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Regardless of how many developers have "improperly accessed user data", you can do a lot of stuff as a regular person such as tracking how long all your friends

by sdan 7y ago

Regardless of how many developers have "improperly accessed user data", you can do a lot of stuff as a regular person such as tracking how long all your friends sleep: https://github.com/sqren/fb-sleep-stats https://github.com/sqren/fb-sleep-stats After I found one of my friends doing this, I quit FB (this reason among others).

knzhou 7y ago
You could find much much more personal information about your friends before social media, the old fashioned way -- stalking. Both stalking and this kind of data scraping have the same response: get better friends.
- pengstrom 7y ago
  Sitting in the comforts of your own home is very different from having to go outside to reach the victims.
  - knzhou 7y ago
    And blocking social media stalkers is much much easier than stopping real ones. It is indeed a different game, but I don't think it's qualitatively worse.
    - crematoria 7y ago
      It can be automated and packaged into a solution for anyone to use. IRL stalking is hard and dangerous, and it's going to be that way for the foreseeable future. Is that "qualitatively" worse enough?
      - knzhou 7y ago
        No, because blocking people takes one click. You can completely solve the problem in literally two seconds. For that reason, I’m more confident of my privacy when on social media sites than in real life.
- randomb_1979 7y ago
  I have never seen a comment which is so ignorant of Facebook's past behavior. Are you aware that Facebook at one point unilaterally decided to allow people to see and comment on photos of friends of friends (i.e. 2nd degree connections)? Just in case you are not clear on what actually happened: this "feature" didn't initially exist, so you behaved in a certain way one day. And the next day, they added this feature and you had no way to opt out of it. Am I now supposed to also monitor and choose the friends of my friends? And then also study Facebook's API to know what level of access is provided to first degree connections? And then second degree connections? And are you suggesting everyone who uses Facebook is supposed to learn about all this stuff?

by sdan 7y ago

knzhou 7y ago

You could find much much more personal information about your friends before social media, the old fashioned way -- stalking. Both stalking and this kind of data scraping have the same response: get better friends.

pengstrom 7y ago
Sitting in the comforts of your own home is very different from having to go outside to reach the victims.
- knzhou 7y ago
  And blocking social media stalkers is much much easier than stopping real ones. It is indeed a different game, but I don't think it's qualitatively worse.
  - crematoria 7y ago
    It can be automated and packaged into a solution for anyone to use. IRL stalking is hard and dangerous, and it's going to be that way for the foreseeable future. Is that "qualitatively" worse enough?
    - knzhou 7y ago
      No, because blocking people takes one click. You can completely solve the problem in literally two seconds. For that reason, I’m more confident of my privacy when on social media sites than in real life.
randomb_1979 7y ago
I have never seen a comment which is so ignorant of Facebook's past behavior. Are you aware that Facebook at one point unilaterally decided to allow people to see and comment on photos of friends of friends (i.e. 2nd degree connections)? Just in case you are not clear on what actually happened: this "feature" didn't initially exist, so you behaved in a certain way one day. And the next day, they added this feature and you had no way to opt out of it. Am I now supposed to also monitor and choose the friends of my friends? And then also study Facebook's API to know what level of access is provided to first degree connections? And then second degree connections? And are you suggesting everyone who uses Facebook is supposed to learn about all this stuff?