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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

> Sounds like they designed this feature explicitly to show people why they need to provide facebook data. Facebook is making moves to explicitly show how on Facebook privacy is at odds with utilitarianism of their product.

In all seriousness, how is that possible any other way? Take the example he gives about log in. If you want a website to automatically know who you are without logging in, please let me know how that is possible without automatically sending identifying information to the website.

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Yes, to offer that functionality it would need a cookie. No, the website doesn't need to correlate that login and all activity related to it to everything else you ever did on the internet to build up a profile about you. It is technically feasible (even easier) to offer the first ("remember me on this one site") without doing the second ("track me across all sites").

Well, technically it's all the same, it's a request to FB servers with an user id and token. Decoupling that relies entirely on Facebook's internal policy. Since they are a public company now, not using that dsta is leaving money on the table.

Technically, at least for EU users, whether they do this or not should now be a switch on the GDPR panel.

Not using that data also makes the ads expierence for people significantly worse.

And I prefer seeing good ads over bad ones

There's not logging in automatically, and then there's using other data they have about you (however limited) to still provide a good experience. The parent comment is clearly talking about the latter (creating experiences that are equally good for privacy minded and open book people) while you're focused on a small feature that isn't really relevant to the bigger picture.

Yea!? How the hell can a website provide easy automatic login without storing your last 10 years of browsing history , every personal covertion you ever had and reselling that information to third parties that use it to track you political affiliations so they can manipulate you during elections!!?!?!! Do these people even know how cookies work? /s

Privacy and usability are not orthogonal, though Facebook will definitely go leaps and bounds beyond themselves to try to convince the public that it is so.

You're conflating the analogy with what the analogy was about. They didn't say that ten years of browser history was needed for automatic login.

Privacy and usability actually are orthogonal, as the cookie and login issue shows. You will see this again and again in almost every service. People can't offer loans without knowing credit history. Games can't do balanced matchmaking systems without learning about your level of skill. A website can't send you emails unless you give them your email. I could go on, but I think you are upset enough with Facebook that you won't get the point.

Sorry to be "that guy", but just responding because I was confused by your post and the parent's post, because you are both using "orthogonal" to mean the opposite of what it actually means. If two things are orthogonal, it means they are independent of each other, i.e. changing one has no effect on the other.

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