Edward Snowden: Facebook is a surveillance company rebranded as 'social media'

I don't know about WhatsApp, but from what I recall about Telegram, its main criticism is the fact that it isn't using secret chats (i.e. private conversations) by default. However when using secret chats, the communication is end-to-end encrypted. Is there anything else wrong with it?

But you do know the answer: Quit Facebook. We all have time, so we should vote with it.

So I was wondering, why you did not mention Signal or Diaspora then?

It is easy to bitch, but there are actual things you can do. Even it is only tell people of alternatives. And while I by myself don't even tried Diaspora yet, I like that it exists and getting more mature. And Signal I do use and see no downside compared to WhatsApp, except most people beeing too lazy to change or having, oh my god, 2 installed messengers.

And my main issue with signal, that it uses Google Servers, is something that could be changed in the future, as far as I know, but till then, it is still 100% open source and private

We roll through new generations of computer-using society every year, and every 4 - 5 years, after some intensive studying, new waves of developers and "computer people" evolve from being clueless teenagers, to clued-in members of society.

This is of course, of benefit to society at large - but there is a deleterious effect at play here, as well. While cramming hard to graduate, people keep their heads down - and/or in the sand - and tend to ignore the wider, broader aspects of society in the meanwhile.

And this is why we must continually rehash themes that we - living in the static world - consider to be 'old news'.

Always remember - ALWAYS - that there is a generation of kids on the cusp of making their way into society, and no matter what we adults do, no matter how hard we try and cry and pound our fists on the table, these kids were NOT paying attention to the important issues in the last few years.

So this is why we must consistently push key social issues to the forefront, no matter how tiresome it becomes. Its the kids who are coming to this scene who can do something about it, before its too late - before they too, become jaded adults who just want to pay the mortgage.

Between these two worlds is a no-mans land of social issues, and a war being waged by all the special interests to obfuscate and confuse and devolve the issues, such that the powerful young new adult elite don't put them in their spotlights.

"Since when its even a question?" - every day, there are people learning the extent to which our society has devolved. It is ALWAYS a question.

sorry.

Facebook is more on the populist side of things, their core audience are common people focused on maximizing their reputation.

It also reflects their core businesses, Googles ad business centeres more about search and information, and Facebook more about persuation, and call to action.

Namely, a course of conduct in self protection needs to have an understanding of what the potential harm is from a given threat.

As I see it, the big danger is not from these corporate data vacuums like Facebook, directly.

The biggest threat is the use of this aggregated data by bad actors.

I have yet to hear of a major tech company undertaking actions to directly harm the users of their products. In fact, they are highly incentivized to minimize harms to users.

I don’t see targeted advertising as a bad thing. If I’m going to see adds, I prefer they reflect my interests. I actually find out interesting things from such adds.

Because the overall system has become so complex and monolithic, I think taking steps to thoughtfully minimize personal information leakage is prudent.

But inconveniencing oneself to no discernible benefit is counter productive, and can easily backfire.

For example, if you move your email service to one provided by your shared website host, you open yourself to many potential woes.

Emails from private domains are more likely to get lost in spam filters. I’ve had unfortunately breakdowns in relationships because people who needed to reach me thought I was blowing them off.

Last time I had an email address a private domain, the spam filtering was so bad, it rendered it almost useless.

You’re also hosting your mail on god knows what server, controlled by a company with a lot less security resources than Google.

So there is a substantial cost in avoiding the free email services like Gmail, for nebulous benefit.

I am very concerned about the issue of personal information security. But everything comes at a cost.

The question of whether allowing law enforcement back door access to private communications is worth it is not so straightforward as many commenters seem to imply.

Snowden's premise is also historically a vague, unsupported claim at best. Ford knew incredible details about its customers and workers, as did Standard Oil. Neither were routinely described as being primarily surveillence companies.

The only thing that has actually changed, is that Facebook can do it easily today, as their users willingly provide the information in a convenient technological manner even after the Snowden revelations.

Me uploading pictures of you and a large part of your social graph, and Facebook correlating that with a shadow profile built with tracking pixels etc isn't exactly passive? Or with your explicit permission?

I figure we must promote your calming beliefs. We must allow the the socials' privacy violation pressure cooker to build up its internal pressure to WMD levels. When it finally blows, the socials will be destroyed by the combination of regulatory over-reaction and lawsuits.

2. In the past, Facebook has sold info to advertisers and tracking companies:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304772804575558...

That article is a little old, and Facebook may have changed their policy. But the recent story about Cambridge Analytics shows that, at least in some cases, Facebook still shares your information with third parties.

This is when they must have decided to turn into a surveillance company, to become a data-crunching behemoth it is today.

> how this runaway freight train ... can be stopped at this point

Once people realize what they will lose, then the only way to win is not to play.

These are platforms for speech. People crave and seek such platforms, and frankly I think they provide a valuable service in disseminating ideas that corporate entities have no incentives to.

It verges on absurd to criticize platforms designed to transmit public speech on the grounds that they might leak that information.

There seems to be a quaint archetype floating in the collective consciousness with an image of privacy that has never existed, outside of recluses living in exile from their community.

Historically, anyone living in a small community had such a lack of privacy, that it would be intolerable to many modern city dwellers.

There needs to be a more nuanced and realistic concept of how personal information is managed, by all entities who touch it.

And it's crazy that we're allowing them to do that in the "data breach era". Companies should should be incentivized/penalized to keep the absolute minimum information it needs for its services. The less data, the better, and the less it would be penalized in case of a data breach. The more data it stores and the more data it exposes in a data breach, the bigger the penalties should be for it.

Companies would ignore that at their own peril, as the penalties should be a big percentage of the global annual revenues. So a company like Equifax would have to come out either crippled or bankrupt out of a data breach where it exposed all of the US adults' information.

Build the right system, and companies will be "incentivized" to do the right thing. This is why the EU is doing the right thing with the GDPR, and if the US Congress wasn't completely captured by corporations by now, it would probably do something like that, too.

But even GDPR doesn't go as far as I'd like, to the point where companies would be incentivized to use minimum amounts of information and switch to end-to-end encrypted systems (which by default would bring minimum to zero penalties in case of server data breach).

However i guess the analogy is more fitting for Baidu. The Chinese state has some very restrictive laws that are applied in practice.

And in Russia you can get sentenced for a wrong repost, so yandex.ru or ok.ru/vk.ru is in the same league.

There is some truth to what you’re saying though, but that’s in the data Facebook collects about you, without your knowledge.

I think the facial recognition program is a good example. Even if you don’t have a Facebook account, or even if you do but didn’t share any pictures of your vacation, Facebook might still know you went. They know by recognizing you in pictures of other people. If you get caught in someone’s Instagram selfie in an airport or at a popular tourist spot, then Facebook knows you where there.

Stasi would have loved that, but that’s not information people share willingly.

But I've been developing programs since I was 15, and created my first startup (hardware) at 18 with an engineer 10-years older than me.

Never once did I ever refer to any of our customers or clients as "dumb fucks". Why? What did they do to Zuck?

Although, I did refer to AOL executives, FBI agents, Secret Service agents, federal prosecutors and lame wannabe hackers as dumb fucks. Both then and now. And I work with the federal government, with an agency that's often unfairly demonized by a variety of people.

Which makes me think of a new phrase: dumb zucks.

Quasi wannabe devs who build products and services not to advance the hacker ethos or crypto-anarchy but to get rich being essentially technical marketing partners for the FBI and corporate America.

EDIT- Facebook's address is 1 Hacker Way. Zuck is not a hacker. He is the opposite of one.

Of course you could say that Zuckerberg is getting a taste of his own medicine, but I dunno, it still seems a bit hypocritical to me.

Maybe someone can come up with a good argument of whose private data we're allowed to post publicly, and whose we aren't?

There's much to say by way of critiquing Facebook, but obviously the "dumb fucks" bit is not it. That's merely an excuse to feel superior, and the discussions it spawns are predictable, therefore uninteresting, therefore off topic for Hacker News.

All: if you can't think of something stupid or bad you said as a teenager, dig deeper.