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Comment by themodelplumber | Hacker News Reader

> Shadow profiles of me are showing up on services I'd never use willingly because my friend shared their address book with Facebook.

Is that really so bad? The worst I've seen is "this is a picture of John" which is not an abuse that's limited to social networks. And if this happens really often, you can complain to your friend about it. And if you can't complain to your friend, you can complain to abuse. And if abuse doesn't do anything (not likely) you can send a legal notice.

To jump from "a friend can mention me, talk about me, etc." to "there is no privacy anymore" is...well, I just can't get there, sorry.

Do we have privacy problems? Yes. Are these examples really selling that? No. I can't remember any case in which a friend sold me out for a trinket; if you do have a common example, cite it. That would really help us all here.

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Is that really so bad? The worst I've seen is "this is a picture of John"

Yes, it is - when there are a bunch of "this is a picture of John" posts mostly by identifiably pro-1st/2nd/4th/10th Amendment[1] types, facilitated by face recognition software confirming it's the same John, whereby data mining can determine that there is an un-tracked person named John who is most likely a pro-1st/2nd/4th/10th Amendment type and, because of his pointed absence from social media, likely rather hardcore about it and worth tracking with particular interest.

Tom Brown (famous tracker) tells a story of his tutor telling him "go to the grandfather tree." He scoured the woods for the curious plant, and found nothing. Standing in a clearing wondering what was meant, he realized that the space he was standing in - an unusually empty space in an otherwise dense forest - must have been created by a very large and very old tree that had subsequently fallen and rotted away, leaving a space other trees had been unable to grow in. Moral: an apparent absence can, coupled with identifiable effects, be indicative of something very interesting; to wit if there's a lot of pictures of someone but nothing from that someone he's probably hiding something.

[1] - terms for various passionately-defended civil rights here

It's really scary that we're at a point where not using social media can reveal something about you.

If they somehow manage to get an IP address associated with the shadow profile, they can use XKeyScore to see which websites you've visited. If they see you've been reading a lot of articles about the NSA ordeal, browsing wikipedia a lot, visiting websites related to cryptography and visiting a website called hacker news, they'll target you as 'politically dangerous' and you'll be put in the 'nihilist, anarchist, hasn't talked to the opposite sex in 5 years'-list.

'and visiting a website called hacker news'

Right...because with all their super-surveillance powers, they're going to be blinded by that title and miss the fact that HN is a fairly pedestrian community consisting mostly of entrepreneurs, technologists on the make, and few artists and oddballs. This reading of things requires us to believe that government is both omnipotent and incompetent, neither of which are true to the extent that people like to imagine.

It's a community where people regularly talk about ways to limit the NSA's power and who are actively encouraging people to use encryption to weaken their data mining capabilities. Do you think that doesn't raise any red flags?

We already know they're more likely to target encrypted connections, so what does mean for those who enable encrypted communication?

You can go ahead and make fun of this like you did a few comments below, but if you believe this couldn't happen then I think you've been living under a rock the past few weeks.

To be frank I don't; Hacker News is a very tame community. There are lots and lots of internet communities ranging from fringe politics to neo-nazi groups that rank way higher in the 'potential domestic threat' category.

It's the ones that, after such activity, post a final "oh shit" message and promptly fall off the 'net that may very well get special attention.

You really think they have a special state-security list for nerds?

During their four years in power, the Khmer Rouge overworked and starved the population, at the same time executing selected groups who they believed to be enemies of the state or spies or to have the potential to undermine the new state. People who they perceived to be intellectuals or even those that had stereotypical signs of learning, such as glasses, would also be killed. - Wikipedia

Of course they do! We nerds are the smartest people in society and frankly everything would fall apart if it wasn't for our intellectual heroism. Naturally this makes us the #1 threat to the Evil Overlords, with whom we shall soon have a final showdown on the fields of Nerdageddon.

Well damn, nothing on my Bitbucket profile can be weaponized!

You're missing the point. The fact is, even if you decide to not use any online accounts, host your own email, run your own server and VPN, etc. profiles of you are being created of you anyway AS IF you had an account! These are called "shadow profiles".. Facebook is the easiest example because it's already been demonstrated to do this. I'm sure most other online services work similarly.

https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-security/important-m...

How about "I was having an argument with my friend John who is all paranoid about the government spying on him. Maybe he's a closet terrorist."

Maybe your friends are more intelligent than average, but I wouldn't lump most of humanity in that category.

Just assume each one of your friends is a raving moron until you observe evidence that contradicts that fact.

Half jokingly, my alibi for getting out of FB was "On moral grounds, I cannot offer my support to a company that was started through borderline fraud and is known to change its privacy-policies/terms-of-use without notice".

Trello asks for your friend's emails so you can recommend the service, even going so far as to have a friendly little puppy you can 'feed' the emails to.

Facebook is well-documented in scraping your address book on your phone if you use their app, and many other games will do the same. I get LinkedIn spam all the time from friends who gave them my email account so I could join.

This is really common, least of all because of the push for high viral coefficients in startups.

The reason I find it so repugnant is that I want to trust my friends and family, and I want to be able to enjoy my privacy (such as it is). That these companies go out of their way to make it so so easy for my friends to betray that trust is unforgivable.

way to make it so so easy for my friends to betray that trust is unforgivable.

Did your friends sign some sort of friendship agreement that prohibits them talking about you without your permission?

Well they're his friends, so yes.

Do you remember this from not so long ago?

http://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/what-exactly-is-a-...

It's sad to see valid opposing arguments down-voted into grayness.

>Are these examples really selling that?

http://money.cnn.com/2013/01/28/technology/social/facebook-c...

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