Comment by achompas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by achompas | Hacker News Reader

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Nothing good can come out of applying dumb algorithms (that is, any algorithm) to a sufficiently rich "social graph"; it will always lead to situations like that which are, at best, embarrassing, and at worst, dangerous, for whoever is in the system.

What does this even mean? The "dumb algorithm" here will (a) take a user's query and (b) search that user's friends and public profiles for hits on that query. What's next: shouting about the robots taking over? Lamenting about how we're all losing our humanity and man weren't things better back in the old days?

I'm really disappointed this is the top comment on HN's top post. Users identified by Graph Search have public accounts and have willingly entered personal information into Facebook. We go thorough this song-and-dance every year: FB updates security policies, everyone is up in arms, then -- gasp! -- everyone updates their security settings. Facebook has a clear transaction with users: build a profile, get sold as eyeballs to advertisers. If you don't like it, then quit.

"With great power comes great responsibility," indeed. People have received numerous warnings about Facebook and privacy, and yet they've chosen to share personal information with everyone they know. At this point the user is responsible for choosing to participate or drop out. Meanwhile, every third HN post includes a commenter, wagging their finger, reminding us in a nasally, know-it-all voice that we're not the customer if we're not paying.

Is Graph Search really that shocking to you--to anyone on HN? Why the hell is anyone up in arms about this in 2013, given what we know about social networks?

If you fail to see the danger that a tool with the ability to search a network for such things as "Islamic men interested in other men, living in Tehran," a tool that can then display their place of work or other contact details (that they may have willingly ((yet unwittingly)) entered), in the hands of bullies, bigots or oppressive regimes then personally I feel you are similarly limited in your world experience to what the grandparent poster is accusing Zuckerberg of being.

Basically, it's one of two things:

1.) such incredible naiveté that, frankly: you require supervision

2.) such hideous cynicism, so deeply felt, that it represents, to my sensibilities, a form of evil

This thing is dangerous. The people to whom it poses danger are the ones least likely even to comprehend the danger imposed upon them.

I cannot see how you could defend such a thing.

BTW: decrying the state of HN when you feel personally ill at ease with the general feeling of the community is poor form and a very strong indicator of butthurt.

Here's a thought: If you live in a country where people are summarily executed for being gay, don't put "I'm gay" on a public website with your name on it.

YES people should be allowed to be gay in Tehran, and YES Facebook should help them with that - and they do: By not requiring you to enter your sexuality.

I don't live in Tehran, so I am privileged here - but if I put "I did tax fraud, I win!" on my public Facebook profile, and the tax authorities decided to investigate me, anyone suggesting that I didn't bring that upon myself, frankly required supervision. Even if I did it on my closed Facebook profile and a "friend" decided to report me, it's still not Facebook's fault.

> YES people should be allowed to be gay in Tehran, and YES Facebook should help them with that - and they do: By not requiring you to enter your sexuality.

Forget about being gay in Tehran. How about being gay in cyberspace?

It strikes me that you are of the belief that cyberspace ought to mimic life in meatspace directly. That one fixed identity should be all a person is entitled to.

What a waste of so many wonderful possibilities!

Cyberspace and the promise of a digital space in which to express abstract selves is something precious that is to be protected.

I believe this and I believe that exposing innocents to those running at a deficit of scruple for personal enrichment is evil.

> It strikes me that you are of the belief that cyberspace ought to mimic life in meatspace directly.

If it's a problem that Facebook uncovers someone who's gay in Tehran, then that is only because that persons cyberspace identity mimics his meatspace one. If the gay person in Tehran profile doesn't actually link up to a physical person in Tehran, then there's no added danger to anyone.

Maybe we missed each other... In my example I am talking about a man whose identity is necessarily hidden in meatspace due to an oppressive government.

Cyberspace allows him freedom from this oppression.

Hope that makes it clearer.

Wait, then what's the problem?

He is 'outed' in meatspace by his cyberspatial identities trough the irresponsibility of FB and himself, and all of the other none the wiser users enabled through this product to harm themselves.

Does anyone on this thread know why they have to identify the people's photos and names in the search to still allow marketers to be succesful?

If it didn't identify individuals would it be any less useful to marketers?

This reminds me of gun control debate. The more features FB enables to dig deeper in the social graph, the more chances for people to shoot themselves in the foot.

Should we restrict guns so there are less accidents and murders with them, or should we trust personal responsibility, with the cost it goes attached? Is restricting even possible?

That's for you to decide, but a cost certainly exists.

What is your opinion on the following scenario:

An "Islamic gay man living in Tehran" in 1997 creates a web page and populates it with exactly the same personal information you are describing. Sometime later Google comes of age and indexes his site for the world to easily discover.

Do you feel that Google and Facebook are acting differently in this scenario, and if so, why?

I do. Primarily because Facebook caters to users with low technical ability and includes baked in privacy settings that are notoriously ambiguous and difficult to understand.

Facebook actively promotes an anti-privacy styled online presence.

Those with the skills to build a website in '97, along with the requisite metatags to allow for the type of indexing you describe can reasonably be expected to understand what they are doing.

Not so with Facebook.

Adding content to a webpage is a pro-active move. Vanilla Facebook with no security tweaks or other expert knowledge (by my understanding) leaves users wide open through no action on the part of that user.

Did anyone opt-in to being included in Graph Search results? If they knew what it was, would anyone do this?

It's an interesting question that you pose and I think there is definitely more to it but the answer above is from the top of my head. I will mull on it some more and add should I come up with anything further.

I built a website in or around '97 on geocities. You talk about metatags being required for indexing but I think you forget that the web was young once. Google had a voracious appetite to index and they still do.

The barrier to entry for someone to build a website in '97 wasn't much higher than it is now. Things just look prettier these days.

Prettier than Geocities? Unpossible.

> such things as "Islamic men interested in other men, living in Tehran,"

Do you know what this search will return? "0 results". Because nobody who is gay in Iran is going to put the fact that they are interested in other men on their facebook.

If you scroll down the link, it's right there.

http://actualfacebookgraphsearches.tumblr.com/post/412333061...

Sorry, I should have added a final point that I made in another post: "Interested in" is not interpreted by everybody as "sexual attracted in". I'd be willing to bet that in Iranian culture, it's quite common to say you are interested in being friends with men, and it is not viewed as homosexual.

Bullies, zealots, and police are prone to misinterpreting words in the way which is most beneficial to THEIR ends, not yours. The kids denied entry into the US because they said they were going to "destroy" $CITY were a prime example of this, where "destroy" was local slang for "get drunk and party in $town".

Similarly, anyone looking to oppress gays will say, "He likes men. Why didn't he say he likes women? He must be gay." You can't argue what you really meant in a kangaroo court, or when a mob of angry villagers are throwing stones: it's too late by then.

I completely agree. Let's stop using words altogether because they can be misunderstood. You first please.

"Is Graph Search really that shocking to you--to anyone on HN?"

Are serial killers who actually kill people really shocking to people? Well, the answer to that question depends a lot on how much you let its framing determine your thinking, right?

Sure, I too, personally, don't share anything personally identifying on FB, in violation of FB and G+'s TOS BTW. But all those naive people, they walked through the door, they didn't see the samurai behind the door and pow, what do they expect? They won't be play in the Seven Samurai now. Why should we Samurai give a heck about them morons? Well, there are some reasons, starting with the fact that we have personal relations, with non-Samurai.

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

"Again we are defeated," Kambei muses. "The winners are those farmers. Not us."

Are serial killers who actually kill people really shocking to people?

Yes, universally so. Because they kill people and murder is a Bad Thing.

Social networks that index information produced willingly by members aren't in the same country as your analogy.

Except that in Iran, you get hung for being gay. It's not a huge stretch to see what this search is implying

> “Islamic men interested in men who live in Tehran, Iran“… “Places where they’ve worked.”

What should Facebook do?

Censor itself in Iran?

Indeed.

The thing is, the results in that screenshot don't necessarily mean gay.

Interested in might mean I'm interested in networking or meeting new people, being male or female. Interested in doesn't necessarily mean I'm interested in sticking my penis in *.

Also, all people in that screenshot are also interested in females.

We've heard plenty of stories of false accusations in order to settle old family scores.

"Interested in men" does not necessarily mean in a homosexual way, but it can be twisted to look that way.

I accept what I'm implying is a stretch, but I'm not 100% comfortable with Graph Search either.

It is obvious that you either didn't read the search queries on the linked page, or you don't understand the impact that some of these queries can have on peoples' lives.

People are stupid, so when warned, the will still act stupid. Despite this it is still the responsibility of whoever is able, to protect them, even against themselves.

I also agree with the argument of others here that facebook, to some, seems like a social requirement. It is like having a phone. You don't NEED one, like we need air, but it makes social life harder not to. That of course doesn't mean that you need to put everything online, but that is another matter. What is happening with Facebook again and again though is that they change the rules. 'Liking' used to be quite harmless, now suddenly, my old 'harmless' likes can get someone killed or arrested, as is demonstrated in the demo searches. Not good...

>People are stupid, so when warned, the will still act stupid. Despite this it is still the responsibility of whoever is able, to protect them, even against themselves.

Is this really a mainstream political philosophy on HN?

We keep smoking when we know it is unhealthy, we keep drinking and driving, we vote on politicians based on one liners and the amount of media attention they get, we believe that the evolution theory is 'just a theory', we get in huge debt because of loans we cannot pay and we keep posting things on Facebook despite knowing better.

We are stupid in the sense that we do very stupid things even though we, in many cases (should), know better. It is the task of 'us' (people who know about internet privacy) to protect other people around us from being stupid with Facebook just as I would like to be protected by others in the things I am stupid at.

>it is still the responsibility of whoever is able, to protect them, even against themselves.

I think this is a philosophy you will find a great level of disagreement with. The ignorant should be protected and informed, the stupid, notsomuch.

> Users identified by Graph Search have public accounts and have willingly entered personal information into Facebook.

This is quite misleading. Before Graph Search much of that capability was limited to Facebook Inc. and the affiliated government. This really opens the floodgates.

Were they warned? If you follow Wired and HackerNews yes. For general population though it's not something they were warned enough. They teach you how to cross a road in elementary; nobody explains you how to use privacy controls.

The whole liking and sharing ecosystem is promoted by social media itself. While you have skills to be critical of privacy implications, many more people have very vague idea or none whatsoever. Facebook de-facto is seen as a way of communicating with your social circle, that's why normal people join it; there is a (misguided) expectation of the same kind of privacy that you have in a clique of friends.

"If you don't like it, then quit"

My former boss said this in a morale speech. At the time I thought was being an a-hole. There had been some complaints on safety and usefulness of an exercise and that was his response to it.

Then I realized he was right, and that's why he's a former boss of mine.

Just silently quitting facebook was something I did recently. It's not the end of the world. Quite the opposite really.

"If you don't like it, then quit"

My former boss said this in a morale speech. At the time I thought was being an a-hole. There had been some complaints on safety and usefulness of an exercise and that was his response to it.

Then I realized he was right, and that's why he's a former boss of mine.

Also, bjust silently quitting facebook and sinking back to real life

> If you don't like it, then quit.

Assuming you're socially allowed to quit Facebook.

It's true that some people (like me) only use Facebook for its usefulness as a social tool. In that case, just strip your account of any serious personal information.

"Assuming you're socially allowed to quit Facebook."

I don't even know what that means. How is it that all of the rest of us managed to quite Facebook and continue to have a relatively vibrant social life. Is it the case that WhatsApp/Viber/SMS/Email are no longer considered effective means of communication to get together?

> How is it that all of the rest of us managed to quite Facebook and continue to have a relatively vibrant social life.

Because some people have different lives than you.

Please provide a little story of the type of person who cannot quit facebook, and why he cannot quit facebook. Until you do, you're just making up boogie men.

Quitting Facebook is really not that big of a deal. You won't become a social pariah, an outcast or loose all your friends because you cancel a website account.

You might well lose touch with a geographically diverse crowd of people. FB and the like keep people involved in the minutiae of each others lives and very much help keep real friendships alive.

Of course FB is trying to destroy this as much as possible by controlling what you see of what people post. Trying to decide what's important to me is another facet of the 'dumb' algorithms the OP complains about.

>Of course FB is trying to destroy this as much as possible by controlling what you see of what people post.

Because the alternative brings the wingnuts out. The more Facebook lets people see, the more they get castigated for doing what the entire freaking purpose of a social network site is!

I know there have been a lot of issues about information leaking out because of various security and privacy defaults being bad, but that's not what I meant.

There seems to be some algorithm deciding what gets put into your stream by weighting posts on who you most frequently interact with and how "important" the news is, meaning that your fb experience turns more and more into a echo chamber, and posts by people that don't post often seem to get lost.

Anyway, meh I say, meh!

I guess that depends.

I'm 33, married, two kids.

I have never used Facebook but I do feel 'out of the loop.' especially since the baby arrived - I don't hear about things 'through the grapevine' and subsequently seldom find myself with many social options on the days that I have free.

This is good for my startup but bad for my self esteem.

Hey there, 34, married, 3 kids here. You have two good options in this situation. One is to get your wife on FB so she can keep you in the loop. The other is to have one more kid and then you won't have to worry about what to do with your free time because you won't have any ever again. If you're starting up, I'd recommend option A.

Shit. I'm also 34... Totally forgot I had a birthday recently. My life seems to take place between 4am zombie walks to the kitchen to make milk bottles.

I do have sort of a wife's account vector but tbh: she also starts feeling shit and creeped out after being in there.

It's ok, as the apologists are wont to point out, there is a choice.

Mine is made.

There, of course, people whose circumstances mean that Facebook is a (/the) major source of human interaction in their lives. I really wish those people, and the rest of us, could move to something less ethically troubling.

Because people didn't have a social life or communicate before there was Facebook? Give me a break.

I can't help but think that statement is similar to saying, "Letters are a perfectly valid means of communication; I don't see the use of these telephones."

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