Hacker News Reader

Comment by melissamiranda | Hacker News Reader

Just curious, why don't you trust Facebook? Did you trust them at one point in time? What made you lose your trust?

I'm a designer so it's interesting to me what's behind all the Facebook hate.

There are two general reasons not to trust Facebook:

1. The reason not to trust {big company X} is that there's no reason to trust them. Their interests are not your interests. They are big enough that loss of one client is nothing for them. They have more lawyers than you have dollars, so short of overt crimes they would be able to do anything with your data and you could do nothing to them. They are popular enough that if they don't screw up something major they can live with significant number individuals pissed off about them and not care the least.

2. Facebook management's position, which they expressed a number of times publicly, is that anonymity is harmful and privacy has no value and should not exist on the internet. Here's but one example: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebooks_zuckerberg_sa... If I had to choose one company that should not be trusted with my private info that would be the one whose founder publicly states that privacy should not exist. In short, consider any info going into Facebook as if it were to be published in New York Times. If you're not OK with that - keep it to yourself.

I dunno, maybe this[1], or this[2], or this[3], for starters.

[1] http://www.pcworld.com/article/140182/facebooks_beacon_more_...

[2] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/05/canadian-gro...

[3] http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/media-lab/social-media/14...

Thanks for the links. Seeing 1 from '07, one from '08, and one from last year, seems that it's been building up for 5 years. Yeah, I see your point.

Don't think they weren't busy in 2009 and 2010, either:

http://consumerist.com/2009/02/facebooks-new-terms-of-servic...

http://techcrunch.com/2009/12/09/facebook-privacy/

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230477280457555...

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebook-timeline

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/05/facebook-rogue/

Thanks, point more than proven.

Mark Zuckerberg's perceived public figure does not inspire confidence either. His first actions with Facebook and the story around The Social Network have tainted Facebook for good.

Note this might be far from his real personality. People I know at Facebook love him.

I'm not sure that's true, I think The Social Network actually spun him in a positive light. I found public opinion of him improved overall.

I think that may just be because "normal" people finally got a real person to associate with the faceless (ha!) entity that is Facebook. Shifting from "I've never heard of this man" to "his moral character aside, this man is responsible for Facebook" can be seen as an improvement.

mmm... never thought this way. You're actually right.

>Mark Zuckerberg's perceived public figure does not inspire confidence either.

I haven't seen that movie, but let me just say that I simply can't help but deeply mistrust a person who considers privacy "obsolete" (which he has stated multiple times in the past) and, through his creation, effectively works to reduce it for everybody.

I'm deeply scared of a future where you need a Facebook (and/or Google) account to do anything meaningful on the web, and I hope that we will never arrive at such a future. I won't join Facebook under any circumstance short of a gun pointed at my head.

I don't trust Facebook. I don't even have Facebook. It may not be due to some current form of business practice (selling data) but the potentiality of all my attributed aggregated data being released/sold/made available. Doing facebook only auth only shows the company doesn't share the same privacy values as me and therefor I cannot trust them either.

Thanks for sharing this. I had no idea people felt this strongly about their data. In user testing, I picked up that people are afraid of apps publishing to their walls, or worse, friends' walls behind their back. I got that people don't trust developers with their Facebook credentials because of the abuses in the past, but what you're saying is that you don't trust Facebook itself. Thank you - now I know this going forward.

Another perspective: people wear hats. We cater the hat to the audience we're addressing. This isn't just a web phenomenon - we've crafted our identities in the real world for thousands of years in order to manipulate the target audience in some fashion or another. For that reason, it's not a smart idea to link a single human to a unified web presence.

Facebook login makes sense in its convenience, but in reality, it grates against something that's pretty important to a lot of people: how they present themselves in front of an audience.

True. The flip side is the ability to craft and re-craft your identity everywhere you go, which lets people misbehave because no one can figure out who they are. Abuse, profanity, hate are all easier if you wear a mask.

"Abuse, profanity, hate are all easier if you wear a mask."

Maybe, and it may in fact be that relative anonymity is a net loss for a community. But I find that it's rare for a conversation to rise in quality above "Okay" if I know everyone I'm talking with. This is part of why discussions over web forums and the like are so interesting. If everyone can say what they really think, then everyone can talk about more than just surface issues.

Sure theres the people who try to use their mask to hurt others, but theres plenty of people who don't. And some degree of anonymity is required to get those outlier conversations that make you wish they'd go on longer, regardless of how long you've been talking.

EDIT: Of course, the first rule of Internet pseudo anonymity is that people you haven't talked to for a non-trivial length of time don't get webcam privileges, ever.

I like your edit, well put.

What we found in opening up Tiny Review to other login options was actually pretty civil. We haven't seen much offensive content at all, nor spam. It might be that we're still small yet, but I think I agree with you. Letting people refine their identity for a particular site usually frees up their expression and you get good results. While you're small, it's not a problem. Once you scale enough to have a large userbase, you normally have the time and resources for content moderation.

In addition to everything else, they've been saying that their new advertising model involves sponsored stories showing up on your newsfeed, and arranging and highlighting the timeline so that paid stories show up (and in fact, they already have paid stories labelled as such showing up on their pages occasionally).

I don't trust a company that turns my friends into shills. It's slimy.

I use facebook because it's convenient for keeping in touch with friends and keeping up to date with events. I don't like it or trust it much.

Any company offering a free service has to make money somehow, and since they know 5% of internet browsing is on the Fb newsfeed, it's actually not surprising.

I wonder, would you pay a $5 subscription so that Facebook doesn't show you ads and lets you own your data? Someone else suggested it.

I would not pay that to get rid of ads. However, ads don't bother me. The "social placement" advertising that (ab)uses my friend's content to turn them into shills is what I find a significant turnoff, combined with the other invasive and slimy methods of data collection mentioned elsewhere in this thread.

I don't care if Facebook does advertising. However, the slimy methods used burn any trust I have in them, and as a result, I'm not going to hand them any extra data if I can avoid it.

I am curious why this is not a more popular option across the board. Free with AD's or pay for no ads and no tracking. I would gladly pay for some of the free services if I could get these options and wont even use them for free while the tracking is in place.

Then you have the New York Times: pay and they still display ads.

And real newspapers. And magazines, cable tv, movies, etc...

I dont know how much of value I can bring here, but I can tell you what would make me love Facebook (love opposite to hate).

If they would charge me $5/month for an account BUT give me fair, solid and reasonable TOS that I own my data and they DONT make money off of my eyeballs and clicks under some sort of a penalty. And throw an Independent Board of Facebook Policy-makers so its not that one hacker own majority of the vote.

You can try to revert this and get your answer out of it.

Super interesting. I wonder what would happen if Facebook would implement a subscription service that shows no ads and lets you own and control your data. It's not a bad idea- I'll see if a friend at Fb will ask Zuckerberg if they've ever considered this.

I see some things that I'd consider subscribing to, but they only have "real world" subscriptions for hardcopy.

I guess I could send that to a school or hospital or some such. But it'd be neat if they realised that some people are happy to pay for good reporting.

Maybe there's a need for some simple online-only sub, with feedback buttons of "good quality" or "poor quality" on each article.

no need to -- I will answer you. Its not feasible in FB current situation. IF they make $100 per year per user already on showing ads/tracking/selling/analyzing/whatever they do to make a buck, then going down to $5/month/user and shifting from paying advertiser to paying user would make it a ghost town. Bottom line: I think most people enjoy what they get out of FB even if they data is being used/sold and they are, up to some point, aware of it.

1) They don't make $100/user/year, not even close. They have 800M users and made 4.27B$ last year. That's $5.33 per user per year.

Even considering their number of active users is bunk, there's no way they've reach anything close to $100/user/year - that would mean they only had 42M users.

2) I don't think the suggestion was for them to shift to another revenue model, I think it was to give the option of subscribing. Much like many other sites e.g. Slashdot, Reddit, etc. Most people would probably still choose the free option.

you are right I had this information wrong, apologize.

1) you're missing a few figures and the whole picture, by the conservative estimation Zuckerberg will make 16 billions with the ipo so he personally made ~20 bucks per registered user. Selling ads is pocket money, at the end of the day the wealth is in the mega database of the user data. See, paying users can choose to take their dollars elsewhere so you have to give them what they want, if it's gratis people flock on the service and lack the incentive to go away if the service is somewhat unsatisfying so you can impose whatever you want to them.

2) they can't offer such an option, facebook is a machine designed to collect, store, hold and aggregate user data and they built a business model out of it. Putting the user in control of its data is the opposite of what facebook wants. You can't really compare the subscription of news aggregator websites and an hypothetical subscription on facebook. Facebook is unique in the fact that it holds user personal data and has a strong grasp on it through heavy vendor lock-in, you can easily leave slashdot or reddit and get your news elsewhere from an alternative but you can't leave facebook easily because they have your data, data you need in your daily use and there's nowhere to go to to find an equivalent.

So you dislike Facebook making money of your eyeballs and clicks so much you'd pay money every month to prevent that. I don't understand this attitude at all. I couldn't care less how much money anyone else makes from my eyeballs and clicks. What am I missing here ?

What if according to facebook, the brands you like correlate with mortgage default? And they sold that data to your bank, so now you can't get that house you wanted?

That's what you're missing.

JoinDiaspora.com

"If they would charge me $5/month for an account BUT give me fair, solid and reasonable TOS that I own my data and they DONT make money off of my eyeballs and clicks under some sort of a penalty. And throw an Independent Board of Facebook Policy-makers so its not that one hacker own majority of the vote."

I would not use Facebook if they did all that and paid me $5 per month to use it. Or even $50 per month.

The site is spyware incarnate, and it'll take a lot more than a TOS (not even a piece of paper) and an "Independent Board of Facebook Policy-makers" to make me trust the site enough to use it.

It would have to be totally revamped technologically to be fully anonymous -- and peer to peer, so that the only people who get my data in the first place are my friends. Not some corporation (no matter what promises it gives), but just my friends, and only my friends.

I trust facebook for doing every wrong thing and the other that I can imagine. It's their business model and whole reason of existence.

I don't appreciate the repeated attacks against personal freedom (they like to call it privacy) and against the internet and open web. I dislike the methods and techniques of manipulation they used.

For someone who had some experience of the internet it was quite obvious what was going to happen, history repeats itself, except that when microsoft tried to bypass the internet and build a microsoft network a.k.a. msn, included in windows, they failed hard.

Now with the critical mass and sheer momentum, everyone and their friends are asking to have the closed and proprietary facebooknet preloaded in their mobile device. But I won't be part of the effort to destroy the open internet, so I quit google and its free services and block everything facebook.

"I'm a designer so it's interesting to me what's behind all the Facebook hate."

I don't trust FB, but I don't hate it. Not trusting someone does not mean you hating them.

I don't trust a rapist to have a friendship relationship with my niece but this does not mean I hate them, I 'm just not going to let it happen. I visit them at jail and they are not monsters, they just feel a urge to rape.

I don't trust my sons playing with fire either(single digits years old) but I don't hate them, I love them.

I don't trust FB with my personal info because it is none of their business. Or should I say it is because their business is selling personal info to third parties.

That you don't see what they do with your data does not mean that it does not exist(out of sight, out of mind).

(Edited PS) What people HATE is being forced to use something they don't want to use in order to do something they want to do(like use this service).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com