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Comment by pingswept | Hacker News Reader

If Facebook were simply showing me ads for stuff I mentioned, or something like that, I would have no objection. "Hmm, this guy keeps posting about hats. He must like hats. Let's show him some ads for hats!" No problem. That's basically what I thought would happen when I signed up.

I did not expect that when I visited cnn.com, after having logged into Facebook a week earlier, Facebook would log which articles I read. There was no reason for me to think that clicking "remember me" when I logged into Facebook also implied "and also remember my browsing history on all of your partner sites."

That's the behavior that pisses me off, not the targeted ads that you mentioned.

(I assume it's obvious why logging a subset of my browsing history without my consent pisses me off, but let me know if that seems odd and I'll explain more.)

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It's not obvious to me. How were you harmed by facebook logging this data?

I'm not actually asserting that the logging itself harms me, just that it pisses me off.

The reason it pisses me off is that my browser history reveals things about me that I'd rather keep private. Facebook is taking that from me without my consent. I would feel approximately the same if I discovered they were stealing stuff out of my garage without my consent-- it wasn't part of the deal I thought I agreed to.

Without getting into the details of my particular situation, I'll just say that I have political and religious views that I think are unpopular, and I don't trust the rest of the world to treat me fairly were those views made public. Also, even my views weren't unpopular now, I want to be judged for what I do, not what I read about on the web.

(I should also add that I don't think any of the private stuff that I mentioned is creepy; it's just my private business. For example, I might feel the same way if I were gay and lived in Mauritania (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_Mauritania).)

Seem reasonable?

Not really, no. Please correct me if I'm misunderstanding facebook's tracking system, but I don't think your browser history is being captured here. You are viewing pages that have a facebook widget on them, and if you have a facebook cookie that says "pingswept", this tells facebook that pingswept visited a page with a specific widget on it (and thus, which page). Facebook is not taking anything from you that you are not sending them - the issue is that a website that is not facebook is passing your information on to facebook. Aren't they the ones that deceived you, not facebook?

I believe you have explained the mechanics of the system correctly.

As to who is doing the deception, I think you're right that (in the example we're discussing) cnn.com is being deceptive. That's a good point; I hadn't really considered the complicity of the partner sites.

But in the end, Facebook is producing widgets, building a system to receive data from those widgets, and working with their partners to deploy those widgets. This system of data transmission is in no way obvious to normal people; if I weren't a web developer, I'd just think I was seeing a "like button image," and that's it. That's the part that pisses me off-- I think it's sneaky, not just me complaining about something I originally agreed to.

Just out of curiosity, and assuming you actually have a Facebook account, this really doesn't bother you at all? Should it be obvious to me that buttons I'm not clicking may be transmitting data to other sites?

This may not be a realistic expectation now, but I think that as the general population becomes more technologically literate, for the average person, the presence of such a button should indicate "this website has some kind of relationship with facebook/reddit/google - if I care about what data they are sharing, I should probably check their privacy policy." And I think that 99% of people won't care. My admittedly idealistic belief is that the solution to this "controversy" is for everyone to recognize that we shouldn't try to apply pre-internet expectations and beliefs about privacy to the modern world.

That doesn't seem crazy to me as an expectation for the distant future. Right now, I'd estimate that 95% of Facebook users would be at least irritated if they knew the full extent of the data that Facebook collects. I wouldn't be surprised if that dropped down to 25% 50 years in the future (assuming some new Facebook-like entity that pulls similar bullshit then).

The good news for me is that I'll probably be dead by then, or at least most of my friends will be, so Facebook will be of no interest to me.

I'm curious about why you describe your belief as idealistic. Specifically, what is ideal, or even good, about Facebook logging a subset of my browsing history? I understand it's potentially profitable for them and their partners, but that's not a benefit to me.

My idealistic view, which is substantially in conflict with yours, I think, would be that Facebook just serve me targeted ads and forget about the rest of it. Why would your ideal future be better? (I'm assuming you don't work for Facebook or one of their partners.)

An extreme example, your online history can be presented in court as an evidence against you.

That's not an argument against keeping that history. It could just as well be presented in court as evidence for me, or be presented as evidence against people I don't like. I'm in favor of the legal system having better evidence that they can use to reach more correct verdicts.

Finding evidence "against people you don't like" is exactly the problem privacy intends to solve.

I never want to meet you, if you see nothing wrong with snooping around my life and sharing all my secrets with everyone.

If I sign up to a video store and suddenly some guys are watching inside my windows all the time to check whichever videos I might enjoy more, no, that would not be ok with me.

It's harmful because it's abusive.

Next year they will want more revenue, so how deeper will they go for that, will they break my windows open and storm the house?

I know it's an exageration, but it ilustrates my point.

I see this as something that could potentially lead to abuse, but I don't see how it is abusive by itself, and I don't agree with trying to limit technology because it could potentially be abused unless there's a clear case that the danger of such abuse outweighs the potential benefits. Like the writer of the original article, I haven't seen anyone make that case - it's mostly just people saying "but privacy!"

In your example, those people breaking into your home is wrong. Watching you when you are in public or on their property would not be.

When the service I'm using does not clearly state what info they are using and how, than that's not really being public is it, it's just me having my info appropriated by technology without my knowledge.

No, that's where the metaphor breaks down. I don't think there's a good equivalent of "public" in the facebook tracking situation. Instead, I would say that you are on someone else's virtual property, and that they are perfectly within their rights to watch and record whatever you do there and share that information with whoever they like.

It does happen without the knowledge of many people today, and the surprise when they find out what's really going on has led to a lot of backlash, but the solution to that is to educate people better about technology and what it can do, not to limit technology so that it can only do things the average person can conceive of.

I think I can see what you say about virtual property, even though I don't agree that it should all be logged, I agree that it would be public, something that any other user himself could track. So if they only see my activity within that property, than that's one thing, but once they get into my browser and gather information from it, than I think the boundary is oversteped, and they are now in my own property (my browser) and searching through my stuff.

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