Creating Victims And Then Blaming Them | Hacker News Reader

Creating Victims And Then Blaming Them

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16 pointssalimane24 comments

I think the author makes a very very important point. The entire issue needs to be viewed from the perspective that a user is not equal to his data. Every facebook user shares his/her information with varying intents and motivation. People maintain a fairly public facebook profile say for potential employers, old friends etc.

We are NOT as privacy-illiterate as we are made out to be in recent articles about Girls around me. For instance, I recently applied to YC and enlisted my Facebook profile. And, I have been posting a lot of public content with that very intention in mind for months now.

I came across another instance of this when I was trying to "teach" my sister the importance of heightened privacy. She plainly refused as she often needs to plan open events and she needs to put up a lot of her information public.

We need to understand that just as you cannot ask women not to go out for fear of stalkers, you cannot ask people not to share information publicly. In fact, we need to keep up with the shift in social media to increase law-enforcement. Girls Around Me is a clear violation of the intention with which millions share their information publicly.

I think we need to standardize and associate User Intents as a first class attribute to a user's data. And find and penalize miscreants like Girls Around Me who violate the intention associated with people's information.

Sweet idea, can you add this intent tort liability to the TOS of your startup? I doubt any lawyer would ever abuse such a provision to sue you into oblivion.

Maybe the responsibility and the legal loopholes of such a possibility are too high. But that does not absolve social networks and the like to acknowledge the fact that people have an associated intent with what they share online. It is their responsibility to guard their users' intent and motivations at all times.

In fact, I'd be ready to accept your challenge. I can risk a lawsuit in order to protect my users. After all, when have patent trolls ever stopped passionate people from creating amazing products?

The issue is though is that people think that a different level of privacy should be associated with their data than their friends data.

For various reasons for the last few months I've been considering disconnecting entirely. I lived before facebook/twitter and I'm sure I'll survive after them. I can't really think of anyway that facebook/twitter actually makes my life better in aggregate.

Why is it essential to my life that I see every stupid meme?

Why is it essential to my life that I heard about every political travesty in the world?

Does it really affect my life? What benefit do I gain from knowing these things?

I agree. The way people evaluate the importance of other people's information is so damn skewed. It's a social problem and it has nothing to do with just privacy.

> Does it really affect my life? What benefit do I gain from knowing these things?

For instance, what harm is there otherwise? In fact if you come to think of it, a main reason why you would want to disconnect is the prevalence of people ready to take you for granted. This cannot be avoided entirely but we can atleast make sure things like Girls Around Me don't thrive.

> Because to me there are two perpetrators in situations like these. Those who committed the crime, obviously, but also those who make apps like Girls Around Me

I have no moral problem with considering the Girls Around Me devs to be at fault, but in practice it's like getting angry with individual spammers. It's futile. Pretty soon others will leap onto the publicity created by the furore and create something functionally equivalent. It seems to me the practical approaches to improving the situation are a) Embarrass Foursquare, Facebook et al into not sharing the info, b) Educate people into being more careful what they put online or c) Work on alternative social networking infrastructure that's more respectful of people's privacy. Whether or not we get upset at the Girls Around Me people is just a distraction.

> in practice it's like getting angry with individual spammers. It's futile.

Completely agree. In fact, I think the author makes that point later in the article too. What is worth highlighting is the fact that "Educate people about privacy" cannot work. People share things publicly with a lot of different motivations. A potential employer may be interested in where we usually travel to but so would a stalker too.

Instead of trying to discourage people from sharing such info, I think we need to standardize the associated intent with a user's data. Most of us won't be bothered by targeted ads but anyone surely will be about Girls Around Me.

> "Educate people about privacy" cannot work

I agree that it's unlikely to fix the problem in its entirety, but I'm a bit short of easy fixes and I still think it's an important thing to do. And, although it's a politically fraught area, I'm pretty adamant that we should not always conflate explaining the world's hazards with blaming people for shitty stuff that happens to them.

Indeed, it is a very important thing to include a mature explanation of privacy and it's importance in education. What I meant was that this is not going to fix this problem. We need to figure out ways to stop the misuse of user data.

Why? If you don't like it, don't use it.

Besides if somebody wanted to rape a chick he/she wouldn't need this app. They could simply wait outside close to where drunk girls would be likely to be.

> They could simply wait outside close to where drunk girls would be likely to be.

Hold on. What do you mean by that?

This is clearly a horrible violation of people's integrity and privacy. It's not about "chicks" getting raped. Would you wait for a Nerds around me and see people getting bashed by goons just like that?

It's a serious threat to people's security if it makes it easier to stalk unsuspecting people. Maybe I just misunderstood you but wouldn't the threat of just a single incident facilitated by such an app be enough to reconsider the importance of privacy?

No I would consider the rapist a rapist and, after he had his day in court, see him dragged of to a prison for a very, very long time.

As for the nerd basher, I would expect the same treatment.

It is not about the app, but the criminal. It is about accepting responsibility for ones actions.

And yes, I would say they have every right to make a nerd basher app, if they want to (although I guess they are less likely to have open facebook profiles).

I guess I did misunderstand you then. You're right. A rapist won't probably need this app. All I was trying to say is that leaving the rapist issue aside, this app is misusing unsuspecting people's privacy and personal info.

Just because the data is publicly available, it does not warrant such misuse.

Read through this twice and still don't get the point he's trying to make.

Nothing I've read about the Girls Around Me coverage treats the women in a patronizing tone. If anything the question is more along the lines of "D'you think they know this can happen? Can it happen with my info?"

Sure, you can point the finger at the app developers but there's a certain amount of personal awareness and responsibility that people need to develop. Social-sharing is moving faster than most people are able to comprehend. Anything that encourages discussion is a good and useful thing in my view

I think you're right about the patronizing tone. Most responses to this issue are plainly trying to raise the possible security implications of such misuse of publicly available user information.

Other than that, I think the author makes a strong case for people sharing their info publicly. Yes, they need to be aware about the implications but efforts MUST also be made to find and penalize apps that clearly misuse the data and violates people's intentions with which they shared the info in the first place.

But any such app is just an UI for presenting the data available for everyone. What if this app is just a open source UI with instructions on how to fit your own API key ? Finding and penalizing such apps would serve nothing.

The only solution to this is awareness on the users part and nothing else.

Just a UI? Maybe.

But every application has a specific action. See data is just well, data. What you do with it defines your application. Take something non-intrusive for a change, say the books a bookstore sells most. There's a wealth of information there. We could predict locally trending topics or the most common problems students face. But you could also predict what kind of audience the bookstore receives. It may not sound that creepy unless you find that the store gets a lot of depression related sales. That could get creepy very fast.

> The only solution to this is awareness on the users part and nothing else.

Awareness is extremely important even vital. But that is not it. Thousands of Girls Around Me apps probably exist and it is fairly possible though tough to find them. All I am saying is that efforts should be made in that regard as well.

>> But when I hear people proclaim the importance of educating these presumably ignorant young women about the dangers of Facebook, it is just a little too close to comfort to those seeking to educate women about the dangers of hemlines that end above the knee.

People do need to be educated about the implications of using social services on the internet. It's our responsibility as consumers and citizens to know what we are getting ourselves into.

Mind you, this doesn't just apply to women - but the safety concerns are greater than for men. No amount of moralistic hand-wringing will change the fact that a woman faces a slew of security challenges that men rarely even contemplate.

I don't get how they are perceived as victims in this case. It would require some harm to come to them and in that case it didn't matter is some app was involved or not.

The harm would matter and guess what, we already have laws for that. It doesn't matter whether you killed a guy with your car, a gun, a bow, an axe, a piece of wood or you computer. What you will be punished for is killing him.

And there is no blame here. Only consequences. If you share your information it may be used by third-parties for purposes that you don't much like. If you jump out of a 3th floor window, you may die. We don't have a problem with telling people that they shouldn't jump out of buildings.

Stating that there is likely to be some consequence for a particular action -- whether it is going down to the shady side of town, running in an old abandoned building or eating twenty pizzas a week -- doesn't mean blaming the people involved. A rape victim doesn't deserve being raped, but the chances are higher if she is in a particular place.

The truth of the matter is all of us are far more risk from the people we know than the people we don't.

If you don't like this app and don't like the people behind it, stop making sure that every person who might be interested in it hears about it so they can add it to their phone. I wonder how much bank the devs are making from all this free press.

Maybe there are muggers and robbers and stalkers looking for me on this app, I'm not going to think about it for more than a half second. You should really fear getting cancer, or getting in a car accident, or even getting the flu, not being accosted by random people from the internet. Random people from the internet is not a statistically significant source of crime or harm to people, and this app isn't going to do anything to change that.

> If you don't like this app and don't like the people behind it, stop making sure that every person who might be interested in it hears about it so they can add it to their phone.

It's not about free press for the devs as you make of it. I bet this app must have been doing rounds at anonynous image boards, porn sites and the like since the day it was launched. The Girls Around Me coverage is instead actually bringing to light the intense security threats such misuse of data can bring.

Merely 48 hours since these reports surfaced, the app has been yanked from the app store and its access to Foursquare data turned off. That says something about the need to bring these things to light. People who want it will find a way to get it anyway.

I understand the app's Foursquare API access has been withdrawn, so presumably it won't work anymore. On the other hand this kind of app probably looks like a pretty appealing prospect for unscrupulous app developers right now.

The app doesn't even work and people are still talking about it? That's insane.

Yeah, you could probably make one called Gold Digger that finds eligible bachelors. Maybe narrow it down to all the guys in your area with an LLB/MBA?

> The app doesn't even work and people are still talking about it? That's insane.

I disagree.

The app has raised awareness of some serious issues which already existed before the app was created and still exist after it stopped working. We should absolutely be discussing them. The fact that another app just like it can, and probably will, be created tomorrow is exactly why this is getting so much attention.

Rightly so, in my opinion.

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