12 ms·

Facebook’s Safety Check is a stress-inducing flip of social norms

327 points by imartin2k 9y ago

toomanybeersies 9y ago
I noticed this last night as well. Someone I knew checked in to say they were ok. I looked at the news and saw that it was a building that housed 500 people, in one of the largest cities in the world. It was the same recently when we had a storm in New Zealand, and they activated safety check for the entire country. I don't think it even ended up raining where I was at the time.
- hueving 9y ago
  Do you have friends/family in remote countries? New Zealand is smaller than California and when crap goes down in Southern California I still have people asking me about it even though I live in Silicon Valley. I can see the reasoning to just turn it on for all of New Zealand when it's something as big as a hurricane.
  - pz4i 9y ago
    We live in Australia, and we had concerned family/friends on another continent contacting us after the 2016 earthquake in New Zealand to see that we were OK. So you are definitely on to something.
bogomipz 9y ago
I find it disturbing that FB sees itself as the arbiter of which events and what people are in need of alerting.
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  I don't. For many people it's their primary communication platform, and things like this are to a large extent driven by demand for such features in the wake of previous tragedies/disasters, after setting up impromptu groups or check-in mechanisms. It's not a simple problem to solve. Now I don't think they're doing it very well and the fact that it's subject to the typical feature creep is a problem, but then feature creep is a general problem in software.
  - bogomipz 9y ago
    >"and things like this are to a large extent driven by demand for such features in the wake of previous tragedies/disasters, after setting up impromptu groups or check-in mechanisms" Do you have a citation for this claim that 'FB is just answering the demand'? >"It's not a simple problem to solve." Who asked them to solve it?
    - anigbrowl 9y ago
      Because I've seen people using ad-hoc organizing strategies on social media after previous disasters and and I've also seen people expressing desire for features. People and companies don't need to be asked in formal terms to solve problems, but often choose to offer tools in response to the a perceived demand for such. I'm not obliged to provide citations for every personal observation I make in a short comment, or indeed in a long one. Try being less rude in future interactions.
- ptr_void 9y ago
  I don't see anything disturbing. It's their platform and feature, they are not passing any global laws.
pcunite 9y ago
Its all fun and games until FB starts taking over your sense of security, your world view, and your life.
- userbinator 9y ago
  FB has apparently realised that the safety/security argument is extremely powerfully persuasive, and can be used not just to take away freedoms as is usually the case, but to increase profits. I am probably in the extremely small minority of individuals who don't think of safety and security as a universal good, but as only one of many possibly desirable properties to be weighted and contrasted with others. Coincidentally, I also do not use FB.
  - oliv__ 9y ago
    Yeah they're a little late to the party. Governments have been using this for years.
bbarn 9y ago
I've said it before here, and I'll say it every time it's relevant: Stop using Facebook. Start telling your friends and family to do the same. As the "smart computer person" in many people's lives, you can be the voice they need to hear.
- duncan_bayne 9y ago
  I'm busy shutting down a throwaway FB account that I used to sign up to Spotify back in the day. They don't make it easy. The process, according to Spotify support, is: + Create a new Spotify account + Contact Spotify support to migrate playlists etc. across. + Cancel my paid subscription on the old account. + Create a new paid subscription on the new account. + Migrate my family members onto the new account. This is reminiscent of Microsoft's strategies back in the 90s, to make it incredibly difficult to ship a PC w/o DOS (and later, Windows).
  - jbigelow76 9y ago
    Was there a time, and if so was this throwaway FB account part of it, when you could only sign up to Spotify with a FB account? I was a paying member of Spotify for about two years and my account wasn't tied to FB but Spotify had already been around for a few years prior.
    - deleted 9y ago
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    - duncan_bayne 9y ago
      I'm unsure - I think there was, based on forum chatter. Certainly if there was another way to sign up when I did, I was unaware of it.
    - intoverflow2 9y ago
      > Was there a time, and if so was this throwaway FB account part of it, when you could only sign up to Spotify with a FB account? Yes from the early beta Spotify had it's own account system, then it switched to all new accounts must be FB but legacy accounts could still sign in. This was a while ago though around the time I stopped using it.
deleted 9y ago
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protomyth 9y ago
Putting Safety Check activation in this protective, semi-algorithmic swaddling means the company can cushion itself from blame when the feature is (or is not) activated — since it’s not making case-by-case decisions itself — yet also (apparently) sidestep the responsibility for its technology enabling widespread algorithmic stress. As is demonstrably the case here, where it’s been activated across London and beyond. We would be much better off if we stopped accepting fake apologies and 'the algorithm did it not us' excuses. Facebook employees programmed this thing under, I assume, the direction of management. This is Facebook's fault not some magic, wibly, wobly force. It's one thing to have a bug, but this is working as specified.
- aaron-lebo 9y ago
  Don't forget, FB's culture is to move fast and break things. That's ok when you're breaking features, that's not acceptable when you are breaking social norms, and that's what happens when they are so damn big. They might be sorry, but you can dry a lot of tears with wads of cash. They never see any real consequences for their mistakes.
clusmore 9y ago
>But by making Safety Check a default expectation Facebook flips the norms of societal behavior and suddenly no one can feel safe unless everyone has manually checked the Facebook box marked “safe”. I'm not buying this statement. Where is the evidence of this? The article features two tweets from nondescript people stating they think the feature spreads unnecessary fear, but features no tweets from people who actually felt unnecessary fear. Are there any cases of people who felt afraid because their loved ones didn't check in even though they could have? Otherwise to me this argument is just speculation.
- SeeDave 9y ago
  It's not speculation, in my opinion, because the "Safety Check" feature gives the impression that every human being potentially affected by a terrorist attack/natural disaster/unfortunate circumstance is completely and totally unsafe (killed, raped, beaten, burned, and so on) lest they broadcast their safeness to Facebook. It's one thing to scream "FIRE!" in a crowded theater, but is it not equally damaging to imply that loved ones are in danger lest they broadcast their safety on your platform?
  - clusmore 9y ago
    >but is it not equally damaging to imply that loved ones are in danger lest they broadcast their safety on your platform? Facebook aren't implying this, you're suggesting that people are inferring this. Again, without any evidence. I have yet to hear anybody actually complain that they were afraid because one of their loved ones didn't check in. I haven't been on either end of this feature yet, but from the article it looks like the wording to potential victims is "We want you to know that you can use Safety Check to post that you're safe" and for the loved ones of potential victims, that they are "not marked as safe yet". This doesn't sound like an implication of anything to me, but then again I'm not the sort of person to infer that my friends are unsafe because they haven't told me explicitly that they are safe, Facebook or otherwise.
  - statictype 9y ago
    >It's not speculation, in my opinion If its not speculation, then presumably there is some evidence of people actually complaining about this? The complaints are all of the form 'I think people may not like it because of the following rational reasons' rather than 'I was in a disaster and failed to mark myself as safe and all my family became worried about me unnecessarily ' For whatever its worth, I've been in disaster areas a couple of times - Facebook asked me to mark myself as safe, I ignored it - and literally nothing happened. Because when there's a disaster, people have better ways of communicating their safety than posting on facebook.
whatevthrow31 9y ago
Ok, I had to make a throwaway for this because apparently its a heated debate. Why does everything Facebook do have to be so heavily criticized? Safety Check is a wonderful feature. If I remember correctly, it started off as an internal hackathon project that got turned into a full feature. They get shit if they turn it on (here), and if they don't turn it on (past tragedies where they failed to turn it on). Why does everything Facebook do turn into a riot? After years in the industry, 95% of things that are "bad" that come out of big companies end up being well meaning and just look malicious without context. Hanlon's razor is real. Yeah, Facebook has to fund all this somehow. Yeah, they are going to make their ad space extremely valuable with all the information they have. They don't sell your raw data. They sell access to you like the rest of the industry. Those creepy ads that you saw based on some conversation you had? Turns out that they're NOT listening to your mic or whatever. It's either confirmation bias or something you're not thinking about. Those friends that they suggest with a new account? Turns out your friends posted pictures of you on Facebook, and Facebook knows how to do facial recognition. It feels like everything Facebook is overblown on HN. What am I missing? Edit: I should have said this originally, but I'm a former Facebook employee, now at another big tech company. I try not to be too controversial in writing, which is why I made a throwaway.
- austenallred 9y ago
  The combination of a wildly successful company, not caring about privacy, and a (formerly) bombastic founder. It's the perfect storm for HN shitposting. They have an enormous target on their back and could never do anything right. They got ripped for not enabling safety check recently too. https://techcrunch.com/2015/11/15/facebook-says-it-will-enable-safety-check-in-more-human-disasters-following-criticism/ https://techcrunch.com/2015/11/15/facebook-says-it-will-enab...
  - deleted 9y ago
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  - nickpsecurity 9y ago
    "The combination of a wildly successful company, not caring about privacy, and a (formerly) bombastic founder. It's the perfect storm for HN shitposting" Them implementing a feature so poorly that it tells people 6 miles away to confirm they're safe from a building fire is a "perfect storm for HN shitposting" because of the success of the company, privacy issues, and the founder? And not because the feature is a failing in ways causing false alarms and unnecessary stress?
ars 9y ago
> However 97 are worryingly labelled “not marked as safe yet”. That's the problem. It should be a positive notification only, without any negative one. People can say they are safe (I see value in that). But facebook should not say anything at all if someone has not declared themself safe.
- notahacker 9y ago
  This. And especially this when Facebook knows I'm active on my account 60 miles away, and has a huge amount of data that suggests I never had any connection to that area, never mind the specific residential address the fire took place in. Facebook had a far more legitimate reason to publicly not mark me as safe from an attack in a busy commuter area outside Borough Market a few days after I'd visited it and used Whatsapp there, but I'll have to check whether a friend asking me if I was alive (I was overseas with data turned off) was driven by genuine or Facebook-UI-induced concern
onewaystreet 9y ago
It wasn't long ago that Facebook was being criticized for not enabling Safety Check: https://techcrunch.com/2015/11/15/facebook-says-it-will-enable-safety-check-in-more-human-disasters-following-criticism/ https://techcrunch.com/2015/11/15/facebook-says-it-will-enab... >Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg committed to turning on Safety Check in more human disasters going forward, responding to criticism that the company turned on its safety feature for Paris but not for Beirut and other bombings.
- bogomipz 9y ago
  The phrase "responding to criticism" appears twice in your link and "the criticism" appears once. There are no sources for the actual criticism or where it appeared, it's like an abstract thing. Such is Techcrunh
  - rabboRubble 9y ago
    Here is a case where FB was criticized for not turning on their safety check feature. I've seen similar for events in Africa that went without FB's safety check feature being turned on. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/facebook-criticised-over-paris-attack-safety-check-after-no-action-on-beirut-bombing-a6735196.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/facebook-criticised-... Edit: Found the African event: https://qz.com/638428/facebook-is-being-criticized-for-not-activating-safety-check-during-the-ivory-coast-attack/ https://qz.com/638428/facebook-is-being-criticized-for-not-a...
    - bogomipz 9y ago
      >"Lebanese blogger Joey Ayoub, who studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, wrote in a blog post on Saturday: “These have been two horrible nights. The first took the lives of over 40 in Beirut, the second took the lives of over 100 in Paris. Mr Ayoub’s blog post has been shared over 10,000 times on Facebook, according to Aljazeera." One person sits down and takes the time to be thoughtful and compose actual criticism. 10K do nothing but click a link to share it. Is that the same as 10,0001 individual criticisms?
dkarapetyan 9y ago
Facebook is training rats in a maze. At least the theory is the same. So the question then is, are you a rat in a maze?
deleted 9y ago
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rabboRubble 9y ago
I lived through a major natural disaster that left me an evacuee for months. Facebook's safety check is the only reason I haven't killed my account and I've said this before in prior comments here on Hacker News. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14412146 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14412146 Thank god the author hasn't lived through an event where everybody you know is affected by the event. The ability to say "I'm okay", say it once, and have everybody you know on FB see it is a huge stress reducer. It cuts back on the number of "are you okay?" messages you receive during the event when you may not have a lot of battery or a lot of spare brain to dedicate to answering lots of bullshit inquiries. If he's feeling stressed out because of FB opening the "I'm okay" service in that small area for that catastrophic fire, he's being a self centered jerk. I guarantee that FBs service is helping some poor soul mixed up in that mess. Edit: The Facebook safety check feature is not unique to Facebook. In many ways it mimics Japan's disaster message board feature. Every teleco in Japan offers this service: https://www.nttdocomo.co.jp/english/info/disaster/disaster_board/ https://www.nttdocomo.co.jp/english/info/disaster/disaster_b... I really think the author has lived too lucky a life in a place that has not suffered overmuch from disasters. He can't see beyond his own narrow vision.
- bogomipz 9y ago
  >"Thank god the author hasn't lived through an event where everybody you know is affected by the event." How do you know they haven't? Just because you have and feel one way doesn't mean they haven't. >"If he's feeling stressed out because of FB opening the "I'm okay" service in that small area for that catastrophic fire," I'm not sure I would consider 6 miles a 'small area.'
  - rabboRubble 9y ago
    > How do you know they haven't? Just because you have and feel one way doesn't mean they haven't. Point taken. That said, his entire essay reads to me as a man unaffected by hardship. > I'm not sure I would consider 6 miles a 'small area.' Point taken. That said, let's compare the area affected in New York City on 9/11 to the London apartment fire. WTC's disaster would have benefited from FB's safety check feature. That day/evening I manually called (a lot) of people based on their work address in my contact list. Everybody checked out okay. Some days later, I find out a associate was at a Risk Waters risk conference in the Windows of the World restaurant. He died. Because the conference attendance was (of course) handwritten and only in the building, nobody knew who was there and who wasn't. Had FB's safety check feature been around in those days, I think that particular situation would not have been so chaotic for the families.
mxfh 9y ago
If it's not about wide area disaster response, it's pretty much down to this: We’d be better off checking in as ‘safe’ after our morning commute http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/facebook-safety-check-london-bridge-terror-attack-a7772211.html http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/facebook-safety-check-lo...
weirdshape 9y ago
I can't really relate to people who who clamber to push out notifications to their friends and family about the minutiae of their lives.
- PhasmaFelis 9y ago
  The important thing is that you got to be smug about it.
lngnmn 9y ago
Doesn't social norms depend upon location, community, and culture? Hipster's demand to respect that shallow outward sophistication they cosplay cannot be considered as a universal standard. For most people there is nothing stress-inducing. Merely boring stuff.
ceocoder 9y ago
My cousin and his wife were in Nice on the day of attack in 2016, after obsessively refreshing the page; seeing a green check mark next to their name was the greatest sigh of relief. Back in 2001, I was in India when one of the worst earthquakes to hit that state in recent memory struck. I lived with my grandma and grandpa, and rest of my family - mom, dad, sister, uncles, aunts, cousins were at a wedding. For literally 7 hours we had no way of communicating with each other - they didn't know if we made it or not. So yeah, Safety Check tool is just fine in my book, just mere act of being able to say "I'm OK" makes a massive difference. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_Gujarat_earthquake https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_Gujarat_earthquake
wayanon 9y ago
Glad to hear other people are bothered about this too. I wish there was a way to opt out.
wayanon 9y ago
Is it possible to opt out of Safety Check?
wutbrodo 9y ago
> Those same friends would likely not have even thought to consider there was any risk prior to the existence of the Facebook feature. This article is cynical clickbait nonsense, right down to assuming that it's impossible for Facebook to implement something for any reason but engagement. I'm no fan of Facebook but the idea that, to a man, they're faceless stock price maximizers is just stupid and frankly insulting. I know plenty of people who immediately think of (and often call) family/friends in an affected area when a disaster happens. Depending on how far away it is, it can even be at the level of a city.
ganonm 9y ago
The main issue I have with this feature is that as far as I can tell there is no way to opt out. I don't want this feature and I choose not to respond to the notifications I occasionally receive when there is a terrorist event in my city. That leaves me in a bind - unless I tell friends and family who use Facebook that I'm actively choosing not to use the feature, they invariably begin to worry about me when I don't 'mark myself as safe'. This to me is unacceptable.
ardacinar 9y ago
That seems to be an abuse of the security check feature by Facebook's part. 6 mile radius for a fire in a ridiculously large city? As mentioned in other comments, that feature can be very useful in cases of natural disasters or large terror attacks that prompted the creation of this feature. (Although, to be frank, living in Istanbul, it had become somewhat annoying to mark myself safe every couple of weeks or so - though this is more directed towards the Turkish government than Facebook)
phewvvg 9y ago
I grew up in a town about 80 kilometers north of London and used to go there pretty frequently, until I moved to Amsterdam last summer, so it was pretty surprising when I opened Facebook yesterday evening and was asked if I was safe from the fire in London. I think Facebook's Safety Check is a good feature, but the implementation is pretty dreadful.
bryanrasmussen 9y ago
I like to complain about everything Facebook does as well as the next guy, but in the rare case when they seem to have done something for promoting a social good I'm going to give them a pass.
kylegordon 9y ago
This particular instance of the safety check was utterly ridiculous and pointless. My wife and a friend were prompted to 'Mark as safe', except we both were in Glasgow. Over 400 miles away.
- aembleton 9y ago
  Have you been in London recently? I think the safety check algorithm must look at your location history for the last n days and ask you if you've recently been in the area. I live in Manchester, but was in Bali when the bomb went off last month. I got the safety check. This made sense as my friends might not have been aware that I was away, and so it was useful for them to be alerted that I was safe.
Hattes 9y ago
This reminds me of this Onion video: http://www.theonion.com/video/millions-irrationally-feared-dead-in-minor-train-a-20901 http://www.theonion.com/video/millions-irrationally-feared-d...
NOSHSHNACKERS 9y ago
Its part of the swirling down the toilet bowl of selfishness - its one more way fb helps people say - Look at meeeeeee Im an individual I exist.. ugh.. if was in an emergency I would call my mom and there you go.. everyone would fing know I was ok because mom is old and she talks to people with her vocal cords using sound waves generated through the medium of atmosphere and wow does that work.
ivanhoe 9y ago
So now people can't stand being "stressed" by a simple dialog asking them if they wish to mark themselves safe? I'd understand if it's some business app and you're in the middle of something important, but c'mon you're already wasting your time looking at newsfeed? Is it really that hard and time consuming to answer or just ignore that dialog? Or is it about emotions, you don't like being reminded of the bad things happening in the real world around you?!
markatkinson 9y ago
I live in Cape Town, South Africa and we had a storm that was a bit worst than usual. I don't have facebook but someone told me the Safety Check came up for them during the storm 0_0. Sounds like a neurotic grand mother.
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yladiz 9y ago
I can kind of understand the vilification of this feature, and the reasons for that are explained in other comments on this post, but I think it's a major improvement to how it would have been before, and on other current platforms as well. Unlike other ways to keep in touch with friends, like WhatsApp, WeChat, Kakao, Facebook isn't just a messaging platform (although that's how I primarily use it) and so it's actually possible to see someone marked as safe without having to directly message them about it. This is a direct improvement over other platforms where the only way you know if someone is safe is to actually message them. I don't really buy the argument that you would just assume someone is safe before; you would absolutely have thw worry that if there was a disaster in London, you would want to know if your friend is safe. Previously you couldn't easily contact them, though: if you even had their phone number, calling them internationally wouldn't be easy or sometimes even possible, but often you'd have their address, and hope they would respond to you. Now it's much easier to keep in touch. I also feel like people are making controversy over nothing when they think that asking if they're safe when they're in London during that fire is too much if they're not in the vicinity. Facebook is in a catch-22 here; Facebook either knows your (roughly) exact location and knows if you were in or near the apartment building at the time, which would make people cry about Facebook tracking you everywhere, or it doesn't and it asks if you're safe if you're in London. Even in the image from the tweet that this article references there is a "Not in the area" button you can press. There's really no way to correctly do this without having really accurate and very up to date information about the people using Facebook, which isn't always possible. Could Facebook improve the ways it determines if a user is in the area? Yes, of course; a simple way would be to look up IP address block(s) and see if the user is in a block they look up, then prompt them, although it's not really that simple. I also run into issues with Facebook thinking I'm in Japan when I'm not, even though I left nearly a month ago. Facebook really could also improve the UI around it; the point at the bottom of the article when it says that the writer has 100 (probably) London based friends, 97 of which are not "marked as safe", which is terrible UI. But I do absolutely disagree that this feature is worth removing based on the arguments presented in this article.
- _jal 9y ago
  > I don't really buy the argument that you would just assume someone is safe before The problem is that it doesn't matter how you react to the feature. The problem is how groups of people react to it. This isn't much different than saying you'd calmly walk to the exit if caught in a fire in a club. Even assuming you evaluate your own behavior in that situation correctly, it has zero effect on everyone else. > There's really no way to correctly do this without having really accurate and very up to date information about the people using Facebook, which isn't always possible. So maybe if you can't do something reliably, and there are risks to getting it wrong, the proper response isn't 'hold my beer?'
zebraflask 9y ago
I view it as an invasion of privacy. It's not Facebook's job to do things like that. All it accomplishes is to act like a megaphone to artificially amplify the significance of the story (insert comparisons to Fox News and tabloids here). I'm sure there could be endless debates about the propriety of doing that, but from my perspective, spreading bad news to encourage user hysteria, mostly for the sake of reinforcing platform loyalty, is ethically very questionable. In any event, Facebook these days is only useful anymore as a convenient login mechanism for sites that use the Facebook login widget, and even there, Google's version works better.

327 points by imartin2k 9y ago

I noticed this last night as well. Someone I knew checked in to say they were ok. I looked at the news and saw that it was a building that housed 500 people, in one of the largest cities in the world. It was the same recently when we had a storm in New Zealand, and they activated safety check for the entire country. I don't think it even ended up raining where I was at the time.

hueving 9y ago
Do you have friends/family in remote countries? New Zealand is smaller than California and when crap goes down in Southern California I still have people asking me about it even though I live in Silicon Valley. I can see the reasoning to just turn it on for all of New Zealand when it's something as big as a hurricane.
- pz4i 9y ago
  We live in Australia, and we had concerned family/friends on another continent contacting us after the 2016 earthquake in New Zealand to see that we were OK. So you are definitely on to something.

bogomipz 9y ago

I find it disturbing that FB sees itself as the arbiter of which events and what people are in need of alerting.

anigbrowl 9y ago
I don't. For many people it's their primary communication platform, and things like this are to a large extent driven by demand for such features in the wake of previous tragedies/disasters, after setting up impromptu groups or check-in mechanisms. It's not a simple problem to solve. Now I don't think they're doing it very well and the fact that it's subject to the typical feature creep is a problem, but then feature creep is a general problem in software.
- bogomipz 9y ago
  >"and things like this are to a large extent driven by demand for such features in the wake of previous tragedies/disasters, after setting up impromptu groups or check-in mechanisms" Do you have a citation for this claim that 'FB is just answering the demand'? >"It's not a simple problem to solve." Who asked them to solve it?
  - anigbrowl 9y ago
    Because I've seen people using ad-hoc organizing strategies on social media after previous disasters and and I've also seen people expressing desire for features. People and companies don't need to be asked in formal terms to solve problems, but often choose to offer tools in response to the a perceived demand for such. I'm not obliged to provide citations for every personal observation I make in a short comment, or indeed in a long one. Try being less rude in future interactions.
ptr_void 9y ago
I don't see anything disturbing. It's their platform and feature, they are not passing any global laws.

pcunite 9y ago

Its all fun and games until FB starts taking over your sense of security, your world view, and your life.

userbinator 9y ago
FB has apparently realised that the safety/security argument is extremely powerfully persuasive, and can be used not just to take away freedoms as is usually the case, but to increase profits. I am probably in the extremely small minority of individuals who don't think of safety and security as a universal good, but as only one of many possibly desirable properties to be weighted and contrasted with others. Coincidentally, I also do not use FB.
- oliv__ 9y ago
  Yeah they're a little late to the party. Governments have been using this for years.

bbarn 9y ago

I've said it before here, and I'll say it every time it's relevant: Stop using Facebook. Start telling your friends and family to do the same. As the "smart computer person" in many people's lives, you can be the voice they need to hear.

duncan_bayne 9y ago
I'm busy shutting down a throwaway FB account that I used to sign up to Spotify back in the day. They don't make it easy. The process, according to Spotify support, is: + Create a new Spotify account + Contact Spotify support to migrate playlists etc. across. + Cancel my paid subscription on the old account. + Create a new paid subscription on the new account. + Migrate my family members onto the new account. This is reminiscent of Microsoft's strategies back in the 90s, to make it incredibly difficult to ship a PC w/o DOS (and later, Windows).
- jbigelow76 9y ago
  Was there a time, and if so was this throwaway FB account part of it, when you could only sign up to Spotify with a FB account? I was a paying member of Spotify for about two years and my account wasn't tied to FB but Spotify had already been around for a few years prior.
  - deleted 9y ago
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  - duncan_bayne 9y ago
    I'm unsure - I think there was, based on forum chatter. Certainly if there was another way to sign up when I did, I was unaware of it.
  - intoverflow2 9y ago
    > Was there a time, and if so was this throwaway FB account part of it, when you could only sign up to Spotify with a FB account? Yes from the early beta Spotify had it's own account system, then it switched to all new accounts must be FB but legacy accounts could still sign in. This was a while ago though around the time I stopped using it.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

protomyth 9y ago

Putting Safety Check activation in this protective, semi-algorithmic swaddling means the company can cushion itself from blame when the feature is (or is not) activated — since it’s not making case-by-case decisions itself — yet also (apparently) sidestep the responsibility for its technology enabling widespread algorithmic stress. As is demonstrably the case here, where it’s been activated across London and beyond. We would be much better off if we stopped accepting fake apologies and 'the algorithm did it not us' excuses. Facebook employees programmed this thing under, I assume, the direction of management. This is Facebook's fault not some magic, wibly, wobly force. It's one thing to have a bug, but this is working as specified.

aaron-lebo 9y ago
Don't forget, FB's culture is to move fast and break things. That's ok when you're breaking features, that's not acceptable when you are breaking social norms, and that's what happens when they are so damn big. They might be sorry, but you can dry a lot of tears with wads of cash. They never see any real consequences for their mistakes.

clusmore 9y ago

>But by making Safety Check a default expectation Facebook flips the norms of societal behavior and suddenly no one can feel safe unless everyone has manually checked the Facebook box marked “safe”. I'm not buying this statement. Where is the evidence of this? The article features two tweets from nondescript people stating they think the feature spreads unnecessary fear, but features no tweets from people who actually felt unnecessary fear. Are there any cases of people who felt afraid because their loved ones didn't check in even though they could have? Otherwise to me this argument is just speculation.

SeeDave 9y ago
It's not speculation, in my opinion, because the "Safety Check" feature gives the impression that every human being potentially affected by a terrorist attack/natural disaster/unfortunate circumstance is completely and totally unsafe (killed, raped, beaten, burned, and so on) lest they broadcast their safeness to Facebook. It's one thing to scream "FIRE!" in a crowded theater, but is it not equally damaging to imply that loved ones are in danger lest they broadcast their safety on your platform?
- clusmore 9y ago
  >but is it not equally damaging to imply that loved ones are in danger lest they broadcast their safety on your platform? Facebook aren't implying this, you're suggesting that people are inferring this. Again, without any evidence. I have yet to hear anybody actually complain that they were afraid because one of their loved ones didn't check in. I haven't been on either end of this feature yet, but from the article it looks like the wording to potential victims is "We want you to know that you can use Safety Check to post that you're safe" and for the loved ones of potential victims, that they are "not marked as safe yet". This doesn't sound like an implication of anything to me, but then again I'm not the sort of person to infer that my friends are unsafe because they haven't told me explicitly that they are safe, Facebook or otherwise.
- statictype 9y ago
  >It's not speculation, in my opinion If its not speculation, then presumably there is some evidence of people actually complaining about this? The complaints are all of the form 'I think people may not like it because of the following rational reasons' rather than 'I was in a disaster and failed to mark myself as safe and all my family became worried about me unnecessarily ' For whatever its worth, I've been in disaster areas a couple of times - Facebook asked me to mark myself as safe, I ignored it - and literally nothing happened. Because when there's a disaster, people have better ways of communicating their safety than posting on facebook.

whatevthrow31 9y ago

Ok, I had to make a throwaway for this because apparently its a heated debate. Why does everything Facebook do have to be so heavily criticized? Safety Check is a wonderful feature. If I remember correctly, it started off as an internal hackathon project that got turned into a full feature. They get shit if they turn it on (here), and if they don't turn it on (past tragedies where they failed to turn it on). Why does everything Facebook do turn into a riot? After years in the industry, 95% of things that are "bad" that come out of big companies end up being well meaning and just look malicious without context. Hanlon's razor is real. Yeah, Facebook has to fund all this somehow. Yeah, they are going to make their ad space extremely valuable with all the information they have. They don't sell your raw data. They sell access to you like the rest of the industry. Those creepy ads that you saw based on some conversation you had? Turns out that they're NOT listening to your mic or whatever. It's either confirmation bias or something you're not thinking about. Those friends that they suggest with a new account? Turns out your friends posted pictures of you on Facebook, and Facebook knows how to do facial recognition. It feels like everything Facebook is overblown on HN. What am I missing? Edit: I should have said this originally, but I'm a former Facebook employee, now at another big tech company. I try not to be too controversial in writing, which is why I made a throwaway.

austenallred 9y ago
The combination of a wildly successful company, not caring about privacy, and a (formerly) bombastic founder. It's the perfect storm for HN shitposting. They have an enormous target on their back and could never do anything right. They got ripped for not enabling safety check recently too. https://techcrunch.com/2015/11/15/facebook-says-it-will-enable-safety-check-in-more-human-disasters-following-criticism/ https://techcrunch.com/2015/11/15/facebook-says-it-will-enab...
- deleted 9y ago
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- nickpsecurity 9y ago
  "The combination of a wildly successful company, not caring about privacy, and a (formerly) bombastic founder. It's the perfect storm for HN shitposting" Them implementing a feature so poorly that it tells people 6 miles away to confirm they're safe from a building fire is a "perfect storm for HN shitposting" because of the success of the company, privacy issues, and the founder? And not because the feature is a failing in ways causing false alarms and unnecessary stress?

ars 9y ago

> However 97 are worryingly labelled “not marked as safe yet”. That's the problem. It should be a positive notification only, without any negative one. People can say they are safe (I see value in that). But facebook should not say anything at all if someone has not declared themself safe.

notahacker 9y ago
This. And especially this when Facebook knows I'm active on my account 60 miles away, and has a huge amount of data that suggests I never had any connection to that area, never mind the specific residential address the fire took place in. Facebook had a far more legitimate reason to publicly not mark me as safe from an attack in a busy commuter area outside Borough Market a few days after I'd visited it and used Whatsapp there, but I'll have to check whether a friend asking me if I was alive (I was overseas with data turned off) was driven by genuine or Facebook-UI-induced concern

onewaystreet 9y ago

It wasn't long ago that Facebook was being criticized for not enabling Safety Check: https://techcrunch.com/2015/11/15/facebook-says-it-will-enable-safety-check-in-more-human-disasters-following-criticism/ https://techcrunch.com/2015/11/15/facebook-says-it-will-enab... >Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg committed to turning on Safety Check in more human disasters going forward, responding to criticism that the company turned on its safety feature for Paris but not for Beirut and other bombings.

bogomipz 9y ago
The phrase "responding to criticism" appears twice in your link and "the criticism" appears once. There are no sources for the actual criticism or where it appeared, it's like an abstract thing. Such is Techcrunh
- rabboRubble 9y ago
  Here is a case where FB was criticized for not turning on their safety check feature. I've seen similar for events in Africa that went without FB's safety check feature being turned on. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/facebook-criticised-over-paris-attack-safety-check-after-no-action-on-beirut-bombing-a6735196.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/facebook-criticised-... Edit: Found the African event: https://qz.com/638428/facebook-is-being-criticized-for-not-activating-safety-check-during-the-ivory-coast-attack/ https://qz.com/638428/facebook-is-being-criticized-for-not-a...
  - bogomipz 9y ago
    >"Lebanese blogger Joey Ayoub, who studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, wrote in a blog post on Saturday: “These have been two horrible nights. The first took the lives of over 40 in Beirut, the second took the lives of over 100 in Paris. Mr Ayoub’s blog post has been shared over 10,000 times on Facebook, according to Aljazeera." One person sits down and takes the time to be thoughtful and compose actual criticism. 10K do nothing but click a link to share it. Is that the same as 10,0001 individual criticisms?

dkarapetyan 9y ago

Facebook is training rats in a maze. At least the theory is the same. So the question then is, are you a rat in a maze?

deleted 9y ago

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rabboRubble 9y ago

I lived through a major natural disaster that left me an evacuee for months. Facebook's safety check is the only reason I haven't killed my account and I've said this before in prior comments here on Hacker News. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14412146 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14412146 Thank god the author hasn't lived through an event where everybody you know is affected by the event. The ability to say "I'm okay", say it once, and have everybody you know on FB see it is a huge stress reducer. It cuts back on the number of "are you okay?" messages you receive during the event when you may not have a lot of battery or a lot of spare brain to dedicate to answering lots of bullshit inquiries. If he's feeling stressed out because of FB opening the "I'm okay" service in that small area for that catastrophic fire, he's being a self centered jerk. I guarantee that FBs service is helping some poor soul mixed up in that mess. Edit: The Facebook safety check feature is not unique to Facebook. In many ways it mimics Japan's disaster message board feature. Every teleco in Japan offers this service: https://www.nttdocomo.co.jp/english/info/disaster/disaster_board/ https://www.nttdocomo.co.jp/english/info/disaster/disaster_b... I really think the author has lived too lucky a life in a place that has not suffered overmuch from disasters. He can't see beyond his own narrow vision.

bogomipz 9y ago
>"Thank god the author hasn't lived through an event where everybody you know is affected by the event." How do you know they haven't? Just because you have and feel one way doesn't mean they haven't. >"If he's feeling stressed out because of FB opening the "I'm okay" service in that small area for that catastrophic fire," I'm not sure I would consider 6 miles a 'small area.'
- rabboRubble 9y ago
  > How do you know they haven't? Just because you have and feel one way doesn't mean they haven't. Point taken. That said, his entire essay reads to me as a man unaffected by hardship. > I'm not sure I would consider 6 miles a 'small area.' Point taken. That said, let's compare the area affected in New York City on 9/11 to the London apartment fire. WTC's disaster would have benefited from FB's safety check feature. That day/evening I manually called (a lot) of people based on their work address in my contact list. Everybody checked out okay. Some days later, I find out a associate was at a Risk Waters risk conference in the Windows of the World restaurant. He died. Because the conference attendance was (of course) handwritten and only in the building, nobody knew who was there and who wasn't. Had FB's safety check feature been around in those days, I think that particular situation would not have been so chaotic for the families.

mxfh 9y ago

If it's not about wide area disaster response, it's pretty much down to this: We’d be better off checking in as ‘safe’ after our morning commute http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/facebook-safety-check-london-bridge-terror-attack-a7772211.html http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/facebook-safety-check-lo...

weirdshape 9y ago

I can't really relate to people who who clamber to push out notifications to their friends and family about the minutiae of their lives.

PhasmaFelis 9y ago
The important thing is that you got to be smug about it.

lngnmn 9y ago

Doesn't social norms depend upon location, community, and culture? Hipster's demand to respect that shallow outward sophistication they cosplay cannot be considered as a universal standard. For most people there is nothing stress-inducing. Merely boring stuff.

ceocoder 9y ago

My cousin and his wife were in Nice on the day of attack in 2016, after obsessively refreshing the page; seeing a green check mark next to their name was the greatest sigh of relief. Back in 2001, I was in India when one of the worst earthquakes to hit that state in recent memory struck. I lived with my grandma and grandpa, and rest of my family - mom, dad, sister, uncles, aunts, cousins were at a wedding. For literally 7 hours we had no way of communicating with each other - they didn't know if we made it or not. So yeah, Safety Check tool is just fine in my book, just mere act of being able to say "I'm OK" makes a massive difference. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_Gujarat_earthquake https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_Gujarat_earthquake

wayanon 9y ago

Glad to hear other people are bothered about this too. I wish there was a way to opt out.

wayanon 9y ago

Is it possible to opt out of Safety Check?

wutbrodo 9y ago

> Those same friends would likely not have even thought to consider there was any risk prior to the existence of the Facebook feature. This article is cynical clickbait nonsense, right down to assuming that it's impossible for Facebook to implement something for any reason but engagement. I'm no fan of Facebook but the idea that, to a man, they're faceless stock price maximizers is just stupid and frankly insulting. I know plenty of people who immediately think of (and often call) family/friends in an affected area when a disaster happens. Depending on how far away it is, it can even be at the level of a city.

ganonm 9y ago

The main issue I have with this feature is that as far as I can tell there is no way to opt out. I don't want this feature and I choose not to respond to the notifications I occasionally receive when there is a terrorist event in my city. That leaves me in a bind - unless I tell friends and family who use Facebook that I'm actively choosing not to use the feature, they invariably begin to worry about me when I don't 'mark myself as safe'. This to me is unacceptable.

ardacinar 9y ago

That seems to be an abuse of the security check feature by Facebook's part. 6 mile radius for a fire in a ridiculously large city? As mentioned in other comments, that feature can be very useful in cases of natural disasters or large terror attacks that prompted the creation of this feature. (Although, to be frank, living in Istanbul, it had become somewhat annoying to mark myself safe every couple of weeks or so - though this is more directed towards the Turkish government than Facebook)

phewvvg 9y ago

I grew up in a town about 80 kilometers north of London and used to go there pretty frequently, until I moved to Amsterdam last summer, so it was pretty surprising when I opened Facebook yesterday evening and was asked if I was safe from the fire in London. I think Facebook's Safety Check is a good feature, but the implementation is pretty dreadful.

bryanrasmussen 9y ago

I like to complain about everything Facebook does as well as the next guy, but in the rare case when they seem to have done something for promoting a social good I'm going to give them a pass.

kylegordon 9y ago

This particular instance of the safety check was utterly ridiculous and pointless. My wife and a friend were prompted to 'Mark as safe', except we both were in Glasgow. Over 400 miles away.

aembleton 9y ago
Have you been in London recently? I think the safety check algorithm must look at your location history for the last n days and ask you if you've recently been in the area. I live in Manchester, but was in Bali when the bomb went off last month. I got the safety check. This made sense as my friends might not have been aware that I was away, and so it was useful for them to be alerted that I was safe.

Hattes 9y ago

This reminds me of this Onion video: http://www.theonion.com/video/millions-irrationally-feared-dead-in-minor-train-a-20901 http://www.theonion.com/video/millions-irrationally-feared-d...

NOSHSHNACKERS 9y ago

Its part of the swirling down the toilet bowl of selfishness - its one more way fb helps people say - Look at meeeeeee Im an individual I exist.. ugh.. if was in an emergency I would call my mom and there you go.. everyone would fing know I was ok because mom is old and she talks to people with her vocal cords using sound waves generated through the medium of atmosphere and wow does that work.

ivanhoe 9y ago

So now people can't stand being "stressed" by a simple dialog asking them if they wish to mark themselves safe? I'd understand if it's some business app and you're in the middle of something important, but c'mon you're already wasting your time looking at newsfeed? Is it really that hard and time consuming to answer or just ignore that dialog? Or is it about emotions, you don't like being reminded of the bad things happening in the real world around you?!

markatkinson 9y ago

I live in Cape Town, South Africa and we had a storm that was a bit worst than usual. I don't have facebook but someone told me the Safety Check came up for them during the storm 0_0. Sounds like a neurotic grand mother.

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yladiz 9y ago

I can kind of understand the vilification of this feature, and the reasons for that are explained in other comments on this post, but I think it's a major improvement to how it would have been before, and on other current platforms as well. Unlike other ways to keep in touch with friends, like WhatsApp, WeChat, Kakao, Facebook isn't just a messaging platform (although that's how I primarily use it) and so it's actually possible to see someone marked as safe without having to directly message them about it. This is a direct improvement over other platforms where the only way you know if someone is safe is to actually message them. I don't really buy the argument that you would just assume someone is safe before; you would absolutely have thw worry that if there was a disaster in London, you would want to know if your friend is safe. Previously you couldn't easily contact them, though: if you even had their phone number, calling them internationally wouldn't be easy or sometimes even possible, but often you'd have their address, and hope they would respond to you. Now it's much easier to keep in touch. I also feel like people are making controversy over nothing when they think that asking if they're safe when they're in London during that fire is too much if they're not in the vicinity. Facebook is in a catch-22 here; Facebook either knows your (roughly) exact location and knows if you were in or near the apartment building at the time, which would make people cry about Facebook tracking you everywhere, or it doesn't and it asks if you're safe if you're in London. Even in the image from the tweet that this article references there is a "Not in the area" button you can press. There's really no way to correctly do this without having really accurate and very up to date information about the people using Facebook, which isn't always possible. Could Facebook improve the ways it determines if a user is in the area? Yes, of course; a simple way would be to look up IP address block(s) and see if the user is in a block they look up, then prompt them, although it's not really that simple. I also run into issues with Facebook thinking I'm in Japan when I'm not, even though I left nearly a month ago. Facebook really could also improve the UI around it; the point at the bottom of the article when it says that the writer has 100 (probably) London based friends, 97 of which are not "marked as safe", which is terrible UI. But I do absolutely disagree that this feature is worth removing based on the arguments presented in this article.

_jal 9y ago
> I don't really buy the argument that you would just assume someone is safe before The problem is that it doesn't matter how you react to the feature. The problem is how groups of people react to it. This isn't much different than saying you'd calmly walk to the exit if caught in a fire in a club. Even assuming you evaluate your own behavior in that situation correctly, it has zero effect on everyone else. > There's really no way to correctly do this without having really accurate and very up to date information about the people using Facebook, which isn't always possible. So maybe if you can't do something reliably, and there are risks to getting it wrong, the proper response isn't 'hold my beer?'

zebraflask 9y ago

I view it as an invasion of privacy. It's not Facebook's job to do things like that. All it accomplishes is to act like a megaphone to artificially amplify the significance of the story (insert comparisons to Fox News and tabloids here). I'm sure there could be endless debates about the propriety of doing that, but from my perspective, spreading bad news to encourage user hysteria, mostly for the sake of reinforcing platform loyalty, is ethically very questionable. In any event, Facebook these days is only useful anymore as a convenient login mechanism for sites that use the Facebook login widget, and even there, Google's version works better.