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Comment by jammygit | Hacker News Reader

First they ask for email passwords. Then the new users assume Facebook won't comprehensively mine their emails. Then Facebook awkwardly gets caught uploading 1.5 million users' email contacts.

It doesn't make sense for people to trust the service at all unless you assume one of two things:

1 - Despite all the outrage on hackernews, and the NWT stories, our neighbours down the street and family members still don't know how Facebook works or what is done with their data

2 - They don't care about their data privacy. I've heard this claim many times, but the people saying it often change their minds when they read more news stories. I really do think people have trouble assuming the worst about the intentions of others and are inclined to be trusting.

edit: clarification

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Group #2 somehow lacks the imagination to see what could go wrong. They will learn when a cause effect of Facebook usage is put in their face. I guess the recent news does not push it in their face enough.

Its like that with skimming, lock picking, server security, infrastructure security, basically everything security related.

You can add willingness to switch to electronic voting to that list. It's sad how many people don't understand the danger.

>They don't care about their data privacy. I've heard this claim many times, but the people saying it often change their minds when they read more news stories.

"People don't care about a problem initially, then when it becomes graver they start to care"

So normal, expected behaviour?

I try to be an advocate for privacy. I really do. But everyone just calls me paranoid, asks why I need to be worried about my government like I have something to hide, or just stares blankly at me because they can't be bothered to actually think about the words climbing through their ears.

I'm going mental over the explosion of televisions in the last half decade which identify and report any content you watch on the TV by default, in exchange for 100-150 off the television (which was fluff to begin with... it's not a direct trade of $100 for your data).

I've set up about a dozen of these now for people and they just stare blankly while I try to explain what "Auto Content Recognition" means... Hello 1984.

I'm right there with you. Most people write it off as paranoia and give the tired "Doesn't matter if you have nothing to hide". I think the problem is the only reason we have to convince people to change is just principles. There is no existential reason right now to convince people to change their behavior. Sure it's scary having large entities vacuum up our data and spy on us but so far there are no real bad effects on the users being spied on that I know of.

These companies would not be wrapping their practices in secrecy and lobbying against user rights unless there were sinister aspects of Big Data.

And it's not just principles. The effects of Big Data are extremely tangible even if not to you in this particular time or space. Some feel the effects now, others will feel them later in life.

I'm worried my children or grandchildren could one day be denied healthcare or adequate education or loans or low insurance payments just because of my attitude towards my government and every other aspect of my lifestyle which gets swept up and analyzed by for-profit robot armies bent on achieving the Holy Margin.

I think the backlash is mostly just delayed. At one point revenue will take a hit because engineers might refuse to implement these "unintentional" and "accidental" features on time.

There is no doubt that the public image about FB is significantly changing - a year from now things will not look better for Facebook then they are today, most likely worse I'd say. This is not something they can turn around anymore - the leadership is not making any learnings and repeats the same mistakes over and over again.

3 - those who know how fb works, assume the worst about its intentions, and still don’t care and keep using it

Don't attribute to stupidity what can be attributed to malice. No, I didn't get that backwards.

Sufficiently advanced malice disguises itself as incompetence.

Sufficiently advanced?

I'm pretty sure there are five year olds who have learned the magic phrase "I didn't mean to!"

You're absolutely right. Yet for some reason it seems popular to discount that possibility. Particularly when invoking the thought terminating cliche that is "Hanlon's Razor."

For an entry in a joke book, it has done a surprising amount of damage.

edit - specifically, that mighty tome of great knowledge; 'Murphy's Law Book Two: More Reasons Why Things Go Wrong!', by Arthur Bloch.

Only idiots invoke "Hanlon's Razor" not jokingly. It's such an incredibly shallow and stupid thought indeed. I like the way you put it: "thought terminating." That's what stupid people generally prefer to do with arguments.

> "I really do think people have trouble assuming the worst about the intentions of others and are inclined to be trusting."

I think you hit the nail on the head. Even on HN, it's not uncommon to see a few comments on each negative story about facebook accusing the media of a conspiracy against Facebook; claiming that the media is wrongly maligning Facebook who is merely the unfortunate victim of a series of coincidental accidents.

They have trouble accepting that a tech corporation like facebook actually might be rotten.

I think you see that more with other tech companies.

There is a certain amount of anti-silicon valley sentiment in the media and as a result there are a lot of stories maligning tech companies in ways that aren't always fair. Especially when the media companies are campaigning for some kind of problematic legislation that the tech companies are on the other side of and so will take any excuse to try to make them look bad.

Then there's Facebook, about which nobody has time to write a story maligning them unfairly because there is never that long between any of the stories maligning them fairly.

>They have trouble accepting that a tech corporation like facebook actually might be rotten.

Probably because they work for an evil tech corporation as well (this is HN, where SV techbros hang out, so the probability of that it pretty high) and want to ease their cognitive dissonance.

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