Comment by AndrewKemendo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AndrewKemendo | Hacker News Reader

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I think it's important to make a couple of distinctions here.

1. Facebook collects on you when you interact with their systems

2. You can purposefully interact with facebook systems by requesting content from a Facebook registered IP (eg, FB.com, whatsapp, IG, Messenger, comment widget etc...)

3. You can passively interact with facebook systems by accessing a website that posts metadata/telemetry to a Facebook registered IP (eg. FB pixel etc...)

In either case you are requesting to access or interact with a facebook system, however in the latter you aren't aware of it unless you know to block it specifically.

So yes you do directly give it to them, but it's guilt by association. It's also not hidden at all, you can inspect the page and see the requests clearly [1].

I think the major issue is that 99% of people have no clue any of this is happening and just assume that they aren't under the spotlight of facebook because they aren't on facebook.com. However it's not just facebook, it's thousands of internet companies not to mention all of the ISPs and State Actors. So Facebook isn't really the issue, the issue is that people don't know or care about how their data flows around the world.

[1]https://imgur.com/a/G8FQz

My account is deactivated now, but once upon a time I was an active FB user. I did not tell Facebook my birthday. However, friends who knew me would still post Happy Birthday messages on my birthday, and FB would auto-populate my birthday as a result. So I would go in every year and delete my birthday again.

Then they stopped allowing me to clear it out. Since people--without prompting--had wished me a happy birthday, FB was sure it was my birthday, and that was that. I could leave the year blank, but the month and day were literally unmodifiable.

That's when I started clearing all the personal data out of FB I could. No likes, no group memberships, nobody allowed to "check me in," and so on. They were collecting data on me I had no provided, against my expressed will.

I had a fake name on my account, but all of my real life friends knew what my name on Facebook was. I liked this system as it allowed me to connect with my friends without worrying too much about my name and data being out there.

Eventually Facebook said I had an invalid name and needed to change it. So I tried changing it to another fake name, which was rejected. I tried several more, including perfectly normal names and all were rejected. Not even abbreviations were accepted, it had to be my full exact name. Facebook knew what my real name was.

Later I realized that there was a feature asking you to type in the name of your friends based on their profile picture as a security measure (perhaps for account recovery?) anyway I suspect this one way they may have flagged my account. If friends recovering their account typed in my real name enough times, but got all the other names correct they might flag my account.

Yea good example of how network effects really work.

In this case your network opted in to Facebook and opted your data in - so again "guilty by association."

Those facebook 'like' and 'share' buttons you see on a huge number of websites also interact with their systems.

You don't have to be signed in, nor do you have to actually click them. They record your visit to the site, thus track you all over the web and build shadow profiles with your web visits, even if you don't have a profile.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_like_button#Tracking

> Facebook collects on you when you interact with their systems

I do not think this is true. What happens with my e-mail address when someone else signs up to Facebook and shares their contact list (with my e-mail address in it)?

How did Facebook know who my friends are the very moment I signed in, without sharing my address list?

They already have collected information on my social graph, without my own explicit permission, but with implicit permission from less tech-savy friends.

And that's nothing to say about people tagging me in Facebook pictures to train their giant DeepFace algorithm.

In both scenario's I am not accessing or interacting with a Facebook system, while my information is still being abused.

> It's also not hidden at all, you can inspect the page and see the requests clearly

It's sort of a grey area. The average person doesn't know that the functionality for the buttons is loaded by Facebook, and thus they are requesting information from Facebook that exposes information about them on every page that has a like button. It's "not hidden" in the same way that a pervasive network of closed caption cameras at all the businesses you frequent being owned by one company and having access to all your interactions at all those companies. Sure, the camera is in plain sight, and if you went up to it you might see a tag that says owned and operated by Facebook if you looked, but the normal expectation is that each business would have their own recordings, not that one company would be compiling all your transactions together to track your habits and make a profile. It's not hidden per se, but it's definitely not obvious and not what is expected by the average person.

Actually, I'm wondering is someone could sue Facebook under existing stalking laws.[1]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalking#United_States_2

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