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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

I agree with you, and saying "no thank you" should not even be necessary. Continuing your example, should stalkers be allowed to stalk you up until the point where you deliberately request that they don't?

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It's a bit more complicated than that. Is the stalker analogy even a thing? Because if you were to continue to the analogy then you would be hanging out at the stalker's house, eating the stalker's food and then pissed he's collecting data in his house?

I get it when it comes to analytics, beacons, tracking outside of the ecosystem.

No, stalker has a security camera company, and you visited the stalker's house once because of this great party and left when it seemed dead. Stalker now knows you and starts noting every shop you visit through the cloud connected cameras. You had downloaded an app to get into that party and forgot to remove it later. You start getting notifications about the last restaurant you visited.

This metaphor is getting stretched to the point of complete craziness, but all of this is totally possible. But my bigger question is, when does autonomy and agency end when it comes to these "invasions" (quotes only because we all allow it in varying forms, but it's the creepy emotional factor that seems to elicit a response)

I don't associate with this stalker, I've blocked them from my contacts, moved away, told my friends about them, and I still experience moments of anxiety associated with their incessant invasion of my personal space, and the fact that they conspire with other stalkers to build the most complete profile of me possible.

And the police don't seem to care at all, nor do their masters.

Should a sender of a letter have the right to say that the recipient can't put their address into their rolodex?

>> Should a sender of a letter have the right to say that the recipient can't put their address into their rolodex?

How is a global surveillance network and database like a Rolodex?

Google, facebook, etc are pretty horrible surveillance networks if that is what they are, considering you can just choose to not communicate with their services and they aren't surveilling you any more.

That's pretty disingenuous though, given that FB and Google both track you across the net whether you have an account with them or not. Logging out of your account doesn't stop them or increase the difficulty of them tracking you, or associating that trail with you.

How does facebook and google track me if I, say, install ublock or adblock?

That's actively taking steps to block their tracking rather than just not using their service. And while technically, you can use uBlock Origin to block everything from Google, that would result in many webpages being broken.

You're also likely to be using Google's DNS (8.8.8.8) without knowing, because some piece of software decided to hardcode that DNS server.

And your friends have almost certainly already uploaded your data to Google's Android backup service and to WhatsApp's database.

I think the better analogy would be the postal service using return addresses to populate a database.

Doesn't the postal service already scan every piece of mail and put those images in a database?

Your analogy fails because for most people facebook is not a "stranger" as they already have an account with them. In the case of acquaintances there is more of an onus to inform them if you wish to minimize your contact.

Facebook tracks you even without an account.

So if I buy a watch from someone on Craigslist, he's no longer a "stranger" and the onus is now on me to explicitly inform him to not follow me around? Doing business with someone or some business should not imply consent to their monitoring you.

You describe a one-off transaction in which no expectation of future contact is anticipated. Facebook is an account with an on going relationship. Its the difference between seeing someone multiple times and saying hello to a stranger on the train.

I'm not saying they don't take it too far, but certainly someone with an account has invited facebook to do some data collection and tracking.

Facebook also spies on people who have never used the service.

It's one thing to track me on facebook.com where I signed up, another to track me on blogs, newspapers and everywhere else.

Fine, so instead of Craigslist Guy, let's use Home Depot, where I shop often. Just shopping there does not imply my consent to them tracking where else I go and shop throughout my day. Merely having an account somewhere or regularly doing business somewhere should not imply consent to tracking and data collection, to which I must opt out.

ADD: I probably have 100+ accounts at various sites online. Do these guys all get free passes to collect data and track me because I happen to have created an account there?

If you opened a credit account with Home Depot or had their loyalty card you'd be literally consenting to more tracking. That's the difference between an account and a one off transaction.

Facebook certainly operates outside of even this rather liberal framework so I wouldn't defend them wholesale. However I don't like false equivalencies.

> Its the difference between seeing someone multiple times and saying hello to a stranger on the train.

It goes further than that, as it affects other people too.

See also: Eben Moglen's talk about how privacy is ecological, not transactional.

http://snowdenandthefuture.info/PartIII.html

I suspect that most people do not in fact have a Facebook account. Last I checked, world population was over 7 billion and Facebook did not have 3.5 billion accounts. Or did you mean "most people who live near where I live"? But even there, the existence of Facebook shadow accounts means they will stalk you even if you do not have an account.

As a further point of fact, Facebook (and Google; Facebook is not alone here) stalks even people who _can't_ have a Facebook account. For example, children under 13 in the US.

Certainly there is no defense there. I will say though, much like real life one should be careful of the company they keep - in this case websites which partner with these companies. We should be just as pissed or more at the websites enabling this behavior.

Yeah, I really wish websites would just stop embedding Facebook Like buttons. That would already help a lot.

>As a further point of fact, Facebook (and Google; Facebook is not alone here) stalks even people who _can't_ have a Facebook account. For example, children under 13 in the US.

Surely this is illegal, though? One way to get the laws to ban this sort of dragnet commercial surveillance of people would be to appeal to the 'think of the children' argument and ban companies from tracking information about anyone under 13. That would also stop them from tracking information about anyone that hasn't totally confirmed that they're over 13.

> Surely this is illegal, though?

I don't know enough about the law on this to comment.

> would be to appeal to the 'think of the children' argument

Tempting, though I worry about unleashing demons even if you think they're on your side... ;)

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