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> fairly obvious that user privacy is utmost important No, it's not obvious. Society has many competing priorities. Further, the definition of privacy changes

by xapata 8y ago

> fairly obvious that user privacy is utmost important No, it's not obvious. Society has many competing priorities. Further, the definition of privacy changes rapidly.

donatj 8y ago
I for one don’t understand how or why anyone would presume anything they do on Facebook is private. I’ve always considered what I enter as being given to Facebook rather than somehow mine despite being in Facebooks possession, on their drives in their servers. When I give it to Facebook, it’s theirs. If you don’t want something known I don’t give it to Facebook... If I give my friend my phone number, that’s their knowledge, not mine. It makes no sense to demand they forget it. If they hand it out, they’re a bad friend. I don’t tell bad friends important secrets.
- gaius 8y ago
  I’ve always considered what I enter as being given to Facebook rather than somehow mine despite being in Facebooks possession, on their drives in their servers. There is a huge difference between what you explicitly type into boxes on FB's own website, and their policy of tracking you on every other site they can and correlating the data. Further, they (and others) go to extreme lengths to do so even if you log out of their site, clear cookies, browse in private mode, yadda yadda.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
TangoTrotFox 8y ago
A simple question for you. What do you think is going to happen when 'we' (modern, developed, western nation) eventually put a tyrant into power, and this tyrant has access to immense amounts of information on each and every person the nation? Or do you think that will never happen? In a way we're repeating on a social scale, what we do on a political scale. Many are upset at the level of power of the president, which initially began as a much more limited position than the one-man-war machine we have of today. Yet both sides of the political spectrum rejoice as executive level power increases when 'their side' is in power, as if that will always be the case. And so too today on a social level we're happy (or at least apathetic) to see ever more private information siphoned off without considering what this will, sooner or later, end up being used for.
- lukaslalinsky 8y ago
  Tyrants in power are going to find ways to get information on people they dislike. It already happened before personal computers and internet existed. The goal is to not put tyrants into power. That's a political problem. Facebook is useful for social purposes and I'm saying this as the least social person you could find. It makes connecting with people easy and that's good.
  - TangoTrotFox 8y ago
    When a system collapses when the goal is to just not have something bad happen, then it becomes a question of not if but when the system will collapse. Robust systems are those that are tolerant of negative outcomes instead of just hoping they'll never happen. Two points specifically on Facebook: 1 - The extensive profiling and datamining of Facebook is not necessary for their core service. Third parties can of course always datamine what people voluntarily put out there on their own (https://www.snoopsnoo.com/ https://www.snoopsnoo.com/ is a great example of a very primitive platform exploiting what users say on reddit - even that is disconcerting), but much of the nastier stuff that Facebook does is first party only - cross matching devices/fingerprints, tracking non-registered 'users' through various means, quantifying response to various categories of information, and so on. 2 - I would think it's becoming increasingly clear that people connecting easily is not necessarily as good as it seemed like it should have been. Instead of becoming a more diverse, varied, and embracing world - people have instead just sought out people that confirm their own biases and we're becoming more segregated into our own bubbles than ever before. And as people surround themselves only with those with the same biases of themselves they rapidly slide further down the path to radicalism in their own biases. Lastly it's also creating systems of groupthink as individuals fear that expressing views outside the social standard of their group could result in social expulsion. In times past your friends were whoever you ended up being thrown together with. And it resulted in relationships that would never form today, often to great result. And even this 'great connectivity' of society has had a paradoxical effect as depression and loneliness are at record levels. Clearly there's far greater implications to 'connecting with people easily' than the kneejerk reaction to such a marketing point.

by xapata 8y ago

> fairly obvious that user privacy is utmost important No, it's not obvious. Society has many competing priorities. Further, the definition of privacy changes rapidly.

donatj 8y ago

I for one don’t understand how or why anyone would presume anything they do on Facebook is private. I’ve always considered what I enter as being given to Facebook rather than somehow mine despite being in Facebooks possession, on their drives in their servers. When I give it to Facebook, it’s theirs. If you don’t want something known I don’t give it to Facebook... If I give my friend my phone number, that’s their knowledge, not mine. It makes no sense to demand they forget it. If they hand it out, they’re a bad friend. I don’t tell bad friends important secrets.

gaius 8y ago
I’ve always considered what I enter as being given to Facebook rather than somehow mine despite being in Facebooks possession, on their drives in their servers. There is a huge difference between what you explicitly type into boxes on FB's own website, and their policy of tracking you on every other site they can and correlating the data. Further, they (and others) go to extreme lengths to do so even if you log out of their site, clear cookies, browse in private mode, yadda yadda.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

TangoTrotFox 8y ago

A simple question for you. What do you think is going to happen when 'we' (modern, developed, western nation) eventually put a tyrant into power, and this tyrant has access to immense amounts of information on each and every person the nation? Or do you think that will never happen? In a way we're repeating on a social scale, what we do on a political scale. Many are upset at the level of power of the president, which initially began as a much more limited position than the one-man-war machine we have of today. Yet both sides of the political spectrum rejoice as executive level power increases when 'their side' is in power, as if that will always be the case. And so too today on a social level we're happy (or at least apathetic) to see ever more private information siphoned off without considering what this will, sooner or later, end up being used for.

lukaslalinsky 8y ago
Tyrants in power are going to find ways to get information on people they dislike. It already happened before personal computers and internet existed. The goal is to not put tyrants into power. That's a political problem. Facebook is useful for social purposes and I'm saying this as the least social person you could find. It makes connecting with people easy and that's good.
- TangoTrotFox 8y ago
  When a system collapses when the goal is to just not have something bad happen, then it becomes a question of not if but when the system will collapse. Robust systems are those that are tolerant of negative outcomes instead of just hoping they'll never happen. Two points specifically on Facebook: 1 - The extensive profiling and datamining of Facebook is not necessary for their core service. Third parties can of course always datamine what people voluntarily put out there on their own (https://www.snoopsnoo.com/ https://www.snoopsnoo.com/ is a great example of a very primitive platform exploiting what users say on reddit - even that is disconcerting), but much of the nastier stuff that Facebook does is first party only - cross matching devices/fingerprints, tracking non-registered 'users' through various means, quantifying response to various categories of information, and so on. 2 - I would think it's becoming increasingly clear that people connecting easily is not necessarily as good as it seemed like it should have been. Instead of becoming a more diverse, varied, and embracing world - people have instead just sought out people that confirm their own biases and we're becoming more segregated into our own bubbles than ever before. And as people surround themselves only with those with the same biases of themselves they rapidly slide further down the path to radicalism in their own biases. Lastly it's also creating systems of groupthink as individuals fear that expressing views outside the social standard of their group could result in social expulsion. In times past your friends were whoever you ended up being thrown together with. And it resulted in relationships that would never form today, often to great result. And even this 'great connectivity' of society has had a paradoxical effect as depression and loneliness are at record levels. Clearly there's far greater implications to 'connecting with people easily' than the kneejerk reaction to such a marketing point.