Facebook is “Peeping” into Your System | Hacker News Reader

Facebook is “Peeping” into Your System

cupcakewithsprinkles.com

30 pointshunterford11 comments

I sure hope that's covered in the privacy policy...I'd love to see the legalese required to give permission for: "we are going to capture a list of everything you run on your computer every 3 hours". I'm sure it's just _super_ easy to understand.

With as much privacy flak as Facebook constantly takes, you'd think at least one person in the company would be trying to make sure stuff like this doesn't happen.

Trying does not mean succeeding

There's a difference between running `ps -ceo comm=tasks` and sending that information to Facebook's servers (which is how I read "collecting this information from millions of unknowing users"). It looks like he proved the former, but has provided no evidence as to the latter.

This doesn't mean that they're not sending that information back. I just don't like speculation being presented as fact without evidence. There are enough people on the Internet these days who will trust that `ps -ceo comm=tasks` means whatever a technical blog author tells them it means that I think it's dangerous to overstate what the evidence indicates.

Right, there is no proof yet that they ever send back the information to their servers.

But IMO that doesn't excuse them from collecting the information in the first place.

I did actually use tcpflow to see if there was traffic after the file gets executed, and indeed there is. Unfortunately, it's encrypted so I can't see what's being sent.

You let them run a java applet.

at least they're not peeping into your mind

No, but they can out you if you're gay.

You know what else is bad form? Making such big assumptions about Facebook's intentions.

From the article:

"They could also use this information to see whether I’m using Google Video Chat. Whether this is the purpose or not I don’t know. Regardless, they’re collecting this information from millions of unknowing users. Bad form Facebook. Bad form."

I don't think that's making big assumptions. That's just stating a fact: you don't do something invasive when it's not required or expected by the people trusting you to run software on their computer. End of story.

I think I quite clearly state that I have no idea (nor intend to presume) whether this is how they're using the information. I'm merely stating it's a possibility.

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