Facebook’s Surveillance Machine | Hacker News Reader

Facebook’s Surveillance Machine

nytimes.com

677 pointsimartin2k232 comments

I was one of the co-founders of an early social VR startup and observed first hand the technical capabilities that these applications will afford bad actors to use for surveillance. You can easily capture voice, body tracking, and interaction data, and basically record a full view of the world through the eyes of another human being. It's quite remarkable being able to record and play back a copy of yourself in seconds from a remote server, but the potential for abuse is immense.

Facebook's made a move, probably the biggest move of any company, into VR. They bought Oculus for $2B while everyone else was scratching their heads. Social VR is their focus at Facebook proper, and they are leaving the entire rest of the VR ecosystem to their subsidiary Oculus. Isn't it obvious why? VR, if it becomes the dominant form of human communication, will make their current surveillance machine look like a joke. Facebook would be in a position to be an intermediary for every human interaction on earth that doesn't take place in physical space. It's nice to see the public become aware of what they've done before they are able to take it to the next level of nearly being inside of our heads.

This is the primary underlying motivation for why we are working on building an alternative open communication platform for Mixed Reality at Mozilla. We're heads down building stuff now but you can expect to see us shipping things soon.

https://blog.mozvr.com/enabling-the-social-3d-web/

VR hasn’t taken off as promised and the hype is dying down now. The headset is too clunky in its current incarnation. People view it as a novelty item rather than a useful tool, so I’m inclined to believe this won’t be the massive surveillance tool VR proponents think it’ll be.

Untethered standalone VR devices are likely a prerequisite to any mainstream adoption and are shipping this year. Your guess is as good as mine if they will reach mass appeal, but to assume VR is not viable before these devices are available at low prices is probably wrong.

The one to keep your eye on is the Oculus Go which is a self contained device for $199. (Also a Facebook product, probably going to have all this social functionality burned in. My guess is this is their first big play.)

> Untethered standalone VR devices are likely a prerequisite to any mainstream adoption and are shipping this year

Not good ones though. Any VR headset without positional tracking is essentially a google cardboard.

Sure, but when the iPhone came out I'd already been using Palm and PocketPC smartphones for a few years. At the time I thought "any smartphone without the ability to install third party software, send MMS messages, use a GPS radio to locate me accurately, copy and paste, or even change the ringtone is essentially just a feature phone".

Things start out simple, limited, clunky, and expensive. Occasionally they become capable, svelte, commonplace, and affordable after 5 or 10 years of development and refinement.

Yeah, I think it's pretty safe bet that it will get there, I just haven't seen any announcements regarding an upcoming standalone tetherless headset with positional tracking.

I don't agree with this sentiment. VR enthusiasts tend to cite 3dof tracking as a non-starter but I have seen enough evidence to suggest that 3dof head tracking is sufficient to deliver comfortable, long sessions for social VR applications. The reason 3dof is not a non-starter is because you can still interact with people in a very natural way in VR with these devices, and the low cost enables access to the experience for people who literally have no other means to interact with people in this way. For many social VR applications people simply need to be able to look at one another, make eye contact, and be able to explore a virtual space together. A 3dof head tracker with a 3dof controller, if comfortable to wear and easy to set up, can deliver this.

What is a non-starter are dropped frames, overheating, or other issues around comfort and ease of use. All of these are solved by Oculus Go (and a subset are solved by GearVR) in a way that are not solved by google cardboard. If a device can hold up for 60 minutes, doesn't hurt to wear, has no cables or messy setup steps, and includes asynchronous timewarp to generate missing frames, I believe that is a sufficient device that could takeover the market for a wide variety of communication use cases and is exactly what Oculus Go is the first to offer in full.

Certainly I am guilty of deliberately glossing over some of the most functional distinctions between cardboard and more sophisticated setups, but in my view, the lack of positional tracking is so limiting to what can be achieved in software that any VR/AR device without it is permanently relegated to "cool novelty" status and will never be able to pull off a mass-appeal that will create a blockbuster "must have" device.

We're diverging quite a bit from the posted subject matter, but I wonder how the problem of the health impacts will be solved, if ever.

The commercial products aren't representational of the limits of the form, just what's currently economically feasible to produce and sell.

You've got to have a market first, and affordable entry-level VR is damn good way to generate interest.

VR is still early but it's convincing. Have you tried a very good VIVE setup? I've only used it once but that's all it took for me to understand that VR is the future of immersive entertainment. Based on that experience it seems apparent to me that the only thing stopping it from becoming mainstream is the clunkiness you describe. However, we should all know that it's only a matter of time before that clunkiness is replaced by a better engineered form factor.

Eh, it's still in the palm-pilot phase. They'll figure it out quietly over the next 10 years. Machine learning will help figure out what to pull into the headset (things you're about to walk into) or it will intelligently make the game world similar enough in your immediate surroundings to where you don't hit stuff. I could see people hanging out at parks or beaches with these things on. Even going for a swim if the headset is waterproof enough. It will just take decades of work to get there.

why not just support the open source Highfidelity.io platform instead?

> Facebook makes money, in other words, by profiling us and then selling our attention to advertisers, political actors and others. These are Facebook’s true customers, whom it works hard to please.

And you just figured this out now? This is like saying "wow, who knew we would get so fat by feeding only on pizza, hamburgers and coke, aren't those companies evil".

Well, yes, companies are evil. They don't work for you; they either sell something to you, that is usually bad for you (why else would you want it), or take something from you, that they can then sell to somebody else.

> Should we all just leave Facebook? That may sound attractive but it is not a viable solution.

Of course it is. It's the only solution. If you think Facebook's management care about anything else except the number of active users, you're crazy. The only way to have them change their ways (maybe) is to make that number go down. It's also good for you, like drinking water instead of soda.

Change is upon us, join patchwork at secure scuttlebutt. The social network is the network, no central services, federation or global anything.

Thanks for this pointer--if enough people adopted something like this FB would eventually wither away. I wondered when someone would use this model for social networking.

You're absolutely right we should all leave FB. It's the only way to make them change. I've been seriously considering it for a while - I'd lose some exposure in my hobby groups, and my mother would miss the kids' photo updates, but I could just about live with that.

You could use Diaspora. I haven't used either FB or Diaspora in quite a few years know but I would have to imagine it still exists.

Or Mastodon.

If they announced a totally different business model, you would trust them and go back? I’m just asking because that’s an interesting thought, making Facebook change. How can you trust them enough after quitting in protest?

If we expect to have any success, people need to remove this idea that they need social media in their lives. All this is hypothetical too — last I checked Facebook brought in more cash than the 15 lowest GDPs or something like that. Making Facebook change just isn’t realistic. When you quit Facebook, you join a protest against for-profit social media, and as long as Facebook is a blind money machine it will always be part of the problem.

> people need to remove this idea that they need social media in their lives

People need to remove the idea that they need social media companies in their social media.

Social media itself is fine. The problem is service providers whose interests aren't aligned with their users.

> Social media itself is fine.

This is debatable. A completely ethical social media service still has the ability to control perceptions and thus decisions on a large scale. I think the problem is that everyone can know this and still use Facebook multiple times daily. To know that they contributed to the election of Donald Trump simply by using Facebook, and then go on Facebook to complain about Donald Trump. Surely that must be the problem, whatever makes people knowingly contribute to their own destruction, somehow without ever thinking about it.

what you can't email your mom pictures? IF she can use Facebook she can read email

> Of course it is. It's the only solution.

One viable alternative is legislation, such as the EU has been doing to some effect. Of course the laws lag the technology by some years and we have a wide range of political views on things like "the right to be forgotten" but more consumer protections seem to be needed, perhaps also factoring in "dumb" consumer behaviour e.g. not reading Terms & Conditions.

Some things are impossible to solve by independant actors. Imagine trying to boycott cars in the 1940s because they were manifestly unsafe, or in the 1950s because they polluted the world with lead.

Only legislation changed these things... albeit not enough. Same for workplace safety, child labour, and so on.

Some systemic problems require systemic solutions.

Some ppl argue that legislation would strengthen Facebook and hurt competition.

https://stratechery.com/2017/the-gdpr-and-facebook-and-googl...

Look, my parents were interested in environmental issues like pollution in the 1960s. They demonstrated against racism.

These are not new issues.

But still, if somebody writes an essay saying that we are polluting the earth and that racism is a pervasive, structural force woven into the very fabric of our society, let's support them.

Sure, they're only now realizing what some or perhaps many people have known for literally half a century, but every person coming to that realization is another element of resistence against malevolence.

No, it's not a stunning revelation for you or I that FB is a digital cancer. But yet... Every voice saying this is a lamp, regardless of how late it came to light.

In my eyes, this phrase is the big problem:

"an all-too-natural consequence of Facebook’s business model"

And as long as FB is making billions out of this model, it will not change. The only think one can do is remove themselves from being the means to FB's profitability and leave the FB employees sharing their own data.

In a similar spirit, anyone who has my name & phone number in their contacts, when they decide to use any application that 'wants access to contacts' inherently performs the same violation of my private information.

That is not the only thing one can do. Our governing bodies could be disentangled from private interests and put to task protecting the vulnerable members of our society for the better of the whole. This idea anything but new. Have you not thought of it before? If not, what do you think has prevented your awareness?

> And you just figured this out now? This is like saying "wow, who knew we would get so fat by feeding only on pizza, hamburgers and coke, aren't those companies evil".

No. Zeynep Tufekci (the author of the article) has written about this for years, including a book about social media in political movements (Twitter and Tear Gas), a popular TED talk (https://www.ted.com/talks/zeynep_tufekci_we_re_building_a_dy...), a series of New York Times op-eds, and more besides.

A more productive answer to someone saying something you agree with is “I agree”, not mistakenly berating them for not agreeing sooner.

Timing is important. Oped and Ted talk is not the same as frontpage.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-the-obama-campai...

Thanks for the video link. I am going to share that with friends and family who are sceptical that there is a problem with Internet super-companies collecting data and using it to change our behaviors to make money.

I just said this in another comment but it so belongs here, I'll try to say it in just one sentence: there was a feel-good narrative to Obama that's just impossible now.

It is such an eye opening experience to see how media frames things when they try to support or sabotage somebody. This seems so far the clearest demonstration for anyone remotely interested in the topic.

So could you educate us by showing the comparable actions of the Obama campaign?

Didn't Obama's campaign hire Droga5 to do precisely the same sort of ad targeting that CA was involved in? Ultimately, it doesn't seem that CA did anything out of the norm for any marketing analytics company (from what I've read, correct me if I'm wrong).

Did you read the article? They paid several hundred thousand people via Mechanical Türk to download their poll app and then harvested 50M users data for political targeting.

Data they could have acquired directly from FB anyway? It seems like they found a way to make the data acquisition process more efficient (while also violating FB's TOS, which is the actual problem here).

But the point is, the methods CA used to influence voters weren't significantly different from Obama's 2012 campaign.

There is a giant difference here in the fact that the data acquired for CA was through a third party. Data obtained through the Obama campaign was through the Obama app.

This Washington Post article has details. Obama Supporters clicked OK on apps, those apps pulled their friend graph (including the state of residence of friends) to generate outreach such as emails encouraging the supporter to evangelize specifically named friends on behalf of the campaign: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/facebooks-ru...

Obama had the Obama 2012 app (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nafYT7_i4as). Anyone downloading it knew that the goal of it was to help get Obama elected.

CA (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpbeOCKZFfQ) tricked people into giving up their data and used it to spread targeted propaganda.

How is this the same?

I wasn't talking about that, I was talking about this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden

> Anyone downloading it knew that the goal of it was to help get Obama elected.

Was Obama 2012 restricted to collecting information of its downloaders? Or did it collect all of the downloaders' friends' information as well? Facebook certainly allowed for this (until 2014, that is).

They pulled the whole friend graph and used it to generate emails pushing supporters to reach out to specific named friends who live in specific states.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/facebooks-ru...

So far, no POTUS' actions (taken as a whole) support a feel-good narrative. Unpleasant compromises, manipulation, and dishonesty may be inherent to winning a national election and then running a 330-million-person organization.

You're right. What upset me though was the conclusion that it's "impossible" to leave Facebook. Everything is possible, including walking instead of driving, not eating meat, etc. Some things are more inconvenient than others, but if convenience trumps everything and you can't accept to make any sacrifice whatsoever then maybe you deserve to be taken advantage of.

I think there are two senses in which it is "impossible" to leave Facebook:

1) Even if you actively decide to deactivate or delete your account, nothing guarantees that Facebook won't retain the data. Nothing guarantees that they don't continue to build a profile of you by scanning photos your friends share. It's a Hotel California of personal data.

2) Even if you personally decide to leave, the rest of society may be using it for passing essential information that forces you to re-engate with facebook. Until you can convince your cohort to stop using FB to organize or converse, you might still be forced to use the service.

instead of deleting my account, i wrote an email which i bcc’d to my “real” friends: i’m deleting our facebook friendship, i love you and expect we can stay in touch just fine without. then i deleted all my fb connections, and left a public account with no friends and a publi message about how to find me. if i want to spam a post to my people, i use the bcc email.

i still have an account for logins. i could technically make messages happen.

i don’t have to eject all my pictures, or delude myself about the efficacy of “deleting” my fb account, but i can be sure nobody is going to benefit from selling my social graph to my “friends” or frienemies

I wish there was a name for this fallacy because it comes up so often. When you have a systemic problem, you do not have a viable solution if your solution requires the conscientious choices of every affected individual.

If that worked, we would have already solved car accidents (obey all the traffic laws!), suicide (don't kill yourself!), obesity (don't eat too much unhealthy food), debt (don't spend more than you make), and basically every other social ill.

Effective solutions are ones that can be enacted by humans while fully taking human fallibility into account. It's poor engineering to design a system that requires every part to function perfectly with zero tolerances.

There probably is a term for it, and tragedy of the commons is pretty close to being appropriate

> I wish there was a name for this fallacy because it comes up so often. When you have a systemic problem, you do not have a viable solution if your solution requires the conscientious choices of every affected individual.

I think that's true of the general problem of data privacy, but I don't think it's exactly true of the particular "Facebook" instance of that problem.

Social networks have withered and died before, and there's no reason to think that Facebook can't be nudged in that direction, one user at a time, until the snowball starts. This seems like a pretty opportune time to get that ball rolling.

I don't mean to say that we shouldn't regulate Facebook, as a society; sure we should, and let's try to do it. But that will take years, if not decades.

But as individuals, there is something we can do today: not use it. Why dismiss this very simple solution?

I'm definitely not arguing that we shouldn't take individual steps that helps. But the parent comment says:

> if convenience trumps everything and you can't accept to make any sacrifice whatsoever then maybe you deserve to be taken advantage of.

Which basically sounds to me like, "If every fallible human on Earth can't individually decide to solve this problem, they don't deserve any solution."

> Should we all just leave Facebook? That may sound attractive but it is not a viable solution.

Leaving not just Facebook, but Twitter, Instagram, and all other social media of its ilk is an extremely viable solution. It's like quitting smoking. For the first month or so you feel off-kilter, but, after a while, you can't imagine going back. Life is quantifiably better without it.

Realizing that I don't need up to the minute updates on literally everything has done amazing thing for my mental health in the last year.

Right on. Another thing that works for me is not watching any news at all on TV except for occasionally NPR. Instead, I like the text only feeds of NPR and CNN, and I try not to read those every day.

I do still look at Facebook once a week for about 10 minutes. I do so in a private browser tab, and routinely try to delete FB cookies.

Set up a site specific browser, which makes it easier to sequester all FB cookies and browsing to a separate environment. I use Fluid on macOS, but there are other approaches.

http://fluidapp.com

What's the advantage of this over a private or incognito window?

Private or incognito mode doesn't do all that much. Better to use Ghostery in addition.

If you are more paranoid of intra-browser security risks than inter-browser risks?

There is a certain amount of second hand smoke in the room, though.

1) I can quit my social media, but people are still creating a lot of content with me in it that is being used. I don't need to take a poll about which potato I am if all the posts my friends tag me in are mined for data.

2) While social media is in itself great for cloistering my own community, it's still the case that vast numbers of my compatriots are involved with it and it will continue to be affected by it.

"Just leaving" isn't going to solve either of those problems.

I wholly agree, by the way, that leaving it is a personally good thing. I still use, but I heavily filter it and I have several 0-tolerance policies for unfollowing / blocking / etc. I probably ought to quit, but the crushing loneliness and disconnection of being a 40-year-old, divorced, atheistic remote worker who is quitting drinking make it about my only social interaction short of buying groceries.

This is OT, but perhaps you could join a structured exercise or sports group, like an ultimate Frisbee team or CrossFit. Having a regular group you can meet up with is usually pretty feasible without Facebook. It's good for you (don't go overboard and hurt yourself) and good for making friends.

Funny, I quit smoking and Facebook around the same time a few years ago. My life has been enormously better for it.

I miss neither.

Quitting Facebook isn't as easy as it might seem. The same way as it's not easy to escape from the effects of smoking. Not because you can't, but there is always a chance of passive smoking.

So, as long as we have some relation with some society of which some one is connected, we will have some passive effects due to that.

Say like, if some one need to stop your car, they don't need to stop yours, but someone ahead of you.

Your life might be better, but mine wouldn't be. I use FB to keep up with loved ones and discover local events. That's it. It's not toxic or upsetting to me. All news is filtered out of my timeline.

The privacy issues are my only motivation to quit, and between Google, LinkedIn/Microsoft, and FB, my privacy is irreparably fucked anyway, so it feels futile to try to fix it now.

This is one of the better side-effects of Trump.

We wouldn´t be having this conversation if Hillary or Bernie had used these powerful resources to tilt the odds and get elected.

Because almost no one with a platform likes Trump, it gets exposed. If this happened under Obama (like, uh, Assange and Snowden and Manning and massive data centers in Utah happened), it would be completely swept under the rug in favor of a feel-good progress narrative that's completely impossible in current conditions.

---

Maybe this was Thiel's true play: a shit government is a watched government, a hostilized-against government, a true Libertarian's government.

I'm not sure I agree that it would be swept under the rug, seeing that you can mention those earlier issues without explaining them. Outrage and discussion occurred the same way they are now, and just like in those cases, not much is going to happen concerning facebook and its use of personal data. What I'm saying is that your assertion that it has anything to do with progressive/conservative narrative is false, because the result is going to be the same.

"massive data centers in Utah" was absolutely a Bush Administration thing.

If Obama didn't stop it, it was due to the toxic political climate and congressional domination by TeaParty/GOP. The current Democratic Party lineup, and over the past 15 years, has also been shifted pretty far to the right, but that has been a result of the effort by the extreme right since the Clinton presidency; since Newt Gingrich, and FoxNews to slant the electorate to the right.

I doubt that most Republicans or any Democrats would have supported that kind of horrible breach of the 4th Amendment in the 1990's or 80's. And trying to hang that around Obama's neck is ridiculously dishonest.

It was within Obama's reach to break the mold and pardon Snowden. That kind of sticking-his-neck-out could have been era-defining.

Until Democrats face up to the fact they are now the party of the spies and advertisers they will continue to bumble into this.

Obama absolutely expanded the surveillance state to levels Bush II could only dream of.

So Thiel is playing 5d chess too? How about this: He has shitty political opinions and enough money to put them into action.

Your wishful thinking is just delusional.

It's not really 5D chess. Republicans have been saying "starve the lion" (e.g. taking huge deficits and then proposing budget cuts) since Reagan. I wouldn't be surprised if Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom" (which I never read, I just know the blurb) proposes this meta-strategy en passant somewhere.

I’m have to disagree strongly with the blanket statement “companies are evil”. Companies don’t “sell something that is usually bad for you”. That’s ludicrously naive. Most companies are able to exist because of the net positive they have on individuals and society. I can’t build my own house, produce my own food, make the clothes I wear, or create the medicine I need when I’m sick. Companies publish and distribute the books I read, the entertainment I enjoy, and can can fly me anywhere on the planet if I want to expand my horizons. And yes, they make money off of all of those things, but there is nothing evil about that.

Perhaps the smallest part of some of those things would be possible in a world without companies, but the vast majority of it would not be. Facebook is an exception, is a net negative in my opinion, and we would be better off without it, but that doesn’t mean we have to go back and reinvent the last several hundred years of human history and progress by labeling all companies as evil entities.

> It's the only solution.

How is this a solution? Leaving Facebook doesn't remove ad industry's, political and state surveillance incentives. Literally anyone who wants to participate in a market economy or any political system fuels surveillance incentives. I don't think it's possible to remove such incentives, but theoretically could be possible to limit the scope of surveillance capabilities by distributing and disallowing concentration of power and wealth, capping the size of corporations and so on.

>"And you just figured this out now?"

You realize this is an editorial piece correct? Note the section header at the top of the page. And the format of of op/ed piece includes a layout objective explanations. This is not meant to be a regular reporting news piece. See:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/03/insider/opinion-op-ed-exp...

The media piling on top of facebook is payback for how much facebook has screwed them over with the changes to the news feed. If anyone is interested I'll look for the original sources but in 2012-2016 something like 50%+ of all views on some news sites came from facebook. Then facebook tweaked their front page and now all that traffic is gone.

Someone should have read Machiavelli more: if you are hated, the second you show weakness everyone will try and put you down.

> Should we all just leave Facebook? That may sound attractive but it is not a viable solution.

It's the only sane response, and has been the only sane response, for the past decade. The only counter-argument given by NYT is that in some countries Facebook has a stranglehold. I don't see how that's relevant to people who don't live in those countries. As for organisers of political groups exclusively using Facebook (which is just a terrifying idea for a number of reasons), just pull a Stallman and email them explaining the problem with Facebook and ask if there's another way of staying abreast of the group. You can't fix the problem if you don't even try.

By not exercising your ability to protest against systemic and deep-seated abuse of user privacy, you're just making the world worse for the people who don't have that option currently (because it just tightens their stranglehold).

“Protest” by way of market choice is such a tired fallacy. It’s really amazing so many HN readers are so ready to take such outdated philosophy to the grave.

I am in very strongly favour of GDPR and other similar regulations. I just also think that enabling giants like Facebook to abuse you by admitting that you are unable to function without them is a bad strategy. Diversify if you can, and regulate to protect those who cannot. Nobody said you cannot approach something like this on more than one front.

My (individual) approach has been to try to carefully curate my content where it's associated with my Real Name: FB and LinkedIn. LI especially - I think everybody does this.

I am absolutely not the person I portray on FB. Co workers. People I know, they're all pretty aware of this.

It is an extra level of intimacy in my personal relationships that I allow them to know the real me.

Other social networks, where I can use sock puppets - I get out my frustrations by talking about things I would never talk about on FB. In this way, I maximize the usefulness of these tools, and I minimize my usefulness as a tool for them.

“We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change."

- Mahatma Gandhi

It seems incredibly bizarre to me that the author says that.

She lists all the privacy and user trust violations, future social health concerns, but then says leaving Facebook isn't viable?

I have little faith in the US government regulating Facebook's privacy and data mining and even less faith that Facebook would take any action on behalf of its users privacy. Leaving Facebook is the only viable solution.

"Leaving" Facebook is close to impossible. They track you and keep a profile on you no matter what.

Other than that, there's no competitor to Facebook that exists in the same market. My favorite stores and restaurants downtown have events and sales and information that is only on Facebook. Saying "just quit Facebook" is like saying "just stop making phone calls" or "just get rid of your mailbox" or "just stop reading emails". Entirely possible, sure. But depending on your life situation, you might be giving up more than you're getting back.

Like it or not, for some people there are things on Facebook that are only on Facebook, can only exist on Facebook, and have only been enabled by Facebook. Anything else can replace it, but currently nothing like that even remotely exists.

> They track you and keep a profile on you no matter what.

This is only true because the voting US public believes it to be true.

Meanwhile, the EU simply wrote a law against it. Now any EU citizen can simply withhold consent, and if FB continues to process datasets with their PII they will be brought to court.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regula...

>This is only true because the voting US public believes it to be true.

It's true because it's true. Full stop.

You may argue that there are ways to stop it, and sure there are. Like you said, the EU did it, and it's a great law. But GDPR doesn't make it less true in areas not impacted by GDPR, which is everywhere because it doesn't go into effect until May.

I didn't say "there's no way to stop it", which is a statement that is only true because the voting US public believes it to be true. I said "they track you and keep a profile on you no matter what", which is true because it's exactly true.

Not believing it to be true won't make it less true.

>Saying "just quit Facebook" is like saying "just stop making phone calls" or "just get rid of your mailbox" or "just stop reading emails"

I don't agree with this analogy. Phone calls and physical/electronic mail are a technology, not a corporation. While I'm sure Facebook would like to be there, as it stands a Facebook account is nowhere near the importance of phones/mail to function in a modern society. In fact, I truly hope it does not reach that point, as a central authority like Facebook can choose to blacklist your accounts entirely. (https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/18/facebook-has-suspended-the...)

>"Leaving" Facebook is close to impossible. They track you and keep a profile on you no matter what.

This is mostly dependent on data being fed by your friends and family. Unfortunately, you enjoying events and sales is contributing to this "shadow profiling".

Facebook may as well be considered a technology in and of itself. Nothing else compares. Everything else in the sector is either successful in its niche or wildly unsuccessful. In the 70s and 80s, there were phone companies other than Bell... but you probably didn't have one. You probably had a Bell phone with Bell service. It took government regulation to change it from a company to a technology because everyone was happy enough to keep it as a company.

We're not talking about search engines where all the information is the same and the only competition is who can display them best. With Facebook, much of the information is only available on Facebook, only accessed through Facebook, and in some cases, only enabled by Facebook. Snapchat, Instagram, Reddit, Mastadon, Twitter, none of these social networks are half of what Facebook is, yet Facebook is all of them combined. It's not interchangeable, there are tradeoffs to switching.

>Unfortunately, you enjoying events and sales is contributing to this "shadow profiling".

Which is exactly what I always argue when people say you don't have to give up any social interaction by giving up Facebook. If that information is only on Facebook, you have to use Facebook no matter what, or you have to give up some amount of understanding of the world around you. I'm not going to stop enjoying local bands or community social events, and the only source for that right now in my community is Facebook.

I'd love an American GDPR because as far as my life is concerned, Facebook isn't going anywhere.

I wish quite badly that the benefit of deactivating FB would outweigh the inconvenience, but FB has become such a mainstay that I'd lose touch with lots of people I really have no other way of contacting. I could say "good riddance," if there is no other way to contact them then perhaps they are not important enough to my life, but that's just not true. Or what about all the local forums (FB groups) in my city that have lots of immediate help about all sorts of things -- I'd immediately lose access to all that. I wish there was a better way, but I can't see myself getting rid of FB without a notable disruption to my life. #sad

If you haven’t already, I encourage you to try without it for 30 days: if you truly can’t find a way around it, fine, check it every second day. You might be surprised how unimportant it ends up being

Yes I do this as well. I don't use facebook for platform, news or ads. I use facebook every other day to comment on what friends are doing and its useful for my local community news, events via groups or are they pages not sure. I don't trust Facebook and don't upload or share my personal information.

I've slowly stopped using it because the quality of content is just so incredibly low. Facebook has created a negative feedback loop for me, the more "suggested" bullshit they attempt to push the less I care. I when every third post is that sort of thing it becomes less useful. I've personally been blocked from "hiding" ads on numerous occasions.

What is the point of staying in contact only in Facebook ? If someone is important for me, I'd be in contact with them in real life or another platform.

Also, lots of people seem to be unaware of that you can delete your Facebook account. They don't have a link to the delete page from settings menu though. It's here: https://facebook.com/account/delete

Page not found

It would be very Facebook-y to change that URL daily to break all the "how to delete your Facebook" tutorials that crop up.

It's actually https://www.facebook.com/help/delete_account

This is one of those 'soooo obvious but untrue' statements

I use it to keep in touch with far away or unimportant people. Second degree aunts, ex schoolmates, etc. Without FB it's a nightmare keeping in touch the few times I want to (people change email addresses all the time). Also, many groups are useful

You can stay in touch with relatives via mobile phone. You can text them and ask how they do. Personally, I created a Whatsapp group for my extended family. Some of them don't use Facebook by the way.

It doesn't make any sense to complain about Facebook's business model and also not want to sacrifice a worthless personal account noone cares about.

We choose what we use and they choose how they make money. You can expect them to be ethical but they have no responsibilities to meet your expectations, as they have never promised to be a platform that respects privacy.

"I created a Whatsapp group for my extended family"... You're just changing one poison for another one. Don't forget who owns Whatsapp.

I own Whatsapp. Do you know why? Because I own my contact list. I can migrate my whole family to Telegram or Signal tomorrow. Currently it's not bothering me.

It’s not perfect to still be sharing your social graph, but at least chats are e2e encrypted by default.

LOL, and who owns WhatsApp /facepalm

I don't like the "always on" part of WhatsApp and the like. I like FB because I can go on when I fell like. Who are you to tell me what I should use?

You can deactivate your FB account and still use Messenger (and hence keep your contacts). You would lose Groups and Events though

You'd still have to go give up your phone number. In the end, you might give up your FB profile but you've not quite achieved the objective of giving up your FB profile.

Why would anyone want to use messenger, it is such a low quality app to be beyond useless.

Because all your friends already have Facebook accounts.

I've never used fb, so it's scary to see comments like this.

Right? As if those of us who haven't used facebook for years are living these inhospitably inconvenient lives? I have friends all over the world and we keep in touch...we don't really need a central platform to do so either. I can honestly say that I could really easily drop any of the platforms that I do use (telegram, snapchat, flickr, hackernews) in an instant and it would probably have such a minimal impact in my life that I could care less. Is it these companies' impetus to trick its users into thinking they can't live without them? I think so.

Arguments like yours are extremely tired, and have a strong smell of "look how sad your life is compared to mine".

I could easily make the same argument about email. You know the last time I emailed a friend? Literally never. I don't even know my friends email addresses. I don't even know if they use it.

I could make the same argument about letters. I don't know the addresses of my friends. I know where their houses are and I can drive to them, but I've never sent them a letter.

I could make the same argument about phone calls. I know my friends numbers, but only so I can text them. If I called one of my friends on the phone, I imagine they'd be very confused as to why I didn't just text them. Their first question would probably be "are you driving or what?"

Oh how sad the lives must be of people who call, write letters, or write emails. What inhospitably inconvenient lives they lead. I'm glad you've evolved to more advanced forms of social interaction. Now please stop judging everyone else who chooses a different method of social interaction than you.

I deleted the Facebook and Facebook Messenger apps from my phone two months ago. I love how well that works for me.

I can still contact people (just have to open my computer) and read FB groups. But I don't really post to FB anymore and don't browse the feed at all.

And I don't feel like I am missing anything. (YMMV)

I deleted it three or four months ago when I realized that it was just making me unhappy.

What happened to good ol' emails? Serious question... Can't you organize amongst friends with emails? I hate to suggest Slack as well... But there are alternatives is the point...

What about Meetup.com for bigger groups?

How old are you? I am asking because I remember full well the pre-facebook days when people would send around 'funny videos' to groups of friends, with no chance of opting out, getting your email address shared with people you don't know, filling your inbox with crap, etc... Something like FB is hundreds times more convenient

Lol.. good point. I like to think I was one of the first million people on Facebook when I got it in college... Maybe users who were initiated to Facebook earlier have it more ingrained in their lives.

Gosh, I miss Uncle Dan's chain emails about how terrible Bill Clinton is. . .

wat

It's insanely easier to filter those things out with email.

It's been years since I've used FB, but I don't recall any very good filters for those types of things, and in fact they are incentivized to show you more of them.

No it isn't - not if the same person sends you a mixture of useless and usefule emails. And it doesn't solve the problem of your email adress being made public.

With FB, you simply go on it when you feel like / have the time.

Yeah, actually, I do that all the time. Regex's are awesome, and so is spamassasin. There are plenty of other "rule-based" type tools out there too.

What is the problem with an email being public? I don't think I understand what you mean.

Yes, of course, we all have the time for endless fiddling with regular expressions... please

I never said you had to. I provided a list of tools. You have yet to bring anything worthwhile to the discussion except to complain about tools you don't understand.

Any UX expert can tell you that every little bit of friction counts. I see that mentioned or assumed every day here on HN, but somehow in discussions about using vs. abandoning Facebook it gets thrown out the window. I might be comfortable with email, you might be comfortable with Slack, but my uncle or my high-school friend who's a massage therapist might not be. Also, they and a couple of dozen other older, younger, or less tech-savvy friends are already on Facebook and comfortable doing things there. Getting them to switch to a different platform is a hard sell even if it's more convenient, and if it's even marginally less convenient then forget it. Ease of use and network effects are both real things.

Email addresses come and go all the time, get changed, deactivated, or people start using different emails and never check the old ones. But FB messages are always seen. Email is just not a reliable long-term "address" for someone.

I only go on facebook to talk to other car enthusiasts for a particular brand. Some of them are on some online forums, but most aren't. They are also not my friends - so I don't really want to share emails. The group is also non-English speaking - so services like Meetup or Slack are out of the question. It's a tough one. I think reverting back to standard post-based online forums is the best, but they have more friction and they are hard to discover for some.

It seems like a big problem until you just do it, and then you realise you didn't need it anywhere near as much as you think.

Are you unable to ask those people for alternative contact information?

Many dozens or even hundreds of people, not to mention the thousands on the groups that are helpful strangers? And even if I got all that contact information, email and other contact stuff changes pretty quickly, easily a lot of it would got out of date within a year or two. But people keep their FB accounts active so you can always contact them through there.

This is what I do to keep facebook from being annoying

1. Delete (disable) facebook app on phone 2. Stop all notifications from facebook from browser 3. Use email notifications to see updates to conversations 4. Use a seperate browser (phone and desktop) to login into facebook to reduce privacy tracking

If you want to check up on a specific friend, just go to their facebook profile.

You know, I thought the same thing. But honestly I rarely used those forums. And the people I can't keep in contact with, well... I don't really miss them. I have phone numbers for the people that matter and have resumed exchanging phone numbers with people, which I hadn't really done in several years.

I am part of an organization that uses fb as the primary means of communication. The people that at the top have been pretty obnoxious about me not being on it anymore. But frankly, I see their attitude as pretty toxic and think they should move to a professional method of communication (they are a pretty amateurish / small org).

Sometimes disruption is a good thing. I've been studying a lot more (as a professional dev taking online classes) in the past few months since leaving fb.

Maybe i am misunderstanding something about this whole issue, but was there an exploit or a bug that allowed this to happen on Facebooks end?

I guess my confusion is that whenever someone grants third party access to your facebook, you can query that users list of friends (which i have seen used for things like games and high scores, etc). But you didn't get the full friends profile, instead you got a small subset of it. Did they find some way around that and managed to retrieve the full user profile?

If not then isn't Cambridge Analytica at fault here for misusing someones data? Facebook provides an API and users consented to allowing a third party to access their data. I guess you could remove the friends list, from the API.

I don’t think there was any exploit. My understanding is that a third-party app asked for access, and people gave consent, and CA mined data.

I’m the last person you’d see defending FB, but this just seems like the same thing everyone has been doing on FB as a platform since FarmVille launched years ago?

A major part of Facebook's culpability here is that they knew for 2 years that tens of millions of their users were being profiled as part of a political propaganda war on their platform and their response was practically nothing.

Edit: FB also knew the data was collected under an academic license and was being processed, outside that license, for financial gain.

I guess my question is from a security standpoint, how do you prevent something like this if you were facebook? Do you ask any company who does a huge number of API requests requesting peoples friends lists? To verify how they are using the data? How do you actually confirm they are doing what they said?

According to the article only ~200k people installed the app and consented. Unless there was an exploit, you get a minimal version of the data in their friend list (user id, name, that is all i really see) not a full profile. So didn't they only really get the names of 49.8 million people?

Is the solution to just not allow allow a third party token to access a friend list, and only your personal information?

I am not trying to defend what is going on, i am just struggling to see how they were able to use the extremely minimal amount of information the friend list api returns to make a full profile on 50 million people.

This might be an interesting read if you haven't already, still doesn't go into too much tech detail unfortunately.

> What the email correspondence between Cambridge Analytica employees and Kogan shows is that Kogan had collected millions of profiles in a matter of weeks. But neither Wylie nor anyone else at Cambridge Analytica had checked that it was legal. It certainly wasn’t authorised. Kogan did have permission to pull Facebook data, but for academic purposes only. What’s more, under British data protection laws, it’s illegal for personal data to be sold to a third party without consent.

> “Facebook could see it was happening,” says Wylie. “Their security protocols were triggered because Kogan’s apps were pulling this enormous amount of data, but apparently Kogan told them it was for academic use. So they were like, ‘Fine’.”

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/data-war-whistl...

As I understand it, originally the Facebook API allowed you to access friends of friends - hence the millions of records. They changed this a couple of years ago (but apparently after CA had accessed the data).

It was also against the terms of service to download and store the information retrieved from the API. They also changed this many years ago, in the name of developer convenience.

Is political propaganda against their TOS? I don’t like it, but I don’t like all the other propaganda (re “ads”).

I don’t see how this is worse than a targeted ad trying to get me to invest with Schwab. Also a pretty coordinated campaign. Or just Doubleclick in general.

This comes down to people wanting to limit some ads. There are already laws for political ads. Should we change them? I think they currently apply to Facebook ads.

This prompted me to research UK political advertising regulations, or rather the fact that there are none at all for non-broadcast content. That is insane.

2 years? Try 6. According to Obama campaign adviser Carol Davidsen, they farmed the data in 2012 with FB's knowledge:

From https://twitter.com/cld276/status/975565844632821760:

> "Facebook was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn’t stop us once they realized that was what we were doing."

> "They came to office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side."

I believe that's correct. People gave concent to X but Y used the data. Perhaps that's a violation of FB's ToS for apps?

That said, (personal) data gets brokered all the time. And, btw, sometimes the buyers are gov agencies. Who needs surveillance when people willing hand it all over, often in public.

Perhaps not the public will finally begin to understand why the phone meta data "intrusion" was so bad.

I guess the UK/EU will have a field day with this, considering the GDPR is in effect in a little less then 2 months.

Also, i wonder if this violates any political campaign laws aswell?

> My understanding is that a third-party app asked for access, and people gave consent

Did people consent to use their data to be mined for a political campaign? Currently, consents are meaningless and vaguely worded that can include anything under the sun. Sooner or later, we are going to go the "Informed Consent" way [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informed_consent

It used to be that you could get more information than just the friends list but that hasn't been the case since 2015:

https://techcrunch.com/2015/04/28/facebook-api-shut-down/

Perhaps the academic involved was given special access under the condition that he didn't give the data to any third parties, and he did.

We have to decide if people should have powers like this.

"Build tools that measure the rate and spread of stories and rumors, and model how it works and who has the biggest impact. Tools can tell us about the origin of stories and the impact of any venue, person or theme.

Connect polling into this in some way. Find a way to do polling online and not on phones. Analytics and data science and modeling, polling and resource optimization tools. For each voter, a score is computed ranking probability of the right vote.

Analytics can model demographics, social factors and many other attributes of the needed voters. Modeling will tell us what who we need to turn out and why, and studies of effectiveness will let us know what approaches work well. Machine intelligence across the data should identify the most important factors for turnout, and preference.

It should be possible to link the voter records in Van with upcoming databases from companies like Comcast and others for media measurement purposes.

The analytics tools can be built in house or partnered with a set of vendors."

Edit- Source - https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/37262

Seeking advice: how do I tell friends and family about the negative aspects of Facebook without coming across as all “I don’t even own a TV” or “meat is murder”? Is that even possible?

Right now I'm considering to just show them the video on sentiance's homepage.. (https://www.sentiance.com as linked above)

instead of deleting my account, i wrote an email which i bcc’d to my “real” friends: i’m deleting our facebook friendship, i love you and expect we can stay in touch just fine without.

then i deleted all my fb connections, and left a public account with no friends and a publi message about how to find me.

if i want to spam a post to my people, i use the bcc email

It's not only Facebook though. If you look for a restaurant at Google it will show you a link to that restaurant's website, opening hours, etc. but also: how popular the place is at any time, and how much time people spend there. All thanks to tracking phones.

In case of Google you can disable that in the phone's settings (and trust that opt-out works), but you can't really do that with your phone operator. Or with the apps that do the same but don't brag about it.

To answer your question directly: I showed a search result page to my friends, and showed them how to disable location tracking. Some were terrified, but - sadly - most of them didn't and don't mind being tracked.

> Some were terrified, but - sadly - most of them didn't and don't mind being tracked.

For those friends, I ask them if they can just carry this nickle of mine for me, it will track them and Ill know where they are if I need them. They all refuse to be tracked by me.

Then I ask them if they want a raspberry pi or a router from me, with ads blocked and personal access to my virtual private network with access to all my movies music etc, but dont worry of course _I_ will see every domain-name your computers lookup, Ill even warn you, friend, if I notice bad-name lookups, and I pinky promise not to remotely access the router.

They all act like I am a creep and refuse. But, google, an entity they dont even know or have a relationship with - thats fine to let them into their house and know what time they watch porn and how long.

When the surveillence is put into context like this, it usually works, friends smirk and think one more time.

>an entity they dont even know or have a relationship with

That's the important point. Google and Facebook don't give a shit about me. I'm one of many data points, in a vat with hundreds of millions of other people.

How many people will search Google for porn, sometimes really embarrassing stuff? And no one cares. Google certainly doesn't care. But you'd find less people asking their friends for porn or sharing their porn preferences with their friends, because my friend can and likely will judge me for it. But Google doesn't give a shit. Google's not going to tell my other friends how weird I am.

That is the point indeed.

Google and Facebook, will stab you in the back without blinking, to them you area nothing but a number, and sell out your data faster than your friend will.

Even further, Google and Facebook, will drown you in ads and manipulate your mind, sneak in "features" and change your privacy-settings, while your friend will help you avoid it.

You do make a valid point, how low we have sunk, that people will actually trust a company over their own friends. That people would trust a company with "personalization" everywhere, yet believe they can hide in the masses. If they can give you a personal feed, they know you exactly you not an anonymous mass.

> Google and Facebook don't give a shit about me.

They dont give a shit, they are not your friend, and you cant hide behind a number or massive data, their whole game is figuring out the massive data points. Sayin you will hide behind the masses is saying you will be nobody, you will not have anything to say. Thats hard.

I'm not sure the negative aspects are considered that bad, even by people who know about them. I really think techie sites just have an overrepresentation of online privacy advocates that steer conversations in that direction.

I think you'll have trouble not coming across that way because it almost inherently suggests your values (importance of the privacy of your data) are better than theirs (enjoying Facebook and that it is free).

This is the truth. The average person does not care about data mining. It's a non-issue for them. And no, it's not a matter of intelligence, or that they need to be educated on the matter. Leave them be. Ignorance is bliss - in a positive sense.

If you're going to teach others anything about the perils of the internet, focus on the truly serious things: how to avoid phishing scams targeting bank accounts, fake virus warnings, etc. Everything else sounds like tinfoil hat material because, for most people, that's pretty much what it is.

Yes and no.

I've had a lot of people ask me if Facebook is listening in on the microphone on their phones - because they've been discussing something offline and then started seeing ads for it. Of course, maybe they've searched for it and then forgotten about it - but it's becoming a common topic of conversation.

Likewise, retargetted adverts are getting noticed more and more - people often tell me that they find it extremely creepy and annoying.

So there is a growing awareness out there ... it's just not reached a point where people want to take action yet.

It's worth looking through Zenyep Tufekci's other op-eds [1] and her fantastic book "Twitter and Teargass" [2]. A lot of her analysis borders on prescient. She's someone to pay attention to.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/column/zeynep-tufekci

[2] https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300215120/twitter-and-te...

Agreed. TED talk was good too. https://www.ted.com/talks/zeynep_tufekci_we_re_building_a_dy...

A realistic dystopia, lovely.

Am I understanding correctly is that the primary blame on Facebook is in enabling apps (via API) to collect data?

This stuff has unfortunately existed for years, no different from an Android "beautiful waterfall wallpapers" app that also happens to ask for permission to access your contacts/messages. People consent to their data being public (sometimes in second-degree through their friends), data gets collected. And what about all those helpful Chrome extensions that want access to all of your browsing tabs?

I never authorize third-party apps on my accounts (or even install non-local Chrome extensions), but I'm likely in the minority.

It is interesting how much traditional media likes to bash Facebook - they are competing with it for advertising dollars after all... The only thing that surprises me is that it took them so long. Maybe they had to wait until they could do it without opposing public sentiment too much.

That said, I vastly prefer traditional media over Facebook. You can do propaganda on both, but only Facebook has and exploits everyone's personal data. On traditional media, campaigns also need to be balanced to avoid alienating the general public, while on Facebook, extremist ads can target extremist people with no downsides.

If someone thinks about building a new, better and more mature social network where users data wouldnt be sell to the Facebook’s tune, this is your time!

You dont have to have your startup listed on stock exchange and answer to shareholders how you squeezing out every possible penny out of your users; you just need to show enough ads to keep servers running and paying for salaries. And now you dont have to show off to everyone that you so nice tou only make $1 salary per tear — keep a cool million bucks annul to yourself. Thats a small percentage of ads shown and small percentage of dollars collected that Facebook is harvesting right now, to be able to run similar size of enterprise. And you be on your way of helping out our civilization in truly noble way.

Better than average article about long term dangers posed by Internet super-companies like FB and Google. The author is a professor of information and library science.

The only way, I think, that we in the USA can solve this problem is to pass user rights and privacy laws similar to those in Europe. Given our corrupt political system this will be difficult but I think possible if enough individuals keep contributing to the EFF, ACLU, FSF, etc. It takes money to fight back.

> Given our corrupt political system

This is an unhelpful "truism" that encourages us all to lose faith in a system entirely built on trust. It's a sentence easy to bandy about--especially unqualified--and impossible to counter (in any government).

It also fails to bolster your argument. Your post without those words would be just as effective.

Please reconsider.

I think it's time to finally close the FB account, move on to Firefox and disable 3rd party trackers and start using VPN routinely.

But careful with the VPNs.

They are leaking and selling data too. Can't find the article at this moment, but there was on HN not long ago.

yepp, VPNs are really just shifting the trust from ISP to the VPN.

Sure, there's no way to know.

But it is possible to distribute trust across multiple VPN services, such that none of them alone can compromise you. You just nest one VPN inside another. It's easy using VMs. Most simply, connect to one VPN provider in the host machine, and to another in a VM. Using pfSense VMs as VPN gateways, you can chain more deeply. It's the same idea that's behind Tor using three-relay circuits. But less anonymous, because routes are static.

Do you realise that this kind of behaviour will make you automatically a suspect? Remember, is not the data that you transfer, but the metadata of it which is always visible.

Maintain appearance of normal, but block just what is doing really harm, like advertising and certain cookies. And don't post anything personal online. Use firefox on private window.

Which "you"? Mirimir, for sure. But being a suspect is unavoidable for that persona. However, to my ISP and its friends, I'm just a VPN user. Who torrents, which is pretty common where I'm located. I've never connected directly to Tor, even.

And what metadata? All Mirimir metadata points to the final VPN service. I'm sure that resourceful TLAs could use traffic analysis, and walk either way through the VPN chain. But I can't imagine that I'm that interesting. And indeed, I doubt that they'd find much to prosecute. I mean, all that Mirimir does is write about this stuff, mainly here and on Wilders Security Forums. And occasional stuff that's published by IVPN.

Other personas do more iffy stuff, such as seeing how well Freenet nodes worked as Tor onion services. Freenet being sadly loaded with CP. But those personas used different nested VPN chains, and then Whonix for Tor. So they're not related to either Mirimir or my meatspace identity.

Also, there are no overlaps in interests or Internet activity between Mirimir and my meatspace identity. In communications as my meatspace identity, I rarely use English. Not with family, friends or clients. Occasionally in work-related stuff, but never in social media. So there's not much basis for stylometry.

Finally, I must say the the setup is extremely easy to use. I have VPN client in the host machine, plus several pfSense VMsxas VPN gateways, which can easily be arranged and rearrabged in nested chains. I introduce new middle VMs occasionally, but generally don't change the entry and exit very often. Just update VBox and the VMs periodically.

Algo solves this: spin up your own. Heck, be neighbourly and share yours with a few friends. Gives you coverage of other traffic too.

https://github.com/trailofbits/algo

>move on to Firefox

I can't trust them after the case when they installed the extension as an advertising company of the TV series. 21st centery, you can't trust anyone.

It certainly cannot be trusted given stuff like this happens on a regular basis. See the next one coming: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1446404

Who would you trust then?

I agree that Mozilla has been horrible in how they treat their users, and people should be much more critical of them. But from what I've seen, they are the only ones who are even trying.

"Should we all just leave Facebook? That may sound attractive but it is not a viable solution. In many countries, Facebook and its products simply are the internet."

_That_ is the problem.

> Some employers and landlords demand to see Facebook profiles

I may be wrong - please correct me if I am - but I'm pretty sure that's illegal?

This isn't limited to Facebook. Yesterday I saw that PUBG just came out for Android. I've heard great things about it, so I looked for it on the Play Store and took a look at the permissions. It demands the ability to read my phone's logs & see running apps. What possible reason could it have for that?

It's a free app. While I know that there are in-app purchases, is Tencent also selling information about me if I install it?

No thanks — I chose not to install it.

The modern web/app/software platform is built on users trading their privacy & security for value, rather than trading money for value. I'd really rather just pay.

> It demands the ability to read my phone's logs & see running apps. What possible reason could it have for that?

Possibly anti-cheat?

Let's not forget that Alteryx sells the data of 123 Million American Households. That data Was Exposed Online https://www.upguard.com/breaches/cloud-leak-alteryx "the data was part of a product - the Alteryx Designer With Data - that sells for around $38,995 per license. In its own marketing for the Experian service, Alteryx notes that the database contains "consumer demographics, life event, direct response, property, and mortgage information for more than 235 million consumers." 'It included an extraordinary range of personal details on residents, including addresses, ethnicity, interests and hobbies, income, right down to what kind of mortgage the house was under and how many children lived at the property. In total, there were 248 different data fields for each household, according to the researcher who uncovered the leak data this week.

Whilst there were no names exposed, Chris Vickery, a cybersecurity researcher from UpGuard, told Forbes it was simple to determine who the data was linked to, either by looking at the details or by crosschecking with previous leaks. He found the data was sitting in an Amazon Web Services storage "bucket," left open to anyone with an account, which are free to obtain." https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2017/12/19/120m-...

The positive outcome of this could be society’s shift away from marketing to meaning.

This isn’t unique to Facebook. It’s true of many large media companies that rely on advertising (Comcast with NBC, Disney with ABC, NYTimes, Google, etc).

Facebook is just among the best at advertising’s extreme optimization.

The election is high attention now, but I’m looking for research on whether society is worth off from drinking Coke and sitting for hours watching video.

It's interesting that we have 2 big scandals in tech right now: one with Uber's self-driving car killing a pedestrian, and the other with Facebook revealing too much data about users and their friends to third-party apps. With Uber, we're asking for data (telemetry leading up to the accident) to be recorded and access to be more open. With Facebook, we're asking for access to be more closed; ironic that we usually criticize Facebook for being a walled garden.

Assuming data needs to be recorded in the first place to make the products work better, what's ethically better, open access or closed? Is it better for a few big tech companies to wield so much power with their troves of user data, or is it better to distribute it across numerous companies/governments who can be even more unscrupulous (e.g. Cambridge Analytica, Russia)?

EDIT: even now, with full benefit of hindsight, should Facebook allow accessing friend lists with user permission (would lead to more cases of abuse by third-party apps), or not (would perpetuate their walled garden and monopoly on social media)?

I'm not sure that's a useful binary. In both cases we're asking corporations to handle their data in a responsible way. Neither open nor closed is absolutely more ethical, it depends on the context.

In addition to what n4r9 said, we organize our moral code around freedom of individuals, and not freedom of other entities. So it's morally acceptable to ask for privacy of individuals, yet ask for things and institutions to be surveilled by society at large.

Not that this would ever happen..probably, but if Amazon were to offer users a $20 amazon store voucher to get users to disable their FB account and port all their pictures to a social media solution they build, I could see myself doing that. This platform would only be accessible to users with Amazon Prime accounts and that would be a way for them to keep it ad-free.

This is good because it might make people question what they read on FB, but the reality is that (a) the whole digital economy is based on that. FB are no better than Google or Apple (who know where you are, right now!) or a miriad others (b) FB serves some purposes (my old aunt wouldn't be able to work out email, but FB is easy enough for her, for example) and (c) it seems that the trend is away from 'public' platforms like FB and towards non publicly accessible groups such as WhatsApp groups (also owned by FB..) or Telegram or Snapchat etc, so an anti-FB backlash may not achieve much in terms of a "healthier public discourse"

Also, it all depends on how you use it. I subscribe to a lot of food based groups and art events groups, and share next to nothing about what I do. OK, some AI can infer that if I like Lebanese AND Mexican I am probably left leaning. OK, now what? What are they going to do with that info?

In many cases, industry self-regulation can be a good solution to protecting customers from being wronged. PCI is a great example- there can be huge fines on merchants that don't meet strict regulations for handling customer financial transactions according to the strict standards set by PCI.

What has become extremely clear from this situation is that we are far past the point of self-regulation being the answer for protecting personal data. Facebook knowingly enabled a 3rd party to pay $1-$2 to 300k people to acquire facebook data that may have been marked private/don't share for 50 million users. Roughly $500k for 50 million people's personal data, or in other words, a penny per person. This data is connected to influencing the election of the POTUS. There needs to be significant overhaul of how personal data is protected or this will continue to happen.

> In many cases, industry self-regulation can be a good solution to protecting customers from being wronged.

PCI is a self-regulation by self-interest: not to protect the card holders, but merely to protect the card issuers first. Because legislation made issuers responsible for most mishaps in payments.

What are documented examples of industry self-regulation in the interest of customers? (true question, I'm genuinely wondering about it)

The trick is to have customers that aren’t users.

In addition: You need reasonably trustworthy entities if you want them to self-regulate and self-certify.

Facebook, with their behavior over the years, have lost any benefit of a doubt.

This may not be a popular opinion here, but given their behavior, their evasions and their lies it's time for the law to crack down on them; hard!

As someone who has worked with PCI compliance, I'm not sure I'd say it's a great example.

Sure, it's better than nothing, but it's also relatively trivial to bypass, and is done so regularly. I think the governing organization should have much sharper teeth.

That's not to say that self-regulating won't work, but I don't think PCI is a great example of it in action.

Serious question, to where are companies who were previously dependent on FB moving their advertising and marketing?

That's a very good question. As a business owner, as far as I'm concerned I'm tied to Facebook. As someone who writes a local blog, Facebook is where I get most of my information about my city.

The Internet (and this thread) is full of people telling you to get off Facebook and go to something else, but especially for businesses, what else is there? I have thousands of followers on Facebook and Facebook drives 90% of the traffic to my site, meanwhile my email newsletter has 6 subscribers.

When I'm walking, I like to know where my next step is before I take it. Without that, shutting down Facebook means shutting down my business.

A lot of people here are telling me to take the step, but can anyone tell me where my foot is going to land when I do?

In that case I would recommend pushing as many subscribers over to your e-mail newsletter as possible. I'm sure this has already been attempted to some degree on your part, but e-mail marketing is very effective when done right and could potentially displace some negative impact from if/when Facebook decides/regulates that your business is no longer needed on their platform.

>if/when Facebook decides/regulates that your business is no longer needed on their platform.

That's really my fear, I'm trying to create a critical mass where Facebook isn't required anymore. I took a big hit earlier this year when they decided to stop showing people content from pages. But a huge problem is, any article I write that doesn't get posted to Facebook gets zero hits. Posting to Facebook gets thousands of hits. No one is visiting my site without being provided a link to click on. And my audience is Millennials, which is a demographic that doesn't use email as much as others.

Even pulling all my current followers into the email newsletter, though, doesn't solve the problem of finding a new audience. Right now I can pay Facebook $1/day and reliably get 30 new followers every week. Even though my audience is all within my small town, building that audience on Facebook is far cheaper than even the most conservative physical advertising plan.

That is assuming, of course, that Facebook followers translate into actual readers. And it certainly has been an ongoing struggle to get Facebook to show my content to the people who have explicitly opted-in to see my content.

The two situations I face: either rely on Facebook (which is cheap and easy) until the day they decide I shouldn't be a business anymore, or do anything but Facebook, which is harder and more expensive. That's why people use Facebook: no one trusts it, but it's so damn easy, even when they constantly make it harder.

I read "Dragnet Nation" shortly after it came out.

http://juliaangwin.com/dragnet-nation-available-now/

And a couple years later "Chaos Monkeys."

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/06/29/business/dealbook/revi...

Obviously there are others, as well as articles in between.

In terms of FB et al, we are the product. They know this. We know this. And the prevailing (USA) cultural wind is "Privacy? Who needs it?"

If there's a surprise, it's that its taken this long for this issue to get any significant attention. Let's see how long it lasts. If it lasts.

Here in Germany online privacy is a social value, and Facebook is gonna have a even harder time from now on. I don't see it happen in the rest of the world. I give this three months: when the news cycle will have died out, for Facebook it's gonna be business as usual. Zuckerberg is in such a denial about the real mission of his creature, that I don't see how it will ever be able to steer the boat, even if he wanted to. Does he ever lie in bed at night, staring at the ceiling, asking himself "what the fuck did I create"? Will he ever?

Why do you think Zuckerberg is in denial? (Honest question.) Seems to me he knows exactly what he's doing.

Ok, this may sound bad, very way-out-there and not P.C. at all, so forgive me in advance, as it is my (almost fictional) speculation: I think he's in denial because of his lingering autism.

My theory is that, for Zuckerberg, Facebook has always been a perfect data machine to figure out the complexity governing social interactions. The same social interactions that have always escaped him in real life, due to his high-functioning autism.

Facebook, for the first time in history, made possible to quantify social interactions. The next step after such an enlighting discovery (it really is, actually) was to scale the analysis on a global level. Everyone - in Mark's mind - couldn't do but benefit from such formalization of social interactions. He might have asked himself: if only social interactions where as easy to analyse as a calculus problem, or as simple to formalize in a giant set of rules as grammar, wouldn't we all be better off?

Years later, he's still so autistically enamored with his own Leviathan, that he's now in denial about the evil applications his beloved monster has made possible. He's still positive that such a perfect machine can't be used for bad purposes. Sure, there have been speedbumps, but the road is still stretching towards a brighter future where technology can help us rationalize the irrational and ethereal world of mutual interactions.

Long story short: he's an autistic with a delusion of grandeur about his own creature. Such delusions are aggravated buy the shield put up around him by his fellow executives, such as Sheryl "only good news" Sandberg.

Again, this is nothing but my own literary divertissement. He might just be another silicon valley asshole executive, and that's it.

I think it's worth noting that there's a big difference between (1) allowing advertisers to display ads on your platform based on user profiles (e.g. matching certain demographics etc) on the one hand, and (2) handing out arbitrary user data on the other.

With the former, you stay in control and are able to enforce access and use, including the guarantees you gave users on how their data is handled. With the latter model, you're handing over the keys to the castle to random and possibly quite shady third parties that you cannot have the slightest chance at controlling.

It seems rather reckless to do (2), both regarding your responsibility towards users, but also economically – if a bad actor exfiltrates all user data into their competing ad service, you have little to keep them from doing that.

"Should we all just leave Facebook? That may sound attractive but it is not a viable solution. In many countries, Facebook and its products simply are the internet. Some employers and landlords demand to see Facebook profiles, and there are increasingly vast swaths of public and civic life — from volunteer groups to political campaigns to marches and protests — that are accessible or organized only via Facebook."

I have a Facebook account so that I can participate in groups used by clubs I belong to and so that I can follow musical artists. My account has no friends and I have entered no information about myself.

Problem solved?

How convenient for Facebook that large dubious data collection practices like this are exposed only two months before the European GDPR privacy law comes into effect.

The only reason this stuff is being reported on in this way is the president they successfully got elected sucks.

None of this is news. Facebook has _never_ been regarded as some kind of privacy-respecting entity. Users have been willingly participating in the exchange of privacy for convenience as far as I can remember.

Technology has yet to face its A-bomb moment that physicists faced decades ago.

Physicists became aware about the ethical implications of their work after the A bomb - with information science there will not be any such sharp censure - but the implications might be even more profound.

They collect browser histories? Shouldn't that technically be impossible unless they're using their ad partners across multiple sites?

No need for ad partners; their share button scripts are enough for this task. (Google Analytics is the leader on this technique, compounded by secondary tracking inside Google search results, but FB is one of the leading third-party request destinations in the web)

I thought it was fairly well know those Facebook "like" and "share" buttons you find places were also trackers. At least I recall reading that several years ago, things may have changed.

when talking about Cambridge Analytica we should also discuss Palantir

from 5 years ago: https://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2013-06/mysterious...

Palantir ‘wields as much real-world power as Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple, but unlike them, Palantir operates so far under the radar, it is special ops.’ https://channels.theinnovationenterprise.com/articles/is-pal...

Yes, that's the same Thiel who is suing Gawker for outing him while developing predictive analytics that disproportionately target minorities.

See: Peter Thiel’s Palantir wins $876 million U.S. Army contract https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-09/peter-thi...

https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/27/17054740/palantir-predict...

not just facebook but Silicon Valley has in general a total disregard for privacy. You can't hate on Facebook from another corner of the swamp. Also we should be thinking about what's ahead in IoT (Turning IOT sensor data into behavioral insights) https://www.sentiance.com/

Not to mention the gazillion IoT devices with poor factory reset which is the web's equivalent to delete-account function which only disables a users login but retains the data.

apologies for my emotional tone, this obviously has hit a nerve.

Wow, sentiance is super creepy.

wow+1. Truly creepy.

But this is possible because we let them use this data. Thankfully, in EU the GDRP makes this almost impossible.

On a side note, working on a platform that is similar to sentiance in data aquisition, but for totally other purpose and zero effect on privacy, due to a transparent anonymization.

Are you going to invade a foreign power when one of their sovereigns ignores your demand to forget?

Legally, I cannot collect any data and keep the source. So I do strip all the possible identification, until someone's effort to pin point to any personal data becomes economically unfeasible. I also tend to store as little as possible raw data and in some cases, I do data scrambling, where the data as in values is not important for the engine.

A demand to forget has to show that I have data on that person. Without this, claim is impossible. No invasion.

> I do strip all the possible identification

"Anonymizing" data is a myth; stripped or hashed columns can usually be recovered by correlating the remaining data with other data sets.

> until someone's effort to pin point to any personal data becomes economically unfeasible.

Which admits that the data probably is recoverable, just "economically infeasible". Do you have proof of that claim? Unfeasible for who? In general, the difficulty of re-correlating data goes down as the amount of data grows.

> I do data scrambling, where the data as in values is not important for the engine.

DJB once described[1] hashing as "magic crypto pixie dust" that "takes personally identifiable information and makes it incomprehensible to the marketing department".

> A demand to forget has to show that I have data on that person.

So you're trying to launder data to circumvent the letter of the law. This kind of scofflaw, antisocial attitude is how you attract reactionary, heavy handed regulations.

[1] https://projectbullrun.org/surveillance/2015/video-2015.html...

I suppose you talk a bit from outsite.

There is no other data set to correlate. Simply all the external context data is not recorded anywhere. Not even in logs. Unless some higher agency is going to hack some network driver to pick up the tcpip source, etc, I don't see how the data could be associated with datetime and location. This is why I was talking about "economically infeasible".

Data scrambling doesn't mean hashing. Sorry, here you are wrong. It's a on-the-fly frequency/timedomain scrambling, means someone has to physically, again, access a server and pick up from the memory the algorithm. And no marketing department, all research here!

The other stuff, I wound't reply, but let me asure you, there is no law circumventing. We are open and if someone can pinpoint of some personal data, there is no issue removing it.

No, just like China doesn't invade the United States because someone on Hacker News posted a nastygram about Jinping.

But it sure as shit won't let you run a Chinese message board where you allow that sort of thing.

Holy fuck. After watching the video on their site, I agree.

And people keep whining about the GDPR.

I was recruited to work there, since they are from my local neighborhood I know them some time already. They have a history of analyzing data with financial support from Samsung. They are a smart bunch, don't have bad intentions towards people. That being said, their goal is indeed ... Well not something I value personally. But they are all good guys that are eager to make an amazingly powerful product. I agree that the result can be abused. That being said, there should be a middle ground where both parties should benefit. I normally don't comment, but I don't want to see them look like a villain. They are excited engineers.

> They are excited engineers.

It doesn't really matter how nice, smart, talented, excited, curious, or well-meaning a person is. Judge them by their actions. What they build and what it is used for.

If you could pass a message them, please tell them to get a grip and realize how insanely creepy what they are doing is, and they should probably not do it, even if it makes them a bunch of money.

>I don't want to see them look like a villain. They are excited engineers.

I suspect the idea that these two categories are mutually exclusive is at the root of most of the questionable applications of technology today.

>they are all good guys that are eager to make an amazingly powerful product

Lovely. They are also devoid of vision and ethics about the likely results of their actions. In short, they fail to consider the saying:

"The road to hell is paved with good intentions".

Have they even considered the question: Which of their targets would EVER sign-up for their service?

Who are their customers, and why would they pay for the service? The only plausible reason to pay Sentiance is to understand a target's behavior at a fine-grained level in order to insert a stimulus to get them to do something they would otherwise not do willingly. (or a stalker, to assault them).

So, they are making a wonderfully powerful tool to enable strangers to change a target's behavior without permission. Yet they are not bright enough to avoid putting a "sign up" popup on their website in a way that interrupts their own video.

They will enable someone to cause serious damage to our world. Please get a message to them that they need to stop and shut down.

If they want to build something REALLY powerful, they should pivot to building something to allow us to DETECT & PREVENT other software on our phones/computers from doing what they are now trying to do.

I'd pay for that, and I'm not the only one.

So you're saying this is not an elaborate hoax? There goes my last hope..

From the theinnovationenterprise.com article you linked to:

> It is essentially an interface that sits on top of existing data sets and displays data to users for analysis, helping to identify connections otherwise impossible to find. Users do not have to use SQL queries or employ engineers to write strings in order to search petabytes of data. Instead, natural language is used to query data and results are returned in real-time. It is not designed to do any single thing, its main strength is that it is flexible and powerful enough to accommodate the requirements of any organization that needs to process large amounts of both personal and abstract data. This makes it more useful for managing HUMINT, or intelligence from human sources, than SIGINT, or intelligence from signals.

The problem with Palantir is that everything it is said to be doing is so vague that it could just be colorful dashboards based on not particularly great or new data. For example, this is how the Bloomberg story you linked to describes it:

> Founded in 2004, Palantir is used by dozens of federal, state and local law enforcement agencies to aggregate far-flung data, find patterns and present results in colorful, easy-to-interpret graphics. Its use by police in Los Angeles, Chicago, New Orleans and elsewhere has raised ethical concerns about the potential for unfairly targeting minorities.

I'm not arguing whether Palantir is living up to its contracts. Just that it doesn't seem to produce or have the unique and expansive kind of data that Facebook, Google, and Amazon have. Though I guess there's nothing that prevented them from doing a massive data pull from FB's API, in the same way CA managed to do it.

FWIW, not everything about Palantir is necessarily a secret. You can see some descriptions of what they offer and at what price via various FOIA requests that have been done: https://www.muckrock.com/foi/list/?q=palantir&status=done&us...

If the task is "taking datasets and making them more searchable," it seems like that company gets the heat simply for making the task easier. Excel, SQL databases (or, heck, huge CSV files) don't get as much attention even though they could be used for the same purpose, even if very awkwardly.

You are right. But sometimes the data access technology does make a qualitative difference. That’s because a lot of our protection has always been a sort of “security by obscurity”. It wasn’t just the 4th amendment protecting you from unreasonable searches. The government was also restricted by their manpower, and by the fact that searching a house is easily visible and people would notice if you’re targeting everyone.

These restrictions don’t apply to digital eavesdropping, which is why it has become a major point of debate once the technology made it possible to do on a large scale.

Another example are license plate scanners: that data has always been there, and anyone could legally write down all the license plates they saw. But add image recognition and a database, and you’ve created a monster.

The tech community usually turns to technology to fight such technology: encryption for communication, Bitcoin to undermine (pun intended) what they see as the failings of the FED. BitTorrent for their qualms with copyright enforcement.

But laws and the court of public opinion are arguably our first line of defense. Underground printers didn’t stop the nazis or the Sowjets, and it’s not clear that technology has significantly moved power to the people in China, Turkey, or North Korea.

So we need better privacy laws. We need politicians to be scared before they use the services of Cambridge Analytica. And we need to convince our peers that they will have joined the dark side if they accept a job at Palantr. These sort of actions have the added benefit of respecting the processes of a civil society ruled by law, and not a techno-jungle where might is right.

Thiel did not sue Gawker, Terry Bollea ( known professionally as "Hulk Hogan" ) did, Thiel only bankrolled the suit. Gawker going down was their own fault, they defied a court order in a very explicit manner : https://web.archive.org/web/20130428130143/http://gawker.com...

you're right yes. I should make clear that I shed no tears for gawker. good riddance. but Thiel's position on everything (from voting Trump to supporting surveillance capitalism) is still noteworthy.

All these articles coming out now definitely feel like a smear campaign against facebook. Im not saying I agree with facebook's actions, or that I even enjoy the site. But is anyone really surprised by any of this?

Close a FB account is no option... ever lived in a country where FB is essential? It's maybe not USA or many bigger Europe countries but if you go to smaller countries (where Google Maps is even bad) you will loose a lot (groups, buying/selling, advices).

You are repeating what is in the article.

Just because you don't have a Facebook account doesn't mean they don't have data about you. They create a shadow profile for people whose existence they have inferred from other people's accounts.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

― Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked

Facebook and Google are not evil. They are made up of ordinary people with ordinary likes, dislikes, biases, histories, failings. Those people don't have to be evil or wrong or even misguided to give rise to this situation. No matter how much they try to (and want to!) do the right thing, they are just trying to make money. Everyone's economic incentive is to make more money. The shareholders demand it!

Economics is what underlies all of this, and it is completely inescapable. The market is rewarding those who track users and profile them in order to predict their behavior, jam ads in their face, or sell them stuff. Entities that do this make more money than entities that don't. Like, a lot more. $100billion/yr more. So. You are going to get more companies finding more ways to track and profile people to figure out how to make more money. Facebook and Google and Twitter and ad networks and everyone else can be absolute angels in their hearts, but the sheer mathematics of economics is like a pervasive wind that just keeps pushing them in this direction.

You either push back, HARD, with your feet and with the law, or you suffer the consequences along with everyone else.

I agree. In the end, incentives is what drives behaviour, not ideals.

> Facebook and Google are not evil. [...] Everyone's economic incentive is to make more money.

I don't buy the claim that everyone just wants more money above all else and you seem to agree if you're claiming that people can "push back, HARD". We all have the capacity to place ethics above money. Never questioning the impact of your actions--especially when it affects the lives of millions--and simply doing what greed dictates, is indeed a form of malevolence, or "evil"... the 20th century is a testament to that.

Furthermore, if a company's leadership is filled to the brim with these unethical and greedy people, I believe it's acceptable to call the company evil as well.

Tech just needs to stop building tech for tech's sake and start thinking deeply about humans... and holding each other accountable.

> Furthermore, if a company's leadership is filled to the brim with these unethical and greedy people, I believe it's acceptable to call the company evil as well.

I think that's fair. My point was that Facebook and Google and others don't have to be evil to give rise to this situation, economics just does. That, of course, doesn't mean they aren't.

Furthermore, a company's leadership swearing up and down that they "aren't evil" does mean a hill of beans if they give rise to evil through their own economic actions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banality_of_evil#The_banality_...

"The road to hell is paved with good intentions."

Just because you can do something, does not mean that you should do it.

People must apply the same creativity, intelligence, and forethought as they apply to designing & building of their technology to considering the consequences of it's existence and use.

And then take appropriate actions to prevent bad consequences and/or misuse. This must include some decisions to not build it in the first place.

Didn't really expect downvotes. Perhaps it wasn't entirely clear from what I wrote, but what I meant was:

Facebook and Google don't necessarily have to be evil for this to happen.

My point that this is a consequence of economics, and statistically speaking, no matter how nice of people you put in these positions, they are going to tend towards making more money. Surveillance makes money. So surveillance is what you get.

That is orthogonal to the question of whether they actually ARE evil.

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