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Comment by zombieprocesses | Hacker News Reader

Almost every company is spying on you online. Including CNN and hacker news.

The question is why is everyone picking on FB? In china or russia, Xi or Putin orders the institutions to attack so and so and the media/government hounds an entity.

What happened with FB? Was it just an magical organic process where the media, government, etc all decided to attack FB all at once? That's quite a coincidence. What's even more interesting is how britain, canada and western europe also joined in as well.

I'm not a fan of FB. I've never had a FB account and never will. But what has happened in the past year vis a vis FB is quite astounding.

I don't think there has been a day on HN the past year where we didn't have a hit piece on FB.

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FWIW, not every major site on the Internet is out to spy on you.

The Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia, et al) bends over backwards to explicitly avoid harvesting and hoarding long-term analytic information that can clearly identify users and their patterns, even internally. Also, the (very minimal) level of co-operation with state actors (etc) is tracked and published at https://transparency.wikimedia.org/ .

Facebook never gave me anything of value in exchange for constantly monitoring and profilingmy behavior online. in fact, as it became ubiquitous,it added a new chore for me: maintaining ever changing privacy options on a defensive profile on their network.

So it takes peoples time, attention, and details on top of behavioral monitoring.

In contrast, Google provides me with a very competent productivity suite, a superb photo-managing software navigation, maps, aggregate traffic data,and a host of tools to actually build a business and educate myself and others.

Plus i get enterprise class security for my account and -arguably- the best web email service.

The day theres a data breach or in this case a breach of trust, im more likely to view google in a better light and give them the benefit of the doubt. Facebook gets my contempt and scorn.

> Facebook never gave me anything of value in exchange for constantly monitoring and profilingmy behavior online.

Then don't use it. I don't use it. It's not that difficult.

> In contrast, Google provides me with a very competent productivity suite, a superb photo-managing software navigation, maps, aggregate traffic data,and a host of tools to actually build a business and educate myself and others.

This reads like cringe material from google's social media team.

> Facebook gets my contempt and scorn.

Well both google and facebook get contempt and scorn from me. But then again I don't work for google or facebook so I can be somewhat objective.

Other websites are different. facebook is performing one big MITM attack between friends and family, and shameless siphoning and selling all information to nefarious bidders.

I'm all for privacy, but I'm also all for facts and reason, and some of this comments are getting incendiary.

> facebook is performing one big MITM

Is it a MITM attack if you choose to use that platform? That's like saying Uber is kidnapping, because you're in someone else's car. The whole point of MITM is you don't know there's a MITM.

> shameless siphoning

Accurate.

> selling all information to nefarious bidders

The data by CA was not sold, it was stolen. Facebook sells targeted ads.

> Is it a MITM attack if you choose to use that platform?

They also build 'shadow profiles' of people who don't, though.

That's sketchy, but not a MITM since there's no communication to or from a shadow profile. Again, I'm all for privacy and it's unceasing that facebook has profiles of people without their knowledge, but just trying to keep the discourse rational cause I've seen a lot of very sentimental and fearful posts, which lead to an irrational collective discourse, which just leads to chaos and unproductive conversations.

So if I have never joined Facebook, but fb has logged phone calls to me and associated them with my shadow profile - what is that?

There are Facebook trackers on nearly every website and they siphon data from your friends & family which you have no control over. Yes, yes, I can and do block things via browser extensions and whatnot, but it's simply not possible to stop them from sucking up a considerable amount of data.

FB has control over both collecting personal data and filtering what news to show. Not to mention scale.

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