Facebook employees opened a privately shared Google Sheet | Hacker News Reader

Facebook employees opened a privately shared Google Sheet

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46 pointsmadtrax16 comments

What an absolute joke of a thread. Very obviously a preview generation bot. I've never actually visited /r/privacy but I am far from impressed. Way too many unknowledgeable / alarmist comments and nobody with any visible technical knowledge beyond an understanding of the various technologies that privacy advocates tell other privacy advocates to use. It's amazing how many comments are saying "use PGP stupid!" when there's nobody that knows how modern web scraping works.

The point is that this wouldn't happen with SMS or phone calls, because there are laws preventing such abuses.

Well, when everyone that understands exactly how the surveillance of the modern internet works has a hand in building it, don't be surprised where there's no one left to make the well informed case against the surveillance apparatus.

Clearly there is a market need for 'facebook mask' which sends one version of the link if it is being read by facebook and one if it is read by the intended recipient.

Note, don't actually do this it will get you in trouble and likely banned from facebook.

Interesting, but how would you check if it's one or the other? By IP? Could work for defined cases, but developing a universal technique could be tricky if all previous communication happens via FB. Much easier to use another platform.

Seems like it could just be a bot fetching the link for a preview?

Would be two bots in this case, very inefficient.

Sometimes it’s harder to share the information gathered from the first bot with the second than just doing the operation twice.

I don't understand why it matters whether or not it is a bot. That's still extremely shady to do

From the description it looks more like a bot then employees.

Could it not just have been that parser or whatever it is called? Like when you post a link it gets title + some kind of picture. So obviously if it visits that link automatically it is going to show up as visitors.

Send a link to a Honeypot, observe FB bots checking, solved. Very unlikely to be humans.

Maybe send a link to something behind a captcha and then check if it gets solved?

Discussed earlier:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15595705

Now both are flagged...

It’s obviously bots.

Frustrating the number of commenters who jumped to the “Facebook is evil” conclusion immediately.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com