The recurring Facebook privacy hoax | Hacker News Reader

The recurring Facebook privacy hoax

bbc.co.uk

27 pointsSimplyUseless21 comments

The resurgence of the hoax shows that some of our FB friends are gullible and don't understand TOS, copyrights, etc. This is obvious and we probably knew who would fall for it because we used to send Snopes links to them.

I think it also shows a deeper unease with the pervasive and fast moving technology and surveillance in their lives. Rather than learning what rights they have, what protection the law does and does give them and what they might be able to do about it, they're happy to imitate what they see others doing in a cargo cultish sort of way.

I posted a snarky rewrite [1] of the hoax to my FB feed and got predictable responses. First was a predictable 'its a hoax' from someone that stopped reading at the first sentence. A few lulz and one person who wanted to persist in the disbelief "What if the hoax is a hoax?".

[1] http://pastebin.com/m3nkq98N

This is how it should be done, ideally. Facebook and similar services behave unilaterally, changing their agreements at will while keeping them dense and obscure, and intentionally make it impossible to communicate with them. Therefore, it's reasonable and valid to simply type into whatever text input Facebook provides "I hereby alter our agreement in the following way" and this should be considered valid.

...and it's reasonable and valid for them (or in fact either party) to have a blanket "We don't accept your modifications and therefore terminate our agreement."

Your move.

Couldn't Facebook detect these posts from their keywords and insert a box above or below the post reminding the reader of Facebook's actual copyright terms? Such as:

"We wanted to take a moment to remind you: when you post things like photos to Facebook, we do not own them. Click here to read our full terms and conditions for more information."

The thing is - almost everyone lacks any sort of critical thinking skills. You see this everyday with all types of stuff that's why these things spread... Perhaps humans are just bad at critical thinking and skepticism or it is cultural. I'm leaning towards the former.

"People think Facebook and Google are sucking up all their personal details so even people who don’t have anything to hide get quite worried. "

https://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/you-may-have-not...

I understand why this keeps recurring, but the part I can't get my head around is how it started. Who was the first person who posted all that fake legalese? As hoaxes go, it doesn't seem funny enough to have been done for the lulz, so somebody actually wrote all that thinking it would work.

I wrote a post on this, mainly to give to my friends and explain why posting the status doesn't work.

http://joshschreuder.me/owning-what-you-do-online/

Including this link on HN and a few friends on facebook linking to the same article, I've seen five people talking about this hoax. And zero people actually spreading the hoax.

Is this a hoax hoax?

It passed Belgium a few weeks ago, it's actually pretty interesting how it moves through the network :P

Saw it this week from an Australian friend.

It went through a few of the same circle a year or so back too.

I see people being taken by the actual hoax weekly. Maybe your friends just have better critical thinking skills than mine.

I see variations of this, in French and English, every 3 or 4 months or so appearing on some friends posts. Every time, I point out that it is a hoax ... and it doesn't prevent some people from reposting it again some months later. I guess it depends to some extent on how tech-savyy your friends are.

My Facebook feed is mostly non-technical friends and family and I see someone seriously posting the hoax disclaimer weekly.

I wish. I have a fair number of Facebook friends who fall for chemtrails, anti-vaccine propaganda, various wacky alternative medicine, etc. (they have good qualities too!) and this shows up with some regularity among them.

I saw it posted today. Another friend commented, "you know this isn't real, right?". He responded "Meh. It doesn't hurt anything".

I am reminded of Slavoj Zizek's story about Niels Bohr having a horseshoe above his door:

"surprised at seeing a horseshoe above the door of Bohr's country house, the fellow scientist visiting him exclaimed that he did not share the superstitious belief regarding horseshoes keeping evil spirits out of the house, to which Bohr snapped back: "I don't believe in it either. I have it there because I was told that it works even when one doesn't believe in it at all." This is indeed how ideology functions today: nobody takes democracy or justice seriously, we are all aware of their corrupted nature, but we participate in them, we display our belief in them."[0]

[0]-http://brooklynbooktalk.blogspot.com/2010/02/its-ideology-st...

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