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Comment by thg | Hacker News Reader

> No one is forced to give their data to Facebook.

Neither do we have to. Facebook is grabbing it all anyway. With pre-emptive measures ala ad-, cookie and tracker blocking we can reduce the amount of data they get, but they still get something.

If they'd only collect data about their users, that would be totally fine. But they don't. They build shadow profiles of people who are not on FB and track them just the same way.

FB is a whole lot closer to Orwellian surveillance apparatus than it is to entertainment site.

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It's interesting to me how upset so many people got about the level of detail that the NSA collected while so many hand over their entire digital presence to FB and Google.

Maybe they think "you don't have to use FB"... By that logic "you didn't have to use AT&T or the internet at all" either.

Public opinion is shaped a great deal by what and in what way the mass media covers a specific topic. There was a lot of uproar about NSA surveillance while it was in the news, which quickly died down as the headlines disappeared. Out of sight, out of mind.

And then there's also the thing that, arguably, Google and FB give those people something in return which they might consider worthwhile for just data. I'd question that the majority of the user population is aware of the implications of handing over data about themselves and specifically other people, who may or may not be okay with that.

> Out of sight, out of mind.

All the more reason to keep an eye on the people who control the page that so many people view their news from these days.

> Public opinion is shaped a great deal by what and in what way the mass media covers a specific topic.

Given that the mass media is in direct competition with FB, I wonder why they haven't destroyed FB already.

The reason people were/are a bit more anxious about the NSA is because the government has the ability to put you in jail. And indeed we've seen some cases of evidence collected through mass surveillance being used in criminal cases through a mechanism called parallel construction.

All things considered, Facebook presents a similar level of risk, especially if nation states use it as a digital weapon as we've seen recently.

Facebook is worser, in a certain way. If they want, they can socialy isolate you, without you even noticing, they can make you run with a bad crowd, they can manipulate your interests towards topics that eat your time and do not help you progress in life. They can manipulate your social network, help your wife find someone more interested in her posts.

When the state tells you its on, its at least to your face.

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