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Comment by potatolicious | Hacker News Reader

> "Nothing good can come out of applying dumb algorithms (that is, any algorithm) to a sufficiently rich "social graph""

These aren't algorithms. This is a search engine - what you put into it is up to you. It can be anywhere from the silliness seen in the link, to "friends who live in London" before you take a trip.

This is just handing people another tool - the uses, and misuses, of said tool are entirely on the users.

> " If you think about who the average Facebook employee is, you'd realize that you probably wouldn't want them to be in charge of designing a system meant to model the intricacies of human interaction."

A snarky and mean-spirited stereotyping of all nerds as socially inept! How clever.

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  | This is just handing people another tool - the uses,
  | and misuses, of said tool are entirely on the users.

The same applies to building hand-held nuclear weapons and handing them out on a street corner.

The same could be said of convincing people to put CCTVs in their houses and then hooking them all up chatroullete-style.

That doesn't mean that it's a good idea.

  | A snarky and mean-spirited stereotyping of all
  | nerds as socially inept! How clever.

I see it more as Mark Zuckerberg having lived a rather sheltered life. E.g., his view that people having different 'faces' with different people as being disingenuous is laughable. Many people only show selected parts of themselves to certain peer groups, while showing other parts to different peer groups.

That, and I assumed the 'average Facebook employee' part was assuming that they were all 20-somethings from (on average) middle-class or above backgrounds (i.e. possibly sheltered and lacking in life experience).

Maybe because I am also a "20-something", but I do not see how Zuckerburg/facebook employees being "sheltered" (I don't know why you asserted that, unless you went to high school with him) has anything to do with Social Graph.

1.) The fact that they had this information is not surprising at all. Again maybe because I am a 20-something, I think its pretty obvious that if you had terabytes of data you would want to search it.

2.) While many people do show different parts of themselves to certain peer groups, the data Facebook has was posted to Facebook. Facebook did not install a CCTV in anyones home and log their guilty pleasures. This gets parroted a lot, but if you don't want someone to find out you love Lifetime originals, don't post it on facebook. It won't end up in the graph, and you can continue playing your identity game.

GuiA answered your question above: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5101237

  | Facebook did not install a CCTV in anyones home and log
  | their guilty pleasures. This gets parroted a lot, but if
  | you don't want someone to find out you love Lifetime
  | originals, don't post it on facebook.

You're either misreading my post or being disingenuous. I said:

  | The same could be said of convincing people to put CCTVs
  | in their houses

I could easily just say, "If you don't want people to see what you do, then don't allow a CCTV into your house." You're acting like CCTVs are by definition involuntary.

People put most things into Facebook because they don't understand the real implications of it. They say, "I like Lifetime originals," because they want their friends to know that, or because they view Facebook's profile questions like a survey. Most of these people are techno-illiterate (including the newer generations which are just more adept at using/consuming tech than their parents).

>A snarky and mean-spirited stereotyping of all nerds as socially inept! How clever.

Not at all. I'm just willing to bet that the average Facebook employee has never had to hide his sexuality/political/religious beliefs for fear of execution/incarceration/abuse to his family/etc. Yet a non-negligible part of Facebook's user base are people precisely in this situation.

That being said, the very fact that you call what the link demonstrates "silliness" speaks for itself.

I think by 'silliness' he's referring to "Girls who live nearby who are single and like Getting drunk!" Fair call in my opinion.

I made this point in another post: the take-away from this link shouldn't be how bad it was of Facebook to not realise that making available powerful search tools for already-public data might put some people in an unfortunate spotlight. The real take-away is that we shouldn't live in a world where people should be scared to be openly gay in Iran, or openly a Falun Gong member in China. Those are the things we should focus on and try and change. And we should appreciate, rather than chastise, the tools which make us realise that there are things we need to improve in the world.

> we shouldn't live in a world where people should be scared to be openly gay in Iran, or openly a Falun Gong member in China. Those are the things we should focus on and try and change.

Right. Wonderful. How?

How should I know?

You could watch The Ascent of Man by Jacob Bronowski.

Sounds interesting. Any reason in particular you're recommending it?

Well, it's fantastic, but what makes it germane here is because the author/narrator switched from being a mathematician/physicist to a biologist mid-career because he saw no other way to continue working on nuclear physics without causing more harm. Several other physicists of that era did.

We are to some extent liable for the ill perpetrated by other people using our technology. The extent is debatable, but it must be greater than "not at all."

Bought this series on DVD recently, only watched a few episodes but it really is great. His presenting style leaves a little to be desired but this is a man of extraordinary intelligence and breadth of knowledge.

If anyone is wondering on the subject matter, it plots of the ascent of man not in terms of biological evolution but cultural evolution - which seems to me to be an oft overlooked facet of how we came to be.

So in the mean time it's ok that this sort of tool is freely accessible to make it real easy to persecute them?

This isn't an opportunity for wishful thinking. Read about what's happened to Walid Husayin, a Palestinian man from the West Bank, since blogging openly about being an atheist:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walid_Husayin

All the stuff he's gone through—death threats, imprisonment, torture—has been for the sole "crime" of apostasy.

This graph search is going to enable sadists to lower their bar for finding victims from "people who openly and loudly proclaim their beliefs" to "people who accidentally clicked 'like' or forgot to fix their privacy settings." I have some difficulty deflecting the blame for Walid's treatment to simply being born on the wrong side of a fence. He may have known better, or perhaps he is on a crusade for religious freedom, but it's going to get a lot harder when we start talking about people with no interest in being martyrs being tortured and killed for this great cause of openness and improving the world.

I can see your point. I'm not saying it's a pleasant prospect to consider. I do consider these sorts of things inevitable teething pains of a one-way process though. Perhaps that seems a little harsh.

I'm not sure what you mean by "one-way process." I think there are certainly situations where bad things happen yet nobody is responsible and nothing needs to be done differently. I do think randomness plays a big role in my arriving at that conclusion, and I don't see a very big role for randomness in the potential abuses of graph search.

Often the best first step to stop something evil is to remove the tools that make evil's job easier. In this case Facebook is facilitating persecution by making better and better tools to filter data on a large number of people simultaneously. If you want persecution to stop you can't just automatically absolve Facebook of responsibility for the consequences of the design choices they make. Sure people should be careful about what they post online but Facebook and the companies advertising on it offer incentives to get people to do it. Past 'likes' will now be easily accessible forever. It isn't only what you've put on your profile, inferences can be drawn based on the information about your friends. If all your friends are openly gay but you don't want others to know you're gay it can now quickly be deduced with a search.

>And we should appreciate, rather than chastise, the tools which make us realise that there are things we need to improve in the world.

What? Of course we all want the world to be a better place, but Facebook has no right to put people's lives in danger to try and force the issue. If they're so worried about making the world a better place they should do it themselves, not just open the flood gates on their users.

> I'm just willing to bet that the average Facebook employee has never had to hide his sexuality/political/religious beliefs for fear of execution/incarceration/abuse to his family/etc. Yet a non-negligible part of Facebook's user base are people precisely in this situation.

And how is that different from real-life?

This is a tool that lets you search data, some of which was collected on a false(or dishonest) expectation set by facebook that the data will not be searchable in this manner. That is a violation of trust. I say this as a huge fan and user of facebook's privacy features.

In most cases, I am arguing on the other side telling people how misinformed they are when they complain about a lack of privacy features. But this feature even has me blindsided and I am someone who uses almost all facebook privacy features very carefully(I have posts visible to Public to posts visible to only selected people, for example).

I fully expect a new set of privacy controls from facebook specifically around this feature.

The Facebook Graph Search article making the rounds mentions that (a) posts are not searchable at this time, and (b) FB is launching a suite of new privacy settings for Graph Search.

Here's a link:

http://www.wired.com/business/2013/01/the-inside-story-of-gr...

This tool is part of a much larger machine that may actually affect society more than it serves it.

What exactly do you mean by that?

I assume something like:

The social implications (for good or ill) are greater than the immediate, personal benefits are (in aggregate).

I think socialization under the umbrella of a facebook type environment will eventually create predictable and malleable identities which are inherently the consequence of a mix of various societal pressures which are in turn constricted through the lens of the facebook environment.

Combine that with facebook's transparent use of corporate cohabitation with people's relationships, and I think you quickly have a society which is much more determined and artificial.

I think "socialisation under the umbrella of a facebook type environment" was inevitable one way or another. The advantages of an efficient system for socialising with a centralised online persona system are just too huge to forgo. I'd be interested to hear what you consider might have been alternatives, but personally, I think the economics lead inexorably to a free-to-play ad-supported system such as Facebook. Show me the day when you can convince a couple hundred million people to sign up for a paid social network product and I'll eat my hat. Show me the day that an open-source community can compete with a for-profit business in terms of attracting the best talent willing and able to slave away for hours to build great products, and I'll eat my hat.

I don't think it means the end of individuality as we know it. We've had ad-supported newspapers for hundreds of years now and people seemed to manage okay.

I think you can create services which achieve the same function as facebook while making a dispersion of self and novelty apparent to its users. I'm not arguing monetization, but the means and consequences of exploiting users responsibly.

Yet again, I struggle to make sense of what exactly you're trying to say. You're using a lot of big words, but not necessarily making your point clear. What does "making a dispersion of self and novelty apparent" mean?

The ability to express your self uniquely among different groups of people without residual consequences, and the ability to explore disparate interests in the same way.

But what about free ponies?

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