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Comment by JonnieCache | Hacker News Reader

The important thing to take away from this:

If they can make guesses this accurate about your photos, imagine they guesses they're making behind the scenes about your life, your personality and your innermost thoughts.

If there was a page on fb where it showed all the inferences they had made about you, sexuality, income, religion, philosophical viewpoints, mental health, etc. then people would run screaming. Of course, a lot of people have already told fb that info voluntarily, and that's why its possible to guess it for everyone else.

Also potentially terrifying: a facebook fortune telling engine. I bet they can predict your future with frightening accuracy, or they will be able to after another decade or so of data anyway.

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Indeed, with all the Facebook sharing buttons around the web they have more than your bookmarks too, they have the equivalent of uploading your browser history each day to them. With current machine learning technology, let alone improvements over the coming years, they'd know more or less what someone would know if they stood behind every time you were browsing for the last few years.

Even if you were to cancel your account you'd turn up in photos of parties on other people's accounts and they'd follow pretty well you after you'd left too. With their dodgy history, Zuckerberg's contempt for his own users as evidenced by his quotes, the idea that this won't be abused is laughable. Given national security letters (NSL) it's almost certain the intelligence community has access. Hell you could hit a mid-level admin at one of their data-centers with a NSL and the top level management and legal wouldn't even be aware that there are outside entities with a connection to their database. That's to say nothing of the extra-legal capacities of these people.

While people like to think that it's more or less anonymized clusters and demographics that are being passed to advertisers to target ads better - not a terribly scary thought, just more relevant ads - I think we need to be far more cautious.

How do you go about convincing the "I have nothing to hide" majority of the population that giving away such vast quantities of information is not in their best interests? I'm thinking of friends, family members, etc. who honestly don't care whether the TSA sees them naked at the airport, or how much the other agencies know about them. Where does such extreme deference to authority come from in the first place?

I think this article, "Why Privacy Matters Even if You Have 'Nothing to Hide'" [1], makes a compelling case. There are essentially two reasons why privacy is important. The first is that privacy can be used to 'hide bad things'. This is what the 'nothing to hide' argument addresses: if you don't do bad things, you should not worry about privacy. The problem is that not everyone agrees on which things are bad. For example, do you agree that the OWS protesters terrorists?

But privacy is not just about hiding bad things. A multitude of innocuous facts about many people, collected in a database, are themselves a powerful tool. The data can be mined by governments to look for 'suspicious' behavior, by insurance companies to deny insurance, by criminals to commit fraud, etc.

I think the basic problem is that violations of privacy give power in the hands governments and corporations, and these entities tend to abuse whatever power you give them.

[1] http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Privacy-Matters-Even-if/127...

Where does such extreme deference to authority come from in the first place?

Gilles Deleuze said it comes from a desire to be led.

> How do you go about convincing the "I have nothing to hide" majority of the population that giving away such vast quantities of information is not in their best interests?

Continuing and possibly gruesome examples where such data mining ruins lives.

I spoke with a recruiter who prided himself on their HR department's willingness to deny entry based on FB profile (unsure if was public or obtained through some "secret friends" policy, or through a backdoor).

Furthermore, it's becoming almost a certainty that some foolish judge will set precedent somewhere that essentially makes FB account data public (or forces publicity of formerly private data).

You can ask to watch them having sex. They have nothing to hide, right?

I'm not sure how compelling my argument is... but if I have nothing to hide then why does anybody need to look? For example does the TSA seeing everybody naked actually improve security?

Everybody has something to hide. If you don't understand what I mean by this, post your credit card number in a reply.

That is true. Mere statistical analysis on the word count on articles you prefer to read will give a very accurate insight into your interests and mindset. Facebook has access to this data through the "Like" button trojans that exist on many websites. If anything, they haven't been very impressive in putting this data to work yet (or I would be seeing a hell of a lot better targeted ads than currently).

Statistical analysis can give you a lot more than just what I like to read. The power of statistics never ceases to amaze: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem

Funny you should mention it. I am in the middle of Cryptonomicon - a thoroughly enjoyable read with a heavy focus on this area of study.

I read Cryptonomicon a month or two ago and really enjoyed it. Seemingly serendipitously, a post about encrypting email turned up on Slashdot the other day:(http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/12/20/0158227/do-slashdotte...) and I realized that with everyone basically using webmail services now, the chance for something like Ordo to take hold at-large is even less (given that fewer and fewer people actually use email clients anymore).

I'd like to fantasize that there could be a way to use a social network like Facebook with a tool like Ordo -- that is, most the data (photos, in this case) you upload to FB is encrypted, and only people who you've approved can decrypt it. Using steganography this is probably already possible with FB, probably not practical, though.

As someone with just a fake-info FB account that interacts with it maybe once or twice a week, I am more concerned by the fact that not having an (active|real) account is also a signal that says (or may say at some point in the near future) a lot about me.

From the link - "Did you login with the facebook app on a smartphone while you were at the hospital? If so, they would have your GPS location at a certain time, when you later upload the photos from your camera, it would have a timestamp, and they could just look check where you had logged in from at that time."

If you are a home owner and this is true, you could possibly be identified -- say for instance posting from home 75% of the time and cross-referencing with certain demographic statistics collected from your browsing history and property records. Would that be legal?

Why does FB need to make guesses about this stuff? People are supplying all this information in form fields in triplicate.

Also they are a fortune telling machine. That's a good pun actually. They are hoping to make a fortune by telling you what ads you'll click.

I found googles page where they tell you which catagories of things they believe about you (basically age and interests).

Some of them where right, but more than half of them was wrong (I am not, for the record, interested in Paleontology).

Can you provide a link? I'm curious now!

http://www.google.com/ads/preferences

See "Your categories"

Edit - Sorry, I copied the link from the Google results page, it acutally shows up as adspreferences in the ad, but ads/preferences below. Kind of strange.

gives me a 404

I think he meant http://www.google.com/ads/preferences

google.com/ads/preferences

Here you go: https://www.google.com/settings/ads/onweb/

Can't remember.

I thought google has more interesting data about all those.

"It seems you've been watching a lot of porn lately. Do you want to post an update about it?"

That's funny, but I've been told some porn sites have social widgets. I don't know who would want to share that, but there they are.

They already sell that data to credit agencies who use it to produce more accurate credit scores (and get the answers to those questions they are not legally allowed to ask).

Yeah it's scary that a site, where you and your friends share the details of your lives online, uses those details to... oh wait that's the point.

I hope they don't lose this info. What a boon for researchers in some distant future!

(The problem, of course, is that a "distant future" today is 10-20 years... Probably even in my lifetime.)

or build a self-aware version/cylon of you.

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