SocialCam's shady secret | Hacker News Reader

SocialCam's shady secret

mgalligan.com

54 pointslleims14 comments

While we're here, let me just say what I've been thinking for weeks: I hate all these apps and sites whose default behavior is to post which videos/articles a user has viewed without some sort of explicit, per-video or per-article intent to share on the users part. That, in and of itself, is shady. I will remember negatively every brand who has chosen to do this. It doesn't matter that the user installed an app that technically gives the them permission to do it. I'd venture to bet that every single time I've seen this sort of stuff in my timeline, it was totally unintentional.

The best paradigm is for people to specifically share when they want something shared. No one cares what someone is watching generally. Just because they watched it doesn't mean it's worth sharing. It's different when someone watches something and then "likes" it or chooses to share it with their friends.

Because of underhanded news sites and services like SocialCam, it's become my advice to everyone I talk to: "If you don't understand how the technology you're using works, don't do or read anything on the Internet you wouldn't mind everyone on Facebook knowing about." That's a sad place to be.

The concerned geek in me agrees with you on all counts, but I'm afraid this should never be taken as universally true. BUT, I do remember a time when that was not an issue I cared about. I loved the fact that e product knew exactly what it wanted to do– if I liked it, I didn't have to do anything and it would integrate. That was awesome. It's only years later with the realization that all of this data exists somewhere and can be used in nefarious (or really, just annoying) ways– that I began to care. Most of my non-tech friends think the same way. They assume that it's an app on facebook, why wouldn't it tell people what I'm doing?. They're still sensitive to more 'traditional' privacy– i.e. talk to your ex in MESSAGES, not on your wall– but everything else is a feature that is genuinely desired. The devil's advocate says that those who care should either know to turn it off, or be more discriminating with the toys they play with.

I can't stand Social[Cam|Reader] style apps. I've always found it to be rather annoying to click on an article or video shared on Facebook, only to be told I need to grant permissions to an app. It just motivates me to hide all posts from those apps.

I was pretty excited about SocialCam when they first launched, and sad when I saw "OMG SEE THIS" type videos spreading via their app on FB.

Why can't we have an instagram of video? It sucks to see my friends tricked into clicking on racy videos on FB and sharing them accidentally, a group of folks as awesome as the SocialCam team shouldn't have to resort to this type of trickery.

SocialCam posted a comment on the blog: "Matt - please recheck this - we have pushed a fix to correct this problem. If you turn off Social Mode in the app it should remain off the next time you open the app."

I have to say I am a bit skeptical if this was truly a "fix" or a "rollback" of a feature.

I've seen these show up on my facebook feed as well. I'm curious, did they cut some sort of biz-dev deal with facebook to keep the proliferation of spam going? It seems like app spam has all but dropped off of facebook recently, I'm curious how socialcam is able to make it through the filter.

Edit: This is anecdotal of course.

I very much doubt that any deal was cut. It just seems that Facebook's algorithms are constantly adjusted.

As far as I know they don't have any special deals. They use the open graph "watch" action, and when you install the app you give it permission to post this action (it is the publish_actions permission). What you are seeing on the feed are aggregations of that action. They also show up in the ticker.

As an aside, I do know that Pinterest is allowed to do somethings that other apps are not. I've heard that there are some feature whitelists, and it looks like Pinterest was whitelisted for at least one of them (the ability to send a message to more than one recipient).

Beyond SocialCam, this feature of facebook is absolutely pathetic. I spent many hours trying to figure out why some mildly explicit story I read on HuffPo was showing up on my activity feed when my sister viewed my profile. The same activity did not appear when I viewed my profile.

What really upset me is that if I used the "View Profile As..." feature and picked my sister, the same item would not show up. As I tried to figure out to remove the item, I had to call my sister each time to see if it still appeared. Ultimately, I could not remove it even though I removed almost every possible app. More importantly, I lost faith in the "View Profile As..." feature. If it is not going to be accurate, it's better to just not have that feature.

I really hope facebook takes this privacy stuff way more serious than all other features. I can imagine a nightmare scenerio where an app with permission sells itself to a porn site which starts auto publishing shitty stories.

Whenever you authenticate an app in Facebook that can post to your feed, there is a drop down that lets you choose who can see your activity with the app. I always choose "just me" because of actions of apps like this. It's become the norm not the exception to auto share.

Facebook should add a clause to their ToS saying apps must actively ask for permission before posting. Twitter has done this and while there are a few bad smaller players, on the whole you don't see most apps using these spammy techniques.

A SocialCam employee stated on this post that this has been fixed, not much info besides that. I wonder when this fix happened though.

Halon's Razor is appropriate here. Before everyone gets up in arms, this is probably a bug.

after I saw that it was posting to my facebook stream, I immediately deleted the posts and removed socialcam's permission to do so.

unfortunately most people who use it don't know how to do either. I should post a how-to for my fb friends :)

This seems like it could have easily been a bug. I don't think that SocialCam is intentionally deceiving their users.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com