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Comment by damoncali | Hacker News Reader

You crossed a line on that one, facebook (again). It's getting really tiresome to keep updating my settings to keep you out of my life.

This sort of thing is what keeps people from doing anything substantial on facebook. Can you imagine "Facebook Docs", FMail, or anything of the sort? No. Because facebook would make it all public without telling anyone.

I really believe that in the very long run, this culture of invasion will limit facebook's potential.

I'm sure this was in the TOS somewhere, but really? It's just disrespectful.

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What precisely are you upset about? I did not work on this feature, but I'm trying to understand your reaction.

Your friends entered their phone numbers. They are your friends. You can see those phone numbers if they choose to allow you to do so. You also (possibly) chose to import your address book of your friends and Facebook is showing them to you. The numbers are not public and everyone involved explicitly agreed to share the information. What part of that do you object to?

There are phone numbers in that list of people who aren't on Facebook, and given Facebook's relationship with law enforcement, I'd rather they not have them. I understood the Facebook app to be syncing information with people who were already on Facebook, not my entire phone book.

That is absurd logic. Law enforcement has no problem getting information about the people you contact from your phone company.

On further thought, it's possible I jumped the gun on this and that my phone contacts weren't actually taken without consent- my memory is imperfect.

That said, my opinion on facebook's attitude towards me and my privacy is unchanged. It's easy to get jumpy when a company disregards your privacy at every turn. Had this been on google (for example), I'm pretty sure I would not have jumped so quickly to what was probably an incorrect conclusion. But it was fb, who has repeatedly disregarded my wishes and abused my trust to the point where I literally treat everything I put on it as public.

We created Social Fortress[1] for this exact reason. Solve the root problem: Protect(AES256 Encrypt) and control your data transparently, prior to sending it anywhere, and you don't have to worry about this ever again.

[1] I'm involved with https://www.socialfortress.com

Really neat idea, I like it. From watching the demo it would seem that anyone who I want to share with would also have to have SocialFortress installed as well?

Thanks. To see protected messages and photos, yes. You are able to toggle protection on and off in real-time so you can easily choose to send simple, less detailed, messages in plain-text and more detailed encrypted.

I'm pretty sure this information is explicitly imported by the user in Adroid/iPhone/BlackBerry apps when he or she allows the apps to use profile pictures as contact photos.

I remember at some point when authorizing the installation of the FB BB App (well over a year ago) it mentioned something about needing access to contacts to work. I presumed this to mean for the local app not for them to suck them up into the cloud.

FB continues to lead the way when it comes to "it's in our TOS but don't go reading it because it won't match our marketing copy"

reminds me of the south park episode that ripped from the human centipede

That episode was so poignant about people not reading TOS's it kind of hurt.

Same here on Android. The options were to add metadata like photos to contacts already in my phone, or to import my entire FB contact list into my phone (even if I didn't have them in my phone book). I chose the former.

At no point was it mentioned that they would be helping themselves to the rest of my contacts, to whom I have no connection to on Facebook.

Pissed off doesn't even begin to cover it.

I clicked through that same authorization step and it was very clear they were syncing your contacts to their service.

However, this is kind of irrelevant because 99% of users are not going to read this kind of a warning no matter WHAT it says and are just going to click through. They want their Facebook photos on their phone contacts dammit!

What I don't understand here is why everyone is so concerned at all about this. If you have an Android phone, Google has your phone book. If you have an iPhone, Apple does. If you back-up your computer to the cloud, they have it too. As long as none of them share it publicly, why do you care?

If Facebook was sharing your private phone numbers to the world or exposing who you had in your phonebook to people, I'd understand the outrage. But all they did was backup and sync your contacts which seems to me to be a service, not an offense.

Well I would like to have my phone number online on as few services as possible. In particular if I have no chance to change anything about it

FMail already exists. https://www.facebook.com/about/messages/

People do substantial stuff on facebook. Good evidence of several hundred people doing so:

http://www.publicopiniononline.com/nationalnews/ci_18438058

The Barnum quotation comes to mind.

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