So OK - much of these things sounds crazy. But it's a free service and if you don't really care if Facebook tracks you or your web-surfs, I don't really see how it matters.
All these "Get off Facebook, they are doing a lot of things you don't like"-posts are getting crazy. It's like a mechanic running around screaming at people they are using the wrong oil in their cars or a lawyer running around acting crazy about people not suing everybody.
It's more like a traffic cop jumping up and down pointing out the wall you're headed for.
Facebook is emphatically not a free service, you pay but not in a way that is visible to you. Privacy as a means of exchange is a relatively new concept and we have not yet learned to put a proper value on it. It will take some major expose rather than individuals coming around like this person did to change that.
Our IRL identities are the new Intellectual Property, I think. I'm waiting for copyright attorneys to start viewing social networking infringements on privacy/security as identity theft.
It's a "boy who cried wolf" attitude with too much "fake" emotional appeal.
It's not so much "get out of fb" it's how you use it.
"but but but it's your privacy!!111" yeah, exactly, that's why I limit the information I share with FB, no location checkins, no "picture every other minute", no "fill your missing data" BS, etc
"People on the street can do that too, I better walk with a paper bag over my head."
But there is no one person on the street that can do that for all other people on all the streets on the planet. Concentration of information in one "brain" is the problem, not that not everything is top secret. There is a difference in the possible consequences between some neighbour on the street seeing you and someone having a database of all public movements of all people.
You're filling out a few fields with fake data, but filling thousands of "fields" daily, for real. Those come from your behaviour: what sites you visit, when, with what frequency, what do you click, what do you install, who are your contacts, when do you sleep, when do you move, how often you send messages... I can not even imagine how long the list must be from all the things you can extract from someone's internet + mobile behaviour.
Edit: and that's what I find most troubling: that someone can know much more about me than myself. Things that you can only realize from looking at the data over time, things that are invisible when experienced on real time.
The part you find troubling is likely the most exciting part---once harnessed and turned to an individual's utility. "Something that knows more about me than myself" was the dream of the 'personal digital assistant' craze in the '90s, but the technology wasn't there yet. It's here now, but it leverages network advantages and scalability to work its magic.
I imagine the synthesis of these forces in the future is technologies that aggregate, but that the indivudal can buy into. Do you want help deciding what to wear based on the weather or time of day, beyond what your assistant can do for you? Then there's a collective data channel you can opt-in to joining, and you'll trade some of your personal private information for access to a digital "collective unconscious" of aggregate data. I liken it to the 23andme approach of collecting genetic profiles.
There is a difference between "knowing more about you" and "helping you find out something new about you". The entity that knows more about everyone than they themselves do concentrates power. A tool that you use to find out something new about yourself, only for yourself, does not.
It can often be cross-checked with information that others provide about you (in good will, or even unknowingly - either explicitly, or by implication, etc.), and you have no control over that
People using facebook has externalities, those externalities affect me, which is why it matters to me. Most obviously, it's a proprietary communication service, and communication services tend to exhibit a network effect[1].
> "It's like a mechanic running around screaming at people they are using the wrong oil in their cars or a lawyer running around acting crazy about people not suing everybody."
These are awful analogies. A better one might be people (a long time ago) jumping up and down telling you that smoking is linked to cancer/death. Imagine being that guy during a time when smoking was considered healthy! Now, of course, everybody knows - and people are free to make an informed choice about their behaviour. The current situation is compounded by the fact that most users simply don't understand the power of machines and algorithms to draw inferences.
Until there are viable distributed alternatives for non sys-admins, the options seem to be to either give all over to The Man or go live in a cave. The former is too nihilistic for my liking so I'm working towards alternatives http://amirchaudhry.com/brewing-miso-to-serve-nymote/
Facebook has been invaluable to me for keeping in touch with friends and family from my entire life time. I've rekindled contact with lost friends, kept in touch with family living abroad, made new friends. Its a tool and like any tool there are instructions and warning labels. What more, this tool is free, and to be fair, costs millions of dollars a month to run. And we mustn't forget Facebook is also a business, and yes, we are not the customers - we are the product used to keep the machine running and make some people a healthy profit in the process. That is the nature of business. Remember that, accept that and use it right, and Facebook is great. You don't like - get off it but don't expect everybody to follow suit. There has been (are still are) many attempts to move the party else where. They all failed or will fail since the point of the 'party' is having everybody attend and attend all at once.
"[...] we are the product used to keep the machine running and make some people a healthy profit in the process. That is the nature of business."
Making a profit is the nature of business. Requiring payment in giving up privacy and control over your perception as the only options is not, and being a monopoly also is not.
"They all failed or will fail since the point of the 'party' is having everybody attend and attend all at once."
That is exactly why facebook must be faught, the name economics has for this is "network externality"[1] - the monopolization of a dominant communication system by one entity has a cost for those who don't participate, which is not acceptable.
Also, you might want to consider that "having everybody attend and attend all at once" technically does not require a monopoly. The telephone network, for example, is also one telephone network where every participant can call every other participant, but still, there are multiple telcos offering access to the network, competing with one another. Something similar is true for most traditional internet services, and the internet itself. Every machine on the internet can send packets to every other machine on the internet, but there are plenty of providers to choose from. You can send email from every email account to every other, but there are plenty of email providers, and it's relatively easy to open your own. Every website hosted anywhere can be read by anyone, not matter which provider they connect through ... all of those technologies allow you access through one single telephone, email client, and web browser, but there is no single entity that controls all of it, and that is vital in order to avoid an unhealthy concentration of power that in the end is likely to affect not just those who choose to use facebook, but all of society.
Tell your friends that you are not willing to accept their terms of friendship. On multiple occasions I've asked my friends/acquaintances to not post a specific photo that I'm in, and they've stuck to it. They might still keep it, as a keepsake, but it's not publicly available. If I wanted to go any further than that, I'd have to ask myself the extreme question of... "Why go out in public at all" due to all the times I'd have my face or actions tracked.
Unfortunately, it's not as simple as not uploading a single photograph. If Facebook has scraped your friend's (or grandma's) contact lists, the shadow profile has been created, and the friend tracking has begun.
When someone does something that prevents you from going outside, society generally makes that illegal. You might find that some of us are not all-powerful enough to make people do things simply by threatening to no longer be their friend.
Well, you need to look at it a little more objectively:
It "prevents" the individual from going outside because that individual has precluded the idea of going outside due to the possibility of being tracked/photographed.
I.e. Nothing about being tracked/photographed "prevents" an individual from going outside. But that, combined with an individual that fears/hates/morally_objects_to such a thing, makes it so that that individual is compelled to not go outside, lest they be forced to subject themselves to the thing they object to.
Additionally, it's not about "making people do things", and being not powerful enough to do so. That's quite an imposing/forceful line of thinking. It's about "thing X bothers me, what peaceful non-violent actions can I do to avoid X affecting me (negatively?)." And yes, making a regulation against X and forcing people to submit to it through the threat of imprisonment is quite violent.
Isn't the "shadow profiles" thing somewhat of an urban myth?
What would be the benefit for FB to store shadow profiles? If they can't use that data publicly or internally or with advertising partners, why would FB need shadow profiles?
I'm not convinced there's a secret hidden profile page with my details on FB. Unless of course they're planning to use that data one day to try to convince me to sign up to FB... this is about the only reason I can think of for them to have such data. Any other reasons you can think of?
It's not a myth. For example, if you tag someone in a photo who doesn't have a FB account, they'll do facial recognition and point them out in other photos you upload. They'll also create "Pages" for companies without their permission. I remember Jake von Slatt had to go to a lot of trouble to make them take down his Page.
No. I have never been on Facebook, but use to receive emails "Look all the friends you have on Facebook". It was slightly disturbing as there were pictures of, indeed, my friends. They've stopped sending these emails a few years back, but I'm sure they haven't dropped me from their graph.
Then you want to a a little experiment: Do sign up on facebook, using the e-mail adress that you normally use to communicate with your friends.
Don't enter any other correct information about you. Just have a look at the suggestions the sign-up wizard will be showing, based on nothing but your e-mail adress. You will be surprised.
(You should immediately delete the account again when you're done if you don't want to stay on facebook. In this case, make sure to clear your cookies.)
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"?
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.
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).
To be fair, Facebook hires psychologists to basically get you addicted to Facebook and hides (as much as it can) the nature of its practices from its merchandise.
Maybe if it were simple as that, the 'war talk' would be avoided. However, as the article explains, facebook tracks people who don't even sign up to its terms.
Maybe you should have read the rest of the sentence before deleting it? I'll reproduce it here for your benefit:
"[...], the name economics has for this is "network externality"[1] - the monopolization of a dominant communication system by one entity has a cost for those who don't participate, which is not acceptable."
The telephone network is interconnected. I can call anyone from any network to any network provider. Facebook is not. If I want to see my friends on Facebook I have to use Facebook. When there is a social network that aggregates all other social networks then it would be like the phone network.
FB is valuable for me too but that doesn't mean I trust it. As you say, it's a business that exists to turn a profit and I am cattle. I don't like this arrangement but I don't really have an alternative (as you say).
However, that does not mean that people shouldn't draw attention to what FB is, what it captures and what it does in your name. Nobody reads the "instructions and warning labels" and even if they did, they're not going to comprehend them. Would you then admonish the user to RTFM? I'd call that victim-blaming. How many developers would dare blame the user for not understanding how to use their shiny new web-app? Why take the same approach to those who can't understand a ToS?
FB may be a tool but that's also an oversimplification. It's not anything like a 'hammer', or even a chainsaw. I'd consider it more like a drug (eg morphine), which is also a tool but is not really your friend. Those kinds of tools get regulated.
"but I don't really have an alternative (as you say)."
Which is another way to say that you in fact do have an alternative. People in oppressive regimes tell themselves the same, which is how they do get perpetuated. The change happens when people accept the fact that there is an alternative.
There is no contradiction between those two terms. Nation states are social networks, too, and some of them are oppressive regimes. One risk factor for becoming oppressive is a concentration of power. Facebook concentrates a lot of power. The concentration of power is why people feel that they have no alternative.
Note: Analogies are analogies because they are analogous, not because they are an exact copy.
I don't think I would compare this to living under an oppressive regime. There are plenty of people in oppressed countries who speak out, and yet the regimes are perpetuated. Sometimes the readily available alternative is just another flavor of repressive regime. It's easy for people in relatively free societies to say, "they should just stand up for themselves", yet have no concept of what that would actually entail.
I didn't say "they should just stand up for themselves", and I didn't say that the alternative was "readily available", I just said that change comes from people accepting the fact that there is an alternative, and that considering the status quo as being without alternative perpetuates the status quo.
Also: No, an oppressive regime with plenty of people speaking out is not perpetuated. One in a million speaking out is not plenty, and half the people in a country speaking out won't leave the government much choice. That's why oppressive regimes suppress free speech. You cannot control a majority of a country by force.
Just because an individual's action may not amount to much, doesn't mean that there is any other way out than individuals' actions. The oppressor won't just give up, and the other side consists of nothing but individuals, whose inaction certainly won't change anything.
You can search and replace your argument with the automotive industry and it works pretty well. You can't be a successful adult without a car, no matter how loud an extremely small minority of the population claims otherwise, and the general public has pretty much no interest in the alternatives.
Yet, in contrast to the auto industry, no one thought it was great that Ford Pinto gas tanks would explode, or the cops punish people for the crime of "driving while black".
If as a company you insist on business practices or class of business operations that inevitably results in the destruction of any real free market probably via monopolization, you can expect criticism and regulation to at least try to reduce the harm.
I don't own a car and almost never miss it. Granted I would miss it slightly more often if ride-sharing services didn't exist as sometimes I'm too lazy to cycle, but it'd still be perfectly doable. I live in the US.
I'm glad you're here to point out that I can't be a successful adult without a car. I hadn't realized that, but now that I'm clued in I can go buy one to fix the issue.
P.S. I think around 25% of my coworkers have cars, and we live in the US making six figures.
You can't be a successful adult without a car? That's one of the most ridiculous things I have ever heard. That's like saying you don't love your wife unless you buy her a diamond. Granted one has more purpose than the other but essentially they are both material objects that we as humans place too much value on.
I seriously doubt that 'millions of dollars a month to run' price-tag. There are alternative, even superior open source software solutions.
The only cost are the servers, but certainly, even with facebook's traffic, a well built stack could run on not more than a dozen. So I'd imagine facebook could be run on a few thousands of dollars a month, certainly the costs shouldn't be that much higher than wikipedia's.
The only thing that's valuable in facebook, and hard to replace, is the user-base, which was won through heavy marketing, and having a more attractive product at a critical stage (more attractive =/= technically superior).
Not centrally, no. But many existing P2P networks prove that you do not need massive data centers to hoard everyone's data. You can use the collaborative effort of humanities existing computation devices.
That was not the point he was making -- he was making the point that "even with facebook's amount of traffic, you could host it on a dozen servers". That is just so far detached from reality I cannot take that seriously.
I agree that p2p social networks are an interesting alternative, but they are a whole different kind of product and a kind of apples / oranges comparison in terms of cost of operation.
Decentralization is less efficient. Instead of each piece of information being copied in a few place it would need to be copied to hundreds or thousands with a decentralized system.
According to this [1] Facebook has multiple data centers with around 60,000 servers as of 2010, probably a lot more now. If you know how to do the same thing with a dozen servers, I am sure they'd love to hire you!
Okay, 60,000 servers - for 1.23 billion active users. That's less than 0.0005 server per user. Facebook as such may cost millions to run of course, but the price they pay to keep your account active is so negligible that you're essentially selling your data for peanuts.
In fairness, while I think the previous comment is a bit clueless myself, I'm inclined to ask how many of those servers would be necessary if FB wasn't logging so very much data on everyone.
If FB's job was once again just to show me my fucking posts, instead of building the most complete profile of a human being in the history of mankind so that it can sell me out to governments and corporations, it seems to me the data load would be a lot lighter.
You cannot and you are right there. The only way to target individuals is by having specific lists of emails or ids that you can upload and create custom audiences (or via their notion of retargeting through pixel fires). Even then though you don't know WHO saw your ads. Its a walled garden and impossible to get per user data as you would in traditional retargeting campaigns. That is why the bidding system is impossible to game (despite some claims from some companies). You have no idea WHO is seeing your ads - only the DEMOGRAPHIC of the ad views/clicks and only if you segmented your campaigns in a way you can track that.
Right now, this would be insider stuff and asking for much trouble to reveal it. Meanwhile, you just have to wait for it to be obvious that facebook has failed and it will start selling user data directly, or that they get hacked and a dump is available on the black market.
In the meantime, find yourself a dodgy intelligence agent or sysadmin.
I don't have a source for this right now, but I remember reading that the vast majority of disk space used by Facebook is taken up by users' photos. They are probably saving hundreds of uploaded photos per person (on average) and while they do compress them quite a bit this still has to take up a lot of storage space.
Of course they do also collect a lot of behavioral data, but I imagine all the data Facebook has collected on me probably uses up less storage than my profile pictures alone...
Also I remember reading that they keep 7 copies of everything at all time a few years back in an article about how deleting your account didn't actually delete your data, which became obvious after data from accounts deleted several years before had reappeared after the introduction of a new feature.
I wonder how many email servers are running today? Probably comparable within an order of magnitude. Yet those server are not owned by one corporation, they're multiple corporations cooperating to move data between each other.
It's too bad Facebook and Twitter are businesses, instead of multiple protocols and multiple businesses. Or in other words, it's too bad The Old Ones didn't think cat pictures and what they had for breakfast was important. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_pioneers
Its not comparable scale. WhatsApp are shifting messages from point A to point B and that's it. Even 100x less servers is still a LOT of servers just or that. They don't store data, just traffic it from one user to another.
I apologise in advance for the sarcastic tone (I could not help myself): If you can run Facebook at Facebook's scale with no more than a dozen servers, I'm going to hire you for my next project because man, that would be something! I suggest you send a CV to Google because they are running an even bigger scale than Facebook and if you can dilute them to say 100 servers - its a win!
Facebook's infra is unique. If it was built today it might have been different but it would still run on MANY servers across MANY geographical locations. It would still cost millions to run every month. This is why companies like Google are building data centres. Its cheaper for them in the long run to own the infra from the ground up, literally (i.e., owning the actual land the DC is on).
Honestly, I'd rather they make it a paid service than a dystopian clusterfuck of advertising espionage.
I'm more likely to quit the wonnnnderful "free" service you describe and defend because it "costs millions of dollars a month to run". Those millions of dollars are just R&D on how to get advertisers more intimate data. If they didn't pay for all that gross research, the infrastructure wouldn't cost nearly as much.
I've never been a fan of Facebook, although as an early adopter I've been on it for a long while. In fact, I've always said (and still say) that Facebook is the closest thing the modern world has to a devil, because it uses your friends against you to encourage you to do things you would not normally do. It's really, really bad.
But I'm still on. Why? Well, because, like I said, all my friends are on there. It's a faustian choice: give up hearing from and relating to all of those people I have put so much emotional capital in all these years? Or stay and hold my nose?
I do not feel that the hype against Facebook is overblown. In fact, looking at it over a period of decades, it's probably understated.
I have tried almost all of these arguments and simply put, the benefit that facebook gives most people is a much higher value than their perceived cost of privacy (or so they think).
Until the house is burning down across the street, it is often difficult to sell fire insurance, and they dont see the massive data mart that fb is.
That's pretty much it. Since so many of my friends are on it, the benefit to being on it is high. (And after a transcontinental and trans-oceanic move, it's much easier than staying in contact in person.)
But I do limit my Likes - I don't Like any ads or commercial entities, with 1 exception - I endorse musicians. Since I am a musician and many of my friends are as well, I Like their music pages.
I don't Like Books/Movies/Games, whatever else. My profile info is relatively sparse and I ignore FB's attempts to make me fill it out further - everything on my profile is already publicly accessible info.
Ultimately I'm useless for marketing data anyway. I've participated in voluntary consumer surveys a few times, and none of the questions were about activities or products I've ever used. I'm so far removed from mainstream/popular culture that there are no advertisers marketing anything of interest to me.
It doesn't actually matter if you limit your likes.
From the article:
Like shadow profiles of people, Facebook can "infer a like" based on
other information it has about you, like what you read all over the
internet or what you do in apps where you log in with Facebook.
Yeah, I don't use FB login for anything else. I don't click FB Like buttons on other web sites. FB can't tell what you're reading on other web sites without your explicit action.
Even the Snowden affair didn't make much people "buy fire insurance". I believe good, free and easy to use doxxing tools could help people change their opinion on the value of their privacy.
Hmmmm, maybe. I assumed the "right to privacy" part was the actual point. Or the next paragraph saying that you might not want to hide stuff now but maybe in the future. Such a spray and pray approach.
Thanks - that's helpful feedback for me to see how this can be read.
I think that even if someone doesn't have anything to hide, there are still issues that are relevant to them. So that section is just to address the issue from that perspective.
this article is not very accurate, it' like the author just found out about the data he is giving up:
-all your private financial transactions.
no, my private financial transactions are private, how can Facebook access them?
-...the right to privacy, and the right to have a say in how information about us is used. We've giving up those rights forever by using Facebook.
No, you are giving up a small part of your privacy using Facebook. You give up privacy basically using any online service, and a lot of offline as well (loyalty cards, phone number, ...). And it's not forever.
-In reality, lots of your posts are never seen by anyone!
I think the article refers to the "Top Stories" features, but you can change it to "Most recent". The problem is not facebook, but the amount of material available. They are not hiding posts, it's just that they are too many for the average user
The entire appeal behind Facebook is the huge user base. Everyone I know is on Facebook, and so is everyone they know. If you're going to get people to switch, you'll need both some killer feature that sets it apart from Facebook and some means to mitigate the loss of that user base - perhaps some compatibility layer where information that wouldn't reach your friends that switched with you to Platform X gets posted to your linked Facebook account.
I'm ultimately envisioning a future where people could host their own Facebooks or set up an account with a family member or small business, seemlessly transfer their data between servers whenever someone wants to switch providers, built-in SSL for everything, PGP with automatic key sharing between friends, encrypted file storage, etc. - everything that tech community advocates for in an easy-to-host-yourself distro.
So much good could come out of having a standardized platform for social media; you just have to be able to overcome Facebook's inertia.
> I'm ultimately envisioning a future where people could host their own Facebooks or set up an account with a family member or small business, seemlessly transfer their data between servers whenever someone wants to switch providers
To be fair, the concept behind diaspora. I was closely following the development at the time diaspore was "hot" and, honestly, the setup was too complicated for people who are used to setting up wordpress or something.
I still think the concept is amazing, but unfortunately, they kind of failed to deliver.
My roommate likes to say the following, which I strongly agree with:
"Several years ago, when Diaspora hit the big news channels, we hackers should have picked up the slack, joined en masse, building a decent early adopter user base while helping with the code.
What we did instead was bickering about technical aspects of the implementation, pointing at the crudeness, and pretending that 'getting off all social media is the best'. And then we all joined Facebook."
Every time I looked into Diaspora over the past several years it seemed dead. I took another look, and it seems to have progressed quite a bit - I just signed up for account!
People move from platforms all the time. Before FB there was MySpace, before Google there was AltaVista, before GApps you'd probably use MS Exchange etc etc. There are many examples.
What's needed is software infrastructure to make it easy to build decentralised systems -- everyone should have their own piece of the cloud. On top of that is the need for a compelling use-case (beyond privacy) that will spur word-of-mouth and user adoption. All this has happened before, and all this will happen again.
The sad thing is all of the technology essentially already exists in some form or another - it's just that no one put it all together in an easy-to-configure box with a web interface. RSS for updates, chat over XMPP, messaging with SMTP+TLS+PGP. At this point it seems like most of the tools for the backend are done and the rest is would just involving plugging them together, putting a nice interface on top and acquiring the user base (I know - understatement of the year).
There is movement in this area - see sandstorm, owncloud, disapora, etc. Slap it all in an Odroid and you have control of your data again. But people won't pay for it.
I tend to agree, but really nobody will respect your privacy but yourself, which is why this should be on your own hardware (or at least on a VPS). A small box under my couch hosts my site, cloud storage (owncloud), and if I could get away from it the RSS feed that basically is facebook, and it's quite nice. It was too hard to set up, though, which is why sandstorm looks great.
The people most likely to be early adopters of such a platform would distrust a solution hosted by a 3rd party. Why? Because if you don't control the system, it can still be used to spy on you. Even a decentralized system with Wordpress-like companies that are federated are not immune.
I hear this a lot, that people move platforms "all the time", but it's not really true as it relates to Facebook. Before Facebook, the vast majority of users on social media (MySpace), were teenagers and young adults. Social media only exploded to your parents and grand parents and everyone else with Facebook. It's much harder getting those folks to switch, and the network effect is that much stronger with the ~30x larger user base. Switching off something like Alta Vista to Google isn't even comparable - there are basically no switching costs in that case.
I'm not saying it's impossible, but the stickiness and network effects of Facebook are pretty much unprecedented.
You need to factor in time. As an example Microsoft isn't treated the same way it was years ago and IBM isn't the same as before Microsoft.
I'm not suggesting FB will become obsolete but people will use other services if they see value elsewhere. If that weren't the case then WhatsApp/Instagram wouldn't have grown so fast. Network-effects does not mean something is immune from disruption.
GNU social is web software you can use to run your own social network, either privately or publicly.
The software supports both single-user and community modes and can be used in an intranet environment or as part of the wider GNU social federated social network.
The software has been used in production environments for over five years and is very stable. GNU social also easily communicates with other GNU social servers, and traditional social networks such as Twitter.
Because GNU social is written in the de-facto web standards of PHP and MySQL, it runs virtually anywhere you can run a common piece of web software, such as WordPress or Drupal.
And because GNU social is part of the GNU project, it's 100% free software, with no malicious features, spyware or advertising.
> I'm ultimately envisioning a future where people could host their own Facebooks...
If we had "bandwidth equality" from our homes the paradigm would be quicker to shift, i.e. upload/download speeds the same. That way we could easily host/transfer/share to and from our home located devices/servers.
Agreed. This will happen again, as it has happened before. I pretty much had the same thought process as you on how to implement it, technology wise. It might be instructive to look at how AOL lost out to the larger web in order to envision how it might play out. Maybe there needs to be a web technology similar to the browser that displaced AOL, a standalone app acting as a front-end to the stack you described. Who knows, maybe snapchat or a similar highly-adopted app could evolve into this.
I wonder though if Facebook will be able to leverage it's massive database of psychological profiling to stay ahead of the curve. Over time companies have lost their spot at the top but this is the first time technology has been powerful enough to reward the company on top with incredibly powerful information reserves. I think Facebook is going through an awkward growing phase but will smarten up and begin using it's role as facilitator of social influence much more effectively.
These psychological factors are much more powerful in this field then an engineer's solution.
> It might be instructive to look at how AOL lost out to the larger web
FB just hit 1.23 billion monthly actives.
AOL peaked at ~26 million [US] subscribers.
FB's network effect is much stronger than AOL ever had.
Also, AOL was heavily dialup-based. Independent ISPs offered broadband at better prices, just as the open web was becoming rich with content. That lured away a lot of AOL customers.
I have three questions regarding self-hosted social networks: (1) Isn't it a huge advantage of social networks like Facebook that it's a central instance which can remove accidentally leaked data from the network and which prevents data scraping on a large scale? (2) Isn't it also a disadvantage of peer-to-peer networks that when your key leaks, all your data that is stored in the distributed network will be irreversibly accessible to everyone? (3) To which degree is it feasible to burden the average user with crypto key management without a locksmith?
> If you're going to get people to switch, you'll need
> both some killer feature that sets it apart from Facebook
> and some means to mitigate the loss of that user base
Something which integrated your facebook feed in a nice way (nice for the user, hostile from FB's perspective of course) could work well.
What you actually need is the 13 years old demographics onboard and the other teens. The user base migrates to the next website really fast as it happened before with the several other websites that existed before fb.
I was about to complain about the constant, ubiquitous and severely annoying (for me) confusion between "it's" and "its". I'm finding it more and more, everyday and everywhere, in articles and posts. People, what's so difficult about it? "It's" === "it is". Therefore, "it's own" === "it is own"; "it's merit" === "it is merit". You can work out the rest.
"Its, without an apostrophe, is the possessive of the pronoun it. It’s, with an apostrophe, is a contraction of it is or it has. If you’re not sure which spelling to use, try replacing it with it is or it has. If neither of those phrases works in its place, then its is the word you’re looking for."
I read about the fuzz but to me its unclear what changed in the policy. I dont haven a Facebook account because the current policy isn't very different from the bad one years ago when I had an account and therefore deleted it.
So does someone know what exactly changed and why my dear ones should suddenly stop using Facebook?
If still staying on facebook, and being quite assertive with content shared, then what else can be done to limit one's online footprint. The article mentions ghostery and some EFF browser extension - that I unfortunately is unable to download at the moment, from the link in the article.
But without limiting your own freedom to much and being to much of a hassle what are some good minimum precautions?
I closed my account years ago. Use NoScript, Disconnect, uBlock. But my profile is probably still there. It's been mentioned that they keep profiles of people who don't have an account.
I can imagine they could attach this comment and my online activity in other platforms to that profile. Even tell my friends about them.
That would make a good episode of Black Mirror. Titled "The Privacy Freaks", it would show people in a social network observing the lives and making fun of the absurd things privacy concerned people do to stay "out".
I assume that they will still keep some data around in order to spot possible new accounts with fake names (by people who deleted their real name accounts), like phone numbers and e-mail addresses. But it's a start...
Is there really a reason to use all three plugins?
I personally use Adblock Edge with the EasyPrivacy + EasyList and Fanboy's Annoyance List filters. I tried NoScript a while back but it destroyed how too many web pages worked for me to keep liking it. I assumed the EasyPrivacy feature took the place of Disconnect pretty well.
That would make a good episode of Black Mirror. Titled "The
Privacy Freaks", it would show people in a social network
observing the lives and making fun of the absurd things
privacy concerned people do to stay "out".
You should read "The Circle" by David Eggers. It is basically this.
I feel like this article, like every other article about facebook, is based on a misunderstanding of what it is and how it should be used. It seems to me that everything on facebook should be to some extent a facade, an idealised version of whats actually going on. Its a really nice way to keep in some sort of contact with people that you've fallen out of touch with or people who you were never that close with to start (but they post interesting things). This is where the primary value of facebook is (for me at least).
The point is, information on facebook is pseudo-public, not private and hopefully not too personal. Use it like this, and it don't think theres any problem. There are plenty of other options for more private or personal communications so its not like they have any monopoly power in this area. So, regardless of the dubiousness of Mark Zuckerberg's vision for open communications, i think the problems written about in this article reduce to a lot of hyperbole.
Since the whole purpose of Facebook is to enable people to share things with their friends, you'd have to be phenomenally stupid to use it to store things you want to keep private.
Off-topic, does anyone have any idea why the text looks so horrible on Firefox running on Linux? I'm using firefox-35.0.1-3.fc20.x86_64. I've also tried midori-0.5.9-2.fc20.x86_64 and it's the same. Only google-chrome-stable-40.0.2214.94-1.x86_64 renders it in a readable way.
That's what it looks like for me too. Contrast is so low that it's essentially unreadable for me. It is very pretty though. Elegant.
On Firefox, Alt-V Y N (for no style) is in muscle memory by now, and renders in glorious 1990s black and white, and the text flows within the browser borders (another problem on many sites today).
Not an expert at all in any sorts of font issues, but I remember having something similar with unfortunate settings of font `Hinting` and `Antialiasing`.
My current settings are: Medium and Grayscale respectively. (on Gnome Shell)
The chosen font has strokes thinner than 1px at the chosen size. Every rendering engine has its own way of handling this kind of broken design, your engine uses subpixels to show accurate stroke width, therefore the weird colors.
[Edit:] Those ultra-light fonts are a very unfortunate fad that probably began with the introduction of iOS 7, maybe even earlier with MS's Metro, contrived and perpetuated by people who don't read but who look at texts.
What Linux are you running? "fc20" I guess that's Fedora? So it looks bad on Firefox on Fedora but fine on Ubuntu. That's a Fedora issue not a Firefox or general Linux issue.
Yes, fc20 stands for Fedora 20. The difference between it and Ubuntu isn't that big if I zoom in: http://imgur.com/ptlQEmf
Based on the other comments I got, the small differences could be caused by different anti-aliasing settings or font engines (I'm currently using freetype-freeworld-2.5.0.1-5 for example).
Sorry - I just picked a theme and never thought to browser check. Weirdly, I run FF on Linux and it looks okay. Anyway, I'll try to tweak the font. Thanks for pointing it out.
I think transparency is good. The secretive (and superficial) society we have now favors cheaters and liars.
If there was a way to publicly expose everyone for who they really were, maybe society would start to value those individuals who have real integrity (as opposed to greedy, manipulative, two-faced individuals). Absolute social transparency would allow power to be placed in the hands of people who are actually worthy of trust.
That said, I'm skeptical about Facebook's intentions. It looks like they just want to take people's personal information and use it for their own benefit. Their primary goal is not to make society more transparent for everyone - They just want to keep this information for themselves and keep everyone else in the dark - That way they get leverage over everyone else.
It is very generous of you, as a white, presumably Christian* heterosexual male living in a Five-Eyes member nation, to assert on behalf of society that no one could possibly have a legitimate reason to keep their personal details and correspondence away from you, or your government.
If no one has anything to hide, no one has anything to fear, right?
*I haven't seen any mention of your religion on the public profiles I've discovered yet. Indeed, almost everything i've seen relates to your programming work. How are we as a community to decide if you're worthy of trust if you don't disclose more personal information about your political views, family, finances, religion? What are you trying to hide? Why are you trying to deceive us?
Quick question: is Facebook tracking what you articles read online on third party sites even when you are not logged in to Facebook? This can be done via cookies, browser fingerprinting, and other methods so long as the third party site (e.g. Buzzfeed) is firing a FB tracking pixel?
Thanks for this. However, unless FB were directly sharing this sort of data outside of FB, this consent decree would seem to be very hard to enforce/police.
Facebook has too much value because of Groups and Events. Both are incredibly useful and when everybody else is using it to organise things it can be hard to stay in the loop without.
That said, it is possible to use Facebook and insulate yourself. I use a fake name, a fake email and never added my phone number. My use is limited to Groups, Events and Messages - I don't doubt that they are still mining data for my account, but my account doesn't link to me.
Just because Google wants "one account ALL of Google", and Facebook wants your real name and Mastercard details, doesn't mean you have to drink their kool-aid and live their grand ONE ID registered member internet life.
Live the way you want to. Go crazy and get a name such as zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC, and suddenly this proxy gets you new powers of expression that can't be tied to your Mastercard or advertising partners of companies you don't even like.
Not if you've stuffed it full of information that is in no way representative of yourself, is the notion the parent poster is describing.
This is actually an old tactic for maintaining privacy while participating on the internet: avatar, persona, handle, multiple names for it. It's the origin of the notion that "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." The social networks hypothetically ban this in their terms of service, but because Facebook has become the market-dominant entity now and can trust the average user to not intentionally falsify all their data, they no longer actively police this aspect of their ToS.
Facebook "Like" buttons on the web will still track your activity and link it to your profile, but you can take measures to ameliorate that (clear cookies, block the "Like" button origin URLs, and---for the most paranoid among us---use Tor so that not even the IP addresses are easily correlated to your activity).
"Not if you've stuffed it full of information that is in no way representative of yourself, is the notion the parent poster is describing."
Well, but what would that actually look like? And who would actually do such a thing?
What I am trying to point out that "it doesn't have the name from my passport attached to it" does in no way mean that it's not "representative of yourself". The name in my passport has some special significance, but in many ways it's also just as much a pseudonym as "zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC" is. If someone knew everything about you, except for the name in your passport, you could hardly argue that they didn't know you, could you? If someone writes a comment on here using a pseudonym, do you really think that the content of that comment is "in no way representative of [themselves]"? Does it matter for facebook that they don't know the name from your passport when they can see a large part of your interaction with the world? Does it make any difference in how they can influence you? What's the effect once you add in your social contacts? How is your social interaction hidden by the fact that you use a pseudonym to tell facebook who you know in real life and what you talk to them about? Even if all of them were using pseudonyms?
Edit: To maybe make it even clearer: Stuffing an account full of information that is in no way representative of yourself would mean that you use the account only to communicate with randomly selected people (otherwise it's info about who you are interested in talking to), newly selected randomly for each new contribution (otherwise it's info about who of the people selected randomly previously you found interesting), writing about randomly selected topics, probably mostly stuff that you are not interested in (but not necessarily, of course, otherwise the lack of certain topics would represent your interests), writing from a randomly selected standpoint (even on topics that you are actually interested in, otherwise it's representing your standpoint), but of course never using your expertise for anything you write (neither for defending your actual standpoint nor the opposite side, as the depth of your knowledge would be representative of yourself).
Specifying that your name is foobar and that you live in Peking and then talking about events in Paris to a semi-constant group of people many of whom are also constantly talking about events in Paris at the time when people in Paris are awake ... is not "Stuffing an account full of information that is in no way representative of yourself". If any human with half a brain can infer something from the whole picture of all the data you and your contacts supply, then that info is there, whether you specified it explicitly or not, and the only way to avoid that is by not letting your interests and your knowledge influence what you do, which is something nobody would ever do.
>do you really think that the content of that comment
Easy fix for me, I don't comment on things on Facebook, nor do I ever feel the need to and I never visit the news feed. My usage is pretty much either:
- Receive email about event, RSVP.
- Receive email about group message, respond with Yes/No/Okay.
I thought of this too. The problem is that adding noise doesn't throw off the existing signals. All you can do is try to introduce new patterns, like try to convince the linear regression that you're left-wing and right-wing. Random data won't do that though; you'd need to know what patterns to recreate. A lot of effort, and as you say, pretty paranoid given one could just optout and block web trackers.
As far as I understand from the post, as long as one person is your friend on facebook (and perhaps even if you just exchanged messages with), and also has your real name and phone number on their phone and linked those two together - facebook can therefore link this (fake) user to your (real) identity.
I don't think anyone actually does that? Link facebook accounts to contacts in their phone?
I mostly go by a nickname, I haven't yet seen anyone add me to their phone using my real full name - I think only about 10% of the people I know even know my full real name, many just assume my facebook name is my real name. I feel pretty safe.
Don't forget to block their web-wide beacons (a.k.a. "like buttons"), and lie about your birthday (useful information for identity thieves[1] -- remember how your bank asked for the last 4 digits of your social when you called them?). I still use them to keep up with some people I know, but with a somewhat fake name, a blank profile, and minimum searchability. I don't think using it unduly exposes me to identity thieves, creepy potential employers, and other not-Mossad threats[2]. I've used it since it required ".edu" addresses, and never clicked an ad, so I think I'm basically getting my money's worth.
Guess you filter through a lot of email or don't engage online with friends and family. Also, people actively use FB for events and groups. Do you not follow any local events?
True. I don't engage much online with friends or family. Or even via email. We mostly call and text, or we actually are together face to face. Likewise with local events - people talk about them in real life and we attend when we want to.
Does anyone know if deactivation helps with any of these privacy concerns? I have had my account deactivated for 4 years. I keep it open just in case I need to get ahold of someone if I can't get through through phone and email (which has happened!).
I think it was mainly about th trending topics section. People were complaining it wasn't showing up there, but I'm pretty sure that is algorithmically driven based on your interests. So if you don't post about politics and news much on Facebook, or Like politics or news posts, it's not considered your interest.
So, if you don't use the android app and don't use it's private messaging system for actually private stuff, you are just as "safe" as a non-user (since they can track you over websites with like buttons just as fine).
Also don't upload photos, don't put demographically-targetable keywords in any posts, don't let anyone tag you in photos, don't use Facebook to RSVP to events, and basically don't use the site at all, then yes.
I would heed that advice if I used Facebook purely to over-share pointless random personal information.
Unfortunately, Facebook is where people I want to communicate with can, and generally do see what I post, and engage with it at higher rates than on Google+.
Back when Google+ was new and very Google-oriented, I was able to build a community of a large number of followers for my personal account and a page for one of my books. But the Google+ user base is now larger, more diffuse, and less engaged. That's not very useful.
Lately, LinkedIn has been a good alternative. LinkedIn has improved their update stream. I read it, and I post to it. But LinkedIn does despicable things with your calendar information.
I'm pretty sure the people at Facebook have figured this out: Either you need it, and will put up with the privacy issues, or it's an entertainment medium for you and you don't care.
I've deleted Facebook and LinkedIn apps from my mobile devices, but I still use them via their Web UIs.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 70.2 ms ] threadAll these "Get off Facebook, they are doing a lot of things you don't like"-posts are getting crazy. It's like a mechanic running around screaming at people they are using the wrong oil in their cars or a lawyer running around acting crazy about people not suing everybody.
Some people are just that: They don't care.
It is a "free service" as in you're not paying them with dollars, but you are paying with something else.
I'm not a tin foil hat (I use Gmail, for instance), but the point of the article is valid.
At least that should be a conscious decision on user's part.
Facebook is emphatically not a free service, you pay but not in a way that is visible to you. Privacy as a means of exchange is a relatively new concept and we have not yet learned to put a proper value on it. It will take some major expose rather than individuals coming around like this person did to change that.
It's not so much "get out of fb" it's how you use it.
"but but but it's your privacy!!111" yeah, exactly, that's why I limit the information I share with FB, no location checkins, no "picture every other minute", no "fill your missing data" BS, etc
Also, don't install or use the FB mobile app (good thing it sucks)
There are browser extensions that hide G+/FB/Twitter buttons, it's a good idea to use them
" Even if you never posted anything, they can easily work out your age, gender, sexual orientation and political views. "
Why is this being said with a surprised tone? Oh and this happens in real life too, you don't need fb for that.
"Guess your age and gender"? People on the street can do that too, I better walk with a paper bag over my head.
But there is no one person on the street that can do that for all other people on all the streets on the planet. Concentration of information in one "brain" is the problem, not that not everything is top secret. There is a difference in the possible consequences between some neighbour on the street seeing you and someone having a database of all public movements of all people.
Edit: and that's what I find most troubling: that someone can know much more about me than myself. Things that you can only realize from looking at the data over time, things that are invisible when experienced on real time.
I imagine the synthesis of these forces in the future is technologies that aggregate, but that the indivudal can buy into. Do you want help deciding what to wear based on the weather or time of day, beyond what your assistant can do for you? Then there's a collective data channel you can opt-in to joining, and you'll trade some of your personal private information for access to a digital "collective unconscious" of aggregate data. I liken it to the 23andme approach of collecting genetic profiles.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
These are awful analogies. A better one might be people (a long time ago) jumping up and down telling you that smoking is linked to cancer/death. Imagine being that guy during a time when smoking was considered healthy! Now, of course, everybody knows - and people are free to make an informed choice about their behaviour. The current situation is compounded by the fact that most users simply don't understand the power of machines and algorithms to draw inferences.
Until there are viable distributed alternatives for non sys-admins, the options seem to be to either give all over to The Man or go live in a cave. The former is too nihilistic for my liking so I'm working towards alternatives http://amirchaudhry.com/brewing-miso-to-serve-nymote/
Making a profit is the nature of business. Requiring payment in giving up privacy and control over your perception as the only options is not, and being a monopoly also is not.
"They all failed or will fail since the point of the 'party' is having everybody attend and attend all at once."
That is exactly why facebook must be faught, the name economics has for this is "network externality"[1] - the monopolization of a dominant communication system by one entity has a cost for those who don't participate, which is not acceptable.
Also, you might want to consider that "having everybody attend and attend all at once" technically does not require a monopoly. The telephone network, for example, is also one telephone network where every participant can call every other participant, but still, there are multiple telcos offering access to the network, competing with one another. Something similar is true for most traditional internet services, and the internet itself. Every machine on the internet can send packets to every other machine on the internet, but there are plenty of providers to choose from. You can send email from every email account to every other, but there are plenty of email providers, and it's relatively easy to open your own. Every website hosted anywhere can be read by anyone, not matter which provider they connect through ... all of those technologies allow you access through one single telephone, email client, and web browser, but there is no single entity that controls all of it, and that is vital in order to avoid an unhealthy concentration of power that in the end is likely to affect not just those who choose to use facebook, but all of society.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
Why the war talk? Can't people who are willing to accept Facebook's terms just use it, while those who are unwilling refrain from using Facebook?
Now, what should I do about my friends posting my photo and personal details such that Facebook creates a shadow profile of me without my permission?
It "prevents" the individual from going outside because that individual has precluded the idea of going outside due to the possibility of being tracked/photographed.
I.e. Nothing about being tracked/photographed "prevents" an individual from going outside. But that, combined with an individual that fears/hates/morally_objects_to such a thing, makes it so that that individual is compelled to not go outside, lest they be forced to subject themselves to the thing they object to.
Additionally, it's not about "making people do things", and being not powerful enough to do so. That's quite an imposing/forceful line of thinking. It's about "thing X bothers me, what peaceful non-violent actions can I do to avoid X affecting me (negatively?)." And yes, making a regulation against X and forcing people to submit to it through the threat of imprisonment is quite violent.
What would be the benefit for FB to store shadow profiles? If they can't use that data publicly or internally or with advertising partners, why would FB need shadow profiles?
I'm not convinced there's a secret hidden profile page with my details on FB. Unless of course they're planning to use that data one day to try to convince me to sign up to FB... this is about the only reason I can think of for them to have such data. Any other reasons you can think of?
Don't enter any other correct information about you. Just have a look at the suggestions the sign-up wizard will be showing, based on nothing but your e-mail adress. You will be surprised.
(You should immediately delete the account again when you're done if you don't want to stay on facebook. In this case, make sure to clear your cookies.)
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?
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.
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.
"[...], the name economics has for this is "network externality"[1] - the monopolization of a dominant communication system by one entity has a cost for those who don't participate, which is not acceptable."
However, that does not mean that people shouldn't draw attention to what FB is, what it captures and what it does in your name. Nobody reads the "instructions and warning labels" and even if they did, they're not going to comprehend them. Would you then admonish the user to RTFM? I'd call that victim-blaming. How many developers would dare blame the user for not understanding how to use their shiny new web-app? Why take the same approach to those who can't understand a ToS?
FB may be a tool but that's also an oversimplification. It's not anything like a 'hammer', or even a chainsaw. I'd consider it more like a drug (eg morphine), which is also a tool but is not really your friend. Those kinds of tools get regulated.
Which is another way to say that you in fact do have an alternative. People in oppressive regimes tell themselves the same, which is how they do get perpetuated. The change happens when people accept the fact that there is an alternative.
Note: Analogies are analogies because they are analogous, not because they are an exact copy.
Also: No, an oppressive regime with plenty of people speaking out is not perpetuated. One in a million speaking out is not plenty, and half the people in a country speaking out won't leave the government much choice. That's why oppressive regimes suppress free speech. You cannot control a majority of a country by force.
Just because an individual's action may not amount to much, doesn't mean that there is any other way out than individuals' actions. The oppressor won't just give up, and the other side consists of nothing but individuals, whose inaction certainly won't change anything.
Yet, in contrast to the auto industry, no one thought it was great that Ford Pinto gas tanks would explode, or the cops punish people for the crime of "driving while black".
If as a company you insist on business practices or class of business operations that inevitably results in the destruction of any real free market probably via monopolization, you can expect criticism and regulation to at least try to reduce the harm.
P.S. I think around 25% of my coworkers have cars, and we live in the US making six figures.
The only cost are the servers, but certainly, even with facebook's traffic, a well built stack could run on not more than a dozen. So I'd imagine facebook could be run on a few thousands of dollars a month, certainly the costs shouldn't be that much higher than wikipedia's.
The only thing that's valuable in facebook, and hard to replace, is the user-base, which was won through heavy marketing, and having a more attractive product at a critical stage (more attractive =/= technically superior).
Decentralize all the things.
I agree that p2p social networks are an interesting alternative, but they are a whole different kind of product and a kind of apples / oranges comparison in terms of cost of operation.
[1] http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/the-facebook-data-center-...
If FB's job was once again just to show me my fucking posts, instead of building the most complete profile of a human being in the history of mankind so that it can sell me out to governments and corporations, it seems to me the data load would be a lot lighter.
Hmm, but that's how they make money. They log, they analyze, they show you ads and they sell your data.
Edit: So downvoters, how do I buy data about Facebook users?
In the meantime, find yourself a dodgy intelligence agent or sysadmin.
Of course they do also collect a lot of behavioral data, but I imagine all the data Facebook has collected on me probably uses up less storage than my profile pictures alone...
It's too bad Facebook and Twitter are businesses, instead of multiple protocols and multiple businesses. Or in other words, it's too bad The Old Ones didn't think cat pictures and what they had for breakfast was important. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_pioneers
EDIT: Changed to intended link.
As per [1], in March 2014 they were handling 20B messages/day (with 600M pics, 100M videos) with just about 550 servers.
My guess would be that, every day more photos are shared on WhatsApp than on FB.
Major difference: At present, WhatsApp does not "keep" your messages or sell "you" to advertisers.
[1] http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/3/31/how-whatsapp-grew-...
I'm more likely to quit the wonnnnderful "free" service you describe and defend because it "costs millions of dollars a month to run". Those millions of dollars are just R&D on how to get advertisers more intimate data. If they didn't pay for all that gross research, the infrastructure wouldn't cost nearly as much.
But I'm still on. Why? Well, because, like I said, all my friends are on there. It's a faustian choice: give up hearing from and relating to all of those people I have put so much emotional capital in all these years? Or stay and hold my nose?
I do not feel that the hype against Facebook is overblown. In fact, looking at it over a period of decades, it's probably understated.
Until the house is burning down across the street, it is often difficult to sell fire insurance, and they dont see the massive data mart that fb is.
But I do limit my Likes - I don't Like any ads or commercial entities, with 1 exception - I endorse musicians. Since I am a musician and many of my friends are as well, I Like their music pages.
I don't Like Books/Movies/Games, whatever else. My profile info is relatively sparse and I ignore FB's attempts to make me fill it out further - everything on my profile is already publicly accessible info.
Ultimately I'm useless for marketing data anyway. I've participated in voluntary consumer surveys a few times, and none of the questions were about activities or products I've ever used. I'm so far removed from mainstream/popular culture that there are no advertisers marketing anything of interest to me.
But every time your friends (who know your taste) share with you, it's pretty much the same thing.
-all your private financial transactions.
no, my private financial transactions are private, how can Facebook access them?
-...the right to privacy, and the right to have a say in how information about us is used. We've giving up those rights forever by using Facebook.
No, you are giving up a small part of your privacy using Facebook. You give up privacy basically using any online service, and a lot of offline as well (loyalty cards, phone number, ...). And it's not forever.
-In reality, lots of your posts are never seen by anyone!
I think the article refers to the "Top Stories" features, but you can change it to "Most recent". The problem is not facebook, but the amount of material available. They are not hiding posts, it's just that they are too many for the average user
I'm ultimately envisioning a future where people could host their own Facebooks or set up an account with a family member or small business, seemlessly transfer their data between servers whenever someone wants to switch providers, built-in SSL for everything, PGP with automatic key sharing between friends, encrypted file storage, etc. - everything that tech community advocates for in an easy-to-host-yourself distro.
So much good could come out of having a standardized platform for social media; you just have to be able to overcome Facebook's inertia.
I think you've just described Diaspora.
I still think the concept is amazing, but unfortunately, they kind of failed to deliver.
"Several years ago, when Diaspora hit the big news channels, we hackers should have picked up the slack, joined en masse, building a decent early adopter user base while helping with the code.
What we did instead was bickering about technical aspects of the implementation, pointing at the crudeness, and pretending that 'getting off all social media is the best'. And then we all joined Facebook."
What's needed is software infrastructure to make it easy to build decentralised systems -- everyone should have their own piece of the cloud. On top of that is the need for a compelling use-case (beyond privacy) that will spur word-of-mouth and user adoption. All this has happened before, and all this will happen again.
Something else needs to be built, with a beautiful interface so we get everyone off facebook. I want to help.
I'm not saying it's impossible, but the stickiness and network effects of Facebook are pretty much unprecedented.
I'm not suggesting FB will become obsolete but people will use other services if they see value elsewhere. If that weren't the case then WhatsApp/Instagram wouldn't have grown so fast. Network-effects does not mean something is immune from disruption.
GNU social is web software you can use to run your own social network, either privately or publicly.
http://gnu.io/social/If we had "bandwidth equality" from our homes the paradigm would be quicker to shift, i.e. upload/download speeds the same. That way we could easily host/transfer/share to and from our home located devices/servers.
These psychological factors are much more powerful in this field then an engineer's solution.
FB just hit 1.23 billion monthly actives. AOL peaked at ~26 million [US] subscribers. FB's network effect is much stronger than AOL ever had.
Also, AOL was heavily dialup-based. Independent ISPs offered broadband at better prices, just as the open web was becoming rich with content. That lured away a lot of AOL customers.
There user accounts/identities are federated. It is easy to switch to another node.
The "standardized platform" is the ZOT-Protocol layer.
So does someone know what exactly changed and why my dear ones should suddenly stop using Facebook?
But without limiting your own freedom to much and being to much of a hassle what are some good minimum precautions?
I closed my account years ago. Use NoScript, Disconnect, uBlock. But my profile is probably still there. It's been mentioned that they keep profiles of people who don't have an account.
I can imagine they could attach this comment and my online activity in other platforms to that profile. Even tell my friends about them.
That would make a good episode of Black Mirror. Titled "The Privacy Freaks", it would show people in a social network observing the lives and making fun of the absurd things privacy concerned people do to stay "out".
I assume that they will still keep some data around in order to spot possible new accounts with fake names (by people who deleted their real name accounts), like phone numbers and e-mail addresses. But it's a start...
I personally use Adblock Edge with the EasyPrivacy + EasyList and Fanboy's Annoyance List filters. I tried NoScript a while back but it destroyed how too many web pages worked for me to keep liking it. I assumed the EasyPrivacy feature took the place of Disconnect pretty well.
The point is, information on facebook is pseudo-public, not private and hopefully not too personal. Use it like this, and it don't think theres any problem. There are plenty of other options for more private or personal communications so its not like they have any monopoly power in this area. So, regardless of the dubiousness of Mark Zuckerberg's vision for open communications, i think the problems written about in this article reduce to a lot of hyperbole.
P.S. Screenshot: http://imgur.com/m4rLSHQ
On Firefox, Alt-V Y N (for no style) is in muscle memory by now, and renders in glorious 1990s black and white, and the text flows within the browser borders (another problem on many sites today).
My current settings are: Medium and Grayscale respectively. (on Gnome Shell)
[Edit:] Those ultra-light fonts are a very unfortunate fad that probably began with the introduction of iOS 7, maybe even earlier with MS's Metro, contrived and perpetuated by people who don't read but who look at texts.
http://imgur.com/6nKzwZq
What Linux are you running? "fc20" I guess that's Fedora? So it looks bad on Firefox on Fedora but fine on Ubuntu. That's a Fedora issue not a Firefox or general Linux issue.
Based on the other comments I got, the small differences could be caused by different anti-aliasing settings or font engines (I'm currently using freetype-freeworld-2.5.0.1-5 for example).
PS I agree too, they look better in Chrome, don't know why.
If there was a way to publicly expose everyone for who they really were, maybe society would start to value those individuals who have real integrity (as opposed to greedy, manipulative, two-faced individuals). Absolute social transparency would allow power to be placed in the hands of people who are actually worthy of trust.
That said, I'm skeptical about Facebook's intentions. It looks like they just want to take people's personal information and use it for their own benefit. Their primary goal is not to make society more transparent for everyone - They just want to keep this information for themselves and keep everyone else in the dark - That way they get leverage over everyone else.
Google tracks everyone everywhere as well. Should it do the same?
If no one has anything to hide, no one has anything to fear, right?
*I haven't seen any mention of your religion on the public profiles I've discovered yet. Indeed, almost everything i've seen relates to your programming work. How are we as a community to decide if you're worthy of trust if you don't disclose more personal information about your political views, family, finances, religion? What are you trying to hide? Why are you trying to deceive us?
That said, it is possible to use Facebook and insulate yourself. I use a fake name, a fake email and never added my phone number. My use is limited to Groups, Events and Messages - I don't doubt that they are still mining data for my account, but my account doesn't link to me.
Just because Google wants "one account ALL of Google", and Facebook wants your real name and Mastercard details, doesn't mean you have to drink their kool-aid and live their grand ONE ID registered member internet life.
Live the way you want to. Go crazy and get a name such as zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC, and suddenly this proxy gets you new powers of expression that can't be tied to your Mastercard or advertising partners of companies you don't even like.
This is actually an old tactic for maintaining privacy while participating on the internet: avatar, persona, handle, multiple names for it. It's the origin of the notion that "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." The social networks hypothetically ban this in their terms of service, but because Facebook has become the market-dominant entity now and can trust the average user to not intentionally falsify all their data, they no longer actively police this aspect of their ToS.
Facebook "Like" buttons on the web will still track your activity and link it to your profile, but you can take measures to ameliorate that (clear cookies, block the "Like" button origin URLs, and---for the most paranoid among us---use Tor so that not even the IP addresses are easily correlated to your activity).
Well, but what would that actually look like? And who would actually do such a thing?
What I am trying to point out that "it doesn't have the name from my passport attached to it" does in no way mean that it's not "representative of yourself". The name in my passport has some special significance, but in many ways it's also just as much a pseudonym as "zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC" is. If someone knew everything about you, except for the name in your passport, you could hardly argue that they didn't know you, could you? If someone writes a comment on here using a pseudonym, do you really think that the content of that comment is "in no way representative of [themselves]"? Does it matter for facebook that they don't know the name from your passport when they can see a large part of your interaction with the world? Does it make any difference in how they can influence you? What's the effect once you add in your social contacts? How is your social interaction hidden by the fact that you use a pseudonym to tell facebook who you know in real life and what you talk to them about? Even if all of them were using pseudonyms?
Edit: To maybe make it even clearer: Stuffing an account full of information that is in no way representative of yourself would mean that you use the account only to communicate with randomly selected people (otherwise it's info about who you are interested in talking to), newly selected randomly for each new contribution (otherwise it's info about who of the people selected randomly previously you found interesting), writing about randomly selected topics, probably mostly stuff that you are not interested in (but not necessarily, of course, otherwise the lack of certain topics would represent your interests), writing from a randomly selected standpoint (even on topics that you are actually interested in, otherwise it's representing your standpoint), but of course never using your expertise for anything you write (neither for defending your actual standpoint nor the opposite side, as the depth of your knowledge would be representative of yourself).
Specifying that your name is foobar and that you live in Peking and then talking about events in Paris to a semi-constant group of people many of whom are also constantly talking about events in Paris at the time when people in Paris are awake ... is not "Stuffing an account full of information that is in no way representative of yourself". If any human with half a brain can infer something from the whole picture of all the data you and your contacts supply, then that info is there, whether you specified it explicitly or not, and the only way to avoid that is by not letting your interests and your knowledge influence what you do, which is something nobody would ever do.
Easy fix for me, I don't comment on things on Facebook, nor do I ever feel the need to and I never visit the news feed. My usage is pretty much either:
- Receive email about event, RSVP.
- Receive email about group message, respond with Yes/No/Okay.
I mostly go by a nickname, I haven't yet seen anyone add me to their phone using my real full name - I think only about 10% of the people I know even know my full real name, many just assume my facebook name is my real name. I feel pretty safe.
[1] http://news.sciencemag.org/2009/07/social-security-numbers-a... [2] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/mickens/thisworld...
A strategy to get people off FB ans sign up for something new? Almost impossible.
I quit Facebook a few years back. I didn't replace it with something new. I simply quit. I don't share my life online. I just live it.
Did Facebook literally do that or is it really about users deleting/blocking posts on some Facebook groups or on they walls?
Unfortunately, Facebook is where people I want to communicate with can, and generally do see what I post, and engage with it at higher rates than on Google+.
Back when Google+ was new and very Google-oriented, I was able to build a community of a large number of followers for my personal account and a page for one of my books. But the Google+ user base is now larger, more diffuse, and less engaged. That's not very useful.
Lately, LinkedIn has been a good alternative. LinkedIn has improved their update stream. I read it, and I post to it. But LinkedIn does despicable things with your calendar information.
I'm pretty sure the people at Facebook have figured this out: Either you need it, and will put up with the privacy issues, or it's an entertainment medium for you and you don't care.
I've deleted Facebook and LinkedIn apps from my mobile devices, but I still use them via their Web UIs.