Not on a Social Network? You’ve Still Got a Privacy Problem | Hacker News Reader

Not on a Social Network? You’ve Still Got a Privacy Problem

wired.com

59 pointscryptoz23 comments

    A Facebook spokesman says the company “doesn’t have shadow
    accounts or profiles – hidden or otherwise – for people 
    who haven’t signed up for our service,” and a 2011 audit 
    by Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner confirmed this.

Does anyone really believe that Facebook is not assembling shadow profiles for as close to 100% of the human population as is possible?

Here's how I would play this game:

Siphon as much data as possible. Keep it indefinitely, but don't synchronously add rows for shadow identities. Instead, build a querying infrastructure that projects your mountain of data into forms you can exploit at runtime. Part of this is sorting activity into unbound identities.

Now you get to have your cake and eat it too: all of the delicious privacy invasion, with the PR/legal bonus of being able to say you don't have "shadow profiles".

I'm sure Facebook has shadow profiles on everyone, just as I'm sure they're smart enough to prove they don't.

Exactly. Facebook doesn't have shadow profiles, they have user data and algorithms. The algorithms traverse the shadow profiles at runtime and produce some output, but there is no need to hold onto the profile data in that form. All facebook needs is the advertising "action-item" that the algorithm produces.

The same analysis applies to the intelligence gathering done by the government. They hold onto all data for all time and draw conclusions from it at a later date.

Whats to stop anyone from doing that now using "open graph"/crowd sourcing and geotagging from seo queries upon names and identities? C&D letters from facebook lawyers they will inevitably send your way from complaints of users asking how you're doing what your doing and to stop, and claim to be protecting users? Ha… I mean seriously with all the public data-sets out there associated with identities, do people really need things like users and login accounts for people to engage in the same behavior as they do on facebook? Are people naive enough to believe that they need to have such to engage in the same social behaviors in a similar fashion?

With 20 VM's located from unknown places in the world, you can mine everyone from FB and query data that facebook declares "public" in about two months… for about $200 total… wanna build a open sourced facial recog database with profile photos (graph.facebook.com/{your_user_id}/picture?type=large)[and then use crowd-soursing to make such better for images that don't get put into the model from not passing simple feature detection from open source recog libraries out there]. Want to query an ip address and return a probability distribution for names associated with pages visited with such + browser fingerprinting techniques written about in enough detail to bore anyone? Prob can't build a business on top of it from it within the US (maybe), but that's what legal arbitrage is for.

Things existed before facebook, things will exist after…

Yes, I really believe Facebook is not assembling "shadow profiles" as described by the article.

I also believe there is nothing Facebook can do to convince you to believe that as well. Or is it?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5926275

Note that's a case of facebook having extended shadow profiles for users, not non users as claimed above.

To misquote a common saying, I @junto hereby shall be quoted as stating for the record:

  The social network of my friend is my enemy.

The only solution is not to share your real identity with your friends. You should tell each friend that you have a different surname.

Even better we should start a cult and all choose the same surname to use online. I suggest it be broken down by country and highest frequency. In the UK we would all use 'Smith'. In Germany 'Müller'. In France 'Martin'. In Spain 'Garcia'. In Portugal 'Silva' and so on.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_most_common_surna...

Sadly, most people have already shared their real identity either by giving those details directly to Facebook or by friend's uploading your details in their contacts.

Still, it would be a nice protest.

Co-Location Privacy and Interdependent Privacy also hints to a similar privacy problem [0]. For example - your Facebook friend could tag you and check-in on a location thus leaking your location details and violating your privacy.

[0] https://www.petsymposium.org/2014/papers/Olteanu.pdf

> We already know that if you use an online social network, you give up a serious slice of your privacy thanks to the omnivorous way companies like Google and Facebook gather your personal data.

Not so, if you use a privacy respecting one like Diaspora*. Not that it offers a robust protection against either attackers or the Big Brother. But the network itself is not built to profit from users' data which is a huge difference in attitude.

It's annoying that such articles take it for granted that social network = FB / G+ way of doing things.

It's not unreasonable to assume Google/Facebook considering their market share (especially if you count Google's control over Android). http://www.marketingcharts.com/updates/top-10-social-network...

Market share doesn't preclude the existence of choice. So the article shouldn't put it as if there aren't any better alternatives.

In the case of social networks where a network is only as useful as the other people on it, it might not necessitate that there is no alternative but practically there isn't.

Diaspora* is quite useful for a constantly growing number of users.

Your thesis however is wrong, which is demonstrated by the fact that any network starts with no users. I.e. any network goes through the growth process, when newcomers see it as rather barren in the early days. Diaspora* isn't at that stage anymore.

>It's annoying that such articles take it for granted that social network = FB / G+ way of doing things.

It's annoying when people are uptight about something that's merely pragmatic. They're talking about social networks people use and know about.

Including Diaspora, a network almost no one has ever heard about, would be completely counter intuitive. Diaspora simply isn't an alternative for the overwhelming majority of users of active social networks.

> Diaspora simply isn't an alternative for the overwhelming majority of users of active social networks.

That's bunk, simply because people already use it and it is a functional alternative.

*You still have

Grammar people, grammar.

It has always been a common grammatical error but I blame AOL for legitimizing it.

I don't understand the grammar problem here.

http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/200161/you-still-...

I am so sick of the Facebook bullying.

"you give up a serious slice of your privacy thanks to the omnivorous way companies like Google and Facebook gather your personal data."

Ooooh scary! Hardly. Nobody can search for me on Facebook... or view my profile without being friends. Yes, they have my info in a database somewhere. Info I gave them.

They also have the shit I said about you, which they can treat as fact. Now imagine if we start using this data for job applications, it's a slippery slope of missed opportunities and Scarlet Letter ostracism that we should work to avoid. What is harmless today can set a president in the future, and a liability that we have no reason to accept.

Yes, they have the info you give them. And info that others give them about you. And info that they gather from you without your knowledge. And whatever they can infer from the aforementioned info.

Which they will save forever. Good thing you've seen the future and know with 100% confidence that they will never abuse this data. Or sell it to someone who will abuse it. Or get acquired by the selfsame. Or hire someone with a personal vendetta against you.

You're the one who purports to know the future - worrying about what you think Facebook might do with your data, instead of what they actually do with it.

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