6 ms·

Users grasp the idea that posting on social media is a public thing. It's like getting on stage and shouting to everyone in the room... It's not private. But,

Users grasp the idea that posting on social media is a public thing. It's like getting on stage and shouting to everyone in the room... It's not private. But, Facebook is invading privacy in subtle ways that users aren't so good at grasping. Like the fact that Facebook remembers every website they visit. And how long you linger on a post in your timeline. And collects your location data even when you're not trying to broadcast it. And analyzes all of your private messages. And trains neural networks to recognize you so they can correlate you with other pictures throughout the internet (and who knows, maybe they're sharing those models with random governments or other companies). That stuff is the real privacy violation, not the public posts. And that stuff is intentionally obscured from the users and vaguely articulated in their privacy policy.

annadane 7y ago
It's also fairly difficult when they intentionally make it hard for the distinction of public/non public to be understood. "People you may know" is a privacy violation. "A friend commented on such and such post" is a priacy violation.
- anticensor 7y ago
  The latter is not a deprivacy of privacy, as it is already visible to you.
  - annadane 7y ago
    But you shouldn't be able to just find things like that so easily. Sure if I go on a post I could find it but the fact Facebook notifies me of this in the first place is incredibly disrespectful.
    - csallen 7y ago
      Not true, since the entire point of a social network like this is to browse a playground of publicly-visible conversations involving your friends, and the people conversing are quite aware they're doing so in public. What would be "disrespectful" is if Facebook told you what your friends were saying in private messages between each other.
      - nashashmi 7y ago
        He is calling privacy the things that are hidden by obscurity. Meaning that if you have a sign on your door advertising sneakers for example, that is private to only those people who visit your door. Sure it may be out in the open, but you didnt open it to all people.
        csallen 7y ago
        Totally, but a door is not a social network. A door is a fixed location. A social network is more like a magical bulletin board that tries to make itself as visible to as many people as possible. Perhaps you don't like that the bulletin board does that, but it's not rude. You're 100% free to not make posts there. I recommend it, in fact.
        tru3_power 7y ago
        Yea but what if your profile is private? Wouldn’t you think that there still would be a level of privacy expectations that should be retained because only people you explicitly choose to share information with can see it? Why do corporations/advertisement get to bypass these constraints?
        csallen 7y ago
        I may or may not agree… I'm not sure exactly what situation you're referring to. In the original article linked above, the situation was that users expected their social information to remain private to the ~100 friends they shared it with, and sued Facebook because it ended up in the hands of Cambridge Analytica. Facebook's attorney's counterpoint is that when you share information with friends, you give up any expectation of privacy as it pertains to these friends. And in this particular case, it was the friends who shared that information with some Facebook app by Kogan(sp?), who then shared it with Cambrige Analytica. I find the argument pretty convincing, actually. If you tell your friend a secret, and they tell someone else, even if it's a corporation, then that's that. If you share your Spotify playlist with a friend, and in turn they give up all their friends' playlists data (including yours) to some app, then imo that's kind of on you for sharing. The situation I disagree with is if you tell your friend a secret, and then the communication platform that you used to share that secret (your phone company, the hotel you're staying in, Gmail, Facebook, whatever) decides to share it with third parties.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - underwater 7y ago
      What are you trying to achieve by allowing someone to see a fact, but not actively surfacing that information? Within the scope of X likes Y, X said Z, Facebook has a very consistent and strong privacy model [1]. However, they have long considered anything that isn't a hard privacy violation of their rules to be fair game. Technically (and this is FB's engineering mindset showing through) not surfacing information is security through obscurity. It seems like they are backing away from that model, by deprecating features like Graph Search. I personally think that this is worse because it makes it much harder for people to understand what is visible to others. It muddies the rule of "if you don't want people to know something, don't put it on Facebook". [1] There are some messier areas, like People You May Know, or when platform apps are allowed to access (and store) all they data that a person who uses that app could see.
    - michannne 7y ago
      Think of it like an echo. If your friend shouts at someone in the real world when others are around, you wouldn't be able to hear it from a mile away, but eventually you will hear about the fact they did so, either through gossip or some other means. Facebook cuts that extraneous fluff out and just tells you what they said. It is far from a violation of privacy, as you would be able to find that information easily if you went out looking for it in the first place. Especially in the world of health, there is a clear distinction about what is private, public, and confidential/secret. This case very clearly public.
trophycase 7y ago
You're absolutely right and I think the metaphor "standing on a stage speaking to people" is very misleading at best and malicious at worst.
doingmyting 7y ago
I completely agree here. And from my vantage point what I see is that the powers that be, that can effect change in this regard are solely focused on the obvious parts of it. They are struggling with simply grasping the concept of Facebook gathering and selling the data users voluntarily supply, so expecting them to be able to grasp these subtle data collection tactics are next to impossible. The average person wouldn't even understand how it's possible for Facebook to capture data when they're not on Facebook. Expecting some 70 year old politician who can barely use a computer properly, to understand it is impossible. And sadly they're ones with the power to effect meaningful and immediate change.
8ytecoder 7y ago
I block every tracker and don’t have Facebook installed and yet they show me ads that are uncanny. Rode my bike and hurt my back. Pretty sure I searched for remedies - likely on DDG. And bought a massage ball on Amazon. Instagram is filled with ads to address my back pain.
- TallGuyShort 7y ago
  I haven't injured my back, but I still see heavy advertising for that plexus wheel plus thing.
- readme 7y ago
  Did you buy any back pain stuff at the pharmacy? Maybe it's tied to a store loyalty card or credit card.
  - wmeredith 7y ago
    This. The shadow demographic profiles that Experian, Facebook, and others have on people are a lot more robust than just online cookies.
calimac 7y ago
Absolutely! The level of data my name as a whole is unquestionably invasive and has far-reaching lifelong societal impacts That we cannot allow. It will take time but hopefully we can replace Facebook with a more benevolent social communication platform. Is mastodon growing?
notatoad 7y ago
I think it's a little patronizing to suggest that users don't understand how Facebook tracks them. Sure, the average person probably doesn't think about the specific method of tracking. They don't know that Facebook tracks how long you watch a video, or spend staring at that photo of your ex. But they have a general sense that Facebook is monitoring their usage patterns to determine what they like and target advertising. That isn't a secret, and isn't obscured. Regardless of what the terms and conditions say, i think it's a fair to assume that the vast majority of people using Facebook have implicitly consented to have their Facebook usage tracked. Facebook tracking you through the rest of the web is a different story...
- wybiral 7y ago
  I've heard this argument for years but they keep on sliding back those privacy policies more and more. And every time a story comes out about how those policy changes were actually utilized to track people in a new way people get upset. You're giving the average user too much credit. As a software developer lurking on Hacker News, sure, you understand how pervasive tracking and data collection are. But have you spoken to your parents or older relatives? My mom had no idea that kind of stuff was even possible. Most of those people still think that the core invasion of privacy us tech nerds are always going on about is the public content (the likes/follows/posts). I'm not patronizing, they genuinely don't understand the scale of modern online tracking.
  - notatoad 7y ago
    i've had a lot of conversations with a lot of people from various backgrounds about how they understand facebook tracking (it inevitably follows when i tell them i'm not on facebook) and i can't think of an instance where people had a poorer understanding of facebook's tracking than i gave them credit for. That's not to say people like it, but they accept it as an inevitable consequence of using the service. And of course, for all the tech crowd's fear about the "invasion of privacy" that comes from the passive behaviour monitoring facebook does, the reality is that likes, follows, and posts are the strongest signals for their ad targeting anyways. a non-trivial number of people think that facebook is continually listening to their every conversation through the mic on their phone, and keep the app installed anyways.
momokoko 7y ago
When I explain to people that there are companies that scrape and sell databases of non-public Facebook profiles and data they often audibly gasp or at the minimum get very uncomfortable. I can guarantee you that most higher level executive positions at fortune 2000 companies have had their private Facebook profiles reviewed during the hiring process. This is not about tracking. This is actually more similar to your phone company selling your conversations and internet activity. There is definitely not a common perception that Facebook activity is public.
caseysoftware 7y ago
I believe the breakdown is where private vs public vs "only my friends" If you were chatting with your friends at dinner in your home, there's no reason you'd assume that was public. Most people mistake Facebook for that when it's closer to chatting with your friends in a crowded subway car. In the real world, we'd see the difference, understand the difference, and likely decide certain topics out of bounds. Facebook's entire business is getting people to open up to advertise to them better so it's their best interest to make us think it's the dinner scenario.

annadane 7y ago

It's also fairly difficult when they intentionally make it hard for the distinction of public/non public to be understood. "People you may know" is a privacy violation. "A friend commented on such and such post" is a priacy violation.

anticensor 7y ago
The latter is not a deprivacy of privacy, as it is already visible to you.
- annadane 7y ago
  But you shouldn't be able to just find things like that so easily. Sure if I go on a post I could find it but the fact Facebook notifies me of this in the first place is incredibly disrespectful.
  - csallen 7y ago
    Not true, since the entire point of a social network like this is to browse a playground of publicly-visible conversations involving your friends, and the people conversing are quite aware they're doing so in public. What would be "disrespectful" is if Facebook told you what your friends were saying in private messages between each other.
    - nashashmi 7y ago
      He is calling privacy the things that are hidden by obscurity. Meaning that if you have a sign on your door advertising sneakers for example, that is private to only those people who visit your door. Sure it may be out in the open, but you didnt open it to all people.
      - csallen 7y ago
        Totally, but a door is not a social network. A door is a fixed location. A social network is more like a magical bulletin board that tries to make itself as visible to as many people as possible. Perhaps you don't like that the bulletin board does that, but it's not rude. You're 100% free to not make posts there. I recommend it, in fact.
        tru3_power 7y ago
        Yea but what if your profile is private? Wouldn’t you think that there still would be a level of privacy expectations that should be retained because only people you explicitly choose to share information with can see it? Why do corporations/advertisement get to bypass these constraints?
        csallen 7y ago
        I may or may not agree… I'm not sure exactly what situation you're referring to. In the original article linked above, the situation was that users expected their social information to remain private to the ~100 friends they shared it with, and sued Facebook because it ended up in the hands of Cambridge Analytica. Facebook's attorney's counterpoint is that when you share information with friends, you give up any expectation of privacy as it pertains to these friends. And in this particular case, it was the friends who shared that information with some Facebook app by Kogan(sp?), who then shared it with Cambrige Analytica. I find the argument pretty convincing, actually. If you tell your friend a secret, and they tell someone else, even if it's a corporation, then that's that. If you share your Spotify playlist with a friend, and in turn they give up all their friends' playlists data (including yours) to some app, then imo that's kind of on you for sharing. The situation I disagree with is if you tell your friend a secret, and then the communication platform that you used to share that secret (your phone company, the hotel you're staying in, Gmail, Facebook, whatever) decides to share it with third parties.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - underwater 7y ago
    What are you trying to achieve by allowing someone to see a fact, but not actively surfacing that information? Within the scope of X likes Y, X said Z, Facebook has a very consistent and strong privacy model [1]. However, they have long considered anything that isn't a hard privacy violation of their rules to be fair game. Technically (and this is FB's engineering mindset showing through) not surfacing information is security through obscurity. It seems like they are backing away from that model, by deprecating features like Graph Search. I personally think that this is worse because it makes it much harder for people to understand what is visible to others. It muddies the rule of "if you don't want people to know something, don't put it on Facebook". [1] There are some messier areas, like People You May Know, or when platform apps are allowed to access (and store) all they data that a person who uses that app could see.
  - michannne 7y ago
    Think of it like an echo. If your friend shouts at someone in the real world when others are around, you wouldn't be able to hear it from a mile away, but eventually you will hear about the fact they did so, either through gossip or some other means. Facebook cuts that extraneous fluff out and just tells you what they said. It is far from a violation of privacy, as you would be able to find that information easily if you went out looking for it in the first place. Especially in the world of health, there is a clear distinction about what is private, public, and confidential/secret. This case very clearly public.

trophycase 7y ago

You're absolutely right and I think the metaphor "standing on a stage speaking to people" is very misleading at best and malicious at worst.

doingmyting 7y ago

I completely agree here. And from my vantage point what I see is that the powers that be, that can effect change in this regard are solely focused on the obvious parts of it. They are struggling with simply grasping the concept of Facebook gathering and selling the data users voluntarily supply, so expecting them to be able to grasp these subtle data collection tactics are next to impossible. The average person wouldn't even understand how it's possible for Facebook to capture data when they're not on Facebook. Expecting some 70 year old politician who can barely use a computer properly, to understand it is impossible. And sadly they're ones with the power to effect meaningful and immediate change.

8ytecoder 7y ago

I block every tracker and don’t have Facebook installed and yet they show me ads that are uncanny. Rode my bike and hurt my back. Pretty sure I searched for remedies - likely on DDG. And bought a massage ball on Amazon. Instagram is filled with ads to address my back pain.

TallGuyShort 7y ago
I haven't injured my back, but I still see heavy advertising for that plexus wheel plus thing.
readme 7y ago
Did you buy any back pain stuff at the pharmacy? Maybe it's tied to a store loyalty card or credit card.
- wmeredith 7y ago
  This. The shadow demographic profiles that Experian, Facebook, and others have on people are a lot more robust than just online cookies.

calimac 7y ago

Absolutely! The level of data my name as a whole is unquestionably invasive and has far-reaching lifelong societal impacts That we cannot allow. It will take time but hopefully we can replace Facebook with a more benevolent social communication platform. Is mastodon growing?

notatoad 7y ago

I think it's a little patronizing to suggest that users don't understand how Facebook tracks them. Sure, the average person probably doesn't think about the specific method of tracking. They don't know that Facebook tracks how long you watch a video, or spend staring at that photo of your ex. But they have a general sense that Facebook is monitoring their usage patterns to determine what they like and target advertising. That isn't a secret, and isn't obscured. Regardless of what the terms and conditions say, i think it's a fair to assume that the vast majority of people using Facebook have implicitly consented to have their Facebook usage tracked. Facebook tracking you through the rest of the web is a different story...

wybiral 7y ago
I've heard this argument for years but they keep on sliding back those privacy policies more and more. And every time a story comes out about how those policy changes were actually utilized to track people in a new way people get upset. You're giving the average user too much credit. As a software developer lurking on Hacker News, sure, you understand how pervasive tracking and data collection are. But have you spoken to your parents or older relatives? My mom had no idea that kind of stuff was even possible. Most of those people still think that the core invasion of privacy us tech nerds are always going on about is the public content (the likes/follows/posts). I'm not patronizing, they genuinely don't understand the scale of modern online tracking.
- notatoad 7y ago
  i've had a lot of conversations with a lot of people from various backgrounds about how they understand facebook tracking (it inevitably follows when i tell them i'm not on facebook) and i can't think of an instance where people had a poorer understanding of facebook's tracking than i gave them credit for. That's not to say people like it, but they accept it as an inevitable consequence of using the service. And of course, for all the tech crowd's fear about the "invasion of privacy" that comes from the passive behaviour monitoring facebook does, the reality is that likes, follows, and posts are the strongest signals for their ad targeting anyways. a non-trivial number of people think that facebook is continually listening to their every conversation through the mic on their phone, and keep the app installed anyways.

momokoko 7y ago

When I explain to people that there are companies that scrape and sell databases of non-public Facebook profiles and data they often audibly gasp or at the minimum get very uncomfortable. I can guarantee you that most higher level executive positions at fortune 2000 companies have had their private Facebook profiles reviewed during the hiring process. This is not about tracking. This is actually more similar to your phone company selling your conversations and internet activity. There is definitely not a common perception that Facebook activity is public.

caseysoftware 7y ago

I believe the breakdown is where private vs public vs "only my friends" If you were chatting with your friends at dinner in your home, there's no reason you'd assume that was public. Most people mistake Facebook for that when it's closer to chatting with your friends in a crowded subway car. In the real world, we'd see the difference, understand the difference, and likely decide certain topics out of bounds. Facebook's entire business is getting people to open up to advertise to them better so it's their best interest to make us think it's the dinner scenario.