Hacker News is a pretty small bubble, but news about Facebook being awful is pretty mainstream at this point. It surprises me that the majority of my family can still tolerate Facebook (and instagram/whatsapp etc.) despite what is known.
I'm pretty vocal among my family about data security/privacy, as I'd like to keep information about me and my family safe from prying eyes, but it takes a lot of effort and know-how to put up walls against the sort of electronic creepiness that's default-on for most of us. It's been almost 3 years, and most of my friends/family still don't have content blockers installed for Safari on iOS. None of my family or friends have made any moves to ditch Facebook, instagram, whatsapp, etc. even though the barrier to entry for new services is so low.
It's frustrating to know that despite how bad they are, despite every new discovery of terribleness, nothing's going to change, and they're just going to get bigger.
Lots of my family just takes the side of "I have nothing to hide".
My little brother is 20 years younger then I and was raised by youtube. I find his attitude towards things really weird. Like I asked him why he didn't use an adblocker to get rid of all the ads and he replied "I want to support to the streamers by watching their ads". As someone who grew up in a more punk/fuck authority, don't sell out 90s this threw me for a total loop. If he was on an android phone he would be mashing that ALLOW ACCESS button to play every game.
I quit facebook after cambridge analytica. Probably 2 weeks of typing "Fa...." into my browser and going "oh wait". There a few birthday parties/bbqs I probably missed because of not being reminded I exist on peoples invite lists, but they weren't the closest friends to begin with.
> I want to support to the streamers by watching their ads
> If he was on an android phone he would be mashing that ALLOW ACCESS button to play every game.
These are different things, and while he might have the same view you express in the second quote, that's not necessarily a foregone conclusion from the first quote.
It's perfectly acceptable to be willing to (and feel obligated to) watch adds to support a program that you enjoy. Not wanting to support anything you consume isn't "fuck authority", it's "fuck everyone else", because it isn't aimed at authority, it's aimed at anyone and everyone that tries to use advertising to support themselves.
I don't think most people would say yes if presented with a choice of "let us read your private instant messages for access", or at least wouldn't after being educated a bit more if they were willing. Giving away privacy is special because you can never get it back (for the specific stuff you gave away), and that's different than people saying they are willing to passively accept some additional content to get what they want. That they might also be giving away privacy is a problem, but that doesn't mean we can infer their position on privacy based on actions they weren't aware they were taking.
I'm not surprised so many people only see this issue from one side, which is some version of "Keeping all of your data locked up is the most important thing in the world and ads are always bad. If you disagree with that you are either not technical or stupid."
It seems that nobody ever considers the other side, which would be that people are now targeted with ads that they want to see instead of poorly targeted ads that just waste their time. Another plus is that small advertisers can now afford to advertise alongside companies with much larger budgets by micro-targeting. I've engaged with lots of ads on Facebook and its not because I'm stupid, it's because they are showing me things I'm interested in. There's nothing wrong with being concerned with how data is being used but this constant dialogue from the "never ads" crowd is pretty tired.
[edit] I was thinking about redirecting to a google image search of cute animals wearing human clothes but after a few weeks of seeing 'this site can't be reached' my habit was successfully broken
I applaud your attitude. The other child commentors have the naive view like your brother that "enabling ads" give some of a positive impact (supporting artists) than the negatives of current ad industry.
The only way to individuals can fight tracking ads now is to starve the industry out. I am tempted to say take the fight forward and install Ad Clickers https://adnauseam.io/ in every browser you get your hands on.
If they're committed to the position that privacy is not valuable in it's own right, for it's own sake, then you might suggest to them that they put a webcam in front of their toilet.
"Nothing to hide" usually means they don't realize just how much can be known about a person from the trail they leave online.
What am I really losing though by allowing access? The company is passing on info to advertising networks so they can try and get me hooked on more mobile games.
No one cares who you are, they are just trying to sell ad space.
The unfortunate explanation for the phenomena that you're observing is that most people simply don't care about their privacy -- at least not nearly as much as you do.
> Third, we generally overweight the importance of our personal values when developing a product — without considering how users will make their decision.
> For example, users do value privacy, but many won’t switch to a product that protects their privacy if it means losing what they have — unlike so many of those commenting in Hacker News threads.
> The unfortunate explanation for the phenomena that you're observing is that most people simply don't care about their privacy -- at least not nearly as much as you do.
I don't think that is a fair assessment. Even if that is true technically, it is missing the spirit of the question at hand. I think many people are misinformed about what is happening in data collection and processing, and if they were well-informed, would care more about their privacy. Given that people are intentionally being misled about the implications of giving up their privacy - via various propaganda about how it's not-that-bad, etc - I think it is unfair to state that people "simply don't care about their privacy ... as much as you do".
I think if people knew what was at stake, they would care more. Stating that they "simply don't care" is basically ending the conversation preemptively, such that the only possible future is that there is no privacy.
But I think people are misinformed, greatly. Very few people have any idea how intense FB's data collection efforts are, or how insecure the data is when it goes there, etc. Even NYT pieces do not reach that many Americans. And NYT or other publications are careful and methodical about their writing, barely able to reach into the future and question out loud the future FB is building.
Democracy is at stake. This is more than a question of individual privacy: people need to understand that our society is crumbling due to lack of privacy, because wealthy and powerful institutions are using that intense violation into private American lives to brainwash targeted people with conspiracy theories and other dangerous society-damaging things.
Privacy matters to everyone, I'd wager even to those who think they don't value their individual privacy.
But the important point that it lost on the tech crowd is that being unconcerned about their privacy doesn't make them wrong. Tech people think because they know more about the details of the system and they've deemed it a clear and present danger to civilization, that everyone who disagrees is wrong or stupid. But this is nothing more than extreme hubris.
Most have no clue of the scope of stalking and creepiness currently ongoing, or in fact the depth of data being collected, collated and invasive profiling involved.
Google, Facebook and others have a whole collection of intentionally misleading dialogues and practices that deceptively conceal what they are doing under the catchall of 'improving user experience' or some such thing. Surely if they actually thought people 'don't care' all these firms and technical folks involved won't feel the need to be deceptive.
This comes across more as tech folks trying to offload their own responsibility in designing, building and profiting from surveillance systems by wishing that people didn't care.
Im fairly security conscious (conscious, as in I see it, but it doesn't mean I care...case by case basis). I use a password manager, all my passwords are separate, Im very careful who I give which piece of data to, etc.
On the other hand, my identity has been stolen 16 billion times by now. Even if it didn't, I own real estate, which means you can infer a hell of a lot of info about me by just looking up my property tax bill, which is public. You could cross reference a lot of data source and get way more than I've ever put on Facebook. Ironically, if you wanted to make my life miserable, Facebook is probably not the first, second, or third place you'd want to go to get the juicy stuff.
So yeah, it's pretty hard to care after a while. My credit reports are frozen, I post on social medias as if I was doing so under my first and last name, assuming they're public anyway, there doesn't exist any embarrassing picture of me or my immediate family in any form (at least that I know of), etc.
I'd like to have privacy, but even if I take every measure I can take, unless I get rid of my credit cards, bank accounts, house, etc, I'll never have it anyway, so...
> I'd like to have privacy, but even if I take every measure I can take, unless I get rid of my credit cards, bank accounts, house, etc, I'll never have it anyway, so...
So if you can't have perfect privacy, you'll have nothing at all? That's quite an all-or-nothing way of looking at this issue.
Well, I was out today when it started raining. I had my raincoat and my wellies in my rucksack, but I didn't have any water proof pants. I'd like to be dry, but unless I could get water proof pants, I'm not going to be dry, so ...
Oh, yeah I can explain that, no problem! I'm one of those people myself. I've never heard of a single example of potential harm that could come as the result of tracking. So as you can imagine, to me these articles seem like a bunch of made-up hoopla over nothing.
To explain my mindset, basically it boils down to:
"Can something bad happen to me as a result of tracking?"
And nobody has ever said "Yes, here are examples."
Somebody's already linked China's credit score shenanigans which is a good example; I'll also chime in by saying there's been actual books written how IBM (and big data of that time) was a direct factor in making the Holocaust happen (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust). Once when "undesirables" (like myself) can be sorted by any widespread metric ... it's too easy to be used as a weapon for more nefarious means.
I know a lot of people who want to quit Facebook, but nobody wants to be the odd one out who misses event invitations and stuff because they're the one person in their social circle who doesn't have an account. To partially solve this, I've been talking to a group of friends about all forming a pact to quit Facebook at the same time. This idea seems to resonate, and I've already gotten about ten of my friends to agree to it.
It's frustrating to know that despite how bad they are, despite every new discovery of terribleness, nothing's going to change, and they're just going to get bigger.
Plenty of other social networks that once seemed dominant have collapsed in the past. I agree it feels frustrating, but if a large enough minority of users abandons Facebook I do think that we could hit critical mass where even people on FB start using alternative communication tools to keep in touch with ex-Facebookers, and then that'll start creating a positive feedback loop by making it easier for more people to leave as other platforms fill in and pick up the slack.
I'd like to keep information about me and my family safe from prying eyes
What have these prying eyes done to them directly? Yes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, but realistically, you only truly learn never to touch the stove again until you get burned. If they never get burned, then maybe they are safer than you think.
This is the real issue, I think. Facebook taking your data has no concrete consequences for most people, so it's easy to see why they might think of the typical "don't use Facebook, it's bad" as fearmongering.
I think the burn will come later, and we won't realize the stove is being turned up until we're the frog in boiling water.
Facebook is a bad company doing bad things (full of, undoubtedly, good people trying to do good things) and I'd prefer not to give them any information about me, as they've proved they will share it with whomever, whenever, and only change behavior after they've been caught. 10 or 15 years from now, when my daughter grows up a bit, I want her to be able to decide what pictures of her are online, how much Facebook (or the new social monolith company) knows about her, and who to share her data with.
I don't know what these companies are going to do with our data in the future, but they have terrible track records, and I know they are not to be trusted. I grew up with a gmail account that holds thousands of hours of gchat logs. I grew up posting stupid stuff on Facebook that probably still exists on their servers. I would gladly give up the meaningless interactions that took place in Facebook for just an ounce of invisibility back.
We don't know what the burn will be, but I can tell you it's coming. I'd just rather not have my hand on the stove when it finally gets turned on.
Facebook unfortunately is very useful for social events and events with people you have recently met and want to organize meetups or events with. Facebook messenger or Whatsapp groups are two of the most convenient ways because people will usually have one of those.
And of course, the choice between the two doesn't matter for this.
WhatsApp having been bought out by Facebook is a big pain. It's the defacto messenger for cross iOS/Android communication (at least where I live), and it's harder and harder to say "no I don't Facebook".
>It surprises me that the majority of my family can still tolerate Facebook (and instagram/whatsapp etc.) despite what is known.
I'm not sure why it's super surprising. Facebook's data collection has never personally harmed me. I like Facebook because it helps me stay connected and tools like whatsapp/messenger are some of the best cross-platform messaging tools.
Yes, Facebook has downsides, but I've never experienced a privacy-related downside.
Someone should provide a link to an article that exposes some really nasty stuff about Facebook--I already know Facebook knows my address and my likes/dislikes and probably what sites I browse (since many sites use Facebook tracking), and it reads my messages, but in a way, I don't really care about those things because Whatsapp and FB Messenger are free.
"I'm not sure why it's super surprising. Facebook's data collection has never personally harmed me."
No need to worry, they have the rest of your life to think of something and a lot more of your data to collect.
Best of all: you will dutifully provide the data while continuing to think that Facebook has never harmed you and you will likely never know how they harm you.
> It's frustrating to know that despite how bad they are, despite every new discovery of terribleness, nothing's going to change, and they're just going to get bigger.
IMO, they need a non-profit competitor. There's nothing surprising or innovative left in "share photos and news with selected people" so there's not much value-to-consumers left to innovate on. There is innovation left in how to monetize consumers, but there's not likely to be much value to humanity in that; and there is likely to be a lot of harm. (Looking at you anti-vaxers.)
Non profit. There's needs to be a non-profit facebook alternative to stop all this idiocy.
> news about Facebook being awful is pretty mainstream at this point
Given that mainstream media has been pushing the Facebook is evil meme for the last two years since Facebook changed their ranking models to deprioritize news sharing and destroyed traffic to media sites, this is unsurprising.
> It surprises me that the majority of my family can still tolerate Facebook (and instagram/whatsapp etc.) despite what is known.
I don't think I'm THAT concerned with privacy but even I have thought about disabling my Facebook account. What stops me from doing that is that there isn't really a replacement for it. I don't even really post. Essentially the only thing I use it for is messenger.
However, if I disable it I won't have any way to contact the friends I have who live in other countries or who I don't frequently talk to. And please don't tell me to "just use email". I don't want to use a service where I have to find people by some unique ID instead of their actual names.
> even though the barrier to entry for new services is so low.
Except for the entire social network that remains on the old service & not the new one -- which comprises most of the value one obtains from a social network.
It's because nothing's actually happened, from a day-to-day standpoint. Sure, their data is "out there", but what does that even mean? Nothing actually happens, as a result. The problem is too abstract, too theoretical.
> majority of my family can still tolerate Facebook despite what is known
They've got a captive audience. Like it or not, the service that Facebook provides is unparalleled, and short of direct, tangible harm, it's not enough for most people to give that up.
> the service that Facebook provides is unparalleled
Except that it's not. The vast majority of what Facebook does can be done without Facebook. The essential problem now is that there are large numbers of people who have only ever known Facebook and are unaware of how to accomplish those things without it.
>> It's frustrating to know that despite how bad they are, despite every new discovery of terribleness, nothing's going to change, and they're just going to get bigger.
> They've got a captive audience. Like it or not, the service that Facebook provides is unparalleled, and short of direct, tangible harm, it's not enough for most people to give that up.
I think it's mainly unparalleled from the advertiser perspective, but not the user perspective. I think network effects aren't as compelling to users as is often assumed.
I think Facebook's privacy terribleness will be part of its undoing, but only part. Other things, like fashion, user fatigue, and potentially new regulatory antitrust oversight (to block acquisitions) will be significant factors, and they'll all reenforce each other.
I had a conversation the other day with two journalists on this subject and I was flabbergasted by how little they seem to know. They were under the pretext that when something is free you're the product, but they didn't seem to realize just how many shit Facebook knows about them or how far and deep the tracking goes. I've come to the realization that apart from our community no one else seems to understand what's at stake here.
The real issue is that most people can't make the correlation between personal data that are monitored and ways of exploitation. They don't know that any individual can target them specifically by using their e-mail or phone number. They have this abstract notion that somewhere a company is running a generic ad that shows shoes or cars to them and that's all there is.
I hate this data tracking as much as everyone else here, but is this really a surprise to anyone? I used to put Google Analytics on my blog, and I thought most of the people here were pretty aware of how gigantic the Facebook advertising claws stretched.
I feel like until we have an internet that isn't dependent on ad-networks, this is an inevitability. Targeted ads perform better, and you cannot expect these giant megacorporations to act ethically when it will cut into their profits and while they're technically not violating any laws.
The ad-networks will always try to take extra value regardless of dependence. Ads exist on paid services. My Economist subscription requires me to swipe away Oracle ads. The last flight I was on tried to sign me up for a credit card. No matter what a customer pays, there will always be a temptation to make a bit more money by showing an ad.
Ads will exist until people are empowered to block them.
I think this is the same concept as how people will gravitate in a city to have the worst possible commute they can bear because most people value having a nice home and a nice job over a nice commute. In a similar way services will inevitably be crammed with ads until it starts to negatively affect profits, because people value the content and publishers value money more than either value an ad-free experience.
To stretch the analogy, ad blockers are people who drive in the HOV lane without paying. It isn't so bad that you do it, but if everyone did it the system would break. I personally block ads out of principle because I believe we can transition to a micropayment model and blocking ads forces the issue.
That being said, can anything really ever save us from ads? From my logic in the first paragraph, Patreon et al will eventually be as ad-infested as anything else. Maybe the fundamental answer is to consume less content.
They will also continue to exist because we have been conditioned that the whole internet will cease to exist without them and that ad blocking is "stealing" which is immoral and wrong.
The problem isn't ads. The problem is the stock market. Investors want to see growth every quarter or they punish the company. If your business is making money from ads, you have to increase impressions. At first you can put in more ads. But there's a limit. So, next you move to targeted ads. The overwhelming shadiness to all this is a direct result of investors not seeing past this quarter.
Want to see less intrusive business practices? Get rid of quarterly earnings reports.
It's a "surprise" only to the extent that Facebook's leaders have been hauled before Congress and promised under oath they value privacy. Or something like that. The insidious thing here is: to the layperson, Facebook has promised to the government to play by some rules, so they must not be doing anything too harmful, or else they'd be in trouble.
> I feel like until we have an internet that isn't dependent on ad-networks, this is an inevitability.
It's not just the internet. Every industry that sells anything uses direct marketing, and that requires collecting information about people. Until you eliminate all advertising and marketing, you will be tracked in some way.
Privacy violation is a symptom, but the cause is capitalists trying to sell as much crap as humanly possible.
I'm honestly surprised there isn't an app that pays you to tell advertisers about your friends.
Until you eliminate all advertising and marketing, you will be tracked in some way.
Sort of. There is an acceptable amount of tracking.
For hundreds of years billboard, newspaper, television, and radio advertisers tracked if their ads were working by measuring sales. That was acceptable.
Facebook and Google trying to watch my every move is not acceptable.
Not OP, but personally I removed it and don't miss it. But then I'm not trying to monetise everything, so analytics seem more about the ego boost in retrospect. A bit shameful I was willing to compromise my readers' privacy for that.
Depending on your needs, it's pretty easy and interesting to hack something together yourself though.
In my particular case, I realized I really didn't care about traffic stats with any kind of intimate detail, so I just wrote a thing that tagged the user with a cookie and sent a POST to my site with JS, but even then I eventually just gave up and decided that I really have no interest in the analytics since I really don't have any plans of trying to monetize my blog.
As far as I know, Facebook isn't doing anything directly illegal with all this data tracking, and as a consequence there really is no incentive for them to stop. If they were violating a law, we could charge and/or sue the people involved and it would (theoretically) stop.
Oh the number of apps that EVERY TIME are ran try to talk to FB... Even my phone banking apps. I understand that from a game or a selfie app. They are 'silly' by nature. But why the F... would my bank want to notify FB that I am using their app?
The same applies for EVERY airline app I have used over the last 5 years.
NoRoot Firewall for Android, and put a global Deny rule for 31.13.x.x and problem is solved.
> But why the F... would my bank want to notify FB that I am using their app?
It's not that they want to notify Facebook. It's that they get useful functionality from libraries that Facebook makes available. And they've either decided that sharing your info with Facebook is a worthwhile tradeoff for the engineering time, or they don't realize it's happening.
I would like to know if the application owners/developers get some other compensation/$$$$ from the 'pings' they so freely give to my FB. I think I will write to my bank asking them and then ShowHN of the results/letters.
Keep in mind that FB has an analytics product similar to Google analytics. I agree with the outrage over FB, but I'm surprised that thus far Google has mostly skated by without too much scrutiny from the general media.
> I agree with the outrage over FB, but I'm surprised that thus far Google has mostly skated by without too much scrutiny from the general media.
Google has been smarter by being much more low-key about their data collection and potential privacy problems. Facebook's attitude has been so blatantly sleazy, self-serving, and user-hostile that they've made themselves a magnet for negative attention.
Though Google may catch up, due to their questionable permission requirements for some of their apps (e.g. you must enable all the tracking just to use voice commands with Android Auto).
The thing that Facebook is criticized for in this post is something that Google not only does in an extent that dwarfs Facebook - they also more or less invented it.
This emotional negative bias against Facebook has existed for more than a decade in this otherwise informed and rational community, so it doesn't surprise me anymore.
> But why the F... would my bank want to notify FB that I am using their app?
Probably for ads: either measuring ad conversions, or building ad targeting/exclusion buckets. For example, your bank can exclude your devices from their FB ads because FB already knows you have their app and presumably a customer.
> Oh the number of apps that EVERY TIME are ran try to talk to FB... Even my phone banking apps. I understand that from a game or a selfie app. They are 'silly' by nature. But why the F... would my bank want to notify FB that I am using their app?
Because by doing that they get access to a ton of analytic data?
Facebook made a play to be the social layer for the web. A single place where you explicitly create a social network, then you can use it from all kinds of places. Want to share something with your friends? Smack the share button, it’s right here in your app.
Not a bad idea really. The problem is that it turned super predatory. Facebook just wants engagement at all costs. It’s not a tool for managing your life, it’s a tool for someone else to profit off it.
these ideas aren't good or bad in this way really. only in their execution we find that the integrity of humans is not developed enough for these kinds of services or capabilities.
problem is that with tracking, people on the tracking side become to greedy for profit, and without tracking / censorship, then the people on the user side become vile and corrupt suddenly :D. either way there will be people enjoying it and people hating it at the same time. there's no pleasing some :D in any case , and really, maybe we should stop trying to do so, and just get on with more useful stuff than debating everlasting debates.
in the end it's more philosophical problem than anything, and how useful are those to debate...(except to people who enjoy that of course!) are we in a simulation, or not? no way to prove it, no impact even if it would be, so why try to get the whole of internet users involved and distracted with it.
we can go back and see, that then, it will probably just be people who like to discuss these things who are doing so, and they will always do so.
is it immoral or wrong to make a profit within a capitalist system? Or is it immoral or wrong to expect someone to change their ways or return your investment just because you didn't pay attention and paid for something you didn't want??
example of facebook user mentality i saw in some drunk at a station:
- drunk buys a paper from a bum
- bum gives paper for 50 cents
- drunk gets mad and attacks bum because the paper is a day old.
Have you tried asking your bank about it? With Facebook's standing diminished, maybe they'd be receptive to removing the association between your bank and Facebook's brand.
Identity verification which helps with fraud prevention most likely. It only has to prevent a small % of fraud attempts to probably be worthwhile for them.
> put a global Deny rule for 31.13.x.x and problem is solved.
Since Facebook is only one of a huge number of other objectionable data leakages apps present to us, I recommend something more expansive than that. I recommend blocking all outgoing traffic entirely by default, and only enabling outgoing traffic for specific apps to specific destinations as needed.
- Tracking the behavior of your own users on your own app, for product improvement purposes (which most users will expect)
- Sending the behavior of your own users on your app to an advertising surveillance company, with an ID that can be used to correlate that behavior with behavior elsewhere, without their knowledge, consent, or reasonable expectation
And before anyone says it, no, a generic line about third-party service partners in a sadistically long TOS/Privacy-policy does not count as meaningful consent. Even Supreme Court justices admit that they don’t read them.
I'm not too up to date on the news, but isn't FB building a shadow profile of everyone?
So even if you're not a user, you get tracked and your data gets sold. That to me was a step too far, and got me to really scale back what I share on the Internet.
This just means that people who already know your phone number and are already your Facebook friend will see your profile if they search for your phone number. That seems pretty harmless to me.
I'm not defending Facebook. I'm not responding to a logical argument, therefore I'm not committing a logical fallacy. Whether someone believes user tracking is unethical or not is a value judgement, it can't be proven true or not true.
No, those don't matter in my view. The only thing that matters is if the people you're tracking have given you their informed consent to be tracked. If they haven't, then it's simply wrong.
Changed the title from 'Guess what? Facebook still tracks you on Android apps (even if you don't have a Facebook account)' (too long for HN and missing details)
TL;DR - Full list from the article:
'seven apps, including Yelp, the language-learning app Duolingo and the job search app Indeed, as well as the King James Bible app and two Muslim prayer apps, Qibla Connect and Muslim Pro, still send your personal data to Facebook before you can decide whether you want to consent or not.'
Whataboutism isn't helping anything. Google doing something doesn't make it okay that Facebook does it. And Google's tracking is being discussed in this very thread, so it's not even accurate whataboutism.
I want to see all journalists at least mentioning this whataboutism, if they really want to solve a problem. They’re just gaining traction and views on Facebook’s negative momentum, and they don’t even mention the bigger elephants in the room (such as google analytics, for instance).
When shall we have a "distro" of fair, open source, free apps produced by the open source community guaranteed to run with minimal permissions without privacy abuse?
That solves the "app store" problem, the OS is still hostile though, and even using Replicant the Baseband OS is still a threat.
Not using F-Droid wouldn't be better, it is just that it really seams hopeless for a complete solution without a major movement like what spawned GNU-Linux. All these problems need way more devs involved.
Yeah, I don't think it's a problem and I'm not convinced by the article at all. Also, if an app/website don't track user behavior and improve themselves based on data, they are most likely going to be defeated by their competitors soon enough.
Readit News
I'm pretty vocal among my family about data security/privacy, as I'd like to keep information about me and my family safe from prying eyes, but it takes a lot of effort and know-how to put up walls against the sort of electronic creepiness that's default-on for most of us. It's been almost 3 years, and most of my friends/family still don't have content blockers installed for Safari on iOS. None of my family or friends have made any moves to ditch Facebook, instagram, whatsapp, etc. even though the barrier to entry for new services is so low.
It's frustrating to know that despite how bad they are, despite every new discovery of terribleness, nothing's going to change, and they're just going to get bigger.
My little brother is 20 years younger then I and was raised by youtube. I find his attitude towards things really weird. Like I asked him why he didn't use an adblocker to get rid of all the ads and he replied "I want to support to the streamers by watching their ads". As someone who grew up in a more punk/fuck authority, don't sell out 90s this threw me for a total loop. If he was on an android phone he would be mashing that ALLOW ACCESS button to play every game.
I quit facebook after cambridge analytica. Probably 2 weeks of typing "Fa...." into my browser and going "oh wait". There a few birthday parties/bbqs I probably missed because of not being reminded I exist on peoples invite lists, but they weren't the closest friends to begin with.
> If he was on an android phone he would be mashing that ALLOW ACCESS button to play every game.
These are different things, and while he might have the same view you express in the second quote, that's not necessarily a foregone conclusion from the first quote.
It's perfectly acceptable to be willing to (and feel obligated to) watch adds to support a program that you enjoy. Not wanting to support anything you consume isn't "fuck authority", it's "fuck everyone else", because it isn't aimed at authority, it's aimed at anyone and everyone that tries to use advertising to support themselves.
I don't think most people would say yes if presented with a choice of "let us read your private instant messages for access", or at least wouldn't after being educated a bit more if they were willing. Giving away privacy is special because you can never get it back (for the specific stuff you gave away), and that's different than people saying they are willing to passively accept some additional content to get what they want. That they might also be giving away privacy is a problem, but that doesn't mean we can infer their position on privacy based on actions they weren't aware they were taking.
It seems that nobody ever considers the other side, which would be that people are now targeted with ads that they want to see instead of poorly targeted ads that just waste their time. Another plus is that small advertisers can now afford to advertise alongside companies with much larger budgets by micro-targeting. I've engaged with lots of ads on Facebook and its not because I'm stupid, it's because they are showing me things I'm interested in. There's nothing wrong with being concerned with how data is being used but this constant dialogue from the "never ads" crowd is pretty tired.
https://gist.github.com/thomasbilk/1506210/2d20f47bbcca75b2f...
[edit] I was thinking about redirecting to a google image search of cute animals wearing human clothes but after a few weeks of seeing 'this site can't be reached' my habit was successfully broken
https://medium.com/message/selling-out-is-meaningless-3450a5...
The only way to individuals can fight tracking ads now is to starve the industry out. I am tempted to say take the fight forward and install Ad Clickers https://adnauseam.io/ in every browser you get your hands on.
"Nothing to hide" usually means they don't realize just how much can be known about a person from the trail they leave online.
No one cares who you are, they are just trying to sell ad space.
What Open Source Can Learn From Slack https://www.nemil.com/musings/oss-and-slack.html
> Third, we generally overweight the importance of our personal values when developing a product — without considering how users will make their decision.
> For example, users do value privacy, but many won’t switch to a product that protects their privacy if it means losing what they have — unlike so many of those commenting in Hacker News threads.
I don't think that is a fair assessment. Even if that is true technically, it is missing the spirit of the question at hand. I think many people are misinformed about what is happening in data collection and processing, and if they were well-informed, would care more about their privacy. Given that people are intentionally being misled about the implications of giving up their privacy - via various propaganda about how it's not-that-bad, etc - I think it is unfair to state that people "simply don't care about their privacy ... as much as you do".
I think if people knew what was at stake, they would care more. Stating that they "simply don't care" is basically ending the conversation preemptively, such that the only possible future is that there is no privacy.
But I think people are misinformed, greatly. Very few people have any idea how intense FB's data collection efforts are, or how insecure the data is when it goes there, etc. Even NYT pieces do not reach that many Americans. And NYT or other publications are careful and methodical about their writing, barely able to reach into the future and question out loud the future FB is building.
Democracy is at stake. This is more than a question of individual privacy: people need to understand that our society is crumbling due to lack of privacy, because wealthy and powerful institutions are using that intense violation into private American lives to brainwash targeted people with conspiracy theories and other dangerous society-damaging things.
Privacy matters to everyone, I'd wager even to those who think they don't value their individual privacy.
I was talking to my uncle, a very smart man and a lawyer, about privacy concerns. He said something that will stick with me for years:
"You're like a prophet about this stuff, but like every prophet, you're 30 years too early for us to believe you."
The insight that they need to protect their friends is usually very convincing. - My hope is to spread this narrative.
I imagine with privacy it will be even harder because the danger is much less clear.
Google, Facebook and others have a whole collection of intentionally misleading dialogues and practices that deceptively conceal what they are doing under the catchall of 'improving user experience' or some such thing. Surely if they actually thought people 'don't care' all these firms and technical folks involved won't feel the need to be deceptive.
This comes across more as tech folks trying to offload their own responsibility in designing, building and profiting from surveillance systems by wishing that people didn't care.
On the other hand, my identity has been stolen 16 billion times by now. Even if it didn't, I own real estate, which means you can infer a hell of a lot of info about me by just looking up my property tax bill, which is public. You could cross reference a lot of data source and get way more than I've ever put on Facebook. Ironically, if you wanted to make my life miserable, Facebook is probably not the first, second, or third place you'd want to go to get the juicy stuff.
So yeah, it's pretty hard to care after a while. My credit reports are frozen, I post on social medias as if I was doing so under my first and last name, assuming they're public anyway, there doesn't exist any embarrassing picture of me or my immediate family in any form (at least that I know of), etc.
I'd like to have privacy, but even if I take every measure I can take, unless I get rid of my credit cards, bank accounts, house, etc, I'll never have it anyway, so...
So if you can't have perfect privacy, you'll have nothing at all? That's quite an all-or-nothing way of looking at this issue.
Well, I was out today when it started raining. I had my raincoat and my wellies in my rucksack, but I didn't have any water proof pants. I'd like to be dry, but unless I could get water proof pants, I'm not going to be dry, so ...
To explain my mindset, basically it boils down to:
"Can something bad happen to me as a result of tracking?"
And nobody has ever said "Yes, here are examples."
As to the real life consequences of a laissez-faire approach to privacy:
https://www.businessinsider.com/china-social-credit-system-p...
(Edited to combine my two comments)
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It's frustrating to know that despite how bad they are, despite every new discovery of terribleness, nothing's going to change, and they're just going to get bigger.
Plenty of other social networks that once seemed dominant have collapsed in the past. I agree it feels frustrating, but if a large enough minority of users abandons Facebook I do think that we could hit critical mass where even people on FB start using alternative communication tools to keep in touch with ex-Facebookers, and then that'll start creating a positive feedback loop by making it easier for more people to leave as other platforms fill in and pick up the slack.
What have these prying eyes done to them directly? Yes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, but realistically, you only truly learn never to touch the stove again until you get burned. If they never get burned, then maybe they are safer than you think.
Facebook is a bad company doing bad things (full of, undoubtedly, good people trying to do good things) and I'd prefer not to give them any information about me, as they've proved they will share it with whomever, whenever, and only change behavior after they've been caught. 10 or 15 years from now, when my daughter grows up a bit, I want her to be able to decide what pictures of her are online, how much Facebook (or the new social monolith company) knows about her, and who to share her data with.
I don't know what these companies are going to do with our data in the future, but they have terrible track records, and I know they are not to be trusted. I grew up with a gmail account that holds thousands of hours of gchat logs. I grew up posting stupid stuff on Facebook that probably still exists on their servers. I would gladly give up the meaningless interactions that took place in Facebook for just an ounce of invisibility back.
We don't know what the burn will be, but I can tell you it's coming. I'd just rather not have my hand on the stove when it finally gets turned on.
And of course, the choice between the two doesn't matter for this.
I'm not sure why it's super surprising. Facebook's data collection has never personally harmed me. I like Facebook because it helps me stay connected and tools like whatsapp/messenger are some of the best cross-platform messaging tools.
Yes, Facebook has downsides, but I've never experienced a privacy-related downside.
Someone should provide a link to an article that exposes some really nasty stuff about Facebook--I already know Facebook knows my address and my likes/dislikes and probably what sites I browse (since many sites use Facebook tracking), and it reads my messages, but in a way, I don't really care about those things because Whatsapp and FB Messenger are free.
No need to worry, they have the rest of your life to think of something and a lot more of your data to collect.
Best of all: you will dutifully provide the data while continuing to think that Facebook has never harmed you and you will likely never know how they harm you.
IMO, they need a non-profit competitor. There's nothing surprising or innovative left in "share photos and news with selected people" so there's not much value-to-consumers left to innovate on. There is innovation left in how to monetize consumers, but there's not likely to be much value to humanity in that; and there is likely to be a lot of harm. (Looking at you anti-vaxers.)
Non profit. There's needs to be a non-profit facebook alternative to stop all this idiocy.
Given that mainstream media has been pushing the Facebook is evil meme for the last two years since Facebook changed their ranking models to deprioritize news sharing and destroyed traffic to media sites, this is unsurprising.
I don't think I'm THAT concerned with privacy but even I have thought about disabling my Facebook account. What stops me from doing that is that there isn't really a replacement for it. I don't even really post. Essentially the only thing I use it for is messenger.
However, if I disable it I won't have any way to contact the friends I have who live in other countries or who I don't frequently talk to. And please don't tell me to "just use email". I don't want to use a service where I have to find people by some unique ID instead of their actual names.
Except for the entire social network that remains on the old service & not the new one -- which comprises most of the value one obtains from a social network.
They've got a captive audience. Like it or not, the service that Facebook provides is unparalleled, and short of direct, tangible harm, it's not enough for most people to give that up.
Except that it's not. The vast majority of what Facebook does can be done without Facebook. The essential problem now is that there are large numbers of people who have only ever known Facebook and are unaware of how to accomplish those things without it.
> They've got a captive audience. Like it or not, the service that Facebook provides is unparalleled, and short of direct, tangible harm, it's not enough for most people to give that up.
I think it's mainly unparalleled from the advertiser perspective, but not the user perspective. I think network effects aren't as compelling to users as is often assumed.
I think Facebook's privacy terribleness will be part of its undoing, but only part. Other things, like fashion, user fatigue, and potentially new regulatory antitrust oversight (to block acquisitions) will be significant factors, and they'll all reenforce each other.
The real issue is that most people can't make the correlation between personal data that are monitored and ways of exploitation. They don't know that any individual can target them specifically by using their e-mail or phone number. They have this abstract notion that somewhere a company is running a generic ad that shows shoes or cars to them and that's all there is.
I feel like until we have an internet that isn't dependent on ad-networks, this is an inevitability. Targeted ads perform better, and you cannot expect these giant megacorporations to act ethically when it will cut into their profits and while they're technically not violating any laws.
Ads will exist until people are empowered to block them.
To stretch the analogy, ad blockers are people who drive in the HOV lane without paying. It isn't so bad that you do it, but if everyone did it the system would break. I personally block ads out of principle because I believe we can transition to a micropayment model and blocking ads forces the issue.
That being said, can anything really ever save us from ads? From my logic in the first paragraph, Patreon et al will eventually be as ad-infested as anything else. Maybe the fundamental answer is to consume less content.
Want to see less intrusive business practices? Get rid of quarterly earnings reports.
It's not just the internet. Every industry that sells anything uses direct marketing, and that requires collecting information about people. Until you eliminate all advertising and marketing, you will be tracked in some way.
Target famously predicted a teenage girl was pregnant before her father even found out. They did it by tracking and analyzing her purchases, not by digging into data from Facebook. (https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...)
Privacy violation is a symptom, but the cause is capitalists trying to sell as much crap as humanly possible. I'm honestly surprised there isn't an app that pays you to tell advertisers about your friends.
Sort of. There is an acceptable amount of tracking.
For hundreds of years billboard, newspaper, television, and radio advertisers tracked if their ads were working by measuring sales. That was acceptable.
Facebook and Google trying to watch my every move is not acceptable.
I believe that ad networks as they currently exist are actively destroying the internet.
Please don't do this.
Have you found a viable alternative or removed analytics from your blog altogether?
Depending on your needs, it's pretty easy and interesting to hack something together yourself though.
May you elaborate on that?
The same applies for EVERY airline app I have used over the last 5 years.
NoRoot Firewall for Android, and put a global Deny rule for 31.13.x.x and problem is solved.
It's not that they want to notify Facebook. It's that they get useful functionality from libraries that Facebook makes available. And they've either decided that sharing your info with Facebook is a worthwhile tradeoff for the engineering time, or they don't realize it's happening.
The same applies to all airline companies that through their apps and my boarding passes have access to TOO much personal data.
Google has been smarter by being much more low-key about their data collection and potential privacy problems. Facebook's attitude has been so blatantly sleazy, self-serving, and user-hostile that they've made themselves a magnet for negative attention.
Though Google may catch up, due to their questionable permission requirements for some of their apps (e.g. you must enable all the tracking just to use voice commands with Android Auto).
This emotional negative bias against Facebook has existed for more than a decade in this otherwise informed and rational community, so it doesn't surprise me anymore.
Probably for ads: either measuring ad conversions, or building ad targeting/exclusion buckets. For example, your bank can exclude your devices from their FB ads because FB already knows you have their app and presumably a customer.
Because by doing that they get access to a ton of analytic data?
there's more of these kinds of lists out there for other intrusive ad companies.
Not a bad idea really. The problem is that it turned super predatory. Facebook just wants engagement at all costs. It’s not a tool for managing your life, it’s a tool for someone else to profit off it.
I think it's a genuinely bad idea to put any single entity in the driver's seat like that.
problem is that with tracking, people on the tracking side become to greedy for profit, and without tracking / censorship, then the people on the user side become vile and corrupt suddenly :D. either way there will be people enjoying it and people hating it at the same time. there's no pleasing some :D in any case , and really, maybe we should stop trying to do so, and just get on with more useful stuff than debating everlasting debates.
in the end it's more philosophical problem than anything, and how useful are those to debate...(except to people who enjoy that of course!) are we in a simulation, or not? no way to prove it, no impact even if it would be, so why try to get the whole of internet users involved and distracted with it. we can go back and see, that then, it will probably just be people who like to discuss these things who are doing so, and they will always do so.
is it immoral or wrong to make a profit within a capitalist system? Or is it immoral or wrong to expect someone to change their ways or return your investment just because you didn't pay attention and paid for something you didn't want??
example of facebook user mentality i saw in some drunk at a station: - drunk buys a paper from a bum - bum gives paper for 50 cents - drunk gets mad and attacks bum because the paper is a day old.
really, that's the privacy debate in a nutshell.
Since Facebook is only one of a huge number of other objectionable data leakages apps present to us, I recommend something more expansive than that. I recommend blocking all outgoing traffic entirely by default, and only enabling outgoing traffic for specific apps to specific destinations as needed.
The constant articles deriding Facebook ring hollow considering most of HN’s audience is engaged in similar behavior.
- Tracking the behavior of your own users on your own app, for product improvement purposes (which most users will expect)
- Sending the behavior of your own users on your app to an advertising surveillance company, with an ID that can be used to correlate that behavior with behavior elsewhere, without their knowledge, consent, or reasonable expectation
And before anyone says it, no, a generic line about third-party service partners in a sadistically long TOS/Privacy-policy does not count as meaningful consent. Even Supreme Court justices admit that they don’t read them.
Depends. I think it's clear that users do not expect you to record their session, even though it's tracking behavior for product improvement.
So even if you're not a user, you get tracked and your data gets sold. That to me was a step too far, and got me to really scale back what I share on the Internet.
Right across the Internet? Very few, I imagine!
Mainly because they don't have the resources to do it.
This is a pretty annoying part.
Maybe the scale, motivation and intent matter.
> Since we published our report, mobilsicher.de could also confirm that apps on iOS exhibit similar behaviour.
The root problem is not any one single company.
How so?
Google Fonts.
Google APIs.
Google Login.
Among many others.
Not using F-Droid wouldn't be better, it is just that it really seams hopeless for a complete solution without a major movement like what spawned GNU-Linux. All these problems need way more devs involved.
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