Show HN: Hush, an "incognito mode for Facebook" | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Hush, an "incognito mode for Facebook"

hush.sh

21 pointsdarora36 comments

I use an incognito mode for Facebook. It's called not having a FB account and not allowing any javascript from their domains to run in my browser. Just quit FB if you care about your privacy.

Why go to such lengths to avoid being exploited by a service designed to exploit you? Just stop using it.

I'm sorry, it's a bit early in the morning for me. I browsed the 'about' page and could not understand what the application DOES. I am not about to log into facebook through some application somebody put up randomly on the internet just yet, simply to see for myself. So, to get me started what does this application do? Thanks!

Well, quite simply, you can anonymously[1] discuss things with your Facebook friends (or the whole world, if you'd like).

[1]: That is, apart from the login and pulling in your list of friends so as to populate your "Friends' feed", we don't use Facebook IDs or names at all.

Thanks. What is the identity that shows up on the friend's feed? Is it a constant one so that it can be blocked if needed? If one of your friends goes 'rogue' and starts to spam/harrass you through this will you have to systematically unfriend everyone till you find the culprit?

Why would you want to have an anonymous conversation on facebook anyway? Sorry, don't get it.

The friends' feed (or any other place, for that matter) doesn't show any identities.

For "rogue" friends, we have on our roadmap a mechanism to "flag" users for a review of their postings. That'd trigger an admin banning them if necessary.

The facebook component, is intended to be for a couple of things. Firstly, to allow you to restrict your discussion to just your friends (there are several scenarios in which you'd like their opinions, but you suspect they might not be completely honest with you if you knew who they were). Second, it allows us to be able to keep out bots en masse. The assumption being, of course, that Facebook polices its user-base to keep them out. In turn, the general quality of the discussions stays decent (well, for an anonymous platform, at least).

What's with the astro-turfing comments in this thread?

This is the second time I've seen astro-turfing on HN in as many weeks. On the following thread there were hilariously bad (registered within the hour, first comment on the product "wow great!") fake accounts.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4682896

I'm pretty sure the web is already full of anonymous forums where you don't have to give up your identity by signing in with Facebook.

True, but this is for people who want to be anonymous on facebook.

The idea is, that you want to make statements, but you want people you know to hear them as well. That's why we use facebook's social graph. :)

True. Our reasons for using Facebook were twofold-

* It enables you to talk to your FB friends--a group whose opinion that you probably care about & respect--anonymously, so that they don't have to hold back or sugarcoat things.

* It enables us to ensure a reasonably decent quality on the service, by [hopefully] avoiding too many bots or trolls.

The contrast and font size of this site are a total disaster, my eyes are bleeding.

What I'd really like is an extension for a Facebook "read-only" mode, so I can leave myself logged in without worrying about accidentally clicking a "like" button somewhere.

By logging with fb, your app will have at least my user id and email. Any data breach on your side and all the "anonymous" posts are not so anonymous anymore.

We can assure you from our side, that the way the app is structured, no part aside from login, uses facebook's user ids. We've tried to be very strict about that.

How do you filter my "own" posts without correlating my Facebook id with a post-author id?

All user associated data uses our own user ids, not facebook's ids. That includes post author ids.

Your system seems to be able to correlate the FB id and user id on login to filter my own posts and aggregate my friends postings.

Am I wrong to assume that this ability might enable de-anonymization of postings after a server compromise?

No, you're correct in that assumption.

In case of a complete server breach, that would indeed allow for de-anonymization of posts.

Most people won't understand what "Flavoured Markdown" means.

you should give the possibility to sign up without a facebook account.

To be honest, without the facebook integration of being able to talk to _your friends_, there are-as has been pointed out-far too many anonymous forums already.

And that's ok. But you'd like to test:

1) how many people would sign up without a facebook account? 2) how many of them could you "convert" and sign-in again with facebook? (saying something like "ok..now, how about you use your facebook account to [blabla] with your friends on facebook?

I'd say people are more willing to give it a try and see how it looks without passing facebook credentials first... That's just my hint..

Hmm. I'm beginning to suspect that you're right. We'll be looking into implementing this. Thanks

4chan with facebook login?

now we can all bitch about that friend together digitally.

pretty cool idea :D !

i say Yes.

nice work!

Super awesome! Finally I can express my opinions without offending sponsors and the like.

Awesome idea! Now I can make honest comments and opinions that won't offend the wrong people!

Did you just make two separate comments praising this, both within two minutes of registering?

There look to be a lot of new accounts all praising this.

My suspicion is that he got too used to hush...

Possibly some astroturfing to get this pushed to the front page.

Edit: Which has apparently worked.

Sorry about that. I'm new to this and it looked like my first posting did not get through so I posted again. My bad.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com