5 ms·

First, this is excellent and very well done (the analysis wasn't great for me, but whatever - point made). The part that bothers me so much about this all is t

• kleer001 7y ago
  > genuinely Just Don't Care short term focus makes sense to me in an evolutionary context, the future is quite uncertain
• malvosenior 7y ago
  > It's like they're all rats in a Skinner Box We're all rats in a Skinner Box. Just like me, you gave this site access to your camera and let it scan your face for minutes so you could see the result. I don't think it's fair to judge other people for not caring about privacy immediately after uploading your likeness to a random site.
  • warrenpj 7y ago
    I read the privacy policy before using it. I guess it doesn't upload anything. Is it naive to trust the privacy policy stated here? https://github.com/noahlevenson/stealing-ur-feelings/blob/master/privacy_policy.md https://github.com/noahlevenson/stealing-ur-feelings/blob/ma... > The information is processed locally in your browser and is never transmitted or stored externally.
    • malvosenior 7y ago
      I would say if you are very concerned about privacy, you should never grant a website or app access to your camera. I'm not, so it's no big deal to me, but the parent poster seems to be.
      • _jal 7y ago
        Curious, why would you think that? Plenty of people who want to live long lives drive cars and take showers, even though those are two of the most dangerous activities normal people get up to. At least as I practice it, privacy protection is risk analysis, not blind minimization.
        • malvosenior 7y ago
          You need to take a shower and drive to work. No one needs to use an app like this.
      • sfink 7y ago
        If you use a blanket rule like that, then the most likely outcome is that you'll stick to your guns for a while, but once the benefit gets large enough, you'll give up and stop thinking about it at all. Which, in the long run, results in the worst outcome. It's much more effective to do a lightweight risk analysis and set some sort of standard for what you're ok with given different levels of benefit. For example, if you're generally ok with a privacy policy, maybe you're fine sending your image to random experimental sites that don't have any obvious motive to profit from abusing your data. (Which is actually not quite the case here -- the site in question is specifically thinking about privacy risks, and so probably ought to be given a better prior than a random site.) Then again, I'm a total hypocrite. If I were to do my own analysis, I would not be ok with having a live mic potentially sending any audio it picks up to a company I already distrust. Especially when their privacy policy is not at all reassuring. And yet, I can see the Echo from where I'm sitting...
    • gitgud 7y ago
      Well it is open-source, so you can validate that claim by auditing/reading the code...
      • malvosenior 7y ago
        You don't know if that's what's running on the server though.
        • gitgud 7y ago
          True, but if you don't trust the website, just run the code locally
• kodablah 7y ago
  > The part that bothers me so much about this all is the sense of hopelessness it leaves. Why? Because 99.9% of people literally, actually, truly, genuinely Just Don't Care. This doesn't bother me as much. It can be argued that the first step to the ineffectiveness of this analysis is our growing apathy towards its results as a society. I'm not saying the analysis itself will be wrong, I am saying its results will become less and less effective the more we ignore it akin to infomercials of the past. I know right now we all see what appears to be a seemingly obvious link from individual accuracy to susceptibility. Marketers sure count on that. But the latter will reduce over time as a peak of accuracy is neared as the effectiveness of targeting can't grow forever (and there will be value in marketing your company as one that doesn't track, albeit limited as a niche). I do know I can't make people care nor can I ask them to not give up their info for something they want. I think it is a bit foolish to presume people should care as though something actively harmful is happening to them when such harm is subjective compared to the benefits.
• topmonk 7y ago
  We're all sheep, you're just one of the neighing ones... Unless you have a plan to fix it, that is.
• mattnumbers 7y ago
  Facebook/IG are the cigarettes of our age, and no less unhealthy; we should regulate them as such.
  • rvanmil 7y ago
    Definitely, I've been saying the exact same thing for quite a while. We're currently living in the 1950s of social media use (even kids smoking was considered ok back then). Eventually we'll look back at this the same way we think of smoking today, hopefully... :)
  • kaffeemitsahne 7y ago
    Smoking gives people cancer and heart disease at a pretty predictable rate. Quite baffling to claim facebook/ig are even close to that unhealthy.
    • depressedpanda 7y ago
      It's less baffling if you value mental health and physical health equally.
    • durnygbur 7y ago
      Internet social media are merely 15 years old. We just don’t know yet what kind of toxic and pathological consequences there might be. To use an analogy, places where people use social media intensively and the people themselves soak in certain digital „smell” which is tailling them afterwards.
• closeparen 7y ago
  The combination of cynicism and self-righteousness pervading in the tone of messaging like this is a factor.
• flaque 7y ago
  Believing "People just don't care" is both factually incorrect and counter productive. This is on the top of a site that's read by millions of people. Your hopelessness and cynicism towards "99.9%" of people does not actively contribute to the problem.
• xtracto 7y ago
  Apparentl I like Kayn West... and I don´t even know who that is. I hated the delivery method. It looked like these day´s cartoons, made for millenials or Zs with ultra low attention spans (smileies bouncing around, a lot of flashing graphics, etc).