I deleted my Facebook account in 2010 after appearing in the Times regarding technology addiction. It was my most time consuming social media application at the time. For the article, they had me install an application tracker to see how much time I spent in focus on a particular app. I was alarmed at how often I checked Facebook chat.
Today, after much investigation, I've come to a hypothesis that technology's purpose is to gently erode the concept of "self" as it grows in power and scope. We drive this growth, but at the same time more than a few of us worry about how the growth is affecting our "right" or "natural state" of privacy to be who we want to be without blame or for someone speaking (in aggregate) to what our actions may hold in the future. It seems obvious privacy is a good thing, because as long as privacy exists someone can't take your information and do things in private with it as they see fit. The more tech they have, the more they can do with your data and the more they can "invade" your privacy.
Facebook's accumulation of information is concerning, not so much from the standpoint of the addiction that causes us to contribute to the quantity of data, but from the standpoint of collective thinking that arises from it.
I don't want to be part of a collection or be told to think with the collection. I want to be me and think about things that are important to myself. I want to do that without anyone else telling me how to think about it or speaking for what I know at a later date without knowing me.
I've come to a hypothesis that technology's purpose is to gently erode the concept of "self"
Exactly, although it's being done in a roundabout and non-obvious way. There are millions of tech folks, all (in my mind) honestly trying to create technology to empower folks to do things they've never done before.
But the beauty of tech is generalization, creating cookie-cutter choices. Everything we do, and in ever way we interact with tech, it's more and more leading us down pre-canned behavioral pathways. Even when completely unintended, the place where tech is taking us unless we drastically change our ways is something like the commodification of the species. It's a freaking horror show.
The Borg are going to go from sci-fi super villains to an accurate description of our great-grandkids in just a generation. Amazing.
Will the last human please go outside and do something unique?
Very well said. One would think of the information age as a way to start better communicating which should break down barriers. But it seems we can just more easily flock to the people who think like we do. So we have more strongly cemented factions.
I find myself getting mildly angry at friends who post things I disagree with. If we were seated together having a beer and he said the same thing we'd keep talking for an hour and I would have no negative feelings. I find if I try to engage online it just goes nowhere. I avoid posting anything other than the most banal things because I don't want to be judged/attacked. I just don't have the time or energy to go in depth to defend my positions. And at this point I could care less if anyone knows what I feel.
It's because of the publicity of the discourse. Normal one-on-one discussions can lead somewhere, because you're not constantly afraid of losing face. When you utter opinions publically, you're sortof forced to stand by them, regardless of their merit. That's why televised political "debate" never ends up changing the opinion of any of the debating parties. They're trying to convince an audience instead of the other party. I think it's a big part of why politicians are so unpopular today.
We've built this new world where we are accustomed to leaving tiny traces of our minds in nooks and crannies, where they are waiting to be scraped up and analyzed. As those traces get larger and those nooks and crannies get unearthed, the default level of privacy will shrink. One day it might be that privacy itself becomes an antiquated concept.
I deleted my Facebook in high school in 2010 also, out of paranoia of this exact future. The problem is that if someone sums over the comments I make on other media, they could deduce my identity anyways. In the big picture Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, HackerNews, etc. are all in the same boat. I imagine there exists software which sums over many common sources (FB, TW, HN, IG, YT, RD, etc.) to find correlations in prose structure, post time patterns, topic similarity, sentiment similarity, etc. to identify people, or at least reduce the search space. The NSA would likely use such software, if it existed.
Based on what I've seen you should assume most nation states have this ability. Take the NSA's back door into Cisco routers as an example. The NSA made use of this exploit for years before it was exposed. In all likelihood they are still making use of it as there are likely unpatched routers still in the wild.
Now sidestep to phones. Nation states can tap into your calls and to your location through the GPS info tied to your phone. So if you want your calls to be anonymous you pay cash for a burner and only turn it on and use it in large crowds. Ok, that seems ok, but burner phones are specifically targeted since they are more likely to be associated with behavior a government would want to track. So now what happens is as soon as the burner comes on you are triangulated, phones near you are identified and these are used to start to pinpoint who you are. Social media of everyone near the burner can be mined. Over time if you continue to use the same burner the higher likelihood of being identified.
>I've come to a hypothesis that technology's purpose is to gently erode the concept of "self"
Centralized corporate-style internet services may achieve that, but many other kind of technologies strive for and achieve the exact contrary. I'm thinking of all the free (as in freedom) social networks that allow people to express their true self, to say what they can't say in their outside social life.
Two aspects necessary for these types of communities to exist I think I've identified are: 1. having a persistent identity that isn't linked to your real life one, and 2. having minimal moderation (either hierarchical or caused by mob mentality). Basically the opposite of Facebook.
You know you have an account anyway, right? FB makes and manages profiles of people who don't have accounts, even of people who have never had accounts. They use this for their ad network, among other things.
LinkedIn does this as well. I don't know about others.
Thats why it's super important to only allow javascript and cookies from domains you have explicitly trusted. This will aid in preventing all the plugins (ie "like this post on fb") from tracking you when your browsing the web. You can do this will a good suite of browser addons; noscript, ghostery, ublock, disconnect.
Or you can go the full ban hammer route and add all of facebook's known domains to your hosts file[0].
How does that even work? Where does FB (or LinkedIn) get the information from that they can determine who you are even if you've never signed up for an account?
It's more that the social network platforms themselves are naturally atomizing forces of capitalism itself. And you might wonder how this applies to the elimination of self? Simply put, in capitalism all things need to be a commodity to be traded/sold for a price. Be it physical goods like food and houses or non-physical goods like music or personal data. Ultimately, to ensure you're good at consuming these goods, capitalism will invariably find means to erode the sense of self which is driven more by social needs (family, friends, church, etc) to place you squarely into a new set of identities precisely crafted for consumption (Trekkie, Star Wars fan, Clinton/Trump voter). These identities are meant to feel like you chose them but in practice we're all indoctrinated to these identities to some capacity. It's all part of the larger push to ensure you're alone, afraid, and always ready to do whatever is asked of you so long as you can have your trinkets. Because if some people find out it's all a scam then the whole system falls apart when enough of them refuse to consume. If there's anything the last few years has illustrated is that there is a subculture in the current generation that isn't buying what the capitalists are selling. So they're grasping desperately for more ways to pull on heartstrings or to further alienate us from each other and seek goods/commodities to find comfort in. This I think will fail very quickly once the facts sink in for those not clued in right now. When you can't pay anymore or that the goods bought bring no more comfort then the crisis will set in. Identity or self, as you mentioned, will be the center of that crisis. What comes of it, I can't be sure. But I fear a regression from technology would prove a disaster. We're cyborgs, we're meant to use technology to enhance ourselves but not for the sake of enhancement itself.
> I was alarmed at how often I checked Facebook chat.
A bit unrelated to your broader point, but I recently dropped my phone and shattered the camera lens, and have been astonished at how much less I'm using social media. It's even more surprising because I don't actually post that much and don't take a ton of photos relative to others.
Its not just faces .. me and a friend had a little jam session recently and posted a picture of our cool little setup, consisting of a few pocket-sized machines (synthesizers and controllers) on our table in front of us. Just an innocent little picture of our jam setup.
Within seconds of posting this picture of the machines, my friend was getting targeted ads from the manufacturers of those devices - within seconds!
This was a watershed moment for us. We won't be posting much to Facebook in the future .. far too scary for us!
I had a similar moment (and ironically I'm a musician too).
I went to a bar, where a band was playing on stage... After a while I realized I know the drummer. I played with him before, in another band, years ago. We had a beer, chatted a bit and went home.
Now, we hadn't posted any pictures, nor statuses, we have no mutual friends on facebook, no connection at all... Heck, Facebook DIDN'T EVEN EXIST when I last saw him.
The second I got home the app suggested him as a friend
Facebook suggests a lot of people to me. Overwhelmingly they're people I don't recognize. Are you sure this isn't just confirmation bias making it seem like they're more successful than they really are? I'm not saying Facebook doesn't do some creepy things, but even at worst this is innocuous enough, and this has enough other really innocuous explanations that this would barely make me think twice.
I used to play a phone game and utilized mock locations for area specific content. Later, Facebook would suggest friends from the specific location I had spoofed, despite having never once set foot there or having ever known anyone from the area.
I stopped using Facebook completely when it suggested that I friend a Work Associate that I have only dealt with once via email. The creepiest part of it was that I have never told Facebook where I work at all.
All the other people that it suggests that I friend where I have no idea who they are, I wonder where the association came from...
I also had this recently too. I got given a friend suggestion of someone I haven't seen in twenty years. We have no shared FB friends, nor location, nor schooling / college education.
I have her email address in my contacts which has been shared with WhatsApp.
Curiously, there should be no way to directly link my FB account with WhatsApp. I haven't shared my mobile number with FB, and I haven't shared my FB account email address with WhatsApp. Somehow they have tied the two together.
I've never installed any other FB app on my phone, and my FB account is only a month old.
I found that particularly chilling. The friend suggestion doesn't have my email address nor mobile number, and we live in different countries. I'd love to figure out how they did it. I even use a pseudonym on FB.
Another musician here:
One day I got ads for Waves Plugins. I still haven't figured out how they have learnt about me being into producing. My FB friends are (afaik) non-musicians from school days and I don't open FB in my regular browser. Furthermore, I block almost anything µblock has to offer in my normal browser. Maybe they derived something from my e-mail address. Pretty scary stuff!
1. Location matching - both your apps detected you in the same place for an extended period of time. Maybe you guys had mutual friends in the music community?
2. Microphone[0]. They have since refuted that claim[1], but I've had way too many coincidences and I'm choosing to keep my tin-foil hat on... :/
If they looked you up that could be part of the why and how. Facebook knew where you both were, and the fact they looked you up initiated this. Totally creepy either way.
Well the fact that he is a customer already does make it more likely that he will also be a future customer. He already likes XYZ distortion pedals, so lets remind how good XYZ chorus pedals are..
For the sake of discussion, why is that scary rather than kind of nice? Unless you take the AdBlock route, aren't well targeted ads better than irrelevant ones?
It's scary because the system learned something about you automatically from an innocuous photo and told others about it, all without a human in the loop. Ads are pretty harmless, but you can imagine what might happen in a surveillance system or if a more malicious actor was behind the system.
Its scary because its intrusive. I didn't post the picture so that I would get better ads - rather, to inform my friends that we were having a jam session. But now, we're all going to be bombarded with ads for instruments we don't need to buy (because we already have them).
The most uncomfortable angle is just how quickly Facebook tuned into what we were doing and then changed its ad-delivery algorithm to match. I have one friend who had his picture taken in front of a headshop - he now gets regular ads for bongs and smoke accessories, even though he's not a user. So, that's also quite discomfiting ..
I understand the responses to this, but my take is we're so far past the Rubicon we might as well be in the Atlantic.
For example, I have a friend who has never been on any social media. If he wanted to opt out of the surveillance apparatus, he still would have to address: collection of phone metadata, browsing history, traffic cams, other CCTV, financial paper trail, probably more I'm missing.
That's my wife's position, and IMHO it's a wrong one. It's the same argument about letting them store your search history: everything about you ends up in a database that someone can look up whenever s/he wants. Where you shop, where you eat, where you go on holiday, all about your family and friends, what you like, your health... it's a treasure trove for all sort of nefarious activities that could target you, from ID theft to fraud, framing, entrapment, you name it. But of course it will never happen to you, right?
When you're the advertiser, sure. When you're the target, not so much. Do you really want billboards speaking to you as you walk down the street? Making suggestions based on your recent purchase history or activities and personal associations?
Just because advertising technology can achieve greater powers of reaching people, doesn't mean we need or want advertising woven into the fabric of our existence more than it already is. You can opt in to that if you want, I'm staying well clear.
This is probably the most important question to be able to answer effectively, though I (and it appears many others) have trouble coming up with a compelling reason why people should be worried. Most of the people I try to convince remain unworried, thinking along the same lines -- why is it bad if they know more about me? I inevitably try to explain that 1) it's not beneficial to you, and 2) more importantly, bad actors could use the information unscrupulously. However, they believe that if this information is helpful in any way in protecting them, and otherwise doesn't really bother them, then it's a positive trend.
I would like to come up with some powerful (frightening) examples of why the data collection going on is so dangerous, and why people should be worried and careful.
Because he also looks terrible on the photo and he immediately received ads for MacDonalds jobs within minutes of posting this picture. His insurance also resigned his health policy after a system recognized him as a drunkard.
It used to be that the law couldn't catch up with the fast change in technology, now it's us the people that can't keep up. All my friends using Facebook don't comprehend what is going on, it's just pictures right? The idea that FB is creating highly detailed profiles of every user, and selling them to anyone who will pay, is just dismissed as a joke. What good can come from this I wonder.
Yeah, as someone who has used Facebook for advertising, what they're doing is pretty obvious and not really that nefarious IMO. When I set an ad, I get to say "I want people within 10 miles of this zip code who like dogs, shopping, sports, and breweries" and Facebook limits my ads to only that subset of people. I don't get a list of their names, I don't even know who they are. They just see my ad and I'm charged $1.
Whenever someone asks "what nefarious thing is this company doing with my data?" the answer is rarely "something really, really bad!". Rather, it's almost always "trying to sell you something".
>> "It used to be that the law couldn't catch up with the fast change in technology, now it's us the people that can't keep up."
And I think that, in turn, is holding the law back further. If people don't understand why something is a problem, they don't care and nobody is going to waste time evolving the law to protect them from harms they don't even know are occurring.
But that doesn't mean that I believe I am not on Facebook.
I am pretty sure that Facebook are able to construct most of the shell of me from fragments provided by less careful friends or just strangers.
I imagine, and do not believe I am wrong, that Facebook have a ghost profile already with photographs of me already associated, some preferences and interests already in place.
A montage almost indistinguishable from the whole, or perhaps in some respects better... have they got to 3d models for their Oculus universe yet?
They probably know my name, am I even a necessary part of that picture? What's missing?
Any friends of yours who have installed any FB application will have uploaded your contact details. All FB needs to do is merge all of those profiles of you from each of your friends and they will have a pretty accurate informational profile. Since many people have also added a photo of you to their phone contact entry, FB gets that too. Any time you visit a website that uses an FB Plugin, for commenting or sharing, FB drop a ghost profile cookie against you. If at any point you somehow leak your email address or cell number on one of those sites, they can now tie that ghost profile to a real person, thanks to your friends using FB, even when you don't.
It's not just Facebook, Amazon? Google? Microsoft? They all advertise too, and many others. I've deleted my Facebook profile a couple of times, I've only kept it this long for family. I may change that soon enough too. Especially if anyone ever asks me for my password for it that will be the end of that.
What is the proposed recourse? Ban Facebook from analyzing data that users give it? I use Facebook's automatic tagging because I find it useful. Should it be illegal for me to use this feature because someone might unintentionally be identified in a photo that I took? Is the argument that Facebook--or any other company--should never be allowed to develop software that could process data that could identify folks, even when the data was willingly provided by a user that's complying with the law?
I'm not arguing in defense of Facebook, I just don't understand what someone that's privacy-minded would want. If I can legally take a photo, should I not have the right to have a company analyze that photo on my behalf?
Not saying I agree, but an argument could be made that other people need to be blurred before it is shared with a third party, if they have a legal right to control images of themselves.
If you accept that people do have this right the logical conclusion is then you are infringing and causing harm to them by taking their photo and sharing it with Facebook. If you don't think people should have that right, I am not convinced there is any infringement going on and this creepy database is just the inevitable end result.
Symmetric key encrypt the image, upload the encrypted image with the symmetric key encrypted by your friends' pubkeys.
When you add a friend just append new pubkey encrypted symmetric key for each asset. Friend removal is even more expensive and requires the client side to reencrypt everything :(
I'm sure there are better cryptographic constructs out there with multi key encryption that can alleviate some of the insertion and removal costs.
You could do it with decent trade-offs for the content provider as well. You could obfuscate everyone else's face but yours and allow them to get access to that image and then just encrypt the map for your friends. Of course then it's all about just creating enough mock accounts to recover the full images throughout the graph. Or just take custody of a user's keys in exchange for features.
Still though, it's marginally more expensive to build a mass surveillance app!
I will never disagree with advancing software, because at the end of the day if we don't, someone else will. But I do disagree with companies taking advantage of the laws. There is no privacy law at the moment that bans Facebook from seeing you in someone else's picture and locating where you were, and targeting ads at you based on that information. But it is common decency to have some respect, and discard that information. This is where the capitalist mindset takes over and makes companies think this behavior is ok.
> What is the proposed recourse? Ban Facebook from analyzing data that users give it?
I think the answer's obvious -- replace Facebook with an entity, hypothetical at present, that's controlled by its users, not a corporate board of directors whose loyalty is to themselves and to stockholders, people for whom subscribers are a product being offered up for sale.
I'm obviously speaking hypothetically -- there's essentially zero chance for such a thing, given the modern Internet and the current political environment.
> If I can legally take a photo, should I not have the right to have a company analyze that photo on my behalf?
The unasked question is whether the analysis is carried out on your behalf.
Communism would't work, without some benevolent AI running it. People incharge of managing the system will have reason in billions to be corrupt. Such useful info, will always be monetised, right now we can follow the money, take away the legal way and a backdoor will open which will be more difficult to tame.
Facebook can of course do whatever it wants, and users as well. But bystanders should be able preserve their privacy if they so wish. The only way to do this is active obfuscation.
Here's hoping 2017 is the year it gets scaled up, because it would sure be profitable, with the right implementation.
A friend of mine had something similar[0] on his car (it was a Lamborghini) to avoid his car being identified in images online.
I'm sure it's not hard to have hoodies and tee shirts with this integrated.
It's not visible to the human eye so unless you hold up a camera, it'll not be a problem.
That said, this might be an issue if you visit a bank or airport or something along those lines.
[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2oYReMaS4A
Two remedies I've heard about in science fiction are:
1) "Gevulot" in the book Quantum Thief. There are laws that allow you to control the spread of information about you. Digital technology without the 'DRM' that enforces these laws is banned (and yes, the book does explore the obvious problems with this). I've written more on this at http://www.bayleshanks.com/notes-computer-gevulot
2) "Friends of Privacy" in the book Rainbow's End. A charitable organization creates a zillion fake identities with your name so that someone getting a credit report for you, looking for you on Facebook, etc, gets a lot of hits, all indistinguishable from you, and all filled with lies.
Well in the EU Facebook can't do the kind of face recognition described in the article.
Most people in Europe actually still think face recognition is useless (like how speech recognition was useless until very recently) because they haven't experienced it on Facebook.
I don't think the article was advocating any specific course of action, but it's good to be aware of the scope of the information they have available in any case.
> They have algorithms analyzing your photo. The solution is to run the algorithms on your computer.
Doesn't that defeat the purpose? The whole reason Facebook is able to do what they do is that they have existing tagged photos that I may not have access to. I don't need to train Facebook to know what my friends look like. If I have to do extra work to tag my photos, I'd might as well be manually tagging them.
FB is a commercial privately owned publishing platform. In some countries, you need a model release to publish photos of me, in others you need a release for my kids, in others none. This is the thorny unresolved question of what jurisdiction 'cyberspace' operates under.
If you are storing any PID of EU citizens, regardless of your jurisdiction, that will come under GDPR very soon (not sure how that impacts social publishing, photos, info gathered in public vs private places, or if it has a get-out clause etc but mentioning it as an example)
Facebook, Google, and likely others (observe Amazon with their Echo for instance) are effectively trying to build an electronic Jeeves. But in the process they are building up a dataset on every user that would make STASI look like the keystone cops.
Readit News
Today, after much investigation, I've come to a hypothesis that technology's purpose is to gently erode the concept of "self" as it grows in power and scope. We drive this growth, but at the same time more than a few of us worry about how the growth is affecting our "right" or "natural state" of privacy to be who we want to be without blame or for someone speaking (in aggregate) to what our actions may hold in the future. It seems obvious privacy is a good thing, because as long as privacy exists someone can't take your information and do things in private with it as they see fit. The more tech they have, the more they can do with your data and the more they can "invade" your privacy.
Facebook's accumulation of information is concerning, not so much from the standpoint of the addiction that causes us to contribute to the quantity of data, but from the standpoint of collective thinking that arises from it.
I don't want to be part of a collection or be told to think with the collection. I want to be me and think about things that are important to myself. I want to do that without anyone else telling me how to think about it or speaking for what I know at a later date without knowing me.
Exactly, although it's being done in a roundabout and non-obvious way. There are millions of tech folks, all (in my mind) honestly trying to create technology to empower folks to do things they've never done before.
But the beauty of tech is generalization, creating cookie-cutter choices. Everything we do, and in ever way we interact with tech, it's more and more leading us down pre-canned behavioral pathways. Even when completely unintended, the place where tech is taking us unless we drastically change our ways is something like the commodification of the species. It's a freaking horror show.
The Borg are going to go from sci-fi super villains to an accurate description of our great-grandkids in just a generation. Amazing.
Will the last human please go outside and do something unique?
I deleted my Facebook in high school in 2010 also, out of paranoia of this exact future. The problem is that if someone sums over the comments I make on other media, they could deduce my identity anyways. In the big picture Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, HackerNews, etc. are all in the same boat. I imagine there exists software which sums over many common sources (FB, TW, HN, IG, YT, RD, etc.) to find correlations in prose structure, post time patterns, topic similarity, sentiment similarity, etc. to identify people, or at least reduce the search space. The NSA would likely use such software, if it existed.
Now sidestep to phones. Nation states can tap into your calls and to your location through the GPS info tied to your phone. So if you want your calls to be anonymous you pay cash for a burner and only turn it on and use it in large crowds. Ok, that seems ok, but burner phones are specifically targeted since they are more likely to be associated with behavior a government would want to track. So now what happens is as soon as the burner comes on you are triangulated, phones near you are identified and these are used to start to pinpoint who you are. Social media of everyone near the burner can be mined. Over time if you continue to use the same burner the higher likelihood of being identified.
Centralized corporate-style internet services may achieve that, but many other kind of technologies strive for and achieve the exact contrary. I'm thinking of all the free (as in freedom) social networks that allow people to express their true self, to say what they can't say in their outside social life.
Two aspects necessary for these types of communities to exist I think I've identified are: 1. having a persistent identity that isn't linked to your real life one, and 2. having minimal moderation (either hierarchical or caused by mob mentality). Basically the opposite of Facebook.
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I closed my account yesterday for these reasons and also because, I can honestly say, it's just a boring distraction and waste of my time.
LinkedIn does this as well. I don't know about others.
Or you can go the full ban hammer route and add all of facebook's known domains to your hosts file[0].
[0] - https://github.com/jmdugan/blocklists/tree/master/corporatio...
A bit unrelated to your broader point, but I recently dropped my phone and shattered the camera lens, and have been astonished at how much less I'm using social media. It's even more surprising because I don't actually post that much and don't take a ton of photos relative to others.
Within seconds of posting this picture of the machines, my friend was getting targeted ads from the manufacturers of those devices - within seconds!
This was a watershed moment for us. We won't be posting much to Facebook in the future .. far too scary for us!
I went to a bar, where a band was playing on stage... After a while I realized I know the drummer. I played with him before, in another band, years ago. We had a beer, chatted a bit and went home.
Now, we hadn't posted any pictures, nor statuses, we have no mutual friends on facebook, no connection at all... Heck, Facebook DIDN'T EVEN EXIST when I last saw him.
The second I got home the app suggested him as a friend
Gosh this was scary.
(OP here)
That's a whole other can of worms, of course.
All the other people that it suggests that I friend where I have no idea who they are, I wonder where the association came from...
I have her email address in my contacts which has been shared with WhatsApp.
Curiously, there should be no way to directly link my FB account with WhatsApp. I haven't shared my mobile number with FB, and I haven't shared my FB account email address with WhatsApp. Somehow they have tied the two together.
I've never installed any other FB app on my phone, and my FB account is only a month old.
I found that particularly chilling. The friend suggestion doesn't have my email address nor mobile number, and we live in different countries. I'd love to figure out how they did it. I even use a pseudonym on FB.
1. Location matching - both your apps detected you in the same place for an extended period of time. Maybe you guys had mutual friends in the music community?
2. Microphone[0]. They have since refuted that claim[1], but I've had way too many coincidences and I'm choosing to keep my tin-foil hat on... :/
[0] www.geek.com/apps/facebook-app-now-listens-and-records-audio-when-you-post-updates-from-your-phone-1595873/
[1]http://newsroom.fb.com/news/h/facebook-does-not-use-your-pho...
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Advertising is such a racket.
Facebook: In the week we exposed the user to the add, the user posted a picture of your product. We made that sell for you!
Advertiser: Say no more, take my money!
Facebook: (smiles smugly)
The most uncomfortable angle is just how quickly Facebook tuned into what we were doing and then changed its ad-delivery algorithm to match. I have one friend who had his picture taken in front of a headshop - he now gets regular ads for bongs and smoke accessories, even though he's not a user. So, that's also quite discomfiting ..
For example, I have a friend who has never been on any social media. If he wanted to opt out of the surveillance apparatus, he still would have to address: collection of phone metadata, browsing history, traffic cams, other CCTV, financial paper trail, probably more I'm missing.
When you're the advertiser, sure. When you're the target, not so much. Do you really want billboards speaking to you as you walk down the street? Making suggestions based on your recent purchase history or activities and personal associations?
Just because advertising technology can achieve greater powers of reaching people, doesn't mean we need or want advertising woven into the fabric of our existence more than it already is. You can opt in to that if you want, I'm staying well clear.
It's something to rationaly know it, it's totally different to experience it in real life !
I would like to come up with some powerful (frightening) examples of why the data collection going on is so dangerous, and why people should be worried and careful.
Depends on whether you're a fan other other people making your choices for you, I guess.
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It used to be that the law couldn't catch up with the fast change in technology, now it's us the people that can't keep up. All my friends using Facebook don't comprehend what is going on, it's just pictures right? The idea that FB is creating highly detailed profiles of every user, and selling them to anyone who will pay, is just dismissed as a joke. What good can come from this I wonder.
They (facebook) are the middle men - people who have money come to them to sell their product, and facebook knows who to show those products too.
your friends (and mine, and a huge percentage of facebook's userbase) trust facebook enough for that to happen.
And it does not help anyone's cause when people say "X company (be it Google, Facebook etc.) are selling your info".
Whenever someone asks "what nefarious thing is this company doing with my data?" the answer is rarely "something really, really bad!". Rather, it's almost always "trying to sell you something".
And I think that, in turn, is holding the law back further. If people don't understand why something is a problem, they don't care and nobody is going to waste time evolving the law to protect them from harms they don't even know are occurring.
Even if you are paying, you are still the product. More-so if the company is a startup waiting for a buyout.
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But that doesn't mean that I believe I am not on Facebook.
I am pretty sure that Facebook are able to construct most of the shell of me from fragments provided by less careful friends or just strangers.
I imagine, and do not believe I am wrong, that Facebook have a ghost profile already with photographs of me already associated, some preferences and interests already in place.
A montage almost indistinguishable from the whole, or perhaps in some respects better... have they got to 3d models for their Oculus universe yet?
They probably know my name, am I even a necessary part of that picture? What's missing?
I'm not arguing in defense of Facebook, I just don't understand what someone that's privacy-minded would want. If I can legally take a photo, should I not have the right to have a company analyze that photo on my behalf?
If you accept that people do have this right the logical conclusion is then you are infringing and causing harm to them by taking their photo and sharing it with Facebook. If you don't think people should have that right, I am not convinced there is any infringement going on and this creepy database is just the inevitable end result.
When you add a friend just append new pubkey encrypted symmetric key for each asset. Friend removal is even more expensive and requires the client side to reencrypt everything :(
I'm sure there are better cryptographic constructs out there with multi key encryption that can alleviate some of the insertion and removal costs.
You could do it with decent trade-offs for the content provider as well. You could obfuscate everyone else's face but yours and allow them to get access to that image and then just encrypt the map for your friends. Of course then it's all about just creating enough mock accounts to recover the full images throughout the graph. Or just take custody of a user's keys in exchange for features.
Still though, it's marginally more expensive to build a mass surveillance app!
Even if there were laws, it would be impossible to show whether or not they are (or aren't) complying.
I guess my point is, how would such a law be crafted to be a) reasonably enforceable and b) not impede on the rights of users who want such services
I think the answer's obvious -- replace Facebook with an entity, hypothetical at present, that's controlled by its users, not a corporate board of directors whose loyalty is to themselves and to stockholders, people for whom subscribers are a product being offered up for sale.
I'm obviously speaking hypothetically -- there's essentially zero chance for such a thing, given the modern Internet and the current political environment.
> If I can legally take a photo, should I not have the right to have a company analyze that photo on my behalf?
The unasked question is whether the analysis is carried out on your behalf.
Here's hoping 2017 is the year it gets scaled up, because it would sure be profitable, with the right implementation.
1) "Gevulot" in the book Quantum Thief. There are laws that allow you to control the spread of information about you. Digital technology without the 'DRM' that enforces these laws is banned (and yes, the book does explore the obvious problems with this). I've written more on this at http://www.bayleshanks.com/notes-computer-gevulot
2) "Friends of Privacy" in the book Rainbow's End. A charitable organization creates a zillion fake identities with your name so that someone getting a credit report for you, looking for you on Facebook, etc, gets a lot of hits, all indistinguishable from you, and all filled with lies.
Most people in Europe actually still think face recognition is useless (like how speech recognition was useless until very recently) because they haven't experienced it on Facebook.
Regulating against it would be reasonable. What's the utility to the end user?
> If I can legally take a photo, should I not have the right to have a company analyze that photo on my behalf?
They have algorithms analyzing your photo. The solution is to run the algorithms on your computer.
Doesn't that defeat the purpose? The whole reason Facebook is able to do what they do is that they have existing tagged photos that I may not have access to. I don't need to train Facebook to know what my friends look like. If I have to do extra work to tag my photos, I'd might as well be manually tagging them.
If you are storing any PID of EU citizens, regardless of your jurisdiction, that will come under GDPR very soon (not sure how that impacts social publishing, photos, info gathered in public vs private places, or if it has a get-out clause etc but mentioning it as an example)
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[1] http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/jun/14/illegal-immi... [2] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-vows-crackdown-on-...