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Comment by bcherny | Hacker News Reader

Reading through that article, the FB lawyer’s argument is pretty reasonable:

> I go into a classroom and invite a hundred friends. This courtroom. I invite a hundred friends, I rent out the courtroom, and I have a party. And I disclose — And I disclose something private about myself to a hundred people, friends and colleagues. Those friends then rent out a 100,000-person arena, and they rebroadcast those to 100,000 people. I have no cause of action because by going to a hundred people and saying my private truths, I have negated any reasonable expectation of privacy, because the case law is clear.

Was there more context the article left out about the specific level of privacy the party expected?

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Isn't this more like the venue owner bugged the room and then shared your private truths? It's not your "friends" sharing your info with corporations, it's the venue. Big difference.

(Granted, buried somewhere in your contract for renting the "venue" you've probably agreed to such a thing but that doesn't make this analogy a good one)

The issue I think is not that “friends” disseminated the information but that companies get hold of it, which is the point the judge is also hitting.

If I hypothetically sleep with hundred people and they all show pics of me naked to their friends, I will still not expect penis enlargement companies mailing me their new catalog.

I don't see how it's reasonable for Facebook to enable an app that advertises itself to users as a simple "academic survey" to harvest the private data of not only those users but all of their friends as well. Is it so unreasonable for users to expect that their data would not be harvested by a survey app installed by an online "buddy" who they may have never even met in person?

Also I think the analogy the lawyers brought up is misleading. Instead of renting out an arena, it's more like just one of those friends accepted a 1000-page terms of service a couple decades ago for a random forum, and instead of "rebroadcasting" what's "disclosed" at one party, it's more like the forum is now publishing their per-minute GPS location for the past year.

I agree. Doesn’t FB also agree, and hasn’t it already disabled that kind of API access? At least when I tried to get access to friends-of-friends info for an app I was working on a couple of years ago, there was no way to request it.

This isn't reasonable at all, because the end result will be a withdrawal into privatized spaces because absolutely nobody thinks it is reasonable that their communal activity is automatically broadcasted to the entire world.

And we can already see this happening, with younger people moving to more and more personal spaces (like say Fortnite chats) instead of using facebook.

The goal of facebook, or anybody else who aims to be a digital public space, must be to give users granular control and transparent expectations about who they broadcast to, because if that isn't the case communities will not exist and the only thing that's left is highly curated, generic blogspam.

And even more importantly, the system must be designed in a way to stay at human-scale and to reign in the virality that destroys privacy expectations.

It is kind of reasonable, but when you post on Facebook, you can choose between public post and post that only "Friends" can see. When I post to "Friends", I expect only people that I am "Friends" with on Facebook to see it.

So they need to STOP using the term "Friends" and start using the term "Friends and Corporations" instead.

It's pretty reasonable in the same way that the right to bear arms is pretty reasonable considering older technology (muskets), but perhaps worth reconsidering with M16s (much less nuclear missiles).

Or the right to free speech is pretty reasonable with older technology (printing presses), but perhaps worth reconsidering with broadcast stations (much less the Internet!)

Yeah, no. Shall Not Be Infringed. You don't get your cake, and to eat it too.

Facebook needs to get itself in order. In fact, the tech community as a whole needs to realize that just because they can tap into some data source, doesn't mean they should.

When I go to a store in "public" like Walmart, and buy a bottle of whiskey, an onion, and a deodorant, in front of hundreds of strangers, sharing willfully my payment details with Walmart and Visa, when I get home I still do not expect all my Facebook friends to know what I bought, to have pictures of me buying the items and to have a copy of my receipt. And some of them even have Walmart as a friend. Some even Visa!

Yet all is public information and happened in a location with no expectation of privacy.

The difference is that you have a degree of control over what people see. There is a degree of privacy and can back out at almost any point and can mask what you are doing quite easily.

It’s not socially acceptable to go and rummage through someone else trolley and confirm what’s in there.

But it is socially acceptable that after installing an app or signing up for a service it gets to scrub all the data from the phone; contacts, photos, messages, relationships, locations, businesses, apps installed, calls, usage, all of it, then correlate it, classify it, generate profiles, predict behaviors and sell that information?

Not at all. I’m saying that normal interactions have a degree of privacy to them, even when out ‘in public’. I do think that there are expectations of privacy in most interactions, yet somehow social media and advertising have completely broken this standard.

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