Realistic Facebook Privacy Simulator | Hacker News Reader

Realistic Facebook Privacy Simulator

toys.usvsth3m.com

129 pointsColinWright37 comments

    Don't not make everything not private

    [ ] Not No
    [ ] Not Not Not Yes

My brain was too slow!

Great game.

Took me another 30 seconds just staring at your post here to work it out.

The trick is to just cross out pairs of negatives. Same thing for reading news stories like "court overturns ban on prohibiting suppression of car share services". Is that positive or negative for car2go?

It's not just Facebook, Apple does this too with their "iAd optout" pages too.

Limit tracking: [ off | on ]

I'm still not sure which side I want really.

Facebook and Google make money selling your personal data, Apple makes money selling hardware.

That is a hasty oversimplification. Apple stands to make money selling your personal data just like Facebook and Google. And, were it true that Apple makes money only selling hardware, it would not feel the need to purposely confuse an iPhone user into being tracked by using dirty language tricks.

Apple may make some minuscule amount. Facebook and Google cannot survive without selling your personal data. It is beyond ethics, it is their entire business plan. If it makes you feel better to believe Apple is just as bad with your data go ahead.

Yes that's very true and perceptive. It is also irrelevant to the parent comment.

It goes to the question of motive, which is relevant to the discussion, generally.

No, not really, because whatever their current "motive" is they are using a dark pattern for their tracking opt-out.

Is that really a dark pattern. If Limit Tracking is On then theoretically your tracking is limited, no? Also Apple let's you get a new UDID if you want to wipe all data. Not the most lucrative way to handle advertising data. My biggest problem with tailored adverts is the uncanny valley. The more accurate they are the more it creeps me out.

I think you misunderstand dark pattern here. If you sit and think about it for a while, then yes, it makes perfect sense. But the point of a dark pattern is to give quick, hurried users a misconception of what the choice is.

The non-dark pattern here is to say "Ad Tracking - On/Off".

http://www.theverge.com/2013/8/29/4640308/dark-patterns-insi...

BTW, Google lets you opt out of Interest Based Advertising: https://support.google.com/ads/answer/2662922?hl=en

http://advertising.apple.com/

Apple sell your location data to advertising companies too.

Can't speak for Google, but Facebook certainly doesn't sell personal data. Facebook internally uses personal data to show targeted advertisements. Big difference.

Nor does Google. Twitter, however, does. That being said, Twitter is default public and they've been really open about it since day one.

Note: I have no special knowledge of Google, so maybe they do. Given that it would be really dumb to do so and lie about it, I believe that they do not.

certainly doesn't sell personal data.

It just sells access to use the data, not to know what the data is.

Their proposition is: "Give us $50 and you can target 26 year old iPhone users who go to Stanford and have posted about bratwurst in the past six hours."

You're paying to use the data they've collected about their users.

If they didn't sell access to use personal data, we'd be back to flat banner ads with no retargeting or privacy invading doubleclick social strata pinning.

Ads are not personal data. Google sells impressions, not details. FB too. Your supermarket sells your data to randkme aggregator companies.

Google and FB hoard personal data.

Google has started resorting to some odd and arguably evil tricks as well: http://i.imgur.com/gqJAfH2.png

"Your channel will get a new page on Google+" only appears after checking "No", and does not show up if checking "Yes".

What's wrong? Of you split your identity, you get an extra page.

For context, since another commenter suggested "Ad Tracking - on/off", the limit ad tracking option doesn't actually prevent all tracking. Developers are supposed to use this setting to know what they can use the advertisingIdentifier for. See bullet #2 here: https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/AdSupp...

Please, make a version suitable for kids. This would make an excellent teaching tool.

If they haven't by the time I am done with my current project (middle of next month) I'll do it!

I just watched the zealous Zuckerberg dance for three, straight minutes.

Its his face photoshopped over the woman from this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-50GjySwew

This would be amusing if I were Commander Data, and so could actually see my score in the brief moment it shows the results before switching to taunting me for losing my privacy.

I got to level five. This simulator is not realistic enough.

It's not not not realistic enough

This is too realistic, I'm super stressed out now because I didn't have time to answer everything right. Next thing I know, there's probably going to be something embarrassing on my FB timeline!

Dancing Zuckerberg is the new trollface

Conditioning has taught me never to press the blue facebook button on another website!

I took a leap of faith though when I read the comments here.

Good game, although I was checking my FB profile every five mins to make sure it hadn't posted any crap!

I swear, I was about to post exactly the same thing!

I had to try it a few times, as I was laughing too much too, even have chance, when I first saw the line up of "settings"

I'd like to take a moment here to be "That Guy" and throw a wet blanket on the Facebook hate train:

  * The options given here are not at all representative of the actual Facebook privacy settings, which my freaking mother can understand.

  * There is not a countdown attached to usage of the real privacy settings

  * Privacy is not a binary thing you either have or don't. Checking the wrong option in Facebook might result in some piece of information being available for certain other people to view. That doesn't mean they necessarily did. Nor does it mean that you can't go back and change the setting around later.

  * Facebook's redesigns were all centered around the goal of misleading people into publicizing information they didn't want to. /s

  * Whatever point this game is trying to make is completely overshadowed by its tone.

People take the internet too seriously. It used to be a fun place, I promise. And there used to be lots of terrible shareware games you could buy on CD-ROM or floppy disk, and they were often much, much worse than this game. Take these games for what they are, which is basically like the little puzzles on the back of a cereal box.

If this were posted anywhere else but Hacker News, I'd agree. But this site has a downright pathological hatred of it. It's like listening to conservatives banging on about how terrible liberals are.

This is the best game I've ever found on the front page of HN! Absolute awesomeness.

I suspect there's a whole department at Facebook, Google, and other companies that sole purpose is to come up with cleverly puzzled opt-in questions for users.

I noped out of there when I saw the triple negative :-)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com