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Comment by Sleepytime | Hacker News Reader

I see this often, but the trust problem still exists. There's no universe where I can trust Facebook (or Google or...) To not track me. Others have their own standards, but I don't feel like it's unreasonable to consider them APTs no different than the spyware of old. They have datacenters dedicated to exactly that. How can my data be reliably segregated so that it's not 'accidentally' included later?

Even if the data stays all first-party, they make so many copies and it gets put in so many datasets across the world that co-mingling and abuse of it just feels inevitable at that scale.

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Uploading your daily business, personal photos, and down to what you eat to a profile on someone else's servers was never a good idea from the very start. I find it pretty amusing how it becomes outrage and parroting after the fact that bad news comes out about Facebook. We knew what Facebook was doing in 2008-2012 era as well but nobody parroted these old and tired narratives then.

I've always taken Zuck's infamous "dumb fucks" comment to come from a place of astonishment, more than malice. Posting tons of private info under your own name online was strongly against Web norms at the time, but all those newbies didn't know that. FB and others made it normal, but the reasons it was a bad idea to begin with didn't go away.

>against Web norms at the time

I would even say it was against social norms. Don't talk to strangers. Don't give away your phone number. Don't give away your address. Don't tell state your mother's maiden name.

It was such a simple thing to get all of those new people on social media to give up all of that very personal information without hesitation. Yet, if some random person at the supermarket asked you any of those questions in person you'd definitely raise an eyebrow and walk away. SocialEngineering++

Exactly. If you used the internet from the beginning you clearly saw how Facebook is a data harvesting scam. By late 2010 I'd chatted with several engineers at Facebook about how they were clearly storing all chats/messages indefinitely, even if you deleted your PMs. So to the dude up there downvoting me, yes, many of us in tech knew this very early on. It was literally the goal of Facebook from the time you ever heard about Facebook.

We knew what Facebook was doing in 2008-2012 era as well but nobody parroted these old and tired narratives then.

We didn't know that Facebook was compiling dossiers on every human being on the planet, even the ones without Facebook accounts.

Everyone paying attention when Path et al were uploading whole phone address books (which lead to Apple adding it as a specific permission in the next iOS) knew this data was getting stored indefinitely.

There were plenty of greybeards making claims about FB tracking etc, they just got written off as crackpots. The below link describes the history of some of FBs tracking and includes publicised examples from 2010 and 2011. To me it’s just that we believed FB back then when they claimed ‘it’s a bug’, ‘a limited number of users were affected’ or ‘we don’t don’t do that’.

https://www.propublica.org/article/its-complicated-facebooks...

I created a fake account for testing a fix to a bug for my company. I used a fake email, fake name, fake location, etc. I used a photo of something I was given for graduation and a date of birth that was within 6 months of my real one.

They started recommending my friends from my high school. I went to a magnet school for my junior and senior years, and Facebook even recognized that. I graduated 10 years before I signed up. And the one piece I made sure I faked was the school I went to. I'm shy. If I wanted to communicate with someone I figured I'd add them myself.

Nothing magical to it. They had some other piece of data from someone else (or me from some other source) that matched up (the data was fake, but I had used it previously; I don't make that mistake anymore). But it showed me just how dedicated to getting all of this data they were.

Wow, thanks.

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