I Would Rather Die Than Let Facebook Monitor My Heart Rate | Hacker News Reader

I Would Rather Die Than Let Facebook Monitor My Heart Rate

gizmodo.com

It's been a long time since the big news about psychological experiments performed on users without their consent [0]. However, intentional emotional manipulation unquestionably remains a core goal for the mainstays of Facebook - marketing, advertising, propaganda, and politics. Heart rate is a visceral emotional indicator that would add value in the context of Facebook, in ways that aren't as accessibly exploitable from the ecosystems of Apple.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_emotional_manipulatio...

You could replace Facebook with a lot of different things and the song remains the same.

There's a lot of influential, intelligent people who believe that showing like counts in apps like Instagram are bad for people's mental health. There's other that think that it's actually good for mental health.

If you are a company with such an app, and you care about doing the right thing, how would you figure out whether or not showing those like counts affects users in that way? How would you figure out how to do things in ways that don't affect users negatively?

I'm not saying that running a test of the two and measuring how it affects users is necessarily the best way, but, honestly, it's not clearly wrong to me.

If you are worried that your current thing is bad for users mental health and that this other approach is better, isn't it, in fact, the morally right thing to check that?

I would buy an oculus quest 2 today if they removed the Facebook account requirement.

Would you, though? Knowing what Facebook has already gone back on, who's to say they wouldn't add some other objectionable required integration?

There is corporate version for around $700 that does just that.

This seems interesting - Is there a way to buy this? I looked on their site, and only saw forms to be connected to their sales department.

At this price, how do you feel it competes with the Vive Pro 2 and other headsets in that price bracket?

It also has a bs annual "support" cost of $180 so short of robbing one of them, you're better off waiting for the root method for the Quest 2 becoming publicly available or if you like to live a little dangerously, just use the workaround for the login that I did (search it on Youtube, I'd rather not detail it on this site).

Every time you violate the tos of a company like Facebook, you're making the world a better place and I'm only half joking.

"Every time you violate the tos of a company like Facebook, you're making the world a better place and I'm only half joking. "

I'm sorry but every time you purchase something, while disagreeing with the ToS, and work around it instead of just not buying it, your making the world a worse place.

That's assuming there is a viable alternative for the same price point - and no, I don't consider abstinence as a valid alternative.

> I’m well aware that if you want your health data to remain private, smartwatches are certainly risky. But we’re way past that now. These devices can and have saved lives, and despite some early skepticism, wearables aren’t going anywhere.

The Apple Watch is right there.

Apple is very clearly committed to user privacy, to the fullest extent reasonably possible in the current climate. Indeed, they've even doubled down on privacy harder than ever before as of the WWDC keynote this week—one particular item of note being that where the hardware will support it, they'll be moving Siri processing on-device, rather than requiring it to go to their servers. At this point, any FUD alleging that they might still be taking your data, or might want to at some future date, is founded in no actual evidence whatsoever, and is actively detrimental to the cause of privacy as it causes people to think that they "might as well" get something from FB or Google because they're "no different".

If you want a smartwatch, and want your data to remain private, just get an Apple Watch.

>If you want a smartwatch, and want your data to remain private

Pick one.

And here, ladies and gentlemen, we have a perfect example of the kind of person I was describing in my post above. Note the utter lack of nuance or reading comprehension.

To the point: No, you do not have to "pick one," for the reasons I just stated.

If you have any evidence that your data will not be kept private by an Apple Watch, then by all means, present some! It would certainly be a scandal for the company, given how hard they've been pushing the privacy angle!

If all you have is a) a general feeling that All Tech Companies Are The Same, or b) a seething hatred of Apple and all that they do, then kindly keep them to yourself, because they are emphatically unhelpful in this context.

No need to push together so much straw. I think the folks at Apple now are doing great things that push things like differential privacy and other techniques in a direction I agree with and I think is better than many other companies. I’ve personally sought out their products since running System 6.0.8 on a PB100’s persisting RAM disk.

At the same time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICloud_leaks_of_celebrity_phot...

For the Nth time, that was a *phishing attack*. Apple cannot be held responsible either for selling that data by design, nor for insufficient data security. Their systems were not compromised.

I cannot believe that 7 years later people are still holding that up as an example of why Apple cannot be trusted.

User error is part of the total security profile of any system. It doesn’t have anything to do with Apple specifically, just an example of how the best intentions of a vendor are only part of the picture.

>clearly there’s a market for Facebook hardware—look at the success of its smart display, Portal.

Is that a joke? I haven’t heard of anyone buying that. Only people balking at the mere idea of it.

35-60 year old women drove that segment. They are actually really good(if you can get past the facebook part). Far better than the really expensive cisco board room systems.

What does "you personally hearing" about anything have to do with a success of a major corpo product?

I mean, media is reporting it as a success: https://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-portal-is-a-hit-during-th...

What does your personal experience mean here? Or to Facebook as a whole? Bubbles are a thing you know and it's good to get rid of this bubble-restricted thinking.

Much of what the media, particularly the tech media "reports" on is really just paid advertising.

>Numbers on Portal sales are hard to come by.

That's buried in the article. If the sales numbers are hard to come by, how do they know it's a hit? Because Facebook says so? Questionable.

On January 17, 2019, The New York Times columnist Kevin Roose posted on Twitter that Facebook Portal's Amazon product listing contained five-star reviews that appeared to have been written by Facebook employees, including one who claimed to have "historically not been a big Facebook or other social media user" before purchasing Portal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Portal

Agreed about Portal, but Oculus is FB hardware and is pretty popular.

If this device was truly selling well or exceeding Facebook's expectations, they'd be yelling it from the PR department constantly. That one 10X data point they mentioned has zero context and is unsubstantiated enough to be ignored entirely.

reading the article I feel there is some disconnect between the text of the article and the headline and the writer may not actually want to die instead of letting Facebook monitor their heart rate.

I guess I wouldn't rather die either. I would just rather buy an Apple Smartwatch, but I guess that's pragmatism for you.

I would rather die than be more dependent on technocrats than medieval peasants were on their lords. Quantity != quality.

.. hyperbole much?

TL;DR: the author is super committed to wearing a timepiece.

For the general case, no one is going to die if they don't buy whatever Facebook craps out as a watch. I'd say it's more a false dichotomy, bordering on hyperbole. Not "wear this or die", but "wear this, and if you have bad genetics and/or lifestyle, you might be one of the small percentage of people who are prompted to make a life-saving trip to the cardiologist."

But you imply a good point: Apple has already set FB's price ceiling. A Series 3 is, what, US$300 now? Another $100 gets you latest-and-greatest. I'm guessing competing on price is going to be tough, so what outstanding feature will the FB watch have to make it competitive? Oh, and don't forget that Apple isn't the only one to worry about. My bet on who is in 2nd place on wearables is probably Garmin, and Garmin will come and nibble on you at the other end. It'll be interesting to watch (thanks, I'll be here all week...).

>so what outstanding feature will the FB watch have to make it competitive?

it's going to cost less and sell all your location data, what you're doing day to day when not online data to advertisers.

So the main thrust is: wearables are shit and leaky, but they save lives [citation needed] you can be as insecure as you like, unless you're facebook.

I mean surly the scum that make crappy adware riddled android phones are worse? or is it not as fashionable to dunk on them? Especially as only poor people buy those?

Really not a fan of the trendy and fairly recent idea that anything justifies "saving lives" (regardless of whether or not it actually does so).

Yawn. No, you wouldn't rather die.

I don't feel like reading the article but I support the statement in the headline. I wouldn't give any of the faang companies access to my health information unless they paid my salary and I block those recruiters.

I'd trust FB with my data over say.. Equifax, and they have way more important data than my pulse. But they also got hacked for bad software maintenance and no one is constantly shitting on them.

Not that I use it, but idk FB is a scapegoat if anything.

...Also I know it's whataboutism but common lol. People are so entitled with their privacy when it means nothing to their actual safety. Comes off so weak and whiny.

I admittedly find this attitude perplexing.

My pulse is far less private to me than my email or messages. Same with my medical history. I get that there would be situations where someone might want to hide certain conditions or histories, but for the average person, wouldn't having one's medical data leaked be a lot less harmful than having one's messages leaked?

Maybe if you consider the heartrate in isolation, but imagine that they corrrelate it with other things. For instance using it to figure out which ads you are responsive to.

The issue is in the combination of data. Could you imagine the value of knowing if your heart rate went up after reading a certain message, or seeing a certain ad?

>Could you imagine the value of knowing if your heart rate went up after reading a certain message, or seeing a certain ad?

No, I'm guessing it's worth a couple of cents ?

Perhaps. But this kind of psychographic profiling is used in labs to craft better adverts. Video games are another example.

The Left 4 Dead director was trained on player emotions and designed to improve the game, which was a huge success.

Having access to it in the field has real applications.

I don't care about the value.

What's the cost?

We can’t know the cost without knowing the value. Nothing will happen to the data unless someone buys it.

To identify the costs, we’ll have to think about who might want to purchase this data and what they could do with it.

Ask yourself this: why would anyone be willing to pay for your heart rate?

Depends on the context.

Data and what one can do with personal data is unknown unknown.

My observation is that "black mirror" type exploitation of private information is already happening.

If you’re focusing on a person having access to your pulse data as the threat model, your thinking is out of date. The real play will be combining heart rate data with other signals like which Facebook page you’re viewing in order to inject ads. Basically, know when you’re most vulnerable to influence and catching you with a post that sends whatever message the highest bidder wants for you at that moment.

What heart rate makes me most vulnerable?

When they've learned that your base heart rate is ~70bpm and when you get shown a puppy your heart rate excites by 20bpm they can guess that you like puppies. They could be wrong, and it could be that you're actually terrified of puppies, but they'd be safe in assuming that you're a big fan of them and so they add "Enjoys puppies" to their advertising profile of you.

That is the rub with most of this 'data'. Each one by itself it is nearly meaningless. But tossed together it creates a much more interesting thing to use. Like my DOB is borderline useless. But combined with a few other random bits of info and you can target me nearly exactly. The amount of random info is not much at all either. Add in a metric like gets depressed/excited by, and the intrusion gets even deeper.

Beyond health conditions, heart rate is correlated with the activities you do.

Sleeping, walking, running and other fun stuff has a different heart rate profile, especially more so when time is taken into account (do you run for 3 minutes in the morning? maybe you’re late for a bus?).

This becomes even more concerning when it’s crossed with other data such as location, purchases, ad engagement... Very scary to be honest.

I guess it could be a very course analog for "Feeling" in any direction. You could make guesses on what exactly that feeling is based on some context.

At any rate, getting an add that said "Always running late? Try Uber!" after running for a bus would be super creepy, I don't want any of that.

Or worse:

“We noticed your heart rate was only elevated for a couple of minutes in bed last night, need help lasting longer in bed?”

“We noticed the same heart signature while you were away from your wife’s location, need a divorce lawyer?”

I suppose one could immediately counter this by asking - how much of your medical history would you willingly share with random people on the street? And how about if you knew they wanted to gather it up and sell it? Maybe for yourself, you don't care about that, but I think most people consider this sort of thing deeply personal and private.

In a more practical sense, it's not a big stretch to imagine a future where there are all kinds of insurance penalties associated with certain health conditions, plus the potential for hidden discrimination in multiple areas like job applications (maybe they did reject you because of your health condition, but how would you prove it?). I'm sure there are other potential problems.

I would choose to share my medical history with strangers over my data from most other digital services, from my Google search history to my private messages to my emails.

> Maybe for yourself, you don't care about that, but I think most people consider this sort of thing deeply personal and private.

Part of the reason I asked. Why are your conversations less private and personal to you/others/this journalist than what is probably a mundane medical history or in this case, just a pulse?

The discrimination angle certainly makes sense though as a plausible fear.

Perhaps medical records are more 'viscerally' private to people than conversations with friends? It's easier to forget that big brother is recording everything you say when most of it is amiable chatter, but when it comes to having, say, incurable butt-warts, people become a lot more reticent, if only out of a fear of embarrassment.

Personally, short of deleting my account, I stay as far away from Facebook as I can, and try to minimise the amount of data I share with other services, although some compromises are still necessary or at least sufficiently convenient.

I love how people are vilify Facebook like they are almost hiring forced labour and willfully collaborate with authoritarian regimes...

Oh wait that is Apple which people follow like a cult... Color me shocked....

I am not going to defend Facebook, but this is ridiculous how people here are willing to look through pink-eyed glasses for their "favorite" companies.

Downvote away, that is the best counter-argument :)

Changing the subject with a "whataboutism" about Apple adds nothing to the discussion and is still a sort defense of Facebook, despite you saying you weren't going to defend them.

Asking "what about" is not always a fallacy. If somebody says we shouldn't buy Facebook watches because they track you, asking "what about the other smart watches that track you" is relevant and sensible.

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