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Comment by wybiral | Hacker News Reader

Users grasp the idea that posting on social media is a public thing. It's like getting on stage and shouting to everyone in the room... It's not private.

But, Facebook is invading privacy in subtle ways that users aren't so good at grasping. Like the fact that Facebook remembers every website they visit. And how long you linger on a post in your timeline. And collects your location data even when you're not trying to broadcast it. And analyzes all of your private messages. And trains neural networks to recognize you so they can correlate you with other pictures throughout the internet (and who knows, maybe they're sharing those models with random governments or other companies).

That stuff is the real privacy violation, not the public posts. And that stuff is intentionally obscured from the users and vaguely articulated in their privacy policy.

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It's also fairly difficult when they intentionally make it hard for the distinction of public/non public to be understood. "People you may know" is a privacy violation. "A friend commented on such and such post" is a priacy violation.

The latter is not a deprivacy of privacy, as it is already visible to you.

But you shouldn't be able to just find things like that so easily. Sure if I go on a post I could find it but the fact Facebook notifies me of this in the first place is incredibly disrespectful.

Not true, since the entire point of a social network like this is to browse a playground of publicly-visible conversations involving your friends, and the people conversing are quite aware they're doing so in public. What would be "disrespectful" is if Facebook told you what your friends were saying in private messages between each other.

He is calling privacy the things that are hidden by obscurity. Meaning that if you have a sign on your door advertising sneakers for example, that is private to only those people who visit your door. Sure it may be out in the open, but you didnt open it to all people.

Totally, but a door is not a social network. A door is a fixed location.

A social network is more like a magical bulletin board that tries to make itself as visible to as many people as possible. Perhaps you don't like that the bulletin board does that, but it's not rude. You're 100% free to not make posts there. I recommend it, in fact.

Yea but what if your profile is private? Wouldn’t you think that there still would be a level of privacy expectations that should be retained because only people you explicitly choose to share information with can see it? Why do corporations/advertisement get to bypass these constraints?

I may or may not agree… I'm not sure exactly what situation you're referring to.

In the original article linked above, the situation was that users expected their social information to remain private to the ~100 friends they shared it with, and sued Facebook because it ended up in the hands of Cambridge Analytica. Facebook's attorney's counterpoint is that when you share information with friends, you give up any expectation of privacy as it pertains to these friends. And in this particular case, it was the friends who shared that information with some Facebook app by Kogan(sp?), who then shared it with Cambrige Analytica.

I find the argument pretty convincing, actually. If you tell your friend a secret, and they tell someone else, even if it's a corporation, then that's that. If you share your Spotify playlist with a friend, and in turn they give up all their friends' playlists data (including yours) to some app, then imo that's kind of on you for sharing.

The situation I disagree with is if you tell your friend a secret, and then the communication platform that you used to share that secret (your phone company, the hotel you're staying in, Gmail, Facebook, whatever) decides to share it with third parties.

You know that button on FB called "share"? If I wanted someone to see something I'd press that or manually copy it into my status update. I don't want FB making the decisions for me and they've received feedback for it on their forums and refuse to fix it

We will just have to agree to disagree here, I suppose.

The way I see it, it's Facebook's platform, and it's up to them to build features as they see fit. The news feed works how the news feed works. There's nothing to "fix," and there's nothing rude about it. It's just an optional feature on a website on the Internet, and of course you don't have to use it if you don't like it.

When FB essentially becomes the internet, they need to be receptive to the needs of their users. It's not informed consent to have features like that.

> people conversing are quite aware This is not true

I doubt many people who use facebook don’t understand that they can see in the Newsfeed posts that weren’t addressed directly to them by their friends. That is the entire point of the Newsfeed.

It was a big change when Facebook introduced the newsfeed back in 2006 or 2007 and I do remember people calling it the ‘stalker feed’ and there being a big facebook group with a million members asking for it to be removed. But people got over it, liked it, and instead of moving to myspace or one of the many alternative social networks stuck with facebook and facebook just got bigger and bigger thanks to users loving it.

I don't know about "liked it". "Did not stop using FB due to need to scroll through unrelated posts" would be a better description of what happened.

We are just fortunate enough to be able to fix this problem for ourselves using a browser extension. Others just complain.

I don't know. At the time the Newsfeed was introduced (September 2006), Facebook was not the juggernaut it was today. There were other countries with social networks that had much stronger network effects locally (e.g. Orkut).

Facebook only opened membership to non-college or high school students in Sept 2006 in fact - so if we had wanted to jump ship because of the 'stalker feed', there were still plenty of other options (e.g. MySpace) and the chance for a disruptor to launch if the other options weren't suitable. In practice, users chose to join Facebook and grow it to what we know it as now.

What are you trying to achieve by allowing someone to see a fact, but not actively surfacing that information?

Within the scope of X likes Y, X said Z, Facebook has a very consistent and strong privacy model [1]. However, they have long considered anything that isn't a hard privacy violation of their rules to be fair game. Technically (and this is FB's engineering mindset showing through) not surfacing information is security through obscurity.

It seems like they are backing away from that model, by deprecating features like Graph Search. I personally think that this is worse because it makes it much harder for people to understand what is visible to others. It muddies the rule of "if you don't want people to know something, don't put it on Facebook".

[1] There are some messier areas, like People You May Know, or when platform apps are allowed to access (and store) all they data that a person who uses that app could see.

Think of it like an echo. If your friend shouts at someone in the real world when others are around, you wouldn't be able to hear it from a mile away, but eventually you will hear about the fact they did so, either through gossip or some other means. Facebook cuts that extraneous fluff out and just tells you what they said. It is far from a violation of privacy, as you would be able to find that information easily if you went out looking for it in the first place.

Especially in the world of health, there is a clear distinction about what is private, public, and confidential/secret. This case very clearly public.

I block every tracker and don’t have Facebook installed and yet they show me ads that are uncanny. Rode my bike and hurt my back. Pretty sure I searched for remedies - likely on DDG. And bought a massage ball on Amazon. Instagram is filled with ads to address my back pain.

I haven't injured my back, but I still see heavy advertising for that plexus wheel plus thing.

Did you buy any back pain stuff at the pharmacy? Maybe it's tied to a store loyalty card or credit card.

This. The shadow demographic profiles that Experian, Facebook, and others have on people are a lot more robust than just online cookies.

When I explain to people that there are companies that scrape and sell databases of non-public Facebook profiles and data they often audibly gasp or at the minimum get very uncomfortable.

I can guarantee you that most higher level executive positions at fortune 2000 companies have had their private Facebook profiles reviewed during the hiring process.

This is not about tracking. This is actually more similar to your phone company selling your conversations and internet activity.

There is definitely not a common perception that Facebook activity is public.

I believe the breakdown is where private vs public vs "only my friends"

If you were chatting with your friends at dinner in your home, there's no reason you'd assume that was public. Most people mistake Facebook for that when it's closer to chatting with your friends in a crowded subway car.

In the real world, we'd see the difference, understand the difference, and likely decide certain topics out of bounds.

Facebook's entire business is getting people to open up to advertise to them better so it's their best interest to make us think it's the dinner scenario.

You're absolutely right and I think the metaphor "standing on a stage speaking to people" is very misleading at best and malicious at worst.

I think it's a little patronizing to suggest that users don't understand how Facebook tracks them. Sure, the average person probably doesn't think about the specific method of tracking. They don't know that Facebook tracks how long you watch a video, or spend staring at that photo of your ex. But they have a general sense that Facebook is monitoring their usage patterns to determine what they like and target advertising. That isn't a secret, and isn't obscured.

Regardless of what the terms and conditions say, i think it's a fair to assume that the vast majority of people using Facebook have implicitly consented to have their Facebook usage tracked.

Facebook tracking you through the rest of the web is a different story...

I've heard this argument for years but they keep on sliding back those privacy policies more and more. And every time a story comes out about how those policy changes were actually utilized to track people in a new way people get upset.

You're giving the average user too much credit. As a software developer lurking on Hacker News, sure, you understand how pervasive tracking and data collection are. But have you spoken to your parents or older relatives? My mom had no idea that kind of stuff was even possible. Most of those people still think that the core invasion of privacy us tech nerds are always going on about is the public content (the likes/follows/posts). I'm not patronizing, they genuinely don't understand the scale of modern online tracking.

i've had a lot of conversations with a lot of people from various backgrounds about how they understand facebook tracking (it inevitably follows when i tell them i'm not on facebook) and i can't think of an instance where people had a poorer understanding of facebook's tracking than i gave them credit for. That's not to say people like it, but they accept it as an inevitable consequence of using the service. And of course, for all the tech crowd's fear about the "invasion of privacy" that comes from the passive behaviour monitoring facebook does, the reality is that likes, follows, and posts are the strongest signals for their ad targeting anyways.

a non-trivial number of people think that facebook is continually listening to their every conversation through the mic on their phone, and keep the app installed anyways.

The most common story i have heard from non-tech people about how they experience tracking is that Facebook (et al) must be listening to their (spoken) conversations. Say they talk about visiting a relative in another city, and they immediately start getting hotel and flight recommendations on their phone.

It always freaks them out when i run through all the ways this might have occurred, without voice recognition. Yes, they did a search, but on their work computer, yes they mentioned it in a pm, yes they put the dates into their calendar, yes they went to get a wrote from a travel agent. But these things are not connected are they?

Edit: They all understand the scale, they see the cause and effect, they just don't understand the how.

Eh, have you heard about that app in Spain that was listening for soccer games at bars to see if they were illegally broadcasting said game?

The problem here is FB 'might've do that directly, but is 100% happening they are getting metrics from other apps that directly listen to users or do what we would consider outright privacy violations. There is too much money and too little risk not to at this point.

> You're giving the average user too much credit.

It's not compelling to acknowledge that they understand and then turn around and say they need their hand held because they aren't responsible enough. This isn't a public safety issue.

Privacy isnt a public safety issue?

What does privacy mean in that context? Casting the term more widely doesn't crystallize the issues. If what I put or do on a 3rd party platform is subject to some concept of "privacy", then so is what pickles I buy at the store. Neither of these are public safety issues, unless you're ready to say that the govt needs to monitor and protect what people say and do on the internet. The same people you think you want to protect, have to write the laws and they are just as clueless with the benefit of various industry corruption behind them. Regulation is not a panacea here.

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