Comment by David | Hacker News Reader

Comment by David | Hacker News Reader

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Question for you all. A bit ago, I posted the following, which was in minutes at -5 and counting:

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This is disturbing. Yes, Facebook was sharing your information before -- it was the source of all their ad revenue. But now, instead of individual pieces of data (location, specific interests, etc.), they have the potential to share (read:sell) an entire person's worth of data in a lump. Not saying it will happen immediately, or at all, but I see some serious possibility for harm here. (Cross-site behavior tracking just got a whole lot scarier, if you can link it to a FB profile...) Of course, there could be some serious academic applications to this, too. And it makes them look more open, and access to your own data is good.

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I'm on HN to learn, but the downvotes told me nothing. (No child comments.) So in the interest of writing better comments (and hopefully improving my own analyses), what's wrong with this one?

Is it the cynical outlook? Is there something factually incorrect? Is mine just an unpopular opinion? I'm looking for feedback, because I didn't expect my comment to bomb like it did.

Anything you can offer is appreciated!

Your comment just didn't make any sense. They already have all of this information. How on earth does giving it to you in a zip file make it more likely for them to sell it to other people?

...That... _does_ makes sense. Color me embarassed.

I didn't downvote you, but here is what I think may have motivated the downvoters:

Assuming facebook is using some form of SQL doing that would be as simple as "SELECT INTO OUTFILE" with the appropriate clauses, so this doesn't add anything whatsoever to the threat from the direction of facebook.

If someone manages to hack in to your facebook account it's become marginally easier, but a well written bot would have a lesser problem digging out your profile than you as a user would, so facebook just made it a bit easier for users to get at their own data at 0 cost to them, and with a negligible security risk in the case of a compromised account.

That does not detract from the fact that I think that this is largely a PR move and that any real benefit is quite small, other than for those people that would like to have their data in several places.

In those cases facebook probably comes out ahead because you now only have to upload to facebook to be able to export it to another service (I don't think it will be long before the first 'import' utilities will be made).

Had an exam earlier... hasn't done well for my brainpower. Of course they already have the data, and as you mention, exporting it is fantastically easy from their end.

My line of thinking probably evolved from the ease with which Facebook could just push the entire zipped file to purchasers, instead of just the relevant info. This is incorrect in that 1) I wouldn't imagine facebook shares its actual data, just uses it to allow advertisers to target their ads, and 2) even if they did, I seriously doubt they would group data by user thoroughly enough to be identifiable.

Half of my concern was what would be accessible via facebook connect, and the ability of a malicious website to harvest scary amounts of personal information via this + cross-site user tracking (about which, admittedly, I know almost nothing). Again, the data dump is only about ease of access, not a totally new ability.

I'm also talking about things I don't really know about. I've never used fb connect, nor do I have experience with cross-site user tracking. But I'm certainly under the impression that it would be possible to combine these two concepts into something disturbing. (http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1250497 would seem to imply that a large advertising network could do this sort of thing (though I'm not sure where the fbconnect info would come from, exactly).

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