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Edward Snowden: Facebook is a surveillance company rebranded as 'social media'

317 points by doppp 9y ago

fastball 9y ago
A bit pedantic, but probably more accurate if you flip that around: Facebook was a social media company that has pivoted to become a surveillance company because they can make more money that way.
- switch007 9y ago
  "has pivoted"? Recently? When was it not a surveillance company?
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    When it was just a small site for bunch of college kids to share their party experiences.
    - switch007 9y ago
      Which is its distant past, not recent (to me implied by saying "has pivoted" instead of just "pivoted")... as we're being particular here.
      - fastball 9y ago
        The present perfect tense does not necessarily mean that the action is recent. I chose the present perfect because I think Facebook still derives utility from being a social network and is not solely a data-mining machine. It's a process that I think is probably inevitable but is not completed yet.
- 6ak74rfy 9y ago
  I agree. When they must have started to monetize their platform through ads, they must have realized how useful their data was. For e.g., search engine advertising is based on customer's intent because they know what the customer is searching for, whereas a social network's knowledge runs deeper than that. This is when they must have decided to turn into a surveillance company, to become a data-crunching behemoth it is today.
rdtsc 9y ago
The Stasi and KGB would have given everything to have something like Facebook. Here they were installing listening devices, torturing people, following them, getting family members to spy on each other. They just needed Facebook and none of that would have been necessary. People would voluntarily log in and type everything they do, where they travel, what food they are eating, what political parties they support, who their friends are, everything connected nicely in a pretty graph with nodes and edges. > https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS [Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one? Zuck: People just submitted it. Zuck: I don't know why. Zuck: They "trust me" Zuck: Dumb fucks
- cirgue 9y ago
  The point of the Stasi wasn't the information. They didn't give two shits about truth or verifiable fact, it was the awareness of survailence and the mistrust it created that was useful to them.
  - ahartmetz 9y ago
    I don't know, from their actions it looked quite like they actually wanted the information. They needed it, among other things, to sow mistrust among the right groups.
- appleshore 9y ago
  People can dismiss this saying he was a teenager, and just randomly chatting to a friend privately. But I've been developing programs since I was 15, and created my first startup (hardware) at 18 with an engineer 10-years older than me. Never once did I ever refer to any of our customers or clients as "dumb fucks". Why? What did they do to Zuck? Although, I did refer to AOL executives, FBI agents, Secret Service agents, federal prosecutors and lame wannabe hackers as dumb fucks. Both then and now. And I work with the federal government, with an agency that's often unfairly demonized by a variety of people. Which makes me think of a new phrase: dumb zucks. Quasi wannabe devs who build products and services not to advance the hacker ethos or crypto-anarchy but to get rich being essentially technical marketing partners for the FBI and corporate America. EDIT- Facebook's address is 1 Hacker Way. Zuck is not a hacker. He is the opposite of one.
product50 9y ago
This is why Snowden is a mixed figure. While I admire what he did and what he stands for, blatant statements like this reduce trust and makes one question whether he is indeed righteous.
- shinypotatoe 9y ago
  What is wrong with his statement?
  - PaulStatezny 9y ago
    > What is wrong with his statement? I assume they think it’s disingenuous to paint Facebook in such absolute terms, ignoring the context in which it was first launched: It was competing with MySpace. Social media was a much newer phenomenon; it hadn’t yet taken its modern shape. Perhaps Facebook has become a tool for surveillance, but it seems a bit of a stretch to suggest that surveillance is the primary reason it exists.
    - realusername 9y ago
      The pivot to surveillance is pretty old now, I guess we could say that at the absolute start of Facebook, they really wanted to create a social media but that shift was pretty quick.
    - rdiddly 9y ago
      And yet surveillance is the foundation of the primary service they sell right now. If a company makes clocks, we tend to say it's a clock company.
      - product50 9y ago
        Yes - FB does all the things it does because it wants to sell your data off to Russia. That is its mission statement. Awesome right since that is what you want to hear. Lets go back now - party is all over.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
TeMPOraL 9y ago
If Facebook and Google are like Stasi and KGB, how about we start dealing with collaborators? By default, Facebook and Google can only surveil you on their own premises - on facebook.com, *.google.com, some parts of Android experience, etc. But lots - likely most - of their data comes from wilful collaborators - people and companies that put Google analytics, social plugins, and other adtech ware in their products. What I worry about is that even if (through a miracle) Facebook gets slain, someone else will quickly step up to take their place. In the world of adtech, surveillance is a free market.
- Jansemon 9y ago
  The bigger problem is unwillingly sending them even more private information than participating on their sites. Sending a referer and a cookie with every ad (or like button) delivered is far more intrusive. Or isn't that how it works?
- dustingetz 9y ago
  facebook like button is how they scoop data from non-facebook web properties about people who don’t have a facebook account or aren’t logged into facebook
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    Yes. But Facebook buttons don't spread themselves, people actively put them on their sites.
iliketosleep 9y ago
From whichever perspective you look at it, this definitely rings true. Facebook gained popularity as as a way for college students to stalk each other, and as a corporation it makes money from tracking users and gaining detailed/intimate information about them. Combined with the fact that it actually requires effort NOT to be tracked by facebook - much of the tracking is involuntary - facebook is clearly a surveillance company. I wish more people would realize this.
zapita 9y ago
Am I the only one who thinks that Google is getting off easy? When it comes to 1) tracking people and 2) contributing to the perverse incentives which are transforming the media industry into an enemy of democracy, I think of Google and Facebook as equally guilty and toxic. Yet Google seems to get only a fraction of the negative coverage, both in the press and in the tech community. Why is that?
- devwinportable 9y ago
  because... not many people use Google+? sorry.
  - zapita 9y ago
    But many people use Google Search, Maps, Mail, Analytics... And of course the endless tentacles of Adsense, Adwords, Recaptcha, Doubleclick. In my opinion the reach of Google, and therefore their ability to cause harm, is even greater than Facebook's, and beyond the veneer of perceived benevolence they are just as unethical.
    - John_KZ 9y ago
      The reason Google isn't getting much backlash is because they played their cards right. They're much more discreet, their ads look like any other ad except for the tiny adsense symbol, they give the appearance of a free, open search engine etc etc. How many people know that the search suggestions don't really reflect the most popular terms? How many know that Google will go through your emails to pick up information about you? How many know that they actively derank websites, essentially deleting them off the internet, based on political choices? It's also quite possible that people aren't aware of critisism against Google simply because Google chooses to hide it. They're that powerful right now.
  - dredmorbius 9y ago
    This is true. I've measured it. But Youtube's MUA is, IIRC, above Facebook's. That's Google's real social app.
- 9y ago
734786710934 9y ago
"Facebook makes their money by exploiting and selling intimate details about the private lives of millions, far beyond the scant details you voluntarily post." Facebook doesn't sell information, it sells ads. It's in Facebook's best interest to share as little of this information as possible with third parties so they continue buying ads.
- EdSharkey 9y ago
  I am voting you up! I figure we must promote your calming beliefs. We must allow the the socials' privacy violation pressure cooker to build up its internal pressure to WMD levels. When it finally blows, the socials will be destroyed by the combination of regulatory over-reaction and lawsuits.
- jijfeoiwha 9y ago
  1. You're quibbling over semantics. Facebook profits by selling ads. The value of those ads is that they can be precisely targeted. That precision comes from all the private data Facebook collects on you. So Snowden's quote is true. 2. In the past, Facebook has sold info to advertisers and tracking companies: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304772804575558484075236968?mod=wsj_share_twitter https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304772804575558... That article is a little old, and Facebook may have changed their policy. But the recent story about Cambridge Analytics shows that, at least in some cases, Facebook still shares your information with third parties.
krick 9y ago
Of course it is, it's funny that there even is any arguing about that in the comments. Since when it's even a question? The real question is: so what can we do about that? I, for one, don't really see an answer to that. All this babbling by Snowden or anyone else for that matter is worth nothing. If there is any war going on, FB is hopelessly winning and I don't see any attempts (or even possible attempts) to change anything. Fuck, nobody even uses any somewhat "secure" messenger, people use WhatsApp and Telegram (and even dare to speak about them in terms of "privacy", which is mind boggling) and nobody gives a fuck about anything — and "somewhat secure messenger" isn't even that hard to achieve if people would really want it. And here you are talking about FB or Android being evil — yeah, of course they are, but they don't even have any plausible alternative to cover people's needs, so what do you expect…
- kruczek 9y ago
  > people use WhatsApp and Telegram (and even dare to speak about them in terms of "privacy", which is mind boggling) I don't know about WhatsApp, but from what I recall about Telegram, its main criticism is the fact that it isn't using secret chats (i.e. private conversations) by default. However when using secret chats, the communication is end-to-end encrypted. Is there anything else wrong with it?
  - 215163831328308 9y ago
    The main criticism of Telegram is that it created it's own cryptography. It does not use a well established cryptographic scheme. Instead the creators of Telegram created their own scheme, and that has not been checked as thoroughly. The mostly strict rule in these things is, don't roll your own crypto. This is reiterated in [1] and an attack on telegram [2] [1]: https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/49782/is-telegram-secure https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/49782/is-telegr... [2]: https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/49782/is-telegram-secure https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/49782/is-telegr...
  - pigeons 9y ago
    not only not default, secret chats are not even available on linux.
pmoriarty 9y ago
I'd widen this to include search engines, forums, much of the rest of the internet, phone companies, cable companies, banks, and many other companies. Everyone seems to want to get in on the spying game these days, most every company wants to know as much as possible about their customers. Of course, Facebook differs from most companies in the amount of data it manages to collect about its users. A cable company isn't going to know nearly as much about its typical customer as Facebook knows, but they can still probably infer a surprising amount from your viewing habits -- including political views based on which news programs you watch, for instance. Web forums could know even more than cable companies, as many people are quite candid in discussing what they think and care about on them. Then there are communications companies like Skype, which have access to all sorts of confidential and sensitive communications. The list goes on and on, and I'm really not sure how this runaway freight train of voluntary participation in surveillance can be stopped at this point, as for most people all these services are too damn convenient, and virtually none of them were built with strong privacy, much less anonymity in mind.
- 8bitsrule 9y ago
  Once people > how this runaway freight train ... can be stopped at this point Once people realize what they will lose, then the only way to win is not to play.
  - b1daly 9y ago
    What and how will they lose? What kind of potential harms do you foresee happening to the users of social media, as a consequence of that use? There has been some discussion here about China’s plan to increase use of social media as a means of societal control. Is the problem that people are sharing to much information, or is the problem that China has an authoritarian government with little respect for the rights of its citizens?
    - TeMPOraL 9y ago
      Information is a potent substance. Kind of like fissile material - tricky to handle, and can be used for a lot of good and bad things, depending on who manages to get their hands on it. That said, I somewhat agree with you here; I feel there's way too much focus on data handling, and way too little focus on who's doing what with it. The problem isn't information. The problem in China is an authoritarian government. The problem in the West is that we've managed to somehow convince ourselves that lying to people, and maliciously manipulating them, is a legitimate and respected profession (that now happens to finance the Internet). Sure, you don't want to have information lying around for bad actors to make use of. But I think we should also start dealing with the fact that there already are so many bad actors doing bad things with information, and maybe we should have less bad actors in the first place.
dotsh 9y ago
Surveillance and privacy... these are terms that typical "social media" users don't really care about. We can brag about it, we can delete our accounts, block them, do whatever we want and nothing will change because brainless mass will still use it to post hundreds of private information daily. They are addicted to this and if you take this "toy" away from them they will start behaving like hungry junkies. Addiction is the power of Facebook and nothing more. To fight with Facebook you have to set up another social media addiction that will dominate the market and expect that after a few years it will not be the same again...
- etatoby 9y ago
  Instagram managed to do it, but then it was bought by Facebook.
boron1006 9y ago
Usually I like Snowden, he seems to be fairly level-headed about most things. This seems like a bit of a nothing statement though. No evidence to back up his statement, no call to action. I was thinking about reasonable ways to protect personal information. People always say that they delete FB outright, but I don't think everyone has that luxury. It's also a pretty good way of staying in touch with others. I came up with a couple ways of at least making it harder for them to track you. 1. Whatever email you use for FB, stop using it for other things. My understanding is that a lot of how they can put your purchase history together with your facebook profile is that companies that collect purchase data joins it on e-mail. 2. Stop using the FB apps. I think the "FB is listening to me" thing is mostly BS, but apps in general give away a lot more information than websites. 3. Log out of facebook when not using it. A huge reason that Facebook was allowed to reach "beyond" they're own website is the Facebook pixel, which allows FB to know where you're browsing when you're not on the site. Of course, these won't work 100% (I have no idea if they'll work at all, this is all stuff that I gathered from working as a data scientist at a much much smaller social media company), but I think they're reasonable measures to take to protect your data if you can't just stop using FB outright.
- b1daly 9y ago
  I’m just replying to your comment as it jogged lose an example of what I see as a missing piece of the issue. Namely, a course of conduct in self protection needs to have an understanding of what the potential harm is from a given threat. As I see it, the big danger is not from these corporate data vacuums like Facebook, directly. The biggest threat is the use of this aggregated data by bad actors. I have yet to hear of a major tech company undertaking actions to directly harm the users of their products. In fact, they are highly incentivized to minimize harms to users. I don’t see targeted advertising as a bad thing. If I’m going to see adds, I prefer they reflect my interests. I actually find out interesting things from such adds. Because the overall system has become so complex and monolithic, I think taking steps to thoughtfully minimize personal information leakage is prudent. But inconveniencing oneself to no discernible benefit is counter productive, and can easily backfire. For example, if you move your email service to one provided by your shared website host, you open yourself to many potential woes. Emails from private domains are more likely to get lost in spam filters. I’ve had unfortunately breakdowns in relationships because people who needed to reach me thought I was blowing them off. Last time I had an email address a private domain, the spam filtering was so bad, it rendered it almost useless. You’re also hosting your mail on god knows what server, controlled by a company with a lot less security resources than Google. So there is a substantial cost in avoiding the free email services like Gmail, for nebulous benefit. I am very concerned about the issue of personal information security. But everything comes at a cost. The question of whether allowing law enforcement back door access to private communications is worth it is not so straightforward as many commenters seem to imply.
b1daly 9y ago
For those advocating for more awareness of the loss of privacy, some more precision would be helpful. What Facebook does is not the same as a “surveillance company”. To throw out the term, with the obvious negative connotations, might attract attention, but muddies clear understanding of the dynamic flows of networked information that we are part of, and the incentive structures of the entities involved. I’m saying, just getting a clear understanding of what is happening is hard enough, never mind determining the possible consequences of various paths of action. There are a lot of unexpected, emergent properties of such a complicated system as the global internet, which has billions of autonomous agents as fundamental components. A prime example is the current examination of the influence of the “Russian Trolls” in the 2016 election. I doubt many people foresaw the current controversy around this subject. I cant think of any parallels to the phenomenon. Knee jerk reactions about such complicated systems, which from people influenced by the “hacker” ethos tend to the anti-corporate, anti-government point of view, severely misrepresent the threat environment that a common citizen confronts. From my point of view, the biggest threat to an individual is from criminal activity. People like to rag on Equifax for the security breach, but I don’t come across similar screeds against the actual perpetrators of the breach. The phenomenon of these large scale hacks of personal information is an unintended property of the current business, consumer, and governmental conduct. A “surveillance company” is a whole different category of threat.
RandomCSGeek 9y ago
Why is this even a subject for discussion? A typical HN user already knows about this, while the general masses don't give a f* about their privacy. Also, for the most part, FB is not getting your data without your permission(like a surveillance company), rather, it asks you to give it(eg: upload contacts so we could find your friends), or people voluntarily give data to it(eg: uploading selfies, with location and time metadata as bonus). There are only two things of concern here, 1. How to make more people aware about the privacy implications of their online actions. 2. How to make these firms more responsible for properly protecting the data they have. Regarding #1, when I told people about myactivity.google.com, at least one person switched to DuckDuckGo(although I don't know if he sticked with it). Attempts to make people switch to Signal have miserably failed, forcing me to use WhatsApp as well. No one ever quit FB though, rather they got deeper into the rabbit hole by using Instagram as well. Regarding #2, countries should learn from EU and make stronger privacy laws.
- adventured 9y ago
  It's a subject for discussion, because these days a lot of what Snowden does is prop up his own fame by catching headlines. The line about Facebook being a surveillence company is great headline bait and Snowden knows it. Snowden's premise is also historically a vague, unsupported claim at best. Ford knew incredible details about its customers and workers, as did Standard Oil. Neither were routinely described as being primarily surveillence companies. The only thing that has actually changed, is that Facebook can do it easily today, as their users willingly provide the information in a convenient technological manner even after the Snowden revelations.
- e12e 9y ago
  > Also, for the most part, FB is not getting your data without your permission(like a surveillance company), rather, it asks you to give it(eg: upload contacts so we could find your friends), or people voluntarily give data to it(eg: uploading selfies, with location and time metadata as bonus). Me uploading pictures of you and a large part of your social graph, and Facebook correlating that with a shadow profile built with tracking pixels etc isn't exactly passive? Or with your explicit permission?
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

317 points by doppp 9y ago

A bit pedantic, but probably more accurate if you flip that around: Facebook was a social media company that has pivoted to become a surveillance company because they can make more money that way.

switch007 9y ago
"has pivoted"? Recently? When was it not a surveillance company?
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  When it was just a small site for bunch of college kids to share their party experiences.
  - switch007 9y ago
    Which is its distant past, not recent (to me implied by saying "has pivoted" instead of just "pivoted")... as we're being particular here.
    - fastball 9y ago
      The present perfect tense does not necessarily mean that the action is recent. I chose the present perfect because I think Facebook still derives utility from being a social network and is not solely a data-mining machine. It's a process that I think is probably inevitable but is not completed yet.
6ak74rfy 9y ago
I agree. When they must have started to monetize their platform through ads, they must have realized how useful their data was. For e.g., search engine advertising is based on customer's intent because they know what the customer is searching for, whereas a social network's knowledge runs deeper than that. This is when they must have decided to turn into a surveillance company, to become a data-crunching behemoth it is today.

rdtsc 9y ago

The Stasi and KGB would have given everything to have something like Facebook. Here they were installing listening devices, torturing people, following them, getting family members to spy on each other. They just needed Facebook and none of that would have been necessary. People would voluntarily log in and type everything they do, where they travel, what food they are eating, what political parties they support, who their friends are, everything connected nicely in a pretty graph with nodes and edges. > https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS [Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one? Zuck: People just submitted it. Zuck: I don't know why. Zuck: They "trust me" Zuck: Dumb fucks

cirgue 9y ago
The point of the Stasi wasn't the information. They didn't give two shits about truth or verifiable fact, it was the awareness of survailence and the mistrust it created that was useful to them.
- ahartmetz 9y ago
  I don't know, from their actions it looked quite like they actually wanted the information. They needed it, among other things, to sow mistrust among the right groups.
appleshore 9y ago
People can dismiss this saying he was a teenager, and just randomly chatting to a friend privately. But I've been developing programs since I was 15, and created my first startup (hardware) at 18 with an engineer 10-years older than me. Never once did I ever refer to any of our customers or clients as "dumb fucks". Why? What did they do to Zuck? Although, I did refer to AOL executives, FBI agents, Secret Service agents, federal prosecutors and lame wannabe hackers as dumb fucks. Both then and now. And I work with the federal government, with an agency that's often unfairly demonized by a variety of people. Which makes me think of a new phrase: dumb zucks. Quasi wannabe devs who build products and services not to advance the hacker ethos or crypto-anarchy but to get rich being essentially technical marketing partners for the FBI and corporate America. EDIT- Facebook's address is 1 Hacker Way. Zuck is not a hacker. He is the opposite of one.

product50 9y ago

This is why Snowden is a mixed figure. While I admire what he did and what he stands for, blatant statements like this reduce trust and makes one question whether he is indeed righteous.

shinypotatoe 9y ago
What is wrong with his statement?
- PaulStatezny 9y ago
  > What is wrong with his statement? I assume they think it’s disingenuous to paint Facebook in such absolute terms, ignoring the context in which it was first launched: It was competing with MySpace. Social media was a much newer phenomenon; it hadn’t yet taken its modern shape. Perhaps Facebook has become a tool for surveillance, but it seems a bit of a stretch to suggest that surveillance is the primary reason it exists.
  - realusername 9y ago
    The pivot to surveillance is pretty old now, I guess we could say that at the absolute start of Facebook, they really wanted to create a social media but that shift was pretty quick.
  - rdiddly 9y ago
    And yet surveillance is the foundation of the primary service they sell right now. If a company makes clocks, we tend to say it's a clock company.
    - product50 9y ago
      Yes - FB does all the things it does because it wants to sell your data off to Russia. That is its mission statement. Awesome right since that is what you want to hear. Lets go back now - party is all over.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

TeMPOraL 9y ago

If Facebook and Google are like Stasi and KGB, how about we start dealing with collaborators? By default, Facebook and Google can only surveil you on their own premises - on facebook.com, *.google.com, some parts of Android experience, etc. But lots - likely most - of their data comes from wilful collaborators - people and companies that put Google analytics, social plugins, and other adtech ware in their products. What I worry about is that even if (through a miracle) Facebook gets slain, someone else will quickly step up to take their place. In the world of adtech, surveillance is a free market.

Jansemon 9y ago
The bigger problem is unwillingly sending them even more private information than participating on their sites. Sending a referer and a cookie with every ad (or like button) delivered is far more intrusive. Or isn't that how it works?
dustingetz 9y ago
facebook like button is how they scoop data from non-facebook web properties about people who don’t have a facebook account or aren’t logged into facebook
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  Yes. But Facebook buttons don't spread themselves, people actively put them on their sites.

iliketosleep 9y ago

From whichever perspective you look at it, this definitely rings true. Facebook gained popularity as as a way for college students to stalk each other, and as a corporation it makes money from tracking users and gaining detailed/intimate information about them. Combined with the fact that it actually requires effort NOT to be tracked by facebook - much of the tracking is involuntary - facebook is clearly a surveillance company. I wish more people would realize this.

zapita 9y ago

Am I the only one who thinks that Google is getting off easy? When it comes to 1) tracking people and 2) contributing to the perverse incentives which are transforming the media industry into an enemy of democracy, I think of Google and Facebook as equally guilty and toxic. Yet Google seems to get only a fraction of the negative coverage, both in the press and in the tech community. Why is that?

devwinportable 9y ago
because... not many people use Google+? sorry.
- zapita 9y ago
  But many people use Google Search, Maps, Mail, Analytics... And of course the endless tentacles of Adsense, Adwords, Recaptcha, Doubleclick. In my opinion the reach of Google, and therefore their ability to cause harm, is even greater than Facebook's, and beyond the veneer of perceived benevolence they are just as unethical.
  - John_KZ 9y ago
    The reason Google isn't getting much backlash is because they played their cards right. They're much more discreet, their ads look like any other ad except for the tiny adsense symbol, they give the appearance of a free, open search engine etc etc. How many people know that the search suggestions don't really reflect the most popular terms? How many know that Google will go through your emails to pick up information about you? How many know that they actively derank websites, essentially deleting them off the internet, based on political choices? It's also quite possible that people aren't aware of critisism against Google simply because Google chooses to hide it. They're that powerful right now.
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  This is true. I've measured it. But Youtube's MUA is, IIRC, above Facebook's. That's Google's real social app.
9y ago

734786710934 9y ago

"Facebook makes their money by exploiting and selling intimate details about the private lives of millions, far beyond the scant details you voluntarily post." Facebook doesn't sell information, it sells ads. It's in Facebook's best interest to share as little of this information as possible with third parties so they continue buying ads.

EdSharkey 9y ago
I am voting you up! I figure we must promote your calming beliefs. We must allow the the socials' privacy violation pressure cooker to build up its internal pressure to WMD levels. When it finally blows, the socials will be destroyed by the combination of regulatory over-reaction and lawsuits.
jijfeoiwha 9y ago
1. You're quibbling over semantics. Facebook profits by selling ads. The value of those ads is that they can be precisely targeted. That precision comes from all the private data Facebook collects on you. So Snowden's quote is true. 2. In the past, Facebook has sold info to advertisers and tracking companies: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304772804575558484075236968?mod=wsj_share_twitter https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304772804575558... That article is a little old, and Facebook may have changed their policy. But the recent story about Cambridge Analytics shows that, at least in some cases, Facebook still shares your information with third parties.

krick 9y ago

Of course it is, it's funny that there even is any arguing about that in the comments. Since when it's even a question? The real question is: so what can we do about that? I, for one, don't really see an answer to that. All this babbling by Snowden or anyone else for that matter is worth nothing. If there is any war going on, FB is hopelessly winning and I don't see any attempts (or even possible attempts) to change anything. Fuck, nobody even uses any somewhat "secure" messenger, people use WhatsApp and Telegram (and even dare to speak about them in terms of "privacy", which is mind boggling) and nobody gives a fuck about anything — and "somewhat secure messenger" isn't even that hard to achieve if people would really want it. And here you are talking about FB or Android being evil — yeah, of course they are, but they don't even have any plausible alternative to cover people's needs, so what do you expect…

kruczek 9y ago
> people use WhatsApp and Telegram (and even dare to speak about them in terms of "privacy", which is mind boggling) I don't know about WhatsApp, but from what I recall about Telegram, its main criticism is the fact that it isn't using secret chats (i.e. private conversations) by default. However when using secret chats, the communication is end-to-end encrypted. Is there anything else wrong with it?
- 215163831328308 9y ago
  The main criticism of Telegram is that it created it's own cryptography. It does not use a well established cryptographic scheme. Instead the creators of Telegram created their own scheme, and that has not been checked as thoroughly. The mostly strict rule in these things is, don't roll your own crypto. This is reiterated in [1] and an attack on telegram [2] [1]: https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/49782/is-telegram-secure https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/49782/is-telegr... [2]: https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/49782/is-telegram-secure https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/49782/is-telegr...
- pigeons 9y ago
  not only not default, secret chats are not even available on linux.

pmoriarty 9y ago

I'd widen this to include search engines, forums, much of the rest of the internet, phone companies, cable companies, banks, and many other companies. Everyone seems to want to get in on the spying game these days, most every company wants to know as much as possible about their customers. Of course, Facebook differs from most companies in the amount of data it manages to collect about its users. A cable company isn't going to know nearly as much about its typical customer as Facebook knows, but they can still probably infer a surprising amount from your viewing habits -- including political views based on which news programs you watch, for instance. Web forums could know even more than cable companies, as many people are quite candid in discussing what they think and care about on them. Then there are communications companies like Skype, which have access to all sorts of confidential and sensitive communications. The list goes on and on, and I'm really not sure how this runaway freight train of voluntary participation in surveillance can be stopped at this point, as for most people all these services are too damn convenient, and virtually none of them were built with strong privacy, much less anonymity in mind.

8bitsrule 9y ago
Once people > how this runaway freight train ... can be stopped at this point Once people realize what they will lose, then the only way to win is not to play.
- b1daly 9y ago
  What and how will they lose? What kind of potential harms do you foresee happening to the users of social media, as a consequence of that use? There has been some discussion here about China’s plan to increase use of social media as a means of societal control. Is the problem that people are sharing to much information, or is the problem that China has an authoritarian government with little respect for the rights of its citizens?
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    Information is a potent substance. Kind of like fissile material - tricky to handle, and can be used for a lot of good and bad things, depending on who manages to get their hands on it. That said, I somewhat agree with you here; I feel there's way too much focus on data handling, and way too little focus on who's doing what with it. The problem isn't information. The problem in China is an authoritarian government. The problem in the West is that we've managed to somehow convince ourselves that lying to people, and maliciously manipulating them, is a legitimate and respected profession (that now happens to finance the Internet). Sure, you don't want to have information lying around for bad actors to make use of. But I think we should also start dealing with the fact that there already are so many bad actors doing bad things with information, and maybe we should have less bad actors in the first place.

dotsh 9y ago

Surveillance and privacy... these are terms that typical "social media" users don't really care about. We can brag about it, we can delete our accounts, block them, do whatever we want and nothing will change because brainless mass will still use it to post hundreds of private information daily. They are addicted to this and if you take this "toy" away from them they will start behaving like hungry junkies. Addiction is the power of Facebook and nothing more. To fight with Facebook you have to set up another social media addiction that will dominate the market and expect that after a few years it will not be the same again...

etatoby 9y ago
Instagram managed to do it, but then it was bought by Facebook.

boron1006 9y ago

Usually I like Snowden, he seems to be fairly level-headed about most things. This seems like a bit of a nothing statement though. No evidence to back up his statement, no call to action. I was thinking about reasonable ways to protect personal information. People always say that they delete FB outright, but I don't think everyone has that luxury. It's also a pretty good way of staying in touch with others. I came up with a couple ways of at least making it harder for them to track you. 1. Whatever email you use for FB, stop using it for other things. My understanding is that a lot of how they can put your purchase history together with your facebook profile is that companies that collect purchase data joins it on e-mail. 2. Stop using the FB apps. I think the "FB is listening to me" thing is mostly BS, but apps in general give away a lot more information than websites. 3. Log out of facebook when not using it. A huge reason that Facebook was allowed to reach "beyond" they're own website is the Facebook pixel, which allows FB to know where you're browsing when you're not on the site. Of course, these won't work 100% (I have no idea if they'll work at all, this is all stuff that I gathered from working as a data scientist at a much much smaller social media company), but I think they're reasonable measures to take to protect your data if you can't just stop using FB outright.

b1daly 9y ago
I’m just replying to your comment as it jogged lose an example of what I see as a missing piece of the issue. Namely, a course of conduct in self protection needs to have an understanding of what the potential harm is from a given threat. As I see it, the big danger is not from these corporate data vacuums like Facebook, directly. The biggest threat is the use of this aggregated data by bad actors. I have yet to hear of a major tech company undertaking actions to directly harm the users of their products. In fact, they are highly incentivized to minimize harms to users. I don’t see targeted advertising as a bad thing. If I’m going to see adds, I prefer they reflect my interests. I actually find out interesting things from such adds. Because the overall system has become so complex and monolithic, I think taking steps to thoughtfully minimize personal information leakage is prudent. But inconveniencing oneself to no discernible benefit is counter productive, and can easily backfire. For example, if you move your email service to one provided by your shared website host, you open yourself to many potential woes. Emails from private domains are more likely to get lost in spam filters. I’ve had unfortunately breakdowns in relationships because people who needed to reach me thought I was blowing them off. Last time I had an email address a private domain, the spam filtering was so bad, it rendered it almost useless. You’re also hosting your mail on god knows what server, controlled by a company with a lot less security resources than Google. So there is a substantial cost in avoiding the free email services like Gmail, for nebulous benefit. I am very concerned about the issue of personal information security. But everything comes at a cost. The question of whether allowing law enforcement back door access to private communications is worth it is not so straightforward as many commenters seem to imply.

b1daly 9y ago

For those advocating for more awareness of the loss of privacy, some more precision would be helpful. What Facebook does is not the same as a “surveillance company”. To throw out the term, with the obvious negative connotations, might attract attention, but muddies clear understanding of the dynamic flows of networked information that we are part of, and the incentive structures of the entities involved. I’m saying, just getting a clear understanding of what is happening is hard enough, never mind determining the possible consequences of various paths of action. There are a lot of unexpected, emergent properties of such a complicated system as the global internet, which has billions of autonomous agents as fundamental components. A prime example is the current examination of the influence of the “Russian Trolls” in the 2016 election. I doubt many people foresaw the current controversy around this subject. I cant think of any parallels to the phenomenon. Knee jerk reactions about such complicated systems, which from people influenced by the “hacker” ethos tend to the anti-corporate, anti-government point of view, severely misrepresent the threat environment that a common citizen confronts. From my point of view, the biggest threat to an individual is from criminal activity. People like to rag on Equifax for the security breach, but I don’t come across similar screeds against the actual perpetrators of the breach. The phenomenon of these large scale hacks of personal information is an unintended property of the current business, consumer, and governmental conduct. A “surveillance company” is a whole different category of threat.

RandomCSGeek 9y ago

Why is this even a subject for discussion? A typical HN user already knows about this, while the general masses don't give a f* about their privacy. Also, for the most part, FB is not getting your data without your permission(like a surveillance company), rather, it asks you to give it(eg: upload contacts so we could find your friends), or people voluntarily give data to it(eg: uploading selfies, with location and time metadata as bonus). There are only two things of concern here, 1. How to make more people aware about the privacy implications of their online actions. 2. How to make these firms more responsible for properly protecting the data they have. Regarding #1, when I told people about myactivity.google.com, at least one person switched to DuckDuckGo(although I don't know if he sticked with it). Attempts to make people switch to Signal have miserably failed, forcing me to use WhatsApp as well. No one ever quit FB though, rather they got deeper into the rabbit hole by using Instagram as well. Regarding #2, countries should learn from EU and make stronger privacy laws.

adventured 9y ago
It's a subject for discussion, because these days a lot of what Snowden does is prop up his own fame by catching headlines. The line about Facebook being a surveillence company is great headline bait and Snowden knows it. Snowden's premise is also historically a vague, unsupported claim at best. Ford knew incredible details about its customers and workers, as did Standard Oil. Neither were routinely described as being primarily surveillence companies. The only thing that has actually changed, is that Facebook can do it easily today, as their users willingly provide the information in a convenient technological manner even after the Snowden revelations.
e12e 9y ago
> Also, for the most part, FB is not getting your data without your permission(like a surveillance company), rather, it asks you to give it(eg: upload contacts so we could find your friends), or people voluntarily give data to it(eg: uploading selfies, with location and time metadata as bonus). Me uploading pictures of you and a large part of your social graph, and Facebook correlating that with a shadow profile built with tracking pixels etc isn't exactly passive? Or with your explicit permission?

deleted 9y ago

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