Hacker News Reader

Comment by pathy | Hacker News Reader

There are privacy concerns but overall I think it is a splendid idea, both for Facebook and for the businesses that choose to join.

Your run of the mill free wifi is neither secure nor private to begin with and I don't see Facebook Wifi encroaching on privacy any more than currently available free wifi.

View on HN

This is a good point. Honestly the most annoying thing will be the polluting of fb feeds with checkins (something it is possible to ignore from others I believe, but not prevent from posting yourself if you check in on fb... which is the whole idea of course)

That is a fair point, and it will be interesting to see how Facebook will deal with "feed pollution".

It already has this problem, and its solution was to default sort to "Top Stories" instead of "Latest Stories." A lot of accusations that it was a money-grubbing play for pay-for-performance, but I don't think they had much choice. They had to fix the problem of a few noisy people, pages or apps dominating users' feeds. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5320207

Do you honestly believe facebook won't look for and find ways to encroach on privacy more than currently available free wifi does? Their entire mission is to encroach on privacy, and now they've got you connecting to their wifi hotspots at the gynecologist's office.

Assuming you are a Facebook user they would know your location anyway, Facebook Wifi or non-Facebook wifi.

Then again, considering your username I guess you aren't a fan of Facebook at all.

>Assuming you are a Facebook user they would know your location anyway, Facebook Wifi or non-Facebook wifi

How do you figure?

Whenever I open the FB app on my Android, the GPS notification flashes for a moment. This information I'm sure is tracked, but is not shared.

now they've got you connecting to their wifi hotspots at the gynecologist's office

Nobody is forcing you to check in at your gynecologist's office, which is something you can already do, if you're into that kind of oversharing

Actually, it might very well happen that these Wifi networks all have the same SSID, which would likely make most devices automatically connect to them.

Even if they don't, they only ever need one connection to link your device's MAC to your username, and then detect it without ever connecting.

Yeah, I thought of that the moment I posted.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com