8 ms·

Searching Facebook drives home the privacy degradation problem

47 points by rictic 16y ago

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
rictic 16y ago
Inspired by http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1341236 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1341236 (Why in the world does Facebook let me do this?)
aristoxenus 16y ago
Point taken, but what's with the collateral damage? Search for something that's not going to ruin people's lives. FB has a problem. You outing these people on the web isn't helping anything. If you wanted to be classy, you'd leave out the names and/or put rectangles over their eyes. As it is now, you're at least as much an asshole as Zuckerberg.
- aristoxenus 16y ago
  Let me put it another way: we all have a problem right now that we're trying to solve, which is that FB is screwing people. Your clever idea is screwing them worse, with no foreseeable gain for ethics either now or long-term that another demonstration couldn't provide. If you really care about the problem, deactivate your project and come up with something more clever that also takes the moral high ground.
  - skolor 16y ago
    This argument just doesn't make sense. Its trivial to make this search, the OP just put a nice wrapper around it. There are two possible choices he could have made: Something shocking, like "playing hooky", that could get people in trouble. In this case, people will get in trouble, because someone will find out they were playing hooky and report them. However, because people are directly being effected, a shit-storm will be caused, and people will accept that this is a problem faster. On the other hand, the examples could have been something trivial, such as "Weight". It may get people annoyed about it, but no one is going to lose their job. And since they won't lose their job, they won't be pissed, and Facebook can drag their feet. The best part is, anyone with malicious intent could make these searches on their own. Exposing it to the public just forces someone to take action.
    - aristoxenus 16y ago
      To someone with the proper technical skills, it's trivial as you say. But until you do something like what these guys have done, it's dishonest (or geek-myopic) to say that it was trivially available before. When you package it up like this to inject into a receptive media channel, you make it "available" to an audience that would not have had access to this information before. The rhetorical impact of choosing "playing hooky" over "weight" is obvious, and not the problem here. The problem is that someone whose main motivation was obviously geek cred and not solving a problem went straight for a collateral-damage campaign instead of one of the many other options available. Fixing the Facebook privacy policy is not worth endangering the livelihood of even one of these people.
      - piguy314 16y ago
        You sound exactly like somebody who opposes full disclosure of security bugs because you think it makes systems less secure. Shining the light of day on problems is the only way to solve them. Full disclosure is the only way to move big companies, it keeps them accountable.
- Chirono 16y ago
  That seems rather over the top. I can't really see this ruining anybody's life. It isn't letting me search for specific peoples comments. I don't know any of these people, nor am I likely to meet them. This website reminds me of being outside, with people, and hearing little snippets of conversations from strangers. Nobody goes to a park and then complains the council that strangers where able to hear their conversations. Hmmm, I hope this doesn't sound facetious. I feel like I'm missing the point with the facebook privacy hype. There are so many reactions that seem totally strange from my perspective that I feel like I've got something wrong. The way it sits in my mind is: Facebook is a service provided for free. I've given facebook some information about myself so that it can be displayed to people who are interested. My friends do the same and so we can communicate and share things such as photos. Some people start to get angry at the fact facebook doesn't do what they want, namely provide this service in a private manner. I have yet to see anyone personally upset by this. Mostly people seem to disagree with the principle, and go and get angry on behalf of others.
  - rictic 16y ago
    I think that Facebook has failed in two clear ways. They do not do a good job of indicating how public an action will be. This is true across the internet, but it's a real problem on Facebook due to the strong ties to your real identity there. They change the rules far too often. If you had a very strong grasp of Facebook's privacy policy two years ago (or even six months ago) that information would be worse than useless today. Edit: The brunt of the matter however is this: if a few people are using your system wrong, it's their problem. If a large percentage of your users are getting it wrong, it's your problem.
    - Chirono 16y ago
      Thanks, that makes sense. When you add to that the internet's characteristic does of indignant shouting about anything and everything, than I can start to see why these reactions are coming up. My grasp of facebook privacy has always been pretty simple: anyone can see anything I do, except one on one messages. I know this is /way/ over simplistic, but it would explain why I don't feel scandalized that other people can see my wall.
- rictic 16y ago
  We briefly added these measures, but after thinking it over we've decided to disable them. From a technical standpoint they're a fig leaf. This isn't a complex server-side app, it's a minimal UI on top of the JSON results Facebook returns for these searches: http://graph.facebook.com/search?q=control+urges&type=post http://graph.facebook.com/search?q=control+urges&type=po... . This is frankly the least scary use of this data. For example, it would be trivial to start crawling this data and building your own indices to enable far more invasive searches. Our goal is to draw attention to this so that people become outraged and Facebook changes their privacy settings. The security community has been having this conversation for a while (more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_disclosure http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_disclosure ) and the only reason not to disclose a security or privacy problem is to give the company involved time and resources to fix the system. This is not the case here. Facebook made this privacy-affecting change quite deliberately, and I think it's clear that they did so with full knowledge of the implications. If there is not an outcry, this will not be fixed. Right now, from Facebook's perspective, the system is working as intended. The longer it stays this way the worse the privacy breach becomes.
  - hamstersoup 16y ago
    Here's an example of the fig leaf in action: http://willmoffat.github.com/FacebookSearch/?q=HIV%20test&classy=1 http://willmoffat.github.com/FacebookSearch/?q=HIV%20test&#3... We decided the redactions reduce the impact without actually offering any privacy at all. (That's up to Facebook and the users).
    - aristoxenus 16y ago
      "Full disclosure" is a discussion about the ethics of publishing an exploit. Publishing exploits is customarily done in a descriptive manner -- I've never seen it done by publicly sharing the spoils of using that exploit. Did you try publicizing it without the full identifying data available and measuring the response? Did you consider a strategy of escalating outrageousness, instead of going straight for this course of action? What about automatically contacting the affected users first, and attempt to rouse them to action? I'm sorry to be so harsh in a public forum, but when someone takes it upon himself to say that the affected lives are going to suffer for a good cause, then he'd better accompany the resulting campaign with a very thorough -- and thoroughly-vetted -- piece of argument explaining exactly why the ethical balance is in his favor. Two guys deciding they'd get more pageviews by going with plan A, and leaving the moral debate for blog commenters after the fact is not a thorough vetting. There were already numerous forces at play which could potentially result in FB getting things straight. Your app won't have accomplished anything that wouldn't otherwise have been accomplished, except perhaps to cause a few more people to suffer.
dschobel 16y ago
http://twitter.com/#search?q=hooky http://twitter.com/#search?q=hooky I know it's trendy to hate FB right now but don't underestimate the ignorance factor in all of this.
- yaroslavvb 16y ago
  Good point...it's not clear that any of those posts were really meant to be private
- bloodnok 16y ago
  True, but also consider how those two sites evolved. When I post a tweet, I know that it is essentially the same as me taking out an ad in the paper or shouting it at people in the pub. I'm fairly careful with regards to what I post. When I started using Facebook, it was very much about communicating with the group of people you have approved as friends. Over time it has transformed into something much more public, I believe without the bulk of the userbase realising.
- rmc 16y ago
  A big difference is that from the start Twitter was public whereas Facebook was private. Then Facebook changed it to my public by default. Since most people don't change from the default, people are using service (Facebook) that they thought was private, but is now actually public. It's the change from 'default private' to 'default public' that's the biggest thing.
Rabidgremlin 16y ago
I cobbled this together last night. It's very ugly but shows what get's leaked: http://www.rabidgremlin.com/fbprivacy/ http://www.rabidgremlin.com/fbprivacy/
- jdunck 16y ago
  Hey, I was thinking of doing something like this. If you're interested in collaborating, let me know.
snewe 16y ago
Unless we assume that these people are completely ignorant of the public nature of their status updates, then this isn't a privacy violation. Is the argument that Facebook defaults to public and makes it confusing to change settings?
- skybrian 16y ago
  So how do you find out whether they're ignorant of that? A good way is to search for things that people probably didn't mean to reveal publicly. If a large number of people don't know what they're doing, that's a UI design fail. It doesn't matter whether they should have known. (I suspect Twitter has the same problem. People should know it's completely public, but I suspect many don't.)
  - bloodnok 16y ago
    When I talk to people about it, there seems to be a general apathy around the privacy aspects. Most are of the opinion "why would someone other than my friends be interested in me and what I did on Saturday night?". I think the first wake-up call comes when their parents join facebook. Otherwise it's being turned down for a job without knowing why, getting fired for bragging about throwing a sickie, being harassed/stalked etc...
    - GabrielBen 16y ago
      Im about to move out with my girlfriend, and my realtor checked my background with Facebook. I only knew about this because that guy turned out to have gone to high school with my boss, and my boss told me. Even though im a programmer, the only thing i do in facebook is add friends, it already affected me to just have an account there. The effect was neutral to good..this time.
      - jdunck 16y ago
        I'm fiddling with a FB privacy thing. Would you mind if I used this example as an anti-testimonial? Edited as follows: " [M]y realtor checked my background with Facebook. I only knew about this because [he] turned out to have gone to high school with my boss, and my boss told me. [T]he only thing i do in [F]acebook is add friends[.] [I]t already affected me to just have an account there. " OK to attribute, or no?
elbenshira 16y ago
Interestingly, most of the results of "playing hooky" are females. If I were a psychologist, I'd be thrilled about Facebook's idiotic privacy breeches.
- kraynar 16y ago
  I noticed that too. I don't think it's necessarily a sign that females are more likely to shirk responsibility. Maybe just that guys are less likely to call it "playing hooky".
varenc 16y ago
Twitter has it too: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%22playing+hooky%22 http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%22playing+hooky%22 I wrote a paper in grad school about people leaking info on twitter unwittingly, and finding it using queries like these. http://varenhor.st/papers/tweetshow.pdf http://varenhor.st/papers/tweetshow.pdf
fezme 16y ago
It's important to note that no one can 'stalk' you using this feature if they aren't your friend - you can't search by name, only content. Unless there is personally identifiable information about the person in the post itself (e.g. "I'm John Doe and I hate my boss Bob Smith") the odds are you'll never be able to find information about the person you are looking for. If you search for "rectal exam" (http://willmoffat.github.com/FacebookSearch/?q=rectal%20exam http://willmoffat.github.com/FacebookSearch/?q=rectal%20exam) and you happen to know Groten Nils, well, that's pretty embarrassing.
nikolayav 16y ago
The same tool is available on Facebook itself. Type a query in the bar at the top of the page, click on More Results, choose Posts by Everyone from the filter on the left.
- jondoh 16y ago
  Exactly! I was going to say these folks better expect a buyout offer for their amazing real-time search tool until I realized that what it offers has been available on Facebook itself for a while, and nobody cares. I don't mean nobody cares that people's posts are public. I mean, nobody cares to search people's posts because doing so is NOT USEFUL. Ironic how it appears that the catalyst for what people are calling Facebook's privacy violation was the tech media's echo chamber screaming "real-time search." Yes, take the current over-hyped BS (Twitter), combine it with yesterday's insanely successful business (Google), and that is the direction things must go in. And Facebook would be wise to get on board with the inevitable or risk loosing everything. But if they overdo it and sneakily encourage their users to act like attention hungry Twitter users (aka journalists), then they risk loosing everything via a backlash from violated users. Oh, and we're still waiting for either them or Twitter or Google to make bazillions with real-time search because won't that just be so amazing. ...right. I suppose that dismissing this concept now could be a bit premature, but, come on. It's been around for a while and has gone nowhere. Maybe when Facebook realizes that there's no money in this real-time search nonsense, they'll default everyone back to private. Of course, then the story will be that they rudely interrupted their attention hungry users' abilities to act like exhibitionists. And that is why Twitter will always have an edge.

47 points by rictic 16y ago

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

Inspired by http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1341236 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1341236 (Why in the world does Facebook let me do this?)

aristoxenus 16y ago

Point taken, but what's with the collateral damage? Search for something that's not going to ruin people's lives. FB has a problem. You outing these people on the web isn't helping anything. If you wanted to be classy, you'd leave out the names and/or put rectangles over their eyes. As it is now, you're at least as much an asshole as Zuckerberg.

aristoxenus 16y ago
Let me put it another way: we all have a problem right now that we're trying to solve, which is that FB is screwing people. Your clever idea is screwing them worse, with no foreseeable gain for ethics either now or long-term that another demonstration couldn't provide. If you really care about the problem, deactivate your project and come up with something more clever that also takes the moral high ground.
- skolor 16y ago
  This argument just doesn't make sense. Its trivial to make this search, the OP just put a nice wrapper around it. There are two possible choices he could have made: Something shocking, like "playing hooky", that could get people in trouble. In this case, people will get in trouble, because someone will find out they were playing hooky and report them. However, because people are directly being effected, a shit-storm will be caused, and people will accept that this is a problem faster. On the other hand, the examples could have been something trivial, such as "Weight". It may get people annoyed about it, but no one is going to lose their job. And since they won't lose their job, they won't be pissed, and Facebook can drag their feet. The best part is, anyone with malicious intent could make these searches on their own. Exposing it to the public just forces someone to take action.
  - aristoxenus 16y ago
    To someone with the proper technical skills, it's trivial as you say. But until you do something like what these guys have done, it's dishonest (or geek-myopic) to say that it was trivially available before. When you package it up like this to inject into a receptive media channel, you make it "available" to an audience that would not have had access to this information before. The rhetorical impact of choosing "playing hooky" over "weight" is obvious, and not the problem here. The problem is that someone whose main motivation was obviously geek cred and not solving a problem went straight for a collateral-damage campaign instead of one of the many other options available. Fixing the Facebook privacy policy is not worth endangering the livelihood of even one of these people.
    - piguy314 16y ago
      You sound exactly like somebody who opposes full disclosure of security bugs because you think it makes systems less secure. Shining the light of day on problems is the only way to solve them. Full disclosure is the only way to move big companies, it keeps them accountable.
Chirono 16y ago
That seems rather over the top. I can't really see this ruining anybody's life. It isn't letting me search for specific peoples comments. I don't know any of these people, nor am I likely to meet them. This website reminds me of being outside, with people, and hearing little snippets of conversations from strangers. Nobody goes to a park and then complains the council that strangers where able to hear their conversations. Hmmm, I hope this doesn't sound facetious. I feel like I'm missing the point with the facebook privacy hype. There are so many reactions that seem totally strange from my perspective that I feel like I've got something wrong. The way it sits in my mind is: Facebook is a service provided for free. I've given facebook some information about myself so that it can be displayed to people who are interested. My friends do the same and so we can communicate and share things such as photos. Some people start to get angry at the fact facebook doesn't do what they want, namely provide this service in a private manner. I have yet to see anyone personally upset by this. Mostly people seem to disagree with the principle, and go and get angry on behalf of others.
- rictic 16y ago
  I think that Facebook has failed in two clear ways. They do not do a good job of indicating how public an action will be. This is true across the internet, but it's a real problem on Facebook due to the strong ties to your real identity there. They change the rules far too often. If you had a very strong grasp of Facebook's privacy policy two years ago (or even six months ago) that information would be worse than useless today. Edit: The brunt of the matter however is this: if a few people are using your system wrong, it's their problem. If a large percentage of your users are getting it wrong, it's your problem.
  - Chirono 16y ago
    Thanks, that makes sense. When you add to that the internet's characteristic does of indignant shouting about anything and everything, than I can start to see why these reactions are coming up. My grasp of facebook privacy has always been pretty simple: anyone can see anything I do, except one on one messages. I know this is /way/ over simplistic, but it would explain why I don't feel scandalized that other people can see my wall.
rictic 16y ago
We briefly added these measures, but after thinking it over we've decided to disable them. From a technical standpoint they're a fig leaf. This isn't a complex server-side app, it's a minimal UI on top of the JSON results Facebook returns for these searches: http://graph.facebook.com/search?q=control+urges&type=post http://graph.facebook.com/search?q=control+urges&type=po... . This is frankly the least scary use of this data. For example, it would be trivial to start crawling this data and building your own indices to enable far more invasive searches. Our goal is to draw attention to this so that people become outraged and Facebook changes their privacy settings. The security community has been having this conversation for a while (more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_disclosure http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_disclosure ) and the only reason not to disclose a security or privacy problem is to give the company involved time and resources to fix the system. This is not the case here. Facebook made this privacy-affecting change quite deliberately, and I think it's clear that they did so with full knowledge of the implications. If there is not an outcry, this will not be fixed. Right now, from Facebook's perspective, the system is working as intended. The longer it stays this way the worse the privacy breach becomes.
- hamstersoup 16y ago
  Here's an example of the fig leaf in action: http://willmoffat.github.com/FacebookSearch/?q=HIV%20test&classy=1 http://willmoffat.github.com/FacebookSearch/?q=HIV%20test&#3... We decided the redactions reduce the impact without actually offering any privacy at all. (That's up to Facebook and the users).
  - aristoxenus 16y ago
    "Full disclosure" is a discussion about the ethics of publishing an exploit. Publishing exploits is customarily done in a descriptive manner -- I've never seen it done by publicly sharing the spoils of using that exploit. Did you try publicizing it without the full identifying data available and measuring the response? Did you consider a strategy of escalating outrageousness, instead of going straight for this course of action? What about automatically contacting the affected users first, and attempt to rouse them to action? I'm sorry to be so harsh in a public forum, but when someone takes it upon himself to say that the affected lives are going to suffer for a good cause, then he'd better accompany the resulting campaign with a very thorough -- and thoroughly-vetted -- piece of argument explaining exactly why the ethical balance is in his favor. Two guys deciding they'd get more pageviews by going with plan A, and leaving the moral debate for blog commenters after the fact is not a thorough vetting. There were already numerous forces at play which could potentially result in FB getting things straight. Your app won't have accomplished anything that wouldn't otherwise have been accomplished, except perhaps to cause a few more people to suffer.

dschobel 16y ago

http://twitter.com/#search?q=hooky http://twitter.com/#search?q=hooky I know it's trendy to hate FB right now but don't underestimate the ignorance factor in all of this.

yaroslavvb 16y ago
Good point...it's not clear that any of those posts were really meant to be private
bloodnok 16y ago
True, but also consider how those two sites evolved. When I post a tweet, I know that it is essentially the same as me taking out an ad in the paper or shouting it at people in the pub. I'm fairly careful with regards to what I post. When I started using Facebook, it was very much about communicating with the group of people you have approved as friends. Over time it has transformed into something much more public, I believe without the bulk of the userbase realising.
rmc 16y ago
A big difference is that from the start Twitter was public whereas Facebook was private. Then Facebook changed it to my public by default. Since most people don't change from the default, people are using service (Facebook) that they thought was private, but is now actually public. It's the change from 'default private' to 'default public' that's the biggest thing.

Rabidgremlin 16y ago

I cobbled this together last night. It's very ugly but shows what get's leaked: http://www.rabidgremlin.com/fbprivacy/ http://www.rabidgremlin.com/fbprivacy/

jdunck 16y ago
Hey, I was thinking of doing something like this. If you're interested in collaborating, let me know.

snewe 16y ago

Unless we assume that these people are completely ignorant of the public nature of their status updates, then this isn't a privacy violation. Is the argument that Facebook defaults to public and makes it confusing to change settings?

skybrian 16y ago
So how do you find out whether they're ignorant of that? A good way is to search for things that people probably didn't mean to reveal publicly. If a large number of people don't know what they're doing, that's a UI design fail. It doesn't matter whether they should have known. (I suspect Twitter has the same problem. People should know it's completely public, but I suspect many don't.)
- bloodnok 16y ago
  When I talk to people about it, there seems to be a general apathy around the privacy aspects. Most are of the opinion "why would someone other than my friends be interested in me and what I did on Saturday night?". I think the first wake-up call comes when their parents join facebook. Otherwise it's being turned down for a job without knowing why, getting fired for bragging about throwing a sickie, being harassed/stalked etc...
  - GabrielBen 16y ago
    Im about to move out with my girlfriend, and my realtor checked my background with Facebook. I only knew about this because that guy turned out to have gone to high school with my boss, and my boss told me. Even though im a programmer, the only thing i do in facebook is add friends, it already affected me to just have an account there. The effect was neutral to good..this time.
    - jdunck 16y ago
      I'm fiddling with a FB privacy thing. Would you mind if I used this example as an anti-testimonial? Edited as follows: " [M]y realtor checked my background with Facebook. I only knew about this because [he] turned out to have gone to high school with my boss, and my boss told me. [T]he only thing i do in [F]acebook is add friends[.] [I]t already affected me to just have an account there. " OK to attribute, or no?

elbenshira 16y ago

Interestingly, most of the results of "playing hooky" are females. If I were a psychologist, I'd be thrilled about Facebook's idiotic privacy breeches.

kraynar 16y ago
I noticed that too. I don't think it's necessarily a sign that females are more likely to shirk responsibility. Maybe just that guys are less likely to call it "playing hooky".

varenc 16y ago

Twitter has it too: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%22playing+hooky%22 http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%22playing+hooky%22 I wrote a paper in grad school about people leaking info on twitter unwittingly, and finding it using queries like these. http://varenhor.st/papers/tweetshow.pdf http://varenhor.st/papers/tweetshow.pdf

fezme 16y ago

It's important to note that no one can 'stalk' you using this feature if they aren't your friend - you can't search by name, only content. Unless there is personally identifiable information about the person in the post itself (e.g. "I'm John Doe and I hate my boss Bob Smith") the odds are you'll never be able to find information about the person you are looking for. If you search for "rectal exam" (http://willmoffat.github.com/FacebookSearch/?q=rectal%20exam http://willmoffat.github.com/FacebookSearch/?q=rectal%20exam) and you happen to know Groten Nils, well, that's pretty embarrassing.

nikolayav 16y ago

The same tool is available on Facebook itself. Type a query in the bar at the top of the page, click on More Results, choose Posts by Everyone from the filter on the left.

jondoh 16y ago
Exactly! I was going to say these folks better expect a buyout offer for their amazing real-time search tool until I realized that what it offers has been available on Facebook itself for a while, and nobody cares. I don't mean nobody cares that people's posts are public. I mean, nobody cares to search people's posts because doing so is NOT USEFUL. Ironic how it appears that the catalyst for what people are calling Facebook's privacy violation was the tech media's echo chamber screaming "real-time search." Yes, take the current over-hyped BS (Twitter), combine it with yesterday's insanely successful business (Google), and that is the direction things must go in. And Facebook would be wise to get on board with the inevitable or risk loosing everything. But if they overdo it and sneakily encourage their users to act like attention hungry Twitter users (aka journalists), then they risk loosing everything via a backlash from violated users. Oh, and we're still waiting for either them or Twitter or Google to make bazillions with real-time search because won't that just be so amazing. ...right. I suppose that dismissing this concept now could be a bit premature, but, come on. It's been around for a while and has gone nowhere. Maybe when Facebook realizes that there's no money in this real-time search nonsense, they'll default everyone back to private. Of course, then the story will be that they rudely interrupted their attention hungry users' abilities to act like exhibitionists. And that is why Twitter will always have an edge.