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You don't use Facebook, yet lead with claim that it doesn't invade anyone's privacy...

Regrettably there are numerous, well documented cases of Facebook doing exactly this. They've literally been taken to court over it several times (look into "Sponsored Stories," "Beacon," etc).

Even if you don't use it, they have a shadow profile of you over there waiting, with relationships pre-graphed, simply by virtue of being in friends' contact lists who do.

The site "Likes" things on peoples behalf just because they talk about it (even negatively!) with others. It occasionally automatically "friends" people because you looked at their profile and mutual friends in common. It constantly takes liberties with people's relationships, friends, and preferences, without asking. The mobile app turns on the damn mic to listen to ambient noise in the background so it can try learn what you're listening to or watching on TV!

None of this is to try to convince you to care or take up the pitchfork against Facebook, but they're not like other sites. Harvesting your contact info from your friends phone to add you to their graph is an invasion, in my view (glib app permissions dialog, notwithstanding).

> The site "Likes" things on peoples behalf just because they talk about it (even negatively!) with others. It occasionally automatically "friends" people because you looked at their profile and mutual friends in common. It constantly takes liberties with people's relationships, friends, and preferences, without asking. The mobile app turns on the damn mic to listen to ambient noise in the background so it can try learn what you're listening to or watching on TV!

If you don't mind, do you have any sources for this? (Not talking about the mic thing, but the automatic liking and befriending)

Yeah, I know of Beacon etc. but I've never heard of automatic likes or friendships.

Here's a link about harvesting likes from private messages: http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2012/10/03/how-private-are-your-...

and subsequently a class action suit was brought against them over it: https://gigaom.com/2014/01/02/facebook-reads-private-message...

another suit brought over false likes: https://gigaom.com/2014/01/10/facebook-hit-with-lawsuit-over...

facebook recycling "likes" under guise of promoting "related stories" users didn't endorse: http://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2013/01/21/faceboo...

The autofriending thing is less publicized and I don't think they've ever been sued over it, so it probably hasn't been in the headlines. If you search Facebook's /help/community/ pages, you'll find a lot of users reporting it. It's happened to me. It's happened to my wife. I've had friends tell me similar stories. In every case, it seems like something algorithmic, like Facebook thinks the person is someone you should be friends with because of mutual connections or something like that. It isn't a spammy thing as much as it is...creepy, like you, as a user, don't have your own agency. It's weird and off putting to see an accepted friend request you didn't make, from someone you expressly don't want to have any contact whatsoever with, let alone be "friends."

Even your mentions of when they violated people's privacy, those instances were still 100% based on what the user decided to share with Facebook - which I believe was the parent's point.

Not the shadow profile. Not at all.

I'm comfortable sharing my phone number with friends and acquaintances because they're inside my network of trust. Maybe one of them is writing my number on the walls of bathroom stalls or selling it to spammers, who knows, but I guess you take that risk implicitly whenever you give someone your number. I trust my friends though.

I would say most of my friends have no idea that when they install the facebook app they are giving all of their contact info away to facebook. Sure, they click the button to give facebook permissions to "access their contact list", but I don't think most people assume the worst. That just what it takes to participate in the modern culture.

So when facebook is making a shadow account using my number and connections with friends, my privacy certainly feels violated. I did not choose to share anything with facebook. I chose to share things with my friends, and they unwittingly shared it with facebook. Giving your phone number to a friend is a reasonable thing to do. Someone wanting to install facebook on their phone is a reasonable thing to do. Facebook tracking connections of people who choose not to use (or participate in any way with) their service by essentially exploiting peoples naivete about its intentions, is not reasonable to me.

I can educate the people I know about it, but I doubt I will change anyones minds. Facebook has become a part of our culture, I certainly can't blame anyone for wanting to take part in it. I just wish facebook would leave me out of it and it doesn't.

The mobile app turns on the damn mic

I checked my iphone privacy settings because this sounded preposterous, and the Facebook app is not listed as having requested microphone permissions. Is it able to turn on the microphone without requesting permission?

Are you talking about the regular facebook app or the messenger app.

Neither one has requested permission to use the microphone.

I don't know the details, because I don't use the Facebook mobile app or an iPhone, but the feature is advertised as "opt-in." In my wife's case (who uses an Android) she just noticed it start working one day and was surprised by it.

This is the official announcement of the feature. They emphasize it being "optional" and "opt-in" so, it appears it is off by default, and/or at least toggling that control is more clearly delineated in iOS, etc.

http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2014/05/a-new-optional-way-to-sh...

There is no way to not use Facebook.

Let me repeat that: THERE IS NO WAY TO NOT USE FACEBOOK.

Everyone's photos: Mine, yours, Stallmans, get posted to Facebook, annotated with our names (which is increasingly becoming easy enough to do with ML -- the human component will increasingly decline). If at least one of your friends uses Facebook, Facebook has profile information on you.

Stallman doesn't have a Facebook account, but things posted to Facebook identify where Stallman is, who his friends and peers are, who he interacts with, etc.

Signing up for a Facebook/Google Scholar/Researchgate/etc. simply gives you some level of control over the visibility of the information collected about you. If you care about your personal brand, there is strong reason to do it. It's almost blackmail. But if you don't do it, you're still on Facebook; simply without the EULA, and without any control.

Uh...Yes there is. I don't have a facebook account. I did for 8 years. Its possible my life would be different if I used it, but I suspect not.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9201706

I agree with you but I think that you used the wrong term... "use" should probably be replaced with "be cataloged by"... for example they do face recognition on all pictures, they harvest contact information from other people installing the FB app, they collect non-facebook browsing information using the "share to facebook" code that might get linked to your real identity somehow (third party sharing of information between companies?) even if you aren't "using" Facebook.

There is no way to not use life.

Let me repeat that: THERE IS NO WAY TO NOT USE LIFE.

Simply substituting one word for another shows you how you just can't hold Facebook responsible for this. People are and have been able to share information in myriads of ways. Facebook is just one of them. They could be telling information person to person, via a phone call, via e-mail or simply standing in the street and shouting it out. I can be in the next room and a friend of mine could show photos of me to a stranger. I could be thousands of miles away and a friend of mine could reveal my private information to someone else.

What's stopping me to simply create a personal website where I post information about me and my friends? Who's responsible then? The server host? Or is it the me, the one who put all the information on the site, visible for everyone?

People complain about censorship, but basically what they're saying is that they want all information except the one kind where something is revealed about them. If you don't want this information to be shared, then ask your friends to stop posting your name, photos, e-mail, whatever.

Please note that I'm simply responding to the argument that Facebook mines all the data your friends put up. In my wildest dream I wouldn't call FB one of the good guys, nor would I condone most of their practices (e.g. their "Like" buttons on external sites). All I'm saying is that people seem very eager to hand off responsibility to software, machines, corporations. And in some cases that simply doesn't work.

hint: when I listen to your phone calls and use to to make money, that's illegal

I'll quote what I said in the post you're responding to: "Please note that I'm simply responding to the argument that Facebook mines all the data your friends put up." That's the only point I made.

> Simply substituting one word for another shows you how you just can't hold Facebook responsible for this.

Single word substitutions of words that have no relationship with each other do not prove anything. Facebook and life are from entirely different categories in the taxonomy of useful (and not so useful) terms.

The use of certain digital services should be voluntary, not implicit because your associates use it.

While I agree that substituting a single word is a very easy target and easily manipulated, so that I shouldn't have gone for it, I think "life" is very relevant in this case, as for many people it is either part of their life or their social life exclusively evolves around FB.

All I'm saying is that when a friend of yours decides to share information about you in public, you should hold them responsible and not the channel he is sharing this information. That's it.

>Let me repeat that: THERE IS NO WAY TO NOT USE FACEBOOK.

Why are you shouting? We know this. People aren't up in arms over this. Not because they don't understand what you're saying, but because they don't care and no amount of shouting will make them care.

what are you talking about? - i have a lot of friends and do not use facebook - i have an account but dont really log in - a lot of my friends dont use it. the less you use facebook, the more you realize how useless it really is - you want to keep in touch with people, use email - it has worked for a long time, and will continue to work for a long time.

photos - use google photos or dropbox

messages - who care about facebook posts anyways - they are useless

facebook groups - their are competitors in this space now

THERE IS A WAY TO NOT USE FACEBOOK, DELETE YOUR ACCOUNT AND LIFE CONTINUES WITHOUT IT

> what are you talking about?

Read about 3 more lines of the post, and you'll see.

Your reading comprehension skills are lower than my toddler's. Fortunately, you're in good company, from the number of similar posts.

thank you!

Facebook absolutely violates people's privacy. But you're conflating Facebook's privacy violations with people's "over-sharing" on Facebook. But those two are actually not the same.

Let me give you an example:

1) Friend shares when he went to the toilet. Is that a privacy violation by Facebook? If it's public, then it's not. If it was private, and then Facebook makes it public by changing the default settings, as it's done many times before, then that would be a privacy violation. But forget about pooping. What if you get drunk and post your drunk pictures to your friends and then Facebook makes them public so your boss (or future boss) can see them?

2) Here's a much worse example than that. Facebook is tracking people through the Like button without them even clicking on it. They never gave Facebook the permission to do that (and I mean in a very "opt-in" way, not just by automatically agreeing with Facebook's ToS). Even worse than that, Facebook has been caught tracking people who don't even have a Facebook account and building "shadow profiles" of them. How is THAT not a privacy violation?

So I think people who say "Facebook doesn't violate people's privacy - they just choose to overshare", are either oversimplifying all the issues and conflating them into a convenient one, or are not too educated about the topic.

Oh and if you want even more real examples, Facebook has just been found to infringe people's privacy in Europe, where the privacy right actually exists, unlike in US, where "digital privacy" seems to be treated as an abstract almost non-existent thing, and the laws protecting it are orders of magnitude weaker than the laws protecting "physical world" privacy - even though there shouldn't be any difference between say law enforcement getting your printed pictures and getting your digital pictures:

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/23/facebooks-...

I'm surprised that more people don't agree with this.

When the first articles came out that said facebook saves everything you type in messages and status' even if you don't press save, I stopped using facebook for anything other than nondescript one line responses to groups I'm in. It's just so easy to realize that if you don't want incredibly personal things to be saved online for eternity, don't write those things online.

I can't control what others write about me.

You also can't control what others say about you. Or post on any other website about you. Or someone showing a friend of his a picture of you.

(excluding malicious intent of course)

You can't control what others say about you, but you can control who your friends are.

I don't tolerate friends who do not respect my privacy.

I'm not saying I disagree with you here, because what you said is entirely correct, however there have been various instances in the past of social network companies tracking people with the usage of cookies (those "share on X" buttons every website has) even outside their own domain.

And on top of that, you have companies like Facebook doing data analysis on your personal aggregate data and then feeding it to advertisement companies even without your direct consent (although it is implied, either by the user's ignorance or negligence). This is obviously true for other companies as well, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc etc.

Obviously, the main problem here is not the company, it's the people using the company and the peer pressure on everybody else to join in. But that's another story.

> Facebook doesn't invade anyone's privacy.

What do you consider the Like, Connect, etc. buttons that are tracking virtually every page you visit, Facebook user or not?

There are a lot of things about which I'll get up over, and there are plenty of companies feted around here that I think are moral crimes in progress, but this isn't one and I think you've got the arrow of responsibility backwards. You're using websites and applications that have opted into using Facebook's infrastructure for the ends that benefit them, and as a side effect they are sharing the details of their traffic and users with Facebook. If that worries you--and I'm not saying you're wrong to be worried, though I personally don't care--you should not be using those websites. There are people who don't. I think their online lives must suck, but it's their prerogative.

I'm sure it's hard. But doing the right thing often is.

Your last point is exactly right: You can't choose not to use the vast majority of sites on the Internet.

Facebook isn't the only company doing stuff like this by any stretch of the imagination, but claiming that you can just "not use Facebook" if you want to avoid them is complete nonsense, hence my original comment.

How do you know, and thus conciously choose, if a site has a facebook widget without visiting it ?

You could use adblock or something similar on the desktop or android, but then you need to know about it first, and it opens another can of worm regarding site revenues etc.

Also if you're an iOS user you'll just have to live with it or abandon Safari for more limited browsers, and avoid opening any webview from any app ever.

Avoiding sites that use facebook widget is just not realistic. You're fine with it, and that's ok, but that's not really the point.

> How do you know, and thus conciously choose, if a site has a facebook widget without visiting it ?

Black-hole everything coming from a Facebook domain?

> Also if you're an iOS user you'll just have to live with it or abandon Safari for more limited browsers, and avoid opening any webview from any app ever.

Convenient, then, that I don't use iOS. (I use Android, and I do have an /etc/hosts file to kill some things I don't want to see.)