Facebook Disconnect
chrome.google.com
chrome.google.com
Another thing you can do is opening an incognito window for all your facebook/google sessions. Obviously, one must be sure to have deleted all cookies/etc after the last time one logged in to Google/facebook (that includes youtube).
This part made me chuckle a bit. We are so afraid of Google and Facebook tracking our searches/web pages, yet we freely install plugins from 3rd party developers that can easily gather everything that Google and Facebook can get, and more. In theory, I could make a Facebook Disconnect 2, which secretly sends data back home about what pages have been visited, and nobody except the most vigilant (enough to read the source of the plugin) would know.
Why do we not trust large corporations who have billions of dollars at stake, but trust independent developers who have little skin in the game? Is it because we are those developers, so there's some form of camaraderie?
Ultimately though, the opinions of Hacker Newsers (a group with which I've proudly associated for ~3 years now) are only a hint at how much we're helping (or hurting) the world, and while we should always keep it in mind, we need to recognize that this is a group which is accustomed to the IRC style of social networking.
I don't blame anyone at Hacker News for thinking "we" are evil, because we do a shitty job at communicating what we're actually doing and why[1] (and we can't really communicate everything anyway). Instead, we've just gotta try to address the problems that are legitimate and be as transparent as possible.
Shortly, if you call tin foil hat theories tin foil hat theories (even with sound logic as to why they are tin foil hat theories), all you're going to do is convince the tin foil hat theorists that it's yet another elaborate step in manipulating them into believing The Corporate Directive.
And, everyone else, for what it's worth, I'd much prefer it if we could just go back to hacker news on here. I'm a C Hacker first (before being assimilated, I contributed to open source projects like Chromium and Mongrel2, because I loved the problems (coincidentally the same reason I allowed myself to become assimilated into facebook -- I work on code that's hit my millions of users billions of times a day[2])
[0] Cache Infra in 1050 B2
[1] We've enabled applications to write to our network as they wish without introducing much friction or overhead (a single approval), but we've managed to communicate that in such a way that instead of leading people to believe that we've put the onus on developers (and users, as they must ultimately know which apps to trust), we've instead "put our tentacles" into yet another area and are again sharing without reason.
[2] memcache protocol stack stuff, we issue lots (and lots and lots) of requests per page load :)
Bull. We don't trust Facebook because of its actions. Beacon, account deletion, random modification of privacy settings and policies. Facebook has done virtually nothing to earn trust, and taken several clear, conscious actions that violate trust.
Your perception of Facebook's intent does nothing to change what Facebook has actually done to its users.
I'm starting to think that those smug bloggers are in it for the traffic.
It all depends on your perspective I suppose.
As soon as I hit send I was hit with the impulse that I shouldn't have sent those kind of details over FB messaging -- thinking back to warnings such as (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cdrCYrZIvI).
And sure enough a day and half later I received an email from a Facebook recruiter wanting to talk to me about a job.
Normally that would be fine, but the timing is so suspect. I asked around if anyone had heard of FB mining/reading users messages, and no was certain but reminded me that the FB privacy policy states that they own your data and an ex-FB employee said that many engineers have access to the DB.
Does FB mine or read user messages, and why doesn't it do more to prevent so many engineers from having access to the DB?
I have some insight into the safeguards in place to prevent any abuse of any access that an individual might have due to the nature of their work, and the character of the people who maintain them, and if I had any issues with either of them, I would not still be working at Facebook.
Even the best intentions won't help when FB is hacked, sold out to idiots or forced to hand out data to your gov't.
As an aside: I'm happy with ad supported stuff. I never run any ad-blocking extensions or hide my data. But still many ads are lousy.
Any chance of a HN karma style thing to vote up / down ads? ("I hate this ad, it makes me want to leave the page -1", vs "I don't hate this ad, whether I click it or not +/- 0" vs "I like this ad whether or not I click it +1")
And I always like websites that allow paying members to turn off ads.
With a -1 and dislike button comes a visible downside to being present on FB, especially for organizations, the potential to be unpopular in a tangible, measurable, way. Organizations would then think twice about being on FB when before it's might have been a no-brainer. Even if the number of dislikes is not publicly visible, it may be to the owner of whatever it is being unliked, or owners may request for it, and when an owner sees that number, may decide that it's bad to have a FB presence.
Considering the downsides of a -1/dislike button, why would FB want it from a revenue and growth point of view?
Way to win our trust.
In this case your argument is that you just want the information so as to provide people what they want.
Okay - fair enough. But there is a very obvious counter-argument - which has already been mentioned many times. It's that you don't make it easy for people to choose not to allow you to track this information if they don't want you to. And you KNOW that most people wouldn't opt-in to let you track them this way. So at best you make it opt-out - if you let people opt out at all. So - assuming that people know what they are doing and are making a rational decision about their choices, then you aren't ACTUALLY serving their desires at all.
And next comes the only real reply that's available to you. Either people are irrational for wanting to block information gathering that would help you satisfy their first order desires, or that facts like people keep using the service without trying to figure out how to opt-out, shows that they really don't have a problem with privacy issues - even if they state they do. And therein lies the paternalist rub of Facebook's decisions.
Now - you don't state anything directly paternalistic in your reply. To be honest - it's not that consistently thought through. But the germ of it is there when you state to the effect that - people can't understand what we do or why we do it. And thus you relegate them as other - as less informed, or less capable of choosing than the mighty facebook crew.
Sorry you need to try harder to see this from the other point of view. That's not going to be easy for you - because working at facebook must be an incredible experience. Who wouldn't want it to be a ethical easy zone. But you exhibit the clearest signs of someone who has too much of a vested interest to be able to critical engage with this ethical conundrum.
The first of these signs is the fact that you don't address the very obvious counter argument I just laid out. No one at Facebook ever seems to. It's such an obvious reply, and is mentioned so often - it appears disingenuous to continue to ignore it. I don't believe that Facebook consciously avoid replying to it. But the fact that they don't - while keeping the assumption that they mean well - suggests to me that their vested interest has clouded their judgement.
The second such sign of critical impairment is the fact that you are marginalising your opponents as "tin foil hat" people - or as ignorants who couldn't possibly understand. When you do this to a group of people who represent a particular point of view opposed to your own - you've ceased to engage with them - you've ceased to listen.
And that's exactly why people have their backs up. And if you can't see the intuitive force behind that - then people are going to start treating you in kind and start marginalising you in return. And of those who do subscribe to the tin foil hat view - that's exactly why they do.
It's a shame because Facebook probably has a lot to contribute. But if your PR folks (including yourself since you've just spoken for the company on HN) can't recognise the degree to which the discourse is becoming poisoned in this way - then things aren't going to go to well for you in the longer term.
http://code.google.com/p/byoogle/source/browse/trunk/google/...
const DOMAINS = ['facebook.com', 'facebook.net', 'fbcdn.net'];
/*
Determines whether any of a bucket of domains is part of a URL, regex free.
*/
function isMatching(url, domains) {
const DOMAIN_COUNT = domains.length;
for (var i = 0; i < DOMAIN_COUNT; i++)
if (url.toLowerCase().indexOf(domains[i], 7) >= 7) return true;
// A valid URL has seven-plus characters ("http://"), then the domain.
}
/* Traps and selectively cancels a request. */
if (!isMatching(location.href, DOMAINS)) {
document.addEventListener("beforeload", function(event) {
if (isMatching(event.url, DOMAINS)) event.preventDefault();
}, true);
}
127.0.0.1 facebook.com
127.0.0.1 facebook.net
127.0.0.1 fbcdn.netYou could either list out all the domains or use something like dnsmasq or another DNS proxy that lets you define more sophisticated rules.
Edit: the advantages of the /etc/hosts approach are it's simple, and it works without additional software.
How ambivalent is that.
[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3033385
Upd: They say now logging out is not enough (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3035418), which partly invalidates my point.
The problem with naming them like that is that showing the permissions becomes pointless, because people will install them anyway seeing how 95% of the apps have that permission, so they might miss the malicious one that has that, too.
Technically if it's able to do this, then it is able to access the data on that page as well, whether or not the extension is doing so.
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Facebook-vs-Datenschu...
This German site uses a double opt in button for button like "Like ". Press twice on the grey like button and then it only turns into a normal like.
I find it kind of amusing that facebook doesn't display integrated comments at all if you block their cookies. Not to worry, TechCrunch w/out comments ≈ TechCrunch with comments.
it would be great if chrome allowed users to create a separate "sandboxed" browser session in each window. i'd like to maintain just one session for each service i log into, including google/gmail.
hmm, maybe that's why they haven't implemented this.
Nb: I have no skin in this game, I personally don't have a Facebook account, but it's not because I'm some anti-FB zealot.
The frontpage of HN has been very disappointing in the last week with non-substance links littering it, and even less worthwhile comments accompanying them. Let's try not to upvote such frivolous and low-signal links.
So while there may be an element of opportunism in covert anti-FB PR, it's working with dry kindling. There's real fire here, not just smoke.
I'm kind of surprised NoScript doesn't have an option of disabling scripts on a site-by-site basis. Ergo, if I have two tabs open, Google+ and some other page containing a Google+ Like button, I should be able to enable Google scripts on only the Google+ page. As it stands, when a script from a domain is enabled, it is enabled for any and all tabs you have open. I think that behavior can be improved.
In the meantime, you can use the RequestPolicy add-on in order to block cross-domain requests to G+ in your other tabs. In this case, NoScript won't even be needed because the script won't be loaded at all.
Just try googling site:news.ycombinator.com google
From the first page I see:
6 discussions that are basically neutral
1 positive (Google puts Japan quake tsunami warning on their search page)
1 mix of positive and negative (people arguing both positions) (Goodbye, Google App Engine)
2 negative (Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results, Google to announce "new programming language for structured web programming" )
I've never noticed a leaning towards favoring Google here. If you were arguing that YC funded companies get preferential treatment then you might have a case but I don't think your "I get a feeling that the hivemind of HN is critical of anything that is not associated google" is correct at all.
I'm biased because I do think Facebook is lame, and that the amount of online profile wish-fulfillment is just creepy. Is this 'anti-FB zealotry'?
If you're going to meta-moderate HN, try to engage in less hyperbole than the 'smear campaign' you disagree with.
I suppose it's good form to explain why - so here goes.
I guess I find your comment low signal as well. It doesn't help me understand why you think there is a smear campaign - or why you think it might be a conspiracy.
I personally don't want Facebook building a profile about me - and I don't trust them enough not to so act with their like buttons n whatnot. So this is a handy tool for me that I didn't know about before today.
I'm not sure why I have to be considered an anti-facebook zealot, part of the hive-mind, conspirator jerk just because I find such a tool useful.
So don't have an account with them.
I thought it was fairly well established that FB is a privacy quagmire (logged in or otherwise), so this all seems a bit redundant.
Maybe I missed a memo…
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hgiihiookhijpbhafl...
I'm going to give Facebook Disconnect a try, too.
I'd be very amazed if Chrome would not, now or at some point in the (transparently and unstoppably auto-updated) future, keep track of what you're doing, too.
We trust the tools from Google, since it would be a huge backlash if they were caught doing something so nefarious as using Chrome to track people, without them knowing. And it is quite possible to test this.
Scenario B is so potentially devastating to Google that I highly doubt they would implement something like that.
If you'd like to put some money down, I'd take the other end of that bet.
http://code.google.com/p/byoogle/source/browse/trunk/google/...