7 ms·

Why Facebook will win the Internet & why that scares the shit out of me

83 points by adamhowell 17y ago

hugh3 17y ago
This is enough to make me want to use a separate browser just for facebook, to make sure that facebook doesn't know anything about me that I don't consciously decide to tell it. Hmm, startup idea: a browser designed specifically to keep facebook in its place.
- Psyonic 17y ago
  There's an app for that.
  - Psyonic 17y ago
    Are you guys kidding me? The guy above me even said he only browses facebook on his iphone. Using a dedicated app solves the privacy problem!
- tuacker 17y ago
  I almost exclusively use FB on my iPhone (with Location turned off). It's the only way I can parse the stream while staying sane.
- thwarted 17y ago
  This is called "New Incognito Window" in chrome/chromium, or a separate profile in Firefox. What would be really nice, though, is the ability to have a bookmark open in an incognito window. The separate profile in Firefox is better because it'll keep cookies between sessions so you don't need to keep logging into facebook.
  - listic 17y ago
    "Tools" -> "Start Private Browsing" in Firefox
    - wwortiz 17y ago
      control-shift-P works as well (probably command on a mac but I don't have one) But really chromium/chrome has the best implementation as it creates a new window and doesn't destroy your session.
      - listic 17y ago
        In Firefox, the session isn't destroyed, instead it is saved until you choose "Tools" -> "Stop Private Browsing". But, the chromium implementation might be more convenient.
  - pyre 17y ago
    I also use this: #!/bin/sh test -n "$CHROMIUM_COMMAND" || CHROMIUM_COMMAND=`which chromium-browser` test -n "$CLEAN_CHROMIUM_TMPDIR" || CLEAN_CHROMIUM_TMPDIR="/tmp" USER_DATA_DIR=`mktemp -d "$CLEAN_CHROMIUM_TMPDIR/clean-chromium.XXXXXXXX"` case "$1" in cleanup) (cd "$CLEAN_CHROMIUM_TMPDIR" && find . -name "clean-chromium.*" -print0 2>/dev/null | xargs -0 -r rm -rv ) ;; *) chmod 700 "$USER_DATA_DIR" echo "CLEAN_CHROMIUM_TMPDIR = $CLEAN_CHROMIUM_TMPDIR" echo "USER_DATA_DIR = $USER_DATA_DIR" echo "CHROMIUM_COMMAND = $CHROMIUM_COMMAND" echo "Running '$CHROMIUM_COMMAND' --user-data-dir='$USER_DATA_DIR' $@" "$CHROMIUM_COMMAND" --user-data-dir="$USER_DATA_DIR" $@ find "$USER_DATA_DIR" -type d -print0 | xargs -0 -r chmod 700 find "$USER_DATA_DIR" -type f -print0 | xargs -0 -r chmod 600 ;; esac
- wesley 17y ago
  Can't someone develop an extension that prevents cookies from being accessed inside iframes (white/blacklist)? Wouldn't that stop the whole problem? Or simply block the facebook iframe urls?
  - carey 17y ago
    Isn’t this what enabling "block all third-party cookies without exception" in Chrome or disabling "accept third party cookies" in Firefox does?
SlyShy 17y ago
I'm not going to be comfortable until Facebook's motto becomes "Don't be evil". ;)
noelchurchill 17y ago
It’s called ad re-targeting, and it’s the most effective innovation online ads have seen in a while. And no one will be able to do it better than Facebook. Well, Google already does it better, but Facebook might be able to catch up.
- bad_user 17y ago
  I think Google will always have better data ... Google knows what you're really searching for. By contrast on Facebook it's just a vanity contest. One example ... I'm sometimes searching for interesting articles in an area, but without having anything specific in mind. Delicious provides way better results than browsing Reddit ... that's because on Delicious the rating is not a conscious choice.
- Jason7 16y ago
  Google is actually just the 6th largest content network. If you want to truly extend your http://www.adroll.com http://www.adroll.com campaign to the fullest, it helps to display your ads across multiple content networks - as opposed to only one.
toddh 17y ago
The likes also feed into the advertising system, which may be obvious but I didn't read that connection. With the likes being so ubiquitous it's quite possible, given their broad reach, that Facebook will be able build a better model of your propensities than Google.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
SamAtt 17y ago
Unless this guy doesn't have any Credit Cards or specialty cards (Grocery, Gas, etc...) I think he's probably already in the position that he's scared Facebook will put him in. It's just not being run by Facebook. Really what he's doing is freaking out over Facebook because they've been open about what info they're collecting. While the Grocery store tricks him with a discount and then takes all his info on the back end.
- warfangle 17y ago
  That grocery store cannot then tie it to not only who you are but who your friends are. They have your name and address, but they don't have your entire social graph at their fingertips. Or your entire digital (or, with the rfid, real-world) historical travel data. If this goes tits up, it could be just the kind of surveillance needed for a 21st century locked-down police state.
- tokenadult 17y ago
  Yes. Here's the epic.org link shared in another Facebook thread here on HN yesterday by another HN participant: http://epic.org/privacy/profiling/ http://epic.org/privacy/profiling/
- sliverstorm 17y ago
  I still don't understand why people are so worried about grocery store discount cards. Ok, so they know my address. That's alright by me; my address exists so everyone can know it. So they know my name correlates to my address; that's alright too, they can find this info in public records. The only possibly sketchy thing is they can correlate my food purchases to me and my address. However, this doesn't bother me personally. I don't care if the world knows I buy one kind of bread instead of another, or that I buy hummus instead of butter. If there are sensitive things you are paranoid about, like personal care products, just don't use the card for those purchases. Either way, they just wind up with spending patterns on food correlated to one individual. The horror. It's not your SSN or passport or any of that jazz. Besides, if advertising became more accurately targeted, I feel that would generally be a good thing. You'd get in touch with products you were genuinely interested in, advertising costs would plummet (causing prices to drop as well), and there'd be less utterly useless cruft in the ads you receive.
commanda 17y ago
RFID tags "implanted" in conference badges? The OP jumps on to this slippery slope argument and lands in big-brother-knows-my-physical-location land. Nowhere at f8 did Facebook announce any plans for stepping into the location-based services market, least of all with any specialized hardware the OP is so afraid of.
FlorinAndrei 17y ago
Privacy is dead. Get over it.
- stcredzero 17y ago
  Not dead, only marginalized. Don't forget that there's always been power in the marginal.
Tichy 17y ago
"It’s called ad re-targeting, and it’s the most effective innovation online ads have seen in a while." I can not believe that Google & other ad networks have not been doing this for years already. (That's why they are networks).
- falsestprophet 17y ago
  Be assured they did and they do.
sunchild 17y ago
The problem with Facebook is and will always be this: when you signed up, you signed away your rights to privacy. If you think publishing into their social graph is worth letting them spy on you, go for it. If you want access to their social graph so you can unearth long-lost friends, feel free. Personally, I don't see how any of it adds up to a fair deal in anyone's mind, but I very often am unable to understand why people do things that are against their own best interests.
- jimbokun 17y ago
  Because they didn't read the agreement when they signed up.
- ewjordan 17y ago
  Personally, I don't see how any of it adds up to a fair deal in anyone's mind, but I very often am unable to understand why people do things that are against their own best interests. You've listed the upsides, which for some people (I dare say even most people, at least outside of these circles) are quite significant - most people I know absolutely love Facebook, and feel it adds a lot to their lives. They're definitely getting something useful out of it. But even if this advertising-pocalypse 2.0 comes to pass, what's the tangible downside for most of these people? Beyond the obvious "don't post naked pictures of yourself hitting the crack pipe right before going into your job interview" stuff, I mean. Almost nobody actually gives a shit or a half whether some company knows what they buy, what sites they visit, what products they might be interested in, etc., as long as this stuff is not browseable by the public at large. Certainly this information could be used in ways that might hurt them, but for the most part it is merely used to try to sell them stuff that they didn't realize they might want. I just can't get behind the "ZOMG they'll try to sell me stuff that I actually might want to buy, based on what I've already bought, the HORROR!" logic, it really doesn't seem that sinister to me, and in certain contexts (Amazon, Netflix, etc.) I find it incredibly useful. I don't use Facebook, but that's only because I value social privacy; as a rule, I don't want people I went to school with to be able to get in touch with me at all, especially not if it's as easy and impersonal as clicking a box next to my name on a list of former classmates. People that care enough can find me in any of a million other ways if they have anything specific to say to me. But I could care less if Facebook gathers advertising data on me; I don't care one bit when Google does it, and I actually find a bit of value in it because if I'm going to be served ads, I'd prefer that they be targeted at me than completely irrelevant.
ashishbharthi 17y ago
And the article has Facebook connect button below it to sign in to write comments!!
stcredzero 17y ago
There are three countervailing forces: the residual desire for privacy, the availability of cloud resources, and the ubiquity of personal mobile computing. There are still plenty of people who use Facebook and even the Internet as little as possible. They can do so because there are other communication channels available and because networks other than the ones online still matter as much or more than their online networks. The cloud and mobile computing will allow some people to opt-out of social networks, providing ecological niches for competitor networks to grow. Some youth will aways find it awkward to be on the same social network as their parents. New social networks will arise and competition will keep these networks in check.
eirene 17y ago
Like most monocultures operating on 20th century logic, FB will fail. I'm not saying they won't make a ton of money in the process (ala MS) but in the end, the system will innovate around and past them (as it is already doing). The 21st century is all about UX, i.e. power to the people. Entities who do not recognize this will not thrive in the long-term.
- joubert 17y ago
  Sounds interesting. Care to expand?
jeffreyg 17y ago
This person did not answer their own question. There have been a bunch of posts about "Company X will know too much about me, . . . " No one ever says WHY that scares the shit out of them.
toby 17y ago
I'm genuinely curious -- I've never been particularly concerned about privacy on the internet, and it seems like the author's main concern is better ad targeting (which I see as beneficial, although I may be in a minority). What are some other dangerous scenarios that people can imagine?
- pyre 17y ago
  In order to create this 'targeted advertising,' they create huge databases of information on people. People called this creepy when the FBI was doing it, but it's ok when a private corporation does it? It's not like the FBI/CIA/MI6/etc doesn't just send a request to the company and get your data anyways... So I'm not really seeing the difference between any company having access to this information and the government having access to it. In some cases, it may be that the government has better controls over who can internally access the data. Not that I necessarily trust the government to create such oversight, but the sheer amount of bureaucracy can prevent things from happening. On the other hand, there are plenty of companies that have 'organically' grown from a point were everyone was trusted, and now they have poor controls in place or they just have the bare minimum 'government mandated' controls in place to comply with the law. In general though, I don't really think that anyone can be trusted with that sort of information.
  - dhimes 17y ago
    To your point is the Beverly Dennis v. Metromail case. A company had a bad idea for outsourcing some of the tasks they performed with the data they had. It's covered here http://www.privacyrights.org/ar/ftc-info_mktpl.htm http://www.privacyrights.org/ar/ftc-info_mktpl.htm (buried deep in the page)
- jodrellblank 17y ago
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNJl9EEcsoE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNJl9EEcsoE
digitallogic 17y ago
"Given pre-condition #2 (traffic), Facebook Like buttons are going to be everywhere. All of the top sites will have them, and most of the medium-sized sites will too." Wrong. All the medium-sized sites will have it, and all the >= 2nd place large sites (bing, retailers that aren't amazon) will have it. All the top large site will have their own systems to push.
Tycho 17y ago
What I wonder about Facebook is the effects of sharing information with people you don't really want to share information with. For instance, the older generations are all signing up for Facebook now; it's an phenomenon for 'all the family.' Therein lies its problem: teenagers, tweenagers, don't want the grown-ups to know everything about their social lives. It starts to get awkward. I predict some migration of young people to newer, trendier social networks because of this issue.
- pyre 17y ago
  Or there is a big push for Facebook for create/fix publishing controls? (i.e. 'publish this post to everyone except mom & dad')
  - Tycho 17y ago
    I'm thinking they would need to get quite complex - eg. what happens if someone posts to your 'wall' - who controls the visibility of that? Simply moving to a different site might be a more convenient solution for most people. Especially if these 'all-in-one' programs become more popular.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
Pheter 17y ago
How about this: Don't use Facebook if it scares the shit out of you.
mattwdelong 17y ago
I think if Facebook seriously wants to gain trust, they must offer the ability to curate your personal data. Not just FUTURE data -- All of your data. Of course, they would be giving up some serious leverage that they have right now in taking control of the internet. I have been seriously questioning my presence on Facebook for some time now, the only thing holding me back is that a large portion of my distant friends and relatives are on Facebook, and they use it as a primary method of contact. I was an early adopter of Facebook, the amount of data they have on me over the years -- especially during my stupid years at University, scares me. When will this be used against me? Furthermore, HOW it can be used against me scares me most.
prgmatic 17y ago
I think the social-media meets brick and mortar environment you predict is going to happen one way or another whether it's FB or someone else.

83 points by adamhowell 17y ago

hugh3 17y ago

This is enough to make me want to use a separate browser just for facebook, to make sure that facebook doesn't know anything about me that I don't consciously decide to tell it. Hmm, startup idea: a browser designed specifically to keep facebook in its place.

Psyonic 17y ago
There's an app for that.
- Psyonic 17y ago
  Are you guys kidding me? The guy above me even said he only browses facebook on his iphone. Using a dedicated app solves the privacy problem!
tuacker 17y ago
I almost exclusively use FB on my iPhone (with Location turned off). It's the only way I can parse the stream while staying sane.
thwarted 17y ago
This is called "New Incognito Window" in chrome/chromium, or a separate profile in Firefox. What would be really nice, though, is the ability to have a bookmark open in an incognito window. The separate profile in Firefox is better because it'll keep cookies between sessions so you don't need to keep logging into facebook.
- listic 17y ago
  "Tools" -> "Start Private Browsing" in Firefox
  - wwortiz 17y ago
    control-shift-P works as well (probably command on a mac but I don't have one) But really chromium/chrome has the best implementation as it creates a new window and doesn't destroy your session.
    - listic 17y ago
      In Firefox, the session isn't destroyed, instead it is saved until you choose "Tools" -> "Stop Private Browsing". But, the chromium implementation might be more convenient.
- pyre 17y ago
  I also use this: #!/bin/sh test -n "$CHROMIUM_COMMAND" || CHROMIUM_COMMAND=`which chromium-browser` test -n "$CLEAN_CHROMIUM_TMPDIR" || CLEAN_CHROMIUM_TMPDIR="/tmp" USER_DATA_DIR=`mktemp -d "$CLEAN_CHROMIUM_TMPDIR/clean-chromium.XXXXXXXX"` case "$1" in cleanup) (cd "$CLEAN_CHROMIUM_TMPDIR" && find . -name "clean-chromium.*" -print0 2>/dev/null | xargs -0 -r rm -rv ) ;; *) chmod 700 "$USER_DATA_DIR" echo "CLEAN_CHROMIUM_TMPDIR = $CLEAN_CHROMIUM_TMPDIR" echo "USER_DATA_DIR = $USER_DATA_DIR" echo "CHROMIUM_COMMAND = $CHROMIUM_COMMAND" echo "Running '$CHROMIUM_COMMAND' --user-data-dir='$USER_DATA_DIR' $@" "$CHROMIUM_COMMAND" --user-data-dir="$USER_DATA_DIR" $@ find "$USER_DATA_DIR" -type d -print0 | xargs -0 -r chmod 700 find "$USER_DATA_DIR" -type f -print0 | xargs -0 -r chmod 600 ;; esac
wesley 17y ago
Can't someone develop an extension that prevents cookies from being accessed inside iframes (white/blacklist)? Wouldn't that stop the whole problem? Or simply block the facebook iframe urls?
- carey 17y ago
  Isn’t this what enabling "block all third-party cookies without exception" in Chrome or disabling "accept third party cookies" in Firefox does?

SlyShy 17y ago

I'm not going to be comfortable until Facebook's motto becomes "Don't be evil". ;)

noelchurchill 17y ago

It’s called ad re-targeting, and it’s the most effective innovation online ads have seen in a while. And no one will be able to do it better than Facebook. Well, Google already does it better, but Facebook might be able to catch up.

bad_user 17y ago
I think Google will always have better data ... Google knows what you're really searching for. By contrast on Facebook it's just a vanity contest. One example ... I'm sometimes searching for interesting articles in an area, but without having anything specific in mind. Delicious provides way better results than browsing Reddit ... that's because on Delicious the rating is not a conscious choice.
Jason7 16y ago
Google is actually just the 6th largest content network. If you want to truly extend your http://www.adroll.com http://www.adroll.com campaign to the fullest, it helps to display your ads across multiple content networks - as opposed to only one.

toddh 17y ago

The likes also feed into the advertising system, which may be obvious but I didn't read that connection. With the likes being so ubiquitous it's quite possible, given their broad reach, that Facebook will be able build a better model of your propensities than Google.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

SamAtt 17y ago

Unless this guy doesn't have any Credit Cards or specialty cards (Grocery, Gas, etc...) I think he's probably already in the position that he's scared Facebook will put him in. It's just not being run by Facebook. Really what he's doing is freaking out over Facebook because they've been open about what info they're collecting. While the Grocery store tricks him with a discount and then takes all his info on the back end.

warfangle 17y ago
That grocery store cannot then tie it to not only who you are but who your friends are. They have your name and address, but they don't have your entire social graph at their fingertips. Or your entire digital (or, with the rfid, real-world) historical travel data. If this goes tits up, it could be just the kind of surveillance needed for a 21st century locked-down police state.
tokenadult 17y ago
Yes. Here's the epic.org link shared in another Facebook thread here on HN yesterday by another HN participant: http://epic.org/privacy/profiling/ http://epic.org/privacy/profiling/
sliverstorm 17y ago
I still don't understand why people are so worried about grocery store discount cards. Ok, so they know my address. That's alright by me; my address exists so everyone can know it. So they know my name correlates to my address; that's alright too, they can find this info in public records. The only possibly sketchy thing is they can correlate my food purchases to me and my address. However, this doesn't bother me personally. I don't care if the world knows I buy one kind of bread instead of another, or that I buy hummus instead of butter. If there are sensitive things you are paranoid about, like personal care products, just don't use the card for those purchases. Either way, they just wind up with spending patterns on food correlated to one individual. The horror. It's not your SSN or passport or any of that jazz. Besides, if advertising became more accurately targeted, I feel that would generally be a good thing. You'd get in touch with products you were genuinely interested in, advertising costs would plummet (causing prices to drop as well), and there'd be less utterly useless cruft in the ads you receive.

commanda 17y ago

RFID tags "implanted" in conference badges? The OP jumps on to this slippery slope argument and lands in big-brother-knows-my-physical-location land. Nowhere at f8 did Facebook announce any plans for stepping into the location-based services market, least of all with any specialized hardware the OP is so afraid of.

FlorinAndrei 17y ago

Privacy is dead. Get over it.

stcredzero 17y ago
Not dead, only marginalized. Don't forget that there's always been power in the marginal.

Tichy 17y ago

"It’s called ad re-targeting, and it’s the most effective innovation online ads have seen in a while." I can not believe that Google & other ad networks have not been doing this for years already. (That's why they are networks).

falsestprophet 17y ago
Be assured they did and they do.

sunchild 17y ago

The problem with Facebook is and will always be this: when you signed up, you signed away your rights to privacy. If you think publishing into their social graph is worth letting them spy on you, go for it. If you want access to their social graph so you can unearth long-lost friends, feel free. Personally, I don't see how any of it adds up to a fair deal in anyone's mind, but I very often am unable to understand why people do things that are against their own best interests.

jimbokun 17y ago
Because they didn't read the agreement when they signed up.
ewjordan 17y ago
Personally, I don't see how any of it adds up to a fair deal in anyone's mind, but I very often am unable to understand why people do things that are against their own best interests. You've listed the upsides, which for some people (I dare say even most people, at least outside of these circles) are quite significant - most people I know absolutely love Facebook, and feel it adds a lot to their lives. They're definitely getting something useful out of it. But even if this advertising-pocalypse 2.0 comes to pass, what's the tangible downside for most of these people? Beyond the obvious "don't post naked pictures of yourself hitting the crack pipe right before going into your job interview" stuff, I mean. Almost nobody actually gives a shit or a half whether some company knows what they buy, what sites they visit, what products they might be interested in, etc., as long as this stuff is not browseable by the public at large. Certainly this information could be used in ways that might hurt them, but for the most part it is merely used to try to sell them stuff that they didn't realize they might want. I just can't get behind the "ZOMG they'll try to sell me stuff that I actually might want to buy, based on what I've already bought, the HORROR!" logic, it really doesn't seem that sinister to me, and in certain contexts (Amazon, Netflix, etc.) I find it incredibly useful. I don't use Facebook, but that's only because I value social privacy; as a rule, I don't want people I went to school with to be able to get in touch with me at all, especially not if it's as easy and impersonal as clicking a box next to my name on a list of former classmates. People that care enough can find me in any of a million other ways if they have anything specific to say to me. But I could care less if Facebook gathers advertising data on me; I don't care one bit when Google does it, and I actually find a bit of value in it because if I'm going to be served ads, I'd prefer that they be targeted at me than completely irrelevant.

ashishbharthi 17y ago

And the article has Facebook connect button below it to sign in to write comments!!

stcredzero 17y ago

There are three countervailing forces: the residual desire for privacy, the availability of cloud resources, and the ubiquity of personal mobile computing. There are still plenty of people who use Facebook and even the Internet as little as possible. They can do so because there are other communication channels available and because networks other than the ones online still matter as much or more than their online networks. The cloud and mobile computing will allow some people to opt-out of social networks, providing ecological niches for competitor networks to grow. Some youth will aways find it awkward to be on the same social network as their parents. New social networks will arise and competition will keep these networks in check.

eirene 17y ago

Like most monocultures operating on 20th century logic, FB will fail. I'm not saying they won't make a ton of money in the process (ala MS) but in the end, the system will innovate around and past them (as it is already doing). The 21st century is all about UX, i.e. power to the people. Entities who do not recognize this will not thrive in the long-term.

joubert 17y ago
Sounds interesting. Care to expand?

jeffreyg 17y ago

This person did not answer their own question. There have been a bunch of posts about "Company X will know too much about me, . . . " No one ever says WHY that scares the shit out of them.

toby 17y ago

I'm genuinely curious -- I've never been particularly concerned about privacy on the internet, and it seems like the author's main concern is better ad targeting (which I see as beneficial, although I may be in a minority). What are some other dangerous scenarios that people can imagine?

pyre 17y ago
In order to create this 'targeted advertising,' they create huge databases of information on people. People called this creepy when the FBI was doing it, but it's ok when a private corporation does it? It's not like the FBI/CIA/MI6/etc doesn't just send a request to the company and get your data anyways... So I'm not really seeing the difference between any company having access to this information and the government having access to it. In some cases, it may be that the government has better controls over who can internally access the data. Not that I necessarily trust the government to create such oversight, but the sheer amount of bureaucracy can prevent things from happening. On the other hand, there are plenty of companies that have 'organically' grown from a point were everyone was trusted, and now they have poor controls in place or they just have the bare minimum 'government mandated' controls in place to comply with the law. In general though, I don't really think that anyone can be trusted with that sort of information.
- dhimes 17y ago
  To your point is the Beverly Dennis v. Metromail case. A company had a bad idea for outsourcing some of the tasks they performed with the data they had. It's covered here http://www.privacyrights.org/ar/ftc-info_mktpl.htm http://www.privacyrights.org/ar/ftc-info_mktpl.htm (buried deep in the page)
jodrellblank 17y ago
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNJl9EEcsoE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNJl9EEcsoE

digitallogic 17y ago

"Given pre-condition #2 (traffic), Facebook Like buttons are going to be everywhere. All of the top sites will have them, and most of the medium-sized sites will too." Wrong. All the medium-sized sites will have it, and all the >= 2nd place large sites (bing, retailers that aren't amazon) will have it. All the top large site will have their own systems to push.

Tycho 17y ago

What I wonder about Facebook is the effects of sharing information with people you don't really want to share information with. For instance, the older generations are all signing up for Facebook now; it's an phenomenon for 'all the family.' Therein lies its problem: teenagers, tweenagers, don't want the grown-ups to know everything about their social lives. It starts to get awkward. I predict some migration of young people to newer, trendier social networks because of this issue.

pyre 17y ago
Or there is a big push for Facebook for create/fix publishing controls? (i.e. 'publish this post to everyone except mom & dad')
- Tycho 17y ago
  I'm thinking they would need to get quite complex - eg. what happens if someone posts to your 'wall' - who controls the visibility of that? Simply moving to a different site might be a more convenient solution for most people. Especially if these 'all-in-one' programs become more popular.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

Pheter 17y ago

How about this: Don't use Facebook if it scares the shit out of you.

mattwdelong 17y ago

I think if Facebook seriously wants to gain trust, they must offer the ability to curate your personal data. Not just FUTURE data -- All of your data. Of course, they would be giving up some serious leverage that they have right now in taking control of the internet. I have been seriously questioning my presence on Facebook for some time now, the only thing holding me back is that a large portion of my distant friends and relatives are on Facebook, and they use it as a primary method of contact. I was an early adopter of Facebook, the amount of data they have on me over the years -- especially during my stupid years at University, scares me. When will this be used against me? Furthermore, HOW it can be used against me scares me most.

prgmatic 17y ago

I think the social-media meets brick and mortar environment you predict is going to happen one way or another whether it's FB or someone else.