Charlie Stross on Girls Around Me | Hacker News Reader

Charlie Stross on Girls Around Me

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215 pointsbigiain104 comments

I think there is a generational difference in the concept of privacy. And a misunderstanding that the general public "doesn't understand" the privacy controls on Facebook.

My 69 year old mother, when she was on Facebook, had her privacy controls to maximum. You couldn't find her on search. She didn't use her real name even! And she was sending me articles by email every other week when Facebook had some privacy breach. So whenever I hear someone say "most people don't understand privacy on Facebook" I call bullshit because my own mother is the counterexample. She's since deleted her account because of privacy concerns.

I think kids of today (teens and twenty-somethings) don't care as much. They don't mind telling the world they are at a bar tonight. They add people they don't know as friends. They have 800, 900 Facebook friends. There is no privacy when you have 900 Facebook friends and they know it.

All these arguments about stalkers, rapists, and white supremacists are straw men. As another commenter said, you don't NEED an app to find random people. Just use your eyes. A supremacist after Jews? Not hard to find if you know where to look. A rapist looking for women? Not hard to find if you know where to look. This has nothing to do with Facebook.

I think kids of today (teens and twenty-somethings) don't care as much. They don't mind telling the world they are at a bar tonight.

But is this view the result of rational consideration, with full knowledge of all the implications, or is it something these young people have been drawn into without stopping to think about the implications? Or worse: without the full implications even being clear?

In other words: is this really a demographic shift we're seeing, or simply a stage-of-life effect? Will the same teens holding the quoted view of privacy recoil in horror at their actions twenty years later? Will these privacy choices alter the courses of the lives in ways they wish they could later undo? If so, then it seems unreasonable to wave away this mass choice as morally or societally neutral.

Simply put: is privacy a public safety issue or not? If it is, then an argument can be made to restrict young people's (and even grown adults') freedom to choose their "policy" on it, just as many societies do with drugs, alcohol, driving, etc. I think Charlie's post makes a pretty strong argument that privacy is a matter of public safety and societal well-being.

Putting words in his mouth, his argument might be that companies like Facebook are inducing people to relinquish their privacy rights without the full knowledge of the long-term implications -- just as profit-seeking tobacco companies induced large numbers of people to smoke without full knowledge of the long-term implications. Many governments now see the public policy advantages to making the consequences of smoking clear to the public; the same is not yet true of privacy rights.

> Or worse: without the full implications even being clear?

the implications of making this kind of data public are not going to be clear. The data can be combined with other data or mined later in unexpected and surprising ways.

Most people are surprised at how few data points are required to uniquely identify them. Most people will cheerfully enter their first name, family name and date of birth into any website that asks for it.

A while ago I heard the term "retroactive privacy invasion" applied to things such as good cheap facial recognition becoming available and being applied to existing archives of social photos or surveillance video.

Strong privacy regulation might slow down the progress, but there is no way to stop the tide. The technologies to identify, categorize, and link people are only going to get better. In 100 years, privacy as we know it will not exist.

We can accept this fact and educate ourselves about the implications, or we can stick our heads in the sand and hope it all goes away.

In this specific example, I would hope this app gets widely publicized, not shut down. I would rather more people understand the implications of social networks, instead of trying to protect "the innocent" from the inevitable. A sleezeball that uses this app to manipulate women will likely cause considerable pain. But I expect women would adapt rather quickly and be less likely to trust some random guy in a bar just because he seems to know everything about them. This technology can also be used in reverse. A woman could run an analysis on the guy they just met and verify that he is actually who he claims to be.

The technology will be developed, either in secret or in public. I would rather everyone have the tool, rather than the few that want it bad enough to develop it in secret.

This change in privacy will likely cause social upheaval and change they way we interact with people. Is that a bad thing, or is it just different?

In my opinion, regulation will never beat technology. You can slow it down for a time, but the consequences of our progress are eventually realized.

Unfortunately, governments have as much to gain (probably more) as the commercial entities with the end of privacy. Search warrants aren't needed when your life is an email to the company's government liaison away.

I think there's a generational difference in privacy, too. The older generation have learned enough and was passed on enough experience from the previous generations to start with a vague sense of why privacy is useful, and then over the course of their life internalize the reasons why it's actually useful. The current young generation didn't get that taught to them, but they're the same human stock as previous generations. If previous generations found it advantageous to live with it all hanging out, they would have. This generation won't either, except they're going to get to learn a much harder way, without the gentle leadin.

The stories about how this generation doesn't care about privacy have been around for years now and have become common wisdom. The stories about this generation is actually learning the hard way about privacy are few and far between, but by my count, growing rapidly. Stories about groups of young-20-somethings who don't let each other take out their video phones while they are partying, stories like this, they're only going to continue to grow, and grow, and grow.

Humans have not changed. The logic of privacy has not changed. The fact that information about you is power over you has not changed. The only change is one generation thrown to the wolves so quickly and thoroughly that they didn't have time to ease into it safely, and in my opinion the likely end result in five or ten years is a generation more paranoid about privacy than any we've seen in a while, because everyone will have a personal story about how they were socially screwed by the lack of privacy, and not just vague habits picked up by tradition.

re: generational difference in privacy attitudes. The older generations who grew up in small towns or tight-knit neighborhoods gossip(ed) about each other like crazy. Pretty much every aspect of their lives was public knowledge among their friends and associates. (e.g. If you wanted to know where the pretty girls were hanging out - just go out and ask someone.) The sense that there is safety in anonymity may have been something very specific to the suburbia generations (boomers/X).

In the small-town instance, while everyone knew your business, you also generally knew both who every was, and what their business was.

The illusion of social networking is that you're performing in front of a window such that you can see who's viewing you. You're not. You're performing in front of a two-way mirror -- others can see in, but you cannot see out. You can only view their own two-way mirrors.

The telling bit for me is that the companies who are most interested in sucking down personal information, Facebook, but even moreso Google, put extreme controls over outward flows of their data.

Yes, and that's where the desire for privacy comes from. Nobody can gossip about what they don't know (well... to a first approximation, anyhow), and the only way to prevent the gossip mill from passing around some tidbit is to ensure that it is never discovered in the first place.

Privacy is a defense against the gossip mill. Infusing the gossip mill with digital might isn't going to make the desirability of that defense go away.

That's a certain type of privacy, but it seems that most of the concern revolves around employers/creeps/government/etc accessing the information through some backdoor method.

I'm not so sure if most people actually mind if their old high school friends are gossiping about their latest relationship status update. Facebook functions as a personal PR tool to "get out in front" of the gossip. But perhaps you're right and things are changing.

> If previous generations found it advantageous to live with it all hanging out, they would have.

Oh look, the Fully General Social Conservative Argument.

Oh look, the Fully General Political Dismissal With No Actual Argument.

I've never understood the mindset that allows one to label an argument with a particular political label, then dismiss it based on the label you just applied. It seems the very definition of closed-minded, to me. Even on further examination I really don't get what you're getting at... did it become "progressive" dogma that personal privacy is irrelevant sometime in the last five minutes or something? Progressive dogma that we should just roll over and accept that large companies are going to invade our privacy for our gain and it's "socially conservative" to think otherwise?

"Past generations did(n't do) foo for a very long time and it seemed to work out" is a fully general argument against any and all change in society, ranging from Facebook to desegregation to bikinis. "Social conservative" is meant literally as in "opposed to social change", not to refer to any particular political movement. It's not a political statement or a dismissal; at most it identifies a fallacy by pointing out that the same reasoning would justify slavery.

That's not the point I made; I didn't say anything about it "working out". I observed that if people wanted a lower of threshold of privacy in the past, they could have already have had it even without technological intervention. Window blinds were not invented in response to Facebook. It's not about "working out", it's about desires.

Technology changes, but the base stock of humanity doesn't on any usefully observable timespan. (Yet.)

> I observed that if people wanted a lower of threshold of privacy in the past, they could have already have had it

And the point I made is that you can say the same thing about racial desegregation, the abolition of slavery, no-fault divorce, wearing jeans in the office, or the social acceptance of homosexuals.

I think the generational privacy attitudes are less a "when you were born" thing (though that matters) than a "how old you are and what shit you've seen" thing.

Much of the current discussion revolving around Facebook is just a re-treading of discussions that happened in the late 1980s / early 1990s with The WELL and first generation Internet sites and "online diaries" (before they were labled "blogs"). Several prolific early personalities emerged, sharing much about their lives. Most of them have since drastically reduced, or entirely eliminated, their online profiles. All that I'm aware of are much more circumspect and targeted in what they share.

And for the most part, they're now in their 40s, 50s, or later (a few exceptionally precocious ones perhaps their mid/late 30s).

What's happened? The Bush administration (Ari Fleischer's "[people should] watch what they do and what they say") marriages ... and divorces, business startups ... and failures, lawsuits, personal feuds, trolls, stalkers. For some, exposure to less liberal regimes, whether in the Middle East of today, Latin America of the 70s and 80s, Africa of the 60s, Eastern Europe of the 50s and60s, Germany of the 30s an 40s, Soviet Russia of the 20s and 30s.....

Some of us recall dystopian movies or short stories / SF from a few decades previous suggesting that a global, all-knowing network might be something other than a benevolent overlord. And noted a certain Mark Zuckerberg's consistently condescending attitude toward his users, from Harvard days forward, his consistent trashing of privacy settings, association with at best questionably ethical Russian investors. Etc.

So yeah, I think today's kids will get over their social fixation. It's going to take a while though.

For the record, your mother's capability does not prove all seniors understand these things. I'll give the counter anecdote of my mother, who isn't aware FB has privacy capabilities.

You are right that real research is needed, and not just spouting "facts" that are likely heavily influenced by ageism. If anybody has any real data (not just wrt FB) on how the 55+ crowd interacts with technology, the web, and social sites, I'd love pointers. The only thing I've read is that actual usage decreases significantly through a person's sixties, then starts increasing again at about 70.

You wrote: 'whenever I hear someone say "most people don't understand privacy on Facebook" I call bullshit because my own mother is the counterexample.'

How is that a counterexample? Is she is representative of the majority? After all, if 80% don't understand privacy on Facebook (and I am one) then perhaps she's one of the 20%.

So if I understand Facebook privacy settings, and everyone I know well also understands and uses Facebook privacy correctly, and even the most non-technical person I know, my mother, also understands and uses Facebook privacy settings correctly...

Just exactly WHO are these mythical people who don't?

As I wrote, I'm one such person who does not understand and use Facebook privacy settings correctly.

Halloween will be much easier this year; I can come as a mythical creature without needing a costume!

I worry that the current attitude held by the "kids of today" is a knock-on effect of America's celebrity worship culture. I wonder how many of the girls that show up on "Girls Around Me" would, in response to suggestions that they should increase their security settings, claim: "But I can't reduce my visibility on Facebook...I'm going to be famous!"

Real human beings live complex lives in which they occupy different roles which are exposed to different people. Facebook tries to bundle everything up into one amorphous blob.

This is my biggest issue with Facebook. I was once a moderately active Facebook user, back when it was cool and before it became ubiquitous. Over the years, without really thinking about it, I've allowed my Facebook friends-list to accumulate dozens of extended (and my entire immediate) family as well as professional colleagues and many other miscellaneous acquaintances of various walks.

I was once fond of posting interesting articles and commentary, but now I am compelled to consider the politics/religion/sensitivities of ~250 individuals lest I end up in a flame war with my aunt or boss or individuals who I've been actively avoiding who are suddenly pissed because I made a FB post but didn't reply/comment/like their relationship status update.

Facebook has managed to make social interaction online more uncomfortable than real life, and as a result it's been over a year since I've made any type of visible activity on Facebook, but I still can't escape...

Socializing in the real world, I have to explicitly state things like: "Hey, please don't geotag me to this pub, and don't post pictures of me chugging this pint of Blue Moon".

In conclusion, fuck Facebook.

Delete your account?

Fair enough, and I've considered it, but deleting my account still doesn't prevent others from tagging and posting pictures of me for the benefit of those who can identify me through name or face alone. At least with an active Facebook account, I receive notifications whenever my likeness is invoked.

Additionally, Facebook has become the defacto communication platform of the day and not having one is sometimes viewed as a social red flag (or as a lie). My cellphone # has changed three times since 2004, but the respective Facebook query has only become better at finding me. My point being, "delete your account?" is something akin to "cancel your cell service?" except nobody calls and everyone uses Facebook.

You must have a strange social group. I don't have a facebook, and have never once had a problem in anything but other websites wanting me to have one. When friends ask for my facebook I say I don't have one, tell them I don't like their attitude towards privacy, they find it interesting and we move on.

You must have a strange social group.

Not everyone is as enlightened as your non-strange social group. One doesn't face ostracism for lack of a Facebook account, but a lot of real social interaction occurs on Facebook and I don't presume to judge those who highly value that interaction. Those people do exist and some of them are great people.

Facebook has privacy controls for preventing people from tagging you without permission, both in photos and geotagging.

Also, I finally think it's working. Previously when I tried to approve a tag of myself in a photo, FB wanted to change the privacy setting back to "anyone can tag you", but last week it seems to have worked without changing my privacy settings.

Also, I finally think it's working.

I see you've already anticipated my response. Beyond that, it seems like every six months or so I'll discover that some of my settings have been mysteriously reset during a site update or that the introduction/consolidation of new features results in a regressive behavior that I have to explicitly disable (since it's on by default).

Facebook privacy requires regular maintenance.

Ideally, I'd like a "no one can tag you and you will never be asked to approve a tag" setting, but I will give the approval option a go.

Delete all the users you don't like.

I don't think you are as well known as you claim to be. You are most likely just another face in a crowd.

Even if you are tagged in a picture, you most likely don't have an evil nemesis stalking you, looking for a point of weakness, biding his or her time to unleash the evil plot.

Or maybe you do. In that case let people know about it, so they won't tag you.

Key quote: "Unfortunately you don't need a special purpose tool like "Girls Around Me" to do this, if you have a reasonably powerful Facebook query tool and know how to use it. I can't stress this strongly enough: the problem was not invented by SMS Services O.o.o. of Russia, who wrote the app. And banning the app will not make the problem go away."

This is exactly what I was saying last night. There is much MORE information available than this app accesses. This is just one of the first times someone had put a particularly creepy wrapper on it.

Indeed. One can imagine an entirely different reaction if the app was called something like "Popular People Around Me" and had come out of the US startup community rather than Russia.

The whole purpose of FourSquare and Facebook is to show off information about yourself to other people. You sign up for FourSquare because you want to tell people where you are. You want other people to know where you are. You sign up for Facebook so you can show other people your photos and see other people's photos. You can talk to them, interact, and share your beliefs.

Both services make it possible to limit who this information is shared with. Saying "it's confusing" is a pretty poor argument as to why that makes these things creepy or dangerous. Most people WANT this information to be public. That's why they signed up for these services in the first place.

Personally, I feel MUCH safer that people know where I am and what I'm doing. If I ever go missing, there will be a solid documented trail of where I've been up until I go missing.

This notion that Facebook artificially suppresses the multiple "roles" (parent, teacher, officemate, spouse) people live in their real lives is a red herring. Stross tries to make a point by suggesting teachers don't want students to see into their private lives. Yes. And this is why teachers don't friend students on Facebook.

In reality, Facebook doesn't suppress those roles; it just doesn't support them (and when it comes close, perhaps accidentally, that's when Fb can start to get a little awkward --- like, my Dad is an Fb friend; but: some people have adult friendships with their parents! [My dad is still my dad]).

But most people do have a somewhat coherent role of "adult out in the real world interacting with peers, friends, and acquaintances in a social setting". It's the role you play when you go to a coworker's house party, or to a bar, or to the park. This is a huge part of most people's lives. Capturing it in social software is not a minor achievement.

The expectation that Facebook should do so much more than that, dividing people's lives perfectly into facets like "immediate family" and "work group", seems off. It may not even be possible. Just don't friend those people.

Exactly. For some people it makes sense to be Facebook friends with their parents, because they interact with them socially.

It probably never makes sense to be Facebook friends with your students, but then why would you want a relationship with them at all on any social network? It just doesn't seem like an appropriate forum for that relationship. It's not as if Facebook is meant to replace all communication online.

I agree with a lot of what Charlie says here, but on the other hand some of the privacy criticisms he makes about the app and Facebook are equally valid criticisms of walking outside in public: if you can tell what race I am by looking at my picture on Facebook you can also tell what race I am by looking at my face when you see me in person. I feel like that sort of throwing out arguments without considering them detracts from having a meaningful debate about real dangers to privacy that social media can pose.

There are two key differences between walking outside in public and disclosure on Facebook:

a) In public, observation is reciprocal (that is, you can see who is watching you) -- less universal in these days of CCTV, but traditionally this has generally been the case,

and

b) Public observation is real time and line of sight; FB "observation" may take place days, months or years later by persons you have never had an opportunity to see.

The long term consequences arising from these new constraints are not yet obvious.

Totally agree. While there are obviously some differences, I think blaming technology (i.e. Facebook) for horrible things that humans do is just silly. The problem is not that Facebook is making it easier for people to do bad things, the problem is that people do bad things.

The technology is here to stay. Information will be shared more easily in the coming years and it will only get easier to categorize people in the future based on their behaviors. So maybe instead of complaining about "bad companies" taking advantage of this, we should be encouraging people to be more accepting of differences. The problem isn't that a girl checked into a local bar. The problem is that someone wants to stalk/rape her. Scaring people into not checking in to somewhere (or not doing so publicly) is getting dangerously close to saying "well, she shouldn't have worn that short skirt if she didn't want to get hassled", which is a terribly flawed argument and ignores the actual problem.

There's an entire side of this that is overlooked whenever this debate pops up: All the freaks and geeks who thought they were alone because they were into different things can now find like minded people and know that don't have to feel alone. Look at the "it gets better" campaign. It's beautiful and has likely helped thousands of people. We should focus on the good stuff a little more often rather than focus on the potential bad stuff.

You can not however, make a database of all the people of a given race that currently live on a X mile radius of some given place by looking at them in person without a lot of time or trouble.

A fundamental part of charles' argument is that in order to sell ads, facebook must encourage you to set your profile settings to public. That's not the case. It doesn't matter whether you've set your profile to fully private - Facebook's privacy settings don't affect whether or not marketers can target you with ads. In fact, in that regard facebook is incented to protect your privacy so that you'll be comfortable putting more information in the site, which they can then use for better targeting. Since marketers don't get specific information about you when you're targeted, your privacy hasn't been breached in doing so.

This doesn't change that people should be very careful about their privacy settings, but the fact that facebook does targeted ads doesn't mean they have incentives to encourage you to make everything you post public.

“However, to make such micro-targeted advertising practical, the social networks need to motivate their users to disclose information relevant to advertisers. ”

This is what makes most complaints in the facebook-makes-money-off-of-you vein a complete misunderstanding of technology.

For the purposes of advertising, facebook does not need you to disclose relevant information to anyone but facebook. Advertisers need never come anywhere near that information. The data doesn't even need to be sent to them in aggregate. All advertisers need to do is say “I want to target this demographic”. They then need to get no data other than “someone from this demographic clicked on your ad”. That's it! Facebook has the data, facebook does the matching, facebook provides feedback in clicks—this, yes, in aggregate—and no other information needs to be exchanged.

There is a broader argument being made here, about exposing personal information and what have you, but facebook doesn't need you to make your information public so that advertisers can get to it, they want you to make your information public so that that guy you met at a party last night can find you, friend you, and start liking your posts, thus making you feel that your posts are getting more attention, thus making you feel good about yourself, thus making you want to post more, thus making others want to get on more to read your posts, etc, etc. Of course, they also want it public so that guy over there can look you up and see some of your pictures, even if he doesn't necessarily intend on friending you. That way, said guy is also on facebook, using it more than before.

So I would argue that how public information disclosure is on facebook is far more about retention and usage than it is about advertising. Advertising can be and, at least as far as my understanding of it goes, is done without having to disclose anything to the advertiser. And that's as it should be, since the technology lets them not leak that info. Why would they want to provide that information if they can achieve the same results without doing so?

With that in mind, I wish the facebook privacy argument would stop presenting advertiser information swapping as a real issue. There are reasons that privacy is an issue on facebook, foursquare, etc., (indeed, this app is an excellent example) but I don't think advertising is one of those reasons. That can be done with very little information revealed, even in aggregate.

(It's possible I missed a detailing somewhere of facebook explicitly exposing information to advertisers in a way different from what I mention above; if so, I'd love a link and I'll sit down and be quiet now :) It's also true that between fb advertisements and installing fb like buttons, it's possible to gather more data on a user than concentrating on advertisements alone. But that's a complaint about fb giving your information to apps, and while it's a lot harder to tease out the motivations there, I think they still derive a greater benefit from that in terms of retention and usage than they do in terms of advertising.)

This is correct: specifically, Facebook implements exactly the privacy people want for other people's information: that they should be able to access it at any time, for any reason, with no more than a mouseclick. FB users do not want to only be able to access information which has been specifically earmarked to them because that is not the FB value proposition for them and would result in 1/100th of the consumption. FB's privacy settings drive FB engagement, from whence all good things come to FB the company.

The discrimination possibilities are just as unsettling, even if they use the same privacy model.

Say I want to show an "ad" to white, heterosexual, protestant men with libertarian leanings, no history of depression, unlikely to use alcohol in their free time, who don't look pornography, and are predisposed towards compliance with authority currently employed in the technology industry earning over $150,000. Say my "ad" is for a high-paying job opportunity. Or housing. Facebook definitely has the ability to let me do this.

I find that unsettling, in that people can use Facebook to apply prejudices against information I'd prefer to keep hidden but that Facebook has inferred via data-mining even without knowing who I am or actually learning that information about me.

The "stalker" scenario presented here is certainly frightening (although as a heterosexual man I can only really understand the fear in the abstract), but the "reveals information I'd prefer to keep hidden to people with a financial motive for knowing it" scenario is already getting uncomfortable.

I'd rather have people discriminate against me before I meet them rather than after I meet them. It saves me time.

If I showed up to a job interview where someone wanted a "white, heterosexual, protestant men with libertarian leanings, no history of depression, unlikely to use alcohol in their free time, who don't look pornography, and are predisposed towards compliance with authority", it would be a strong disappointment for both of us. The problem is not targeted ads. The problem is that people suck.

Yesterday story about Gwen comes to mind:

http://raganwald.posterous.com/a-womans-story

In some cases, you are correct. For instance, if I am hiring someone to sell cars, I need a person who I can expect to be liked even by the most racist people.

But say that I am only slightly racist. If I knew you were Black, I probably would not go out of my way to say high to you. But once we are having a conversation it's easy for me to relate to you and my prejudices are more likely to be overridden.

I'd start with how good they are at sales. If you sell twice as many cars to everybody else, then why should you care if there are some bigots who don't buy your cars.

My biggest personal fear is the "history of depression" one, because I can plausibly conceal it (in fact, there are a number of laws to help me in doing so).

My standing question for the last several years has been "if we know absolutely everything about absolutely everyone, will some taboos disappear?" Depression is vastly more common than some people think, and if we're going to lose all privacy it'd be nice if we understood each other a little better.

True.

It's easier to fix people sucking if said suckage is easily observable though...

i don't disagree with what you say, but i worry that what you are implying is that people should be able to able to suck freely - not everyone is lucky enough to be able to have that attitude to discrimination.

Absolutely! Again, I'm not arguing that there are no privacy concerns overall, or that there are no misuses possible. Even when we don't intend on giving personal information, the data we provide random companies can be used to create ridiculous profiles of us, as the article on Target's (amongst others) use of behavioral profiling a few weeks ago demonstrated most compellingly. All of that data can be used in really creepy and problematic ways.

What I'm mostly saying is that a lot of the you-are-the-product hate is often presented hand-in-hand with “facebook just gives your information away to advertisers willy nilly so they can make money”, and I'm saying that's not really accurate. Facebook need you to stay on their site, so they get you to share information because that brings you and others onto the site. For advertising purposes, though, they don't have to give away any information, really. And at that point it becomes a matter of “do I trust Facebook with my information”, rather than trusting anyone advertising on facebook with it. This is a smaller question, so it is fundamentally easier to answer.

Now, the fb API of course expands the question to “do I trust facebook… Or any site I visit that uses the facebook API”. But still, there is a “me” component there—I have to visit those sites. This is still a potential problem, no question, but it is not the oft-presented specter of facebook sharing your private information with an arbitrary third party for the sole purpose of presenting advertisements on the site. That's the refrain I hear a lot that I wanted to say something about.

Libertarian leanings and predisposition towards compliance with authority?

And who don't look at pornography?

For the purposes of advertising, facebook does not need you to disclose relevant information to anyone but facebook. Advertisers need never come anywhere near that information.

Facebook's whole lever for motivating people to provide that information is so they can share it with their friends. Why would anyone fill out a demographic profile to be kept under lock and key by Facebook for advertisers?

Again, that particular sentence was specifically about advertising. Of course facebook wants you (and you want to) share that information with people other than facebook, otherwise you wouldn't be on the site. The question is whether they then turn around and feed your information to advertisers, and I don't think they do (or that they need to).

Advertising is Facebook's reason for being, but this story is about people over-sharing with other people (mediated through APIs). Advertising appears irrelevant, except insofar as it's Facebook's reason for being.

If Facebook did exactly as you suggest and walled off advertisers from all but aggregate user detail, it wouldn't have affected this app, or anyone using similar techniques.

(I haven't had enough coffee to think this through, so call me out if I'm dead wrong.)

Let's say Facebook (a) didn't offer advertisers direct personal information, only access to demographic profiles, and (b) set some minimal standard so that you can't target profiles that result in fewer than 15 people. (What's that data set that does that already?)

Can't a sufficiently large advertising aggregator run a sufficiently large set of multivariate ads, do Statistical Magic, and discover the real demographics of each of the users - at least enough to reassociate them with their real-world, extra-Facebook identity? Sure, they'd be violating ToS and probably various laws, but we're talking about attack surface, not public policy (yet).

This paper about "k-anonymity" and "privacy-preserving distributed protocol" might yield some clues, but my brain is fundamentally incapable of reading those once-"beautiful" LaTeX fonts. (I would pay good money for an app/Mechanical Turk/whatever that reprocesses text with a modern font.)

> I would pay good money for an app/Mechanical Turk/whatever that reprocesses text with a modern font.

How much?

I will re-write the paper for you using the font of your choice for one millon dollars.

Excellent! I will send you a PDF of the money as well.

Census information doesnt show small aggregates, although I think the cutoff is less than 15.

I agree with your analysis.

As an example, Google allow advertisers to target what people search for, without telling you who they are.

All social networks are based on our capacity to trust others. We trust social networks like facebook and foursquare not to abuse us with unwanted ads and we trust others to treat us and our information with respect. This "Girls around me" article is coming from a place of extreme fear.

The users of this app are most likely to be introverted young men rather than serial killers and rapists. It's impossible to hurt someone with an app so linking the existence of any app with the dangers of stalking, rape and murder seems to be fear mongering.

1) 'This is what makes most complaints in the facebook-makes-money-off-of-you vein a complete misunderstanding of technology. [...] For the purposes of advertising, facebook does not need you to disclose relevant information to anyone but facebook.'

You didn't understand cstross's sentence. He said that the social networks are motivating their users to disclose information [that is] relevant to advertisers; he didn't say that they are disclosing the information directly to advertisers.

2) Handwaving about applications and like buttons aside, it's pragmatically trivial through the facebook ecosystem to capture a great deal of data about individuals that they might not natively believe they are exposing. I know this because I personally do this (for benign reasons).

"The problem is this: all social networks run on the principle that if you're not paying for the product, you are the product."

I wonder what percentage of Facebook/Foursquare/etc users realize this?

You are a product to almost everybody who shows you pretty pictures or talks to you not asked. It's nothing unusual.

I signed up for Facebook back when it required you to have an email address associated with a university. I acquired my 300 or so friends, various extended family members (each of which in their own carefully crafted privacy circles) and an impressive collection of pictures of debauchery at various parties (ergo, the carefully crafted privacy circles)

The point a which FB became a $100 Billion entity is about when I realized that perhaps it was time to move on. This article was the catalyst that let me pull the rip cord and delete my Facebook account. All credit to Facebbok - they make it exceptionally easy to do. Took me all of 90 seconds (and most of that was deciphering a captcha).

I've switched Path with a much smaller group of five friends (funny how there were only five of the 300 i really felt the need to share with) - i'll hang out there until that becomes intrusive in some way I don't appreciate - who knows, maybe a rolling history of increasingly privacy oriented social networks is the way to go.

Maybe, one day, there will be a social network upon which, -I- am the customer. I would certainly pay for that service.

All credit to Facebbok - they make it exceptionally easy to do. Took me all of 90 seconds (and most of that was deciphering a captcha).

They seem to have a tendency to restore it if you so much as look at one of their buttons during the two week period after you "delete" it. Only after that it becomes "deleted".

Tangential to the actual topic of discussion:

what exactly has changed in Facebook's developer/app policies that an app like this is possible today, while a year ago something like Breakup Notifier was blocked from Facebook's API? Was it just that Girls Near Me hadn't gotten noticed yet?

(I see that Foursquare blocked Girls Near Me from their API, but I haven't seen a response from Facebook yet.)

is there any evidence that the loss of privacy is more than the gains we share from being open and sharing? is there any reason to believe that even such thoughtful posts about privacy will not look quaint and absurd in a couple of years? a loss in privacy is a gain in openness and understanding and thats why real (and much more often) hypothetical horrors aside it is an intrinsic and evolutionary trend for humanity.

"Or even just an unscrupulous ass-hat in search of a one night stand who isn't above researching his target's taste in music and drinks without their knowledge."

Why is he so up in arms about this? What's wrong with this behavior, other than that it is arbitrarily discouraged by most of our culture?

These women are making this information public. If some guy wants to try to use this publicly broadcast information to meet women and attempt to seduce them, who cares? Maybe she'll even enjoy the fact that the guy has bothered to find something common to talk about.

I think the implication is the guy doesnt actually share the interests but can pretend he does to appear like he has something in common with her. The tactic isnt new or anything, just a bit easier to pull off.

I think Charles is right to be concerned about the current state of privacy in social media, but I take issue with his statement that facebook is deliberately making it harder to make your content private. If you click on Privacy setting in facebook today the first thing you're greeted with is a big control asking you if you want your profile to be public /friends/custom. But first you have to care enough to click on it.

Building social network privacy controls is not an easy problem b/c people don't want to do the extra work that's involved in setting privacy on things that they post AND it's confusing. Most people just don't want to choose a circle for their 300 fb friends.

Facebook has gone through many iterations of privacy controls - https://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=391922327130 goes into some of that history. Some of them even included google circle-like functionality for privacy. No one used them.

I'm not saying that these controls couldn't be improved, but the point here is that privacy controls take work from users. Until society as a whole is aware of these issues (and Girls Around Me does a great job of it :), people aren't going to invest the time to do it.

TL;DR - building privacy controls are hard. The industry as a whole needs to improve them, but society also needs to learn to care about their privacy so they actually use what's available to them.

I initially thought that the app was an amusing attempt to point out how creepy fb and 4sq are.

EFF should build a MaxCreepOut app just to highlight the situation.

"It's probably possible to apply this sort of data mining exercise to determine whether a woman has had an abortion or is pro-choice."

Using a social graph to figure out if a user is pro-choice is probably not that hard. I'd love to hear how this guy is going to use it to determine if someone has had an abortion. But I'm afraid to know what assumptions he makes about women who have abortions in order to come to this conclusion.

Target was able to figure out when a woman had likely become pregnant. So it's probably not impossible to figure out when a woman has had an abortion.

Target is not a social network, but I will play along. Target was able to discern pregnancy because of purchases made or not made over a span of months, many months. In the case of abortion there is a significant motivation to not wait; namely abortion laws but also social stigma. Expectant mothers purchased folic acid and other vitamins. There is not a recommended vitamin routine for an abortion. The same thing can be said for many other purchases made by expectant mothers. How are you going to separate abortions from miscarriages?

I disagree with many of the arguments you make to support your theory, namely 1)the idea that the way users use Facebook wont evolve and get more sophisticated as they share more information, and 2) the idea that sharing more information about yourself even makes you more susceptible to stalker and hate crimes.

After I read your post, I went back up to the top re-read your proposal, which, in its simplest form, makes a the claim that reads: "Facebook-as-a-business will eventually kill the very users it needs to survive, because in order for Facebook to grow and profit, it will encourage users to share more about themselves with others, and as a result, users will share so much about themselves with others, (who they are, their interests, behavior, location) that they will become victims of crimes like rape, murder or even hate crimes and genocide.

This sounds outlandish, of not even a little silly. Surely, our acculturation with Facebook and the way we use it will evolve over time to protect our selves from this kind of thing from happening.

I may be way out here but, it's been mentioned that the data facebook holds that is publicly available could be used and mined to target certain groups of people...

Am I way out here in mentioning historical organisations that also stored masses of data on a population like the stasi (maybe extreme)?

I just find it extremely uncomfortable that people are so blasé about what they share on facebook. What worries me more is that I dont think people are ignorant of the privacy settings. Amongst my friends that do use it, they know, they just dont really care, purely because as some people have said it takes maintenance, makes it more difficult to connect with people or makes it impossible to be connected with...

I just find this whole culture of sharing intimate details with a) facebook and b) with each other, that we never really shared previously to be disturbing and the organisations that encourage this to be sinister.

I don't really like the whole privacy debate.

Should my safety rely mostly on the fact that people don't know anything about me?

I'd rather much prefer the world where me not being stalked relies not on the fact that my potential stalker knows nothing about me, but on the fact that everybody knows everything about my potential stalker.

I think that the world I'd prefer is where the technology currently drags us kicking and screaming.

In other words, "Screw privacy! If you're honest, you've got nothing to hide."

No. Rather "Screw privacy! Regardless of your honesty you'll eventually won't be able to hide anything. You might as well demand open access to this kind of information about everybody because some people will know those things about you."

Surely there's a point where you'd want it to stop, though, because it's too invasive? The only way to make sure we know everything about the potential stalker is to coerce everyone into frequently providing detailed information, since (I'm just guessing here) people that are inclined to be the most dangerous stalkers are not going to be obsessively updating Facebook with all the activities that would flag them as a stalker.

Just an information who accesses information about me would be a good thing. When, how often and exactly what information.

Also I'd like to see what other people say about the guy who accesses my information. And no stupid anti-defamation laws. I'll make up my own mind whether someone is slandered or just exposed.

Also you are on every security camera in public space. Why this information is allowed to be non public? I'd like to check out if anyone was following me.

Having peace of mind is a sort of safety.

And it doesn't really matter if someone is nervous about something for good or bad reasons.

Privacy in modern world doesn't give you peace of mind because it's so easily breached.

If the mere illusion of privacy gives someone peace of mind, who are you (or I) to tell them they can't have it?

What is a "reasonably powerful facebook query tooi"? Is this an app category that exists? Are there any good examples?

I wonder how many billions this app could drop off Facebook's IPO, if it either causes people to avoid sharing (unlikely) or brings in a heavy-handed regulatory response in an election year (much more likely).

FB should just buy the company to kill the product; would be cheap in comparison. 1% chance of 100mm loss would warrant it.

And about five minutes later, zillions of programmers would start writing similar apps, in hope of a big payday when Facebook shows up to buy them out.

Which would solve facebook's other problem (hiring).

How the hell does this have anything to do with the Rwandan genocide (linked in second paragraph)? I agree that this confluence of apps/search/sharing is potentially dangerous, but that kind of hyperbole doesn't help -- especially when it is a non-sequitur.

It's not a non-sequiteur; it's a hook for the last-but-one paragraph, which provides a rather more concrete example of how such tools might be misused in future.

I don't know, Charlie - yes, these tools can facilitate genocide, but we've shown ourselves to be pretty good at the genocide thing with a lot less sophisticated technology.

The next time we have a genocide, we'll use a lot of different tools to do it, maybe even iPhone applications and Facebook data, but I have a hard time believing the same horror wouldn't have occurred absent this information.

The problem isn't the app, and the problem isn't the behavioral targeting industry that encourages others to share. The problem is us. When one group of us makes up our minds to kill another group of us, it's going to happen whatever the technology at hand.

Why do you need an app to find girls AROUND YOU! I find them around me all the time.

Am I the only one who thinks the saddest part of all this is the fact that people immediately jump to the conclusion of "OMG STALKERS AND RAPISTS!"? We're addicted to worst-case thinking. We see men as aggressors and dangerous, and we reinforce notions of "weak" members of society (i.e. women and children) needing to be hidden away in what we perceive as safety.

You're not the only one.

What's a bit silly is the idea that there's someone sitting at home wishing to perform a stalking or rape, but is prevented from doing so by the lack of an app for that.

What's a bit silly (actually idiotic) is your second sentence. No one is claiming that stalking or rape is impossible without these apps, they are saying such apps makes life easier for stalkers and rapists.

It seems unlikely that social media has had a significant effect on making rape easier because rapes in the US been declining for a while now.

actually idiotic

Take that attitude elsewhere.

No one is claiming that stalking or rape is impossible without these apps

And nobody was claiming that anyone was making that claim.

If you're going to call someone an idiot, you should really be more careful with what you subsequently write.

8% of women have been stalked in their life. http://www.musc.edu/vawprevention/research/stalking.shtml

Between 15 and 20% of women have been raped in their lifetimes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_in_the_United_States - (now, this gets complicated due to under reporting, and that most rape is done by someone known my the attacker.)

I would say it is a legitimate concern.

Stalkers and rapists don't need these tools to ply their 'trade', they're fine with existing resources. New resources such as the app in question do not magically turn normal people into stalkers and rapists.

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