Hacker News Reader

Comment by DiabloD3 | Hacker News Reader

I support people leaving Facebook forever. Facebook is selling you as the product, and does not care about making your life easier or better, or making it easier to connect with friends and family.

I agree with the article's stance on how Facebook enables stalkers to stalk their victims, and the very nature of Facebook makes it easy for them to do that.

If you are at risk of such things, please do not have a Facebook account. With the example of being homosexual in a country where the punishment is death, foreign governments may be able to use Facebook to find you due to any number of security issues that have existed, exist currently, and will exist in the future, so please, just stay off Facebook altogether.

View on HN

> Facebook is selling you as the product, and does not care about making your life easier or better, or making it easier to connect with friends and family.

Why can't it be that they can care about both of these things and acknowledge that it's a balance which can shift in either direction depending on the product they're putting out?

Because only one of those generates them profit and thus keeps them existing.

But I don't think Facebook is that bad. I do think that Facebook isn't for everyone and real name policies are a bad idea.

People who say this don't have a lot of friends, or don't care about their friends. Participating in facebook's quagmire is the only way to keep in touch with some people.

It sucks, but it's true. You can argue with the ideological purity of it all you want, but it boils down to the fact that you must choose between purity, and staying in touch. Period.

It's not the only way, it's just really convenient. Just about everyone has mail / email / text / phone. The ones that don't have those, aren't going to have Facebook.

They don't use those media for one-to-many invites, though. Sure, my friends could email me everything they post to fb, but they don't - everyone else is already there and gets it.

You can poll your friends. It can work. I have a couple friends without Facebook accounts, they are not anti-social. Perhaps introverted. Sometimes we have to remember to tell them about events. Personally though, the invites and private messaging are what I like most. I think it's just great not having to know somebody's phone number or email address.

I deactivated my facebook account and I manage to keep in touch with my family and close friends from school and college using Whatsapp alone. I don't pretend like I won't miss out on some cool interactions, or miss out on important updates but for the most part it works pretty ok.

That just exchanging the kettle for the pot. Hell, whatsapp IS owned by Facebook...

That's true, but I think of it like this. Computers are much better at processing metadata rather than data - its easy to draw inferences when you press a "like" button or click a link.

With Whatsapp, they have data (text of conversations) and some metadata (who I'm talking to often) but its much harder to draw inferences from that. I don't see any ads, and my behaviour isn't tracked. With Android M, I'll strip it of all extra permissions like location and microphone, further boosting my privacy.

tldr - Its a lot harder to monetise me on Whatsapp.

It is much easier.to get intelligence on you though (ok, same as if you used Facebook messages). Likes are random and nothing consistent. Your communication with peers can reveal everything though.

You're thinking from the perspective of a government operative (or another human) snooping through your data, in which case messages are more important. But most of our privacy is destroyed by computers sifting through the mountain of data that companies collect on us.

Your cellphone constantly broadcasts your location to your carrier and to Facebook and other apps, if you have them installed. If you analyse this data, it is possible to make out where you work, where your home is, where you like to hang out (and with who), and where you take vacations. Further, it is possible to identify a person uniquely from just 4 points of location data if you have a database of everyone's location data. As former NSA general counsel Stewart Baker said, “Metadata absolutely tells you everything about somebody’s life. If you have enough meta data you don’t really need content.”

For more uncomfortable and scary revelations like this, I recommend checking out Data and Goliath by Bruce Schneier.

Instead of Facebook owing your photos and ID, they now own your phone numbers and your friends phone numbers! Not the best swap. WhatsApp Terms: "In order to prevent and reduce unsolicited spam messages, as well as to improve your in-app experience, WhatsApp uses the phone numbers from your phone's address book." "WhatsApp looks at the phone numbers in your address book, then checks to see which of those numbers are verified in WhatsApp." http://www.whatsapp.com/faq/en/general/20971813

So before they knew who he communicated with + pictures + other data, and now they know... who he communicates with. Given how easy most facebook identities are to connect to "real" identities, I don't see how them knowing the phone numbers is noticably worse.

Or... people who say this have friends that care enough that they manage to communicate without facebook?

In my experience there was a phase where that was an issue, but people learned relatively quickly that saying "oh, sorry I didn't invite you, you weren't on Facebook" doesn't go over well, and is really hard to spin as the others fault.

> People who say this don't have a lot of friends, or don't care about their friends

I just wanted to add another voice saying that this isn't remotely true. I have a large and close-knit circle of friends, who work in technical fields, but Facebook isn't our thing. A few of my friends use Facebook a lot, but many use it rarely, and many don't have an account.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com