Hacker News Reader

Comment by Jach | Hacker News Reader

I don't have a facebook account, they don't own me. I surrender instead to other forces. ;P

What's with the anti-Facebook sentiment? It's worse than anti-Microsoft sentiments. Facebook does lots of cool stuff, a lot of it open source.

View on HN

Zuckerberg broke into the emails of journalists he thought could damage him back in the college days, and he called his users "dumb fucks" for trusting him. The way Zuckerberg is idolized for his success and even held up as a role model(!) when it was achieved through unethical means is symptomatic of a lot of my least favorite things about society. The fact that the essential character of Facebook is trying to leverage people's social connections for the purpose of marketing is highly distasteful to me as well.

1. You can import your data into Facebook. You can't export - all you get is Facebook UUIDs back.

2. Privacy options are made deliberately difficult as Facebook (as they've stated before) want you to share as much as you can. Setting anything to 'me only' is buried under a custom setting you have to repeat for everything you don't want shared.

1. Sure you can, go to Account Settings > Download Your Information (second from bottom). 2. I'm very much with you on this one. The privacy settings should be easier.

1. Of your friends, you just get a list of names, not any contact information whatsoever.

The argument is friends' contact info belongs to your friends, not to you. Its a social grey area that has been created by the internet, the correct protocols have yet to be defined.

I can access my friends contact info (including email addresses and phone numbers) as I like, within FB's platform. FB just restricts me from accessing that once I;m not longer connected to it. Indeed, you're right - that's the argument - but I suspect it's merely used as a justification to FB's commercial benefit.

Yes, but the question was about downloading what you put in, not what other people put in that you happen to have access to.

I put in email addresses. I can't get them out.

Facebook has several features requesting users to add not only their username but passwords to other websites, to add friends. The same can not be said of Facebook [0]. The CEO is allegedly said to take advantage of journalists who provided their details to access journalists' private emails [1].

[0] http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/11/google-facebook-data/

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/how-mark-zuckerberg-hacked-in...

As is the way it should be; by befriending you on Facebook I'm not saying that you are free to import my contact information into any old service that may use it to spam me.

Respectfully, I don't think you actually read my comment in its entirety. You can import email addresses into FB, but you can't get them out, along with a whole bunch of other info. FB UUIDs have zero meaning outside Facebook.

I think people resent how Facebook is trying to become the web, in similar way to how AOL did (remember when some companies advertised AOL keywords). They are doing this on top of a platform that is closed, and is mostly a black box for your data. That doesn't mean they don't produce some cool open source technologies, it just means they use them on massive closed source platform.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com