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It still seems to spy on you because Facebook and its employees are in the business of spying on you and everyone else. If you still use fb, messenger, Instagr

It still seems to spy on you because Facebook and its employees are in the business of spying on you and everyone else. If you still use fb, messenger, Instagram, or WhatsApp, you accept that. If you work there, you don’t believe privacy is more important than the money you make. You could work elsewhere, but you choose to spy instead.

bryanrasmussen 8y ago
yeah I just took the article's title but the conclusion pretty much is they continue to spy on you.
rabbadabba_89 8y ago
The privacy clusterf*ck combined with politically-motivated censorship is really starting to steer the conversation towards regulation. Given how profoundly big tech has failed to act responsibly with the power it has amassed, I think it's both inevitable and a good idea. And I say that as a libertarian who works in software. I'll take the US gov's track record wrt protecting speech vs what we're seeing with the tech industry right now. Having said all of that, I wonder why FB gets piled on here vs Google. Google is just as bad, if not worse, and they have control of both a widely deployed browser and an operating system.
- labster 8y ago
  Google tends to build tools that make you more productive on the open web, while Facebook tends to build timesinks that make you less productive in a walled garden. The value proposition is different between them, and so we give Google more slack because it's more valuable to our lives. And at least Google doesn't tend to reset our privacy settings to "share freaking everything" every year or so like Facebook did. On that, they're actually less scummy than my bank is with data sharing.
  - HenryBemis 8y ago
    I imagine what will happen if/when FB in their cancerous ecosystem decide to add/provide email services. I am afraid that young people will use this as one-stop-shop and guarantee that they will never leave this spider web. Imagine if on top of everything they now collect they can also see every email content (like Gmail, Hotmail, end others).
    - stigi 8y ago
      Facebook did offer @facebook.com email addresses starting end of 2010 and had them available until I believe 2014. https://m.facebook.com/notes/facebook/see-the-messages-that-matter/452288242130 https://m.facebook.com/notes/facebook/see-the-messages-that-...
  - hanspeter 8y ago
    No doubt that social media is often a waste of time. However Facebook's products are also great tools for communication. And Google's YouTube is likely the largest time sink on the net. But that doesn't really matter. Even if Google made only the most innocent products known to exist, how can that justify that they abuse those products and build huge databases of private data to be shared with their advertisers? > And at least Google doesn't tend to reset our privacy settings to "share freaking everything" every year or so like Facebook did. Can you elaborate on this? Do you have at least one example of Facebook undoing a user's privacy settings?
    - labster 8y ago
      "Since 2009, Facebook has been under investigation by federal authorities and American senators in the wake of a series of incidents involving the sudden change of users' privacy settings, most notably Facebook Beacon, which shut down that same year." https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/08/future-changes-to-facebook-privacy-settings-to-be-opt-in/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/08/future-changes-t...
      - hanspeter 8y ago
        Beacon was a clusterf*ck, no discussion. Even the commercial partners were surprised by the lack of consent from the affected users. However this was a feature that they launched 12 years ago. Since then Facebook have added more and more granular privacy controls and they have made their API and Ads product increasingly more data restricted in the past 5-6 years. I don't believe there has ever been a case, where they have reset a privacy setting that was specifically set by the user.
        labster 8y ago
        So if a user changes all the settings to say "only ever share with my friends", and then Facebook creates a new service and sets it to "share with all companies", that's not a change of a privacy setting because the setting didn't exist before? Seriously? It's a pattern of behavior on the part of Facebook to not act in the public interest until faced with overwhelming legal or public opinion issues. At least Google is smart enough to see which way the wind is blowing. But sure, continue to support a company that was complicit in the Rohingya genocide though willful ignorance to problems in general. I'm not a Stallmanite but there has to be a point where enough is enough. This is not to take away from the good engineers who worked on React or HHVM. Just consider working for a less morally bankrupt company, please.
- creato 8y ago
  Google's data collection seems much more "transactional" to me. Most of what I share with Google seems to give me something in return, and I don't see obvious "leakage" of this information. Beyond whether or not my contacts have a gmail account or not, I know exactly nothing about what my contacts do with Google, or if they use it at all. I also don't see third party companies with information about me from Google. edit: I will say, I started to get skeeved out by Google when they were pushing Google+ hard, because they started having the same kinds of problems: information about contacts was popping up in places it didn't belong. It was never as bad as FB, but I'm still glad that failed. In contrast, FB seems to just want everything, and they're much more subtle about how they get it. But worse than that, I constantly see information about friends and myself from FB in places that it didn't seemed like it belonged. Right from the very, very beginning: remember when websites would show you people that "liked" them, and your friends would be at the top? That kind of shit just screams "leakiness" and it's why even since 2005 or so I gave as little information to FB as possible. FB's problem is that their business model requires them to exploit some users information to generate content for other users. They've been getting more and more aggressive about this over time. It used to just be your friends content, and people seemed OK with that. But as they pushed the limits further and further, it's getting too fucking weird and people don't like it. Google isn't like this. Google shows me ads when I search for stuff about what I'm searching for. They show me ads in maps when I'm looking for places. That doesn't bother me. The FB equivalent would be telling me about my friends who also searched for this, or also went to this place (hell, FB does this, a perfect example of what I was saying above). If Google starts doing that kind of shit, that will be the end of Google for me.
  - the_duke 8y ago
    Googles data collection certainly is NOT transactional at all. They track you across the entire internet on unrelated websites via Google Analytics, their ad network, reCaptcha, ... They might not directly sell this data directly to third parties (for now), but they sell it in the form of more targeted ads thanks to a better profile. They certainly have a lot of data on you that you never intentionally gave them.
    - 8y ago
- olivermarks 8y ago
  The regulatory restrictions conundrum is tricky, because where the military industrial complex/deep state/5 eyes etc ends and Google/Amazon/FB/Insta/Whatsapp/ Netflix begins is very unclear. Any sort of political regulation could well just be a fig leaf over this as the snooping tech gets ever more sophisticated...
  - HenryBemis 8y ago
    As long as FB and the other big players serve ANY information to ANY government on this planet there will NEVER be a regulatory intervention. With the current setup the price of the State is that they commonly violate the privacy that the users have volunteered by using such servicss. The moment FB stops collecting it will be the moment that FB stops handing in our info to govs. Govs are somehow in this loop.
    - olivermarks 8y ago
      I suspect we are on the cusp of a next generation of snooping social networks, and that FB will be sunsetted to make way for more sophisticated signals intelligence gathering platforms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes
- hanspeter 8y ago
  > Having said all of that, I wonder why FB gets piled on here vs Google. Because this is not about what's actually being done but about likability of the founder(s).

bryanrasmussen 8y ago

yeah I just took the article's title but the conclusion pretty much is they continue to spy on you.

rabbadabba_89 8y ago

The privacy clusterf*ck combined with politically-motivated censorship is really starting to steer the conversation towards regulation. Given how profoundly big tech has failed to act responsibly with the power it has amassed, I think it's both inevitable and a good idea. And I say that as a libertarian who works in software. I'll take the US gov's track record wrt protecting speech vs what we're seeing with the tech industry right now. Having said all of that, I wonder why FB gets piled on here vs Google. Google is just as bad, if not worse, and they have control of both a widely deployed browser and an operating system.

labster 8y ago
Google tends to build tools that make you more productive on the open web, while Facebook tends to build timesinks that make you less productive in a walled garden. The value proposition is different between them, and so we give Google more slack because it's more valuable to our lives. And at least Google doesn't tend to reset our privacy settings to "share freaking everything" every year or so like Facebook did. On that, they're actually less scummy than my bank is with data sharing.
- HenryBemis 8y ago
  I imagine what will happen if/when FB in their cancerous ecosystem decide to add/provide email services. I am afraid that young people will use this as one-stop-shop and guarantee that they will never leave this spider web. Imagine if on top of everything they now collect they can also see every email content (like Gmail, Hotmail, end others).
  - stigi 8y ago
    Facebook did offer @facebook.com email addresses starting end of 2010 and had them available until I believe 2014. https://m.facebook.com/notes/facebook/see-the-messages-that-matter/452288242130 https://m.facebook.com/notes/facebook/see-the-messages-that-...
- hanspeter 8y ago
  No doubt that social media is often a waste of time. However Facebook's products are also great tools for communication. And Google's YouTube is likely the largest time sink on the net. But that doesn't really matter. Even if Google made only the most innocent products known to exist, how can that justify that they abuse those products and build huge databases of private data to be shared with their advertisers? > And at least Google doesn't tend to reset our privacy settings to "share freaking everything" every year or so like Facebook did. Can you elaborate on this? Do you have at least one example of Facebook undoing a user's privacy settings?
  - labster 8y ago
    "Since 2009, Facebook has been under investigation by federal authorities and American senators in the wake of a series of incidents involving the sudden change of users' privacy settings, most notably Facebook Beacon, which shut down that same year." https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/08/future-changes-to-facebook-privacy-settings-to-be-opt-in/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/08/future-changes-t...
    - hanspeter 8y ago
      Beacon was a clusterf*ck, no discussion. Even the commercial partners were surprised by the lack of consent from the affected users. However this was a feature that they launched 12 years ago. Since then Facebook have added more and more granular privacy controls and they have made their API and Ads product increasingly more data restricted in the past 5-6 years. I don't believe there has ever been a case, where they have reset a privacy setting that was specifically set by the user.
      - labster 8y ago
        So if a user changes all the settings to say "only ever share with my friends", and then Facebook creates a new service and sets it to "share with all companies", that's not a change of a privacy setting because the setting didn't exist before? Seriously? It's a pattern of behavior on the part of Facebook to not act in the public interest until faced with overwhelming legal or public opinion issues. At least Google is smart enough to see which way the wind is blowing. But sure, continue to support a company that was complicit in the Rohingya genocide though willful ignorance to problems in general. I'm not a Stallmanite but there has to be a point where enough is enough. This is not to take away from the good engineers who worked on React or HHVM. Just consider working for a less morally bankrupt company, please.
creato 8y ago
Google's data collection seems much more "transactional" to me. Most of what I share with Google seems to give me something in return, and I don't see obvious "leakage" of this information. Beyond whether or not my contacts have a gmail account or not, I know exactly nothing about what my contacts do with Google, or if they use it at all. I also don't see third party companies with information about me from Google. edit: I will say, I started to get skeeved out by Google when they were pushing Google+ hard, because they started having the same kinds of problems: information about contacts was popping up in places it didn't belong. It was never as bad as FB, but I'm still glad that failed. In contrast, FB seems to just want everything, and they're much more subtle about how they get it. But worse than that, I constantly see information about friends and myself from FB in places that it didn't seemed like it belonged. Right from the very, very beginning: remember when websites would show you people that "liked" them, and your friends would be at the top? That kind of shit just screams "leakiness" and it's why even since 2005 or so I gave as little information to FB as possible. FB's problem is that their business model requires them to exploit some users information to generate content for other users. They've been getting more and more aggressive about this over time. It used to just be your friends content, and people seemed OK with that. But as they pushed the limits further and further, it's getting too fucking weird and people don't like it. Google isn't like this. Google shows me ads when I search for stuff about what I'm searching for. They show me ads in maps when I'm looking for places. That doesn't bother me. The FB equivalent would be telling me about my friends who also searched for this, or also went to this place (hell, FB does this, a perfect example of what I was saying above). If Google starts doing that kind of shit, that will be the end of Google for me.
- the_duke 8y ago
  Googles data collection certainly is NOT transactional at all. They track you across the entire internet on unrelated websites via Google Analytics, their ad network, reCaptcha, ... They might not directly sell this data directly to third parties (for now), but they sell it in the form of more targeted ads thanks to a better profile. They certainly have a lot of data on you that you never intentionally gave them.
  - 8y ago
olivermarks 8y ago
The regulatory restrictions conundrum is tricky, because where the military industrial complex/deep state/5 eyes etc ends and Google/Amazon/FB/Insta/Whatsapp/ Netflix begins is very unclear. Any sort of political regulation could well just be a fig leaf over this as the snooping tech gets ever more sophisticated...
- HenryBemis 8y ago
  As long as FB and the other big players serve ANY information to ANY government on this planet there will NEVER be a regulatory intervention. With the current setup the price of the State is that they commonly violate the privacy that the users have volunteered by using such servicss. The moment FB stops collecting it will be the moment that FB stops handing in our info to govs. Govs are somehow in this loop.
  - olivermarks 8y ago
    I suspect we are on the cusp of a next generation of snooping social networks, and that FB will be sunsetted to make way for more sophisticated signals intelligence gathering platforms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes
hanspeter 8y ago
> Having said all of that, I wonder why FB gets piled on here vs Google. Because this is not about what's actually being done but about likability of the founder(s).