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Comment by rhino369 | Hacker News Reader

Your idea of privacy is unrealistic. Anything your friends know about you and freely post is not private.

You're assuming the friends gave the information knowingly.

Most people have no idea what modern image recognition and data mining techniques can do, and many don't understand what they are really agreeing to when they let some on-line service scan their address book.

I've never quite figured out how compiling shadow profiles doesn't violate all kinds of data protection laws in at least much of Europe, but our regulators seem to be gunning for Google at the moment rather than Facebook.

It is still personal data and theoretically regulated in Europe at least. It is hard for me to see how the information about non-users is legitimate from my understanding of UK data protection law but maybe they just stay inside the Irish law (which I know even less about).

Maybe so, but does a Facebook app uploading my phone number from a friend's phone to their servers, or turning on my friend's microphone while we are having an otherwise-private conversation, count as "freely posting"?

If he gives access to his contact list, yes.

But I can't see a situation in which Facebook turning on a mike to record conversations is not a huge violation of privacy.

Do they do that?

But I can't see a situation in which Facebook turning on a mike to record conversations is not a huge violation of privacy.

Do they do that?

FYI, this is mentioned in the article. It also linked to this article on that specific issue:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/05/22/facebook-...

Short version: It's not as simple as "they record all your conversations", but yes, they can and do turn on your phone's mic.

They've introduced an optional feature that records media around you. Based on their past record of changing defaults, I think it's a reasonable possibility that this feature will be turned on by default in the future.

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