Hacker News Reader

Comment by jamesaguilar | Hacker News Reader

For anyone who is too lazy to read, something like 80% of these links are opinion and conjecture, 10% are things that people did reacting to information that Facebook users made public, 5% are unsubstantiated, and 5% are genuine privacy issues.

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Not even close. Even the EFF archives and acknowledges a lot of these cases.

Not every link is weighted equally. Let's talk about:

* Partnering with data brokers

* Deliberately changing users privacy settings

* Beacon (remember that?)

* Shadow profiles

* Everyone searchable via Graph

* Charges from the FTC

* "Deleted" information not actually deleted

* Like buttons on websites tracking you

* User profile data (photos and names) being used in advertisements

...it goes on and on.

You're employed by Google who also deals primary in the data of users. Are any of these issues relevant or important to you?

There is literally only one intentional privacy issue in that list from the last year, out of ten or fifteen posts. There were several exploited vulns, and a compliance issue (prism), but the only privacy violation facebook intentionally made during that period, at least according to this list, is removing the ability to hide from name searches.

And the issues you don't consider issues somehow make all the "genuine" issues irrelevant? You know, Facebook's entire history of not giving a shit about privacy. Not only stepping up to the "creepy line" (like your employer, Google), but blazing past it in complete disregard.

The game is: see how much you can get away with and deal with the consequences later through PR or other distractions. "Move fast and break things."

No . . . the genuine issues are still issues. There is no need to inflate them by pretending there is a multi-page laundry list and posting a bunch of things that are either not Facebook's fault, or not privacy violations, or both. I wouldn't have said anything at all if the site contained only or even mostly real issues.

The website keeps tracks of "reasons" why using Facebook is a bad idea. That can mean privacy violations (which there is a clear history of and are overwhelming) or issues as a result of a user sharing too much information. Either way, all real issues, "opinion and conjecture" aside. Even what you claimed to be "5% genuine privacy issues" is damning.

Instead of dismissing the list as mostly irrelevant, you could have pulled out the important issues for discussion as I did.

There is still enough that are genuine issues that I thought there was a question that was worth asking.

? I don't know anything about you or your question.

I posted it on Quora, as I mentioned in another comment.

Still not clear why you're telling me about this, but ok.

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