you can start taking other evidence into account?
I'm sure that becoming a billionaire and one of the most powerful men in the world has made him infinitely more humble. But I think it's more likely that he's just gotten better at messaging and spin - especially since he now has people to help him do those things.
> How long in the past does something like that need to be before you can start taking other evidence into account?
What evidence (actions not words) is there that Zuckerberg is any more concerned about people's privacy than when he was 19? Take a look at the WhatsApp fiasco[1] - all I see is evidence that we continue to be "dumb fucks" by trusting Facebook.
[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/08/26/whatsapp-me...
Because the dumb fucks comment was in 2004.
Edit: (In case you nitpick my analogy) I guess you would not hire a person that was jailed in the past, because you cannot trust them.
2. Has anything really changed?
Otherwise, what is this rehabilitation you speak of? Two parties are required, someone who forgives, someone who seeks forgiveness. To turn not seeking forgiveness into being unforgiving is just projection, and to give forgiveness where it is not sought would make a mockery of the whole effort, and of those who actually do reflect and repent. People who are the bottleneck don't get to hold the rest hostage. If he is too fucked up, then he's too fucked up, then that's sad but true and I'm not his brother or son or father to pour resources into him when there are far more worthy recipients. At the very least, he queued himself in the back as far as I'm concerned, correctly so.
Zuckerberg could live out the rest of his live just from his current wealth, and you're still white knighting using some poor Schmuck who made a misstep that could ruin his life unfairly as an example? Just step back and ponder that.
What about potential social networks made by people who are more grounded? Who don't exploit their fellow men? Those don't get a chance because we can't damn Zuckerberg for having been back then who he still is today, or what? Don't just think "what if this billionaire was my starving little sister", also think of the opportunity costs.
There's little forgiveness to be sought here. He said something stupid once, as a teenager. Here we are, 13 years later. If someone thinks he is the same person, with the same beliefs, so that one off-the-cuff comment is of any value in evaluating his thinking and behaviour, then frankly, this someone is dumb.
As for the rest of your comment, it all sounds like "let's hate him because he's rich". Your parent talks about basic principles that apply to everyone regardless of their status.
> it all sounds like "let's hate him because he's rich".
Oh, so it sounds like that. To you. That says more about you than about what I wrote.
People still hire me and trust me because I fucking owned up to my mistake, paid my duty to society, made amends, and have never repeated that mistake.
To my knowledge, Zuckerberg has never so much as apologized for being a stalker or an assclown, let alone done anything to make up for it.
It's one thing to give some support to someone who admits they did something bad. It's entirely different to give support to someone who has never done so.
Most people are not all that inclined to give you a shot after you've done time for a felony and paid huge fines, and done everything in your power to make things better for the people you hurt.
It's hard to get a job. Every application is a ton of effort even more than normal because I have to disclose things, explain the situation, my guilt, my response, and what I've done since to make sure it doesn't happen again.
But I've been, thankfully, able to find people who are willing to trust me enough to keep me employed.
People are even less inclined to cut you some slack when you never even tried to apologize, make amends, and keep acting the same way. If I tried to treat my felony the way Zuckerberg treats his fuckups, no one would ever hire me for anything at all. And rightly so.
There's a lot to be said for admitting that you screwed up and working hard to make things better. Zuck has done neither. And I don't care if it was when he was 19. The prosecutors didn't care how old I was at the time.
Being a fuckhead isn't a criminal offense, but that doesn't mean that there should be a statute of limitations on it. Once a fuckhead, always a fuckhead until proven different. And when your platform is still a privacy fuckhead thing, I'm even less inclined to forgive you and pretend that everything is okay.
> Safety Check is a wonderful feature. If I remember correctly, it started off as an internal hackathon project that got turned into a full feature. They get shit if they turn it on (here), and if they don't turn it on (past tragedies where they failed to turn it on).
It's just not the same people doing the complaining. That some people complained about the feature not being on doesn't mean there are no negatives to turning it on, and now people affected by those negatives are complaining.
Or to draw a more absurdist comparison, let's say Facebook had a switch. If they pull it, I get punched in the face. If they don't pull it, you get punched in the face. Now, when they pull it, I'm understandably upset and demand they stop pulling it. When they listen to my complaint and stop pulling it, you are suddenly upset and tell them to keep pulling it. Seems like Facebook just can't catch a break? Or are they simply trying to serve customers with competing needs, something every business has to deal with?
I don't think this situation is special to Facebook, so I think a likely explanation for your initial question(Why does everything Facebook do have to be so heavily criticized?) would be that this is something common to large businesses trying to serve competing interests, and you notice Facebook more because Facebook is very large and has lots of users.
Do you really feel like a non-democratic oligarchy (or more inflammatory language, a dictator) should have that much power?
edit: posted too much to make a proper reply, but China is only at 1.3 billion and is obviously a lot more localized
It's possible, even likely that FB has 600 million fake accounts, but you didn't even bother explaining yourself.
What you're afraid of is evil CEOs doing mind control, not despotism.
If you were to show people exactly what Facebook knows about you and can figure out about you as well as the practices they engage in, many people would not use the service, but they don't know these things because Facebook keeps people ignorant. It's not in Facebook's best interests to have people know.
I can't blame Facebook for that, but when they are incompetent it impacts everyone else. I didn't opt in to racists getting jazzed up and going on killing sprees that they put on Facebook Live because of feeds that are mostly opaque and first and foremost designed to make money, and I didn't opt in to social media creating a generation of narcissists, but we all get to experience that.
I don't even believe Mark's evil, but when you have that much power, you have a ton of responsibility to use that properly and Facebook's response has mostly been to say sorry when they fuck up. There's nothing you can do to curtail that power because there are few entities that can actually sanction them.
That's scary and it's dangerous for society. It's the biggest social experiment ever conducted and there are no rules other than the ones that Zuckerberg makes.
If human existence is a long series of lucky rolls of the dice, is it really a good idea to roll the dice on a single individual who got lucky at 21, who now benevolently or not decides the algorithms that determine what almost 2 billion people see? That's nuts and it is something of our own making. Nobody did or would opt into that because people ultimately like to have agency over their own lives.
No, it absolutely is not. Facebook creates shadow profiles[1] even if you never use the service based on what your friends and family upload about you. Not to mention that not having a facebook profile is often treated as suspicious[2] by potential employers, landlords, significant others, and now US customs[3].
[1] http://www.zdnet.com/article/anger-mounts-after-facebooks-sh...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/08/06/beware-t...
[3] https://www.cnet.com/news/border-patrol-agents-checking-face...
I am curious why do you feel the need to make a throwaway account because something is a "heated debate."?
It's just safer/easier to use a throwaway. I have these opinions in real life, but I try not to be too controversial in writing.
As meta comment though, I don't think anything you said is necessarily controversial, it's just debatable. Obviously you need to gauge the potential fallout on your own life, but the comments themselves are fairly innocuous.
It's just a habit of mine to make a throwaway for anything potentially controversial. It really wouldn't be too big if a deal if my identity was connected to any of my throwaways. It just makes me feel safer.
But in general, I don't doubt that these things are well intended and not malicious. In my case, my complaint isn't that Facebook is malicious or intentional. It's more of a negligence or gross negligence point.
[Edited for clarity]
I had an account for ten years, my real name from day 1, my real pictures from day one, lots of RL friends plus friends I basically casually made on Facebook. I had a great time posting about whatever and hating on Facebook, until one day it greets me with "we have to confirm your identity", because some people who surely did not show their ID clicked "fake profile" enough to basically shut me up. It's not even paranoia that makes me not upload a photo of my ID (with everything but name blacked out), it's the principle. I do have email or phone numbers of my close friends, I don't need FB, but for pretending to be inclusive it's pretty fucking sinister.
It's like I wouldn't hate a piece of chewing gum per se. But when it's advertised as a full meal it becomes something entirely differently.
For those who can't stand others complaining about FB, strap yourself in, I can't stand you still using it, and unless FB changes drastically, that will remain so. I'm Momo, you're the people who got abducted into day cares. And hey, I even went inside with you just so we could keep playing. What a waste of time that was.
Just because someone's making money off of something doesn't mean it's inherently bad.
But jumping on a disaster to make money is always bad. There's a reason being a war profiteer was a prosecutable offense (though that seems to have gone out the window in recent decades.)
I'm not sure what your question is; do you mean is there anything Facebook could do when there's a disaster that wouldn't seem like they're trying to cash grab in a very inappropriate way? I don't know. My response would be Facebook is not important when there's a disaster, there's plenty of other forms of communication. If you can use Facebook then you have internet and phone/texting access, so you don't need Facebook. Your loved ones can get a hold of you by more direct methods.
Which is not to say it's impossible Facebook could come up with a useful feature that would be helpful to people during a disaster; but "Safety Check" is not that.
> Which is not to say it's impossible Facebook could come up with a useful feature that would be helpful to people during a disaster; but "Safety Check" is not that.
The top post on this thread is literally someone saying that this feature is the only reason they have kept their account.
Can it be improved? Absolutely. But to say it's not useful in its current form is absurd.
And yet you had to create a throwaway account before you could comment.
Facebook doesn't receive nearly enough scrutiny and criticism. Western governments have been completely blindsided by the immense power that lies in the hands of Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook have a near-monopoly on social media in many countries. They have an incomprehensibly vast archive of personal data, alongside a EULA that allows them to do nearly anything with that data. Their algorithms profoundly influence how two billion people perceive the world, with practically no transparency or oversight.
Facebook are a hair's breadth away from any number of dystopian scenarios. We should be extremely nervous about the unchecked power that Facebook wields. We should pounce on any dubious decision that Facebook makes, but we should also be asking some serious and fundamental questions about the position of Facebook in our society.
Look at Zuckerberg's recent manifesto. He fully understands how powerful he is, and he has a clear vision of how he intends to use that power to shape the world. It's time that we (and our elected representatives) woke up.
https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/building-glob...
That's not a valid comparison since Facebook doesn't publish their own content. It can promote unfiltered news (that often turn out not to be true) but it's not as if the same news story would be read by 1bn people each day.
Chicken little. That's what came to mind when I read your reply.
If FB OR ANY other entiry gets you so upset then stop using it.
We all make choices. I always give this example.
My grandmother could have voted for every losing president during her lifetime but because of other more important choices like who to marry, whether to work hard or not, what people she associates with, when to have sex and if and when to create life her life became a function of those choices.
Why in anyone's name would a person by choice use or contemplate FB or any other entity if it makes you upset.
I just don't get it.
I posted this in another reply, but that's effectively impossible. Facebook collects data on you from friends and family that use it. How do you suggest I stop that? What about Facebooks's tracking code all over the internet? Know a foolproof way to block that too?
I think it comes from growing up in the USSR, where the threat of the government showing up at your door because of something you said was very real. What no one in the US seems to appreciate is that even a stable country is only one or two major crises from being in the same situation. This is surprising because McCarthyism[1] happened a mere 70 years ago - a blink of an eye by historical standards.
Do you really think that under a Neo-McCarthy government any information Facebook has about you would be kept private? That Facebook's precious social graph or Google's archive of your search history wouldn't be used against you? I think that's naive.
You may like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14456200 which hides your comment scores and scrambles your karma counters.
I find that without the distraction of downvotes, it's much easier to have substantive conversations even on heated topics.
Facebook's history and business model are selling data to advertisers to make money. Locking your data in. Depriving you of ownership of your content.
When the sole source of income for a company depends on duping people into providing free data and content that they can monetize through unbelievably shitty ads, you can bet your ass that there will be some false evil positives. Because why wouldn't they?
Is there anything Facebook wouldn't do to make a buck? I think the answer is no. They have no morals, no ethics, and no values that I can discern. When someone says Facebook is listening to your computer microphone, I think, "Well duh. Of course they would. Anything for another advertising buck." And when I find out they weren't, I think, "Well, it's a good idea for them. They are probably working on it."
Can you name one single thing that Facebook has refused to do in the search for ad revenue? I've never worked there, so I can't possibly know the answer to that question. But based on what I've seen Facebook actually do (false reports not included), I'm pretty sure that no one ever says no to anything if there's a chance at making more money.
Add to that the fact that the company is explicitly against the norms and standards of an open web, and you have a good portion of your answer.
We hate Facebook because it takes advantage of people who don't know any better and subverts the open nature of the internet. And because there is seemingly nothing it will not do, no matter how unethical or awful, to further its own ends above.
Personally I find it offensive that an ad network thinks it has anything to say to me about the safety of my loved ones or that it has pretensions to providing services for the "public good".
If you're going to sell ads, sell ads. Don't pretend that you're not in the psychological manipulation business and you're somehow saving the world.
> After years in the industry, 95% of things that are "bad" that come out of big companies end up being well meaning and just look malicious without context. Hanlon's razor is real.
Intentions don't matter. The negative effects of pervasive corporate surveillance and finely targeted advertising are real and potentially catastrophic. Being "well meaning" just means that the engineers either didn't fully consider the consequences of their actions or acted with enough hubris to think they knew the consequences even though there were many unknowns.
The cost reductions that removed hardware interlocks for the Therac-25[1] were well-meaning. Still killed people.
That's the problem.
It should be a positive notification only, without any negative one. People can say they are safe (I see value in that). But facebook should not say anything at all if someone has not declared themself safe.
Facebook had a far more legitimate reason to publicly not mark me as safe from an attack in a busy commuter area outside Borough Market a few days after I'd visited it and used Whatsapp there, but I'll have to check whether a friend asking me if I was alive (I was overseas with data turned off) was driven by genuine or Facebook-UI-induced concern
Stop using Facebook. Start telling your friends and family to do the same. As the "smart computer person" in many people's lives, you can be the voice they need to hear.
They don't make it easy.
The process, according to Spotify support, is:
+ Create a new Spotify account
+ Contact Spotify support to migrate playlists etc. across.
+ Cancel my paid subscription on the old account.
+ Create a new paid subscription on the new account.
+ Migrate my family members onto the new account.
This is reminiscent of Microsoft's strategies back in the 90s, to make it incredibly difficult to ship a PC w/o DOS (and later, Windows).
Yes from the early beta Spotify had it's own account system, then it switched to all new accounts must be FB but legacy accounts could still sign in. This was a while ago though around the time I stopped using it.
1. Facebook knows about all of your interactions on Facebook, and they probably know what you are buying and what sites you visit through tracking mechanisms. In real life we call those people stalkers.
2. What utility are they really getting? Is keeping up with every part of your friend's life (or the good parts they show you) really worth the stress and anxiety of feeling like you are missing out? It's fake utility. People somehow existed for something like 300,000 years without this utility, so what value is really there?
That being said, it's designed to get people addicted and the immediate "utility" is a lot stronger than any abstract worries, so there's probably nothing you can say.
So what? I mean that earnestly - why is it inherently bad if a company knows a lot about me?
> What utility are they really getting? It's fake utility.
Do you really believe that easily keeping up with friends is "fake" utility? You really think that billions of people log on to a website every day that provides no "real" utility?
> People somehow existed for something like 300,000 years without this utility, so what value is really there?
People existed for a long time without the the lightbulb, automobiles, the wheel, computers, etc. You're basically arguing that there can't be any utility in anything new.
That said, I'm not convinced that the value Facebook provides is net negative.
With enough data about you (Facebook collects more than enough) it becomes easy to manipulate you (blackmail, "targeted advertising" aka propaganda, etc), and your pattern-of-life can be sold for profit. Data doesn't go away and we keep inventing more powerful analysis methods, so the risk, that collected data will be used against you only increases with time.
Claiming that this risk doesn't exist or isn't likely to happen requires showing how Facebook won't lose control of the data to any future hacker, government, or buyer with a sufficiently large cash offer. Pretending otherwise is a just-world fallacy.
Facebook supplies a directory of everything happening in my city, algorithmically curated against things Facebook thinks I will like and which my friends have said they're interested in attending. It lets me organise my own events, and communicate easily with attendees, who can see which of their friends are attending and make plans. It lets me make contact with people I briefly met in person but wouldn't have grabbed their phone number/wouldn't text them out of the blue yet (because who does that?).
I don't need an algorithmic feed to tell me what my interests are and what my friends are doing because I know the first and there are other ways of doing the latter that don't involve giving up my privacy.
There's nothing wrong with calling friends up, but that takes a lot of work and a synchronous connection between two people. There are hundreds of people I want to know about or stay in touch with but don't have the time to call them all up individually.
Facebook makes being friends easier. That's a pretty solid value add. I would probably lose a lot of friends more easily if I didn't have Facebook.
You may not value that, but I find it much more valuable than the value I'd gain from making sure Facebook doesn't know enough about me to show me relevant ads.
I honestly would feel the opposite about getting a new acquaintance's contact information vs looking them up on Facebook and sending them a message. I've been going to a lot of weddings recently and phone/email exchange has been common, and I have yet to be asked "are we friends on Facebook? I'll put these pictures up there", which was a very common thing in years past.
Yours is an interesting perspective because I tend to assume that people on HN who say "just call your friends" are less social and don't have as many people they want to catch up with. Honestly events and groups are the real utility - there's where everything I care about happens on Facebook itself (aside from Messenger - which is good, but we would be doing the same thing elsewhere if it didn't exist).
Though the feed is still terrible - I keep my friends list relatively trimmed (~200 people) and it's still rubbish.
I don't understand why people on HN (Quora too) act all high and mighty and tell people to quit all social media like it's some curse. I understand that social media can be mentally debilitating, but not everyone has this problem. I'm 18, I use Facebook on a daily basis and I don't feel addicted to it.
And even if there is minimal value in using it, so what? I like using it and that's all that matters to me. The day Facebook takes over so much that my work is affected, I'll quit it. I already quit it once and I felt no big difference in life.
People still view the internet as some sort of external luxury that we have. It's not. It's a part of our culture right now and will remain so in some form forever.
Facebook is used for many social and business events. I get a lot of work via contacts that come through facebook. Withought it I'm certain I would miss out on some of these. I'd also miss out on keeping up with family abroad.
Do you have any suggestions?
It sounds like from your examples you're the perfect case for lock-in they are after. It's penetrated your business and family life so much you're afraid to leave it. That bothered me when I started to feel like that, which is why I left. Since then so many other things have happened (there's a link-fest from another commenter on this thread that I won't bother to compete with - thanks) that I'm pretty good with accepting that I might have missed out on a few things as a result.
What makes this one of those times?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber
"An operant conditioning chamber permits experimenters to study behavior conditioning (training) by teaching a subject animal to perform certain actions (like pressing a lever) in response to specific stimuli, such as a light or sound signal. When the subject correctly performs the behavior, the chamber mechanism delivers food or another reward. In some cases, the mechanism delivers a punishment for incorrect or missing responses."
https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/4/10708590/facebook-google-a...
"Facebook made its Android app crash to test your loyalty"
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/12161461/Facebook-addiction-...
"Facebook addiction ‘activates same part of the brain as cocaine’"
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886911...
"Narcissism on Facebook: Self-promotional and anti-social behavior"
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/06/28/facebook...
"Facebook Manipulated 689,003 Users' Emotions For Science"
https://twitter.com/niftyc/status/482925976251154432
"#facebook emotional contagion study effect sizes are small--probably nobody was driven to suicide. #jokingnotjoking http://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.full …"
It's a centralised platform where I can message almost everyone I know, and put people in group chats.
It's also very useful to be able to tell at a glance where people are, and get updates as to what people are doing or where they are going, and also to be able let other people know where I am or what I am doing.
It does have its fair share of issues, like too many posts from pages showing up, or people tagging other people in posts showing up. It also has its ethical issues, but for me they are outweighed by the power and convenience of the platform.
I deleted my account and was "clean" for a few years, but last year decided to sign up again.
I only use it occasionally, maybe once or twice a week. It's nice to catch up with family and friends, and it's very simple to filter out the cruft that you have no interest in.
https://techcrunch.com/2015/11/15/facebook-says-it-will-enab...
>Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg committed to turning on Safety Check in more human disasters going forward, responding to criticism that the company turned on its safety feature for Paris but not for Beirut and other bombings.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/facebook-criticised-...
Edit: Found the African event:
https://qz.com/638428/facebook-is-being-criticized-for-not-a...
Mr Ayoub’s blog post has been shared over 10,000 times on Facebook, according to Aljazeera."
One person sits down and takes the time to be thoughtful and compose actual criticism. 10K do nothing but click a link to share it. Is that the same as 10,0001 individual criticisms?
I'm not buying this statement. Where is the evidence of this? The article features two tweets from nondescript people stating they think the feature spreads unnecessary fear, but features no tweets from people who actually felt unnecessary fear. Are there any cases of people who felt afraid because their loved ones didn't check in even though they could have? Otherwise to me this argument is just speculation.
It's one thing to scream "FIRE!" in a crowded theater, but is it not equally damaging to imply that loved ones are in danger lest they broadcast their safety on your platform?
Facebook aren't implying this, you're suggesting that people are inferring this. Again, without any evidence. I have yet to hear anybody actually complain that they were afraid because one of their loved ones didn't check in. I haven't been on either end of this feature yet, but from the article it looks like the wording to potential victims is "We want you to know that you can use Safety Check to post that you're safe" and for the loved ones of potential victims, that they are "not marked as safe yet". This doesn't sound like an implication of anything to me, but then again I'm not the sort of person to infer that my friends are unsafe because they haven't told me explicitly that they are safe, Facebook or otherwise.
If its not speculation, then presumably there is some evidence of people actually complaining about this?
The complaints are all of the form 'I think people may not like it because of the following rational reasons' rather than 'I was in a disaster and failed to mark myself as safe and all my family became worried about me unnecessarily '
For whatever its worth, I've been in disaster areas a couple of times - Facebook asked me to mark myself as safe, I ignored it - and literally nothing happened. Because when there's a disaster, people have better ways of communicating their safety than posting on facebook.
We would be much better off if we stopped accepting fake apologies and 'the algorithm did it not us' excuses.
Facebook employees programmed this thing under, I assume, the direction of management. This is Facebook's fault not some magic, wibly, wobly force. It's one thing to have a bug, but this is working as specified.
They might be sorry, but you can dry a lot of tears with wads of cash. They never see any real consequences for their mistakes.
It was the same recently when we had a storm in New Zealand, and they activated safety check for the entire country. I don't think it even ended up raining where I was at the time.
I can see the reasoning to just turn it on for all of New Zealand when it's something as big as a hurricane.
So you are definitely on to something.
Now I don't think they're doing it very well and the fact that it's subject to the typical feature creep is a problem, but then feature creep is a general problem in software.
Do you have a citation for this claim that 'FB is just answering the demand'?
>"It's not a simple problem to solve."
Who asked them to solve it?
I'm not obliged to provide citations for every personal observation I make in a short comment, or indeed in a long one. Try being less rude in future interactions.
Back in 2001, I was in India when one of the worst earthquakes to hit that state in recent memory struck. I lived with my grandma and grandpa, and rest of my family - mom, dad, sister, uncles, aunts, cousins were at a wedding. For literally 7 hours we had no way of communicating with each other - they didn't know if we made it or not.
So yeah, Safety Check tool is just fine in my book, just mere act of being able to say "I'm OK" makes a massive difference.
I am probably in the extremely small minority of individuals who don't think of safety and security as a universal good, but as only one of many possibly desirable properties to be weighted and contrasted with others. Coincidentally, I also do not use FB.
We’d be better off checking in as ‘safe’ after our morning commute
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/facebook-safety-check-lo...
I think Facebook's Safety Check is a good feature, but the implementation is pretty dreadful.
I don't really buy the argument that you would just assume someone is safe before; you would absolutely have thw worry that if there was a disaster in London, you would want to know if your friend is safe. Previously you couldn't easily contact them, though: if you even had their phone number, calling them internationally wouldn't be easy or sometimes even possible, but often you'd have their address, and hope they would respond to you. Now it's much easier to keep in touch.
I also feel like people are making controversy over nothing when they think that asking if they're safe when they're in London during that fire is too much if they're not in the vicinity. Facebook is in a catch-22 here; Facebook either knows your (roughly) exact location and knows if you were in or near the apartment building at the time, which would make people cry about Facebook tracking you everywhere, or it doesn't and it asks if you're safe if you're in London. Even in the image from the tweet that this article references there is a "Not in the area" button you can press. There's really no way to correctly do this without having really accurate and very up to date information about the people using Facebook, which isn't always possible.
Could Facebook improve the ways it determines if a user is in the area? Yes, of course; a simple way would be to look up IP address block(s) and see if the user is in a block they look up, then prompt them, although it's not really that simple. I also run into issues with Facebook thinking I'm in Japan when I'm not, even though I left nearly a month ago. Facebook really could also improve the UI around it; the point at the bottom of the article when it says that the writer has 100 (probably) London based friends, 97 of which are not "marked as safe", which is terrible UI. But I do absolutely disagree that this feature is worth removing based on the arguments presented in this article.
The problem is that it doesn't matter how you react to the feature. The problem is how groups of people react to it.
This isn't much different than saying you'd calmly walk to the exit if caught in a fire in a club. Even assuming you evaluate your own behavior in that situation correctly, it has zero effect on everyone else.
> There's really no way to correctly do this without having really accurate and very up to date information about the people using Facebook, which isn't always possible.
So maybe if you can't do something reliably, and there are risks to getting it wrong, the proper response isn't 'hold my beer?'
Is the argument that this shouldn't be done because it can't be perfect?
You seemed to want my argument to be some absurdly rigid form of "ship only on perfect performance". It isn't - it is more that treating misfires and the predictable, if irrational, responses something like this will generate in actual emergencies as if they were as trivial as, say, bad ad targeting is irresponsible and should be given substantially more thought.
Sounds like a neurotic grand mother.
In any event, Facebook these days is only useful anymore as a convenient login mechanism for sites that use the Facebook login widget, and even there, Google's version works better.
Over 400 miles away.
I live in Manchester, but was in Bali when the bomb went off last month. I got the safety check. This made sense as my friends might not have been aware that I was away, and so it was useful for them to be alerted that I was safe.
This article is cynical clickbait nonsense, right down to assuming that it's impossible for Facebook to implement something for any reason but engagement. I'm no fan of Facebook but the idea that, to a man, they're faceless stock price maximizers is just stupid and frankly insulting.
I know plenty of people who immediately think of (and often call) family/friends in an affected area when a disaster happens. Depending on how far away it is, it can even be at the level of a city.
Hipster's demand to respect that shallow outward sophistication they cosplay cannot be considered as a universal standard.
For most people there is nothing stress-inducing. Merely boring stuff.