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Facebook confirms it is scanning your private messages to increase Likes
- bcooperbyte 14y ago"Privacy is a relic of a time gone by" -Sean Parker
- facefxck 14y ago"Fuck you" -Me, responding to Sean Parker on privacy.
- GrumpySimon 14y agoI wasn't aware that Sean Parker was a noted expert on privacy and the implications thereof.
- gm 14y agoOne does not need to be to realize there is no privacy to be expected.
- stephengillie 14y agoWhat about the "ad-likes", where FB shows "Your friend Jill likes ponies. Here's an ad for My Little Ponies" -- are these similarly prevented? Breaking things tends to make unhappy the people using.
- kmfrk 14y agoDon't worry, Zuckerberg will write a heartfelt boilerplate apology soon enough. :P
- codva 14y agoSo if I send a PM to a friend on FB with a link and note that says, this is the lamest site ever the "Like" counter on the site goes up by one? That makes perfect sense.
- grecy 14y agoEven better, I wonder what happens if I send a private message to all my "friends" with a link to my blog in it. Did the like counter on my blog just go up by 500?
- Empro 14y agoActually it goes up by two, but Facebook claims that's the bug, not the fact that it goes up at all.
- tedunangst 14y agoYou didn't like the site, but you obviously felt it was worth sharing. Perhaps "people who engaged with this content" would be better than "like", but it'd make for a much bigger button.
- sadga 14y agothe hubbub over "scanning" here is silly. Obviously Facebook's systems scan your everything. The issue is that FB considers a "private mention" as a "Like", but it's old news that a "Facebook Like" is not an "English like"
- ericdykstra 14y agoThere's a reason I disable Facebook buttons on my browser and don't stick them on my own sites (including my blog). I don't trust Facebook with my browsing data, and I don't want to subject users of any website I work on to their abuse, either. "Move fast and break expectation of privacy"
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- ImprovedSilence 14y agohow do you go about disabling facebook buttons?
- tripzilch 14y agoThe facebook button is an iframe that links to a particular URL. You block that URL (+wildcard) in your browser.
- ericdykstra 14y agoI use http://ghostery.com http://ghostery.com as a Chrome extension. There's also http://disconnect.me http://disconnect.me, also extension based. Then there's the more extreme route of using Tor for all browsing.
- kmfrk 14y agoIs there a point to using both of them? I just ended up using only Ghostery a while ago, because running five potentially redundant extensions seemed to do more harm than good with the hits to performance.
- darkstalker 14y agoFor Firefox, there is an Adblock subscription called "Antisocial" http://adblockplus.org/en/subscriptions http://adblockplus.org/en/subscriptions (at the bottom of the page)
- knowaveragejoe 14y ago
- golgo13 14y agoI know FB scans private messages. You cannot send links with certain domains without getting an error message. Sure, they don't have some dude in a cubical looking at each and every message, but if they are scanning for domains, how hard is it to scan for keywords within those private messages? Mention your new iPhone in a message, and you see ads for iPhone cases. Make a Tony Romo joke and you see ads for an RGIII jersey, etc etc.
- sjf 14y agoThey scan for even more than that, they'll report you to the FBI if they suspect you of illegal activity. http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/12/us-usa-internet-predators-idUSBRE86B05G20120712 http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/12/us-usa-internet-pr...
- ImprovedSilence 14y agoI mean, Gmail does the same thing....
- k-mcgrady 14y agoDoesn't sound like a big deal at all. There certainly aren't any privacy implications. When you send a link to a website via PM the 'like' counter on that page on that website will increase by one. Makes sense (not perfect though e.g. if you're directing a friend to something you don't like). It's not like the 'like' is then shared publicly to your friends not part of the private conversation.
- warfangle 14y agoIt's an ontological problem, I think. Things started out with just 'like', but then they added comments, etc.. the modern like counter much more like Tumblr's "note" counter.
- prodigal_erik 14y agoThey know who you are and what link you forwarded. The only thing keeping it out of the public eye is Facebook's discretion, and they have a track record of unpredictably disclosing more data about you without an opt-in.
- eurleif 14y agoFacebook would have that data even if they didn't use it for the like button count.
- tlrobinson 14y agoSo what? The only thing keeping my emails private is my email provider's discretion.
- jveg 14y agoRight. To say that FB is "scanning" private messages is pretty misleading. FB is counting shares. Seems quite logical to me.
- phwd 14y agoThis is known by most Facebook App Developers. What makes up the number shown on my Like button? http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/ http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/ The number shown is the sum of: The number of likes of this URL. The number of shares of this URL (this includes copy/pasting a link back to Facebook). The number of likes and comments on stories on Facebook about this URL. The number of inbox messages containing this URL as an attachment.
- ig1 14y agoFrom the API you can actually get a breakdown of that number into those component numbers.
- SeanDav 14y agoWhy are people still using Facebook anyway? I can only presume people that do simply don't care much about privacy because Facebook has proved time and time again that your privacy does not matter at all to them.
- clobber 14y agoYour presumption is pretty much all I can think to rationalize it and that's just sad. This breach of privacy stuff is a slippery slope and Facebook will continue to chip away at it until it's gone. To help people remember I've started: http://pleasedeletefacebook.com http://pleasedeletefacebook.com
- NegativeK 14y agoThe users who are okay with Facebook have a different set of priorities than the detractors who have abandoned it. Asking why people are still using Facebook is roughly similar to asking why people use 123456 as a password.
- MartinCron 14y agoAll of their privacy breaches don't really matter if you consider all of the things that you do with Facebook to be explicitly public. My only privacy filters are discretion and sobriety, and they've worked well enough so far.
- robryan 14y ago
- dumb-dumb 14y ago"Private messages" and "Facebook" are mutually exclusive. Facebook is the antithesis of privacy. Dreamers think FB has value. Does the average person, of any age, think privacy has value? What's more valuable? Can all value be measured in monetary terms? Web traffic has value (e.g. we can sell display ads). FB has web traffic. But so did milliondollarwebsite.com. Privacy OTOH seems a long-lived concept, dating from at least the dawn of civilisation. I'd argue we have a lot more privacy than our ancestors. A trend that has continued unabated for hundreds of years. FB is but a {milli,micro,nano,pico}second in the evolutionary timeline of privacy. I'm not throwing away my fig leaf just yet.
- LouDog 14y agoI'd rather be shocked if they don't do it (think viruses, trojans, hoaxes etc)
- TomGullen 14y agoTo me, this is just standard privacy hyperbole that rears it's head every now and then. Anyone remember the headlines several years ago when "Google 'scans' your emails to serve targetted ads'? When was the last time you heard someone complain about that anymore? No one does, because it doesn't matter. Why should me sharing a link via a PM and my action be aggregated into an anonymous number worry me? How is the argument different from Google 'scanning your emails'? Social networks nowadays seem to be competing on ways of justifying bigger numbers on the counters. It makes sense, the bigger the number the bigger the social proof which will attract webmasters. Scanning PM's for shares isn't something I might of thought they would do, but they do and it makes sense. The whole privacy debate surrounding this particular case is a complete non-issue for me though and will probably fade into insignificance just like Google scanning your emails. An action from a big company that shifts the boundaries of acceptability in privacy would be a justified concern, but in this instance no land here in the privacy war has been lost. Nothings really happened.
- Volpe 14y agoIt's called a 'Private Message'. Seems to be misusing the word private. The gmail analogy is a little off, a closer one would be to compare to gtalk. Do google scan gtalk messages? Also what if the message is "This is so crap: <link>" does that increase the like?
- joeyo 14y ago> The gmail analogy is a little off, a closer one would be > to compare to gtalk. Do google scan gtalk messages? Unless you specifically select "Go off the record" I strongly suspect that they do.
- Groxx 14y agoSince they show up in gmail while you're "on the record", I would assume so.
- tedunangst 14y agoWouldn't Facebook chat be the right comparison for gchat?
- dumb-dumb 14y agoThe difference between Gmail and Facebook is that Gmail did not aim to track who you correspond with. Facebook is focussed on personally identifiable information. They have made it their business from Day 1 to know who your correspondents (friends) are _and_ to exploit that for profit. To my mind, this is not something Google set out to do. Although to compete with Facebook, I imagine they may have changed direction. We have Facebook to thank for that. Let's imagine for a second that the future brings us the proverbial "video telephone" that even the most non-technical person expects to one day be standard issue. Crystal clear, real-time communication with both audio and video as available to every person as owning a cell phone is today. Now, hold that thought. Should companies be invited into every conversation we have on this device? Should they be permitted to show ads to us as we converse? We never had companies keeping a record of everyone who we telephone and listening in to our telephone conversation to try to figure out what junk postal mail to send us. Would this be different? How? Ok, now we can return to present day reality. The question is: Where do we draw the line? Should companies be a party to every conversation? What will happen if we leave this question to the unscrupulous kids working and compromised adults working at Facebook? I doubt they would see anything wrong with what I described in the previous paragraph.
- samstave 14y agoEXACTLY Although I still believe google tracks this covertly, FB is overt about it.
- tedunangst 14y agoSomehow gmail manages to auto suggest and complete email addresses for me. Sounds a lot like they tracking who I correspond with.
- dumb-dumb 14y agoYes. 2s/aim/initially aim/ I rarely use Javascript (certainly not for email) so I wouldn't know about all the latest Gmail "features". :) What I was hinting at was a sort of evolutionary pressure on Google... to start using personally identifiable information. That pressure being Facebook as a perceived competitor.
- chuppo 14y agoFacebooks private messages are censored. Here in the western world we can not message one another freely when using this Facebook, of which many think are some kind of nice private messaging system like email. Its not and never was. For example try to send a thepiratebay.org link to your friends as a private message. Who knows what more they censor, perhaps the really interesting bits to censor seem to you like they have been delivered, but facebook never actually shows it to your firend. You would never know. Also, you cant send life-changing notifications through messages to all your friends, for example there is a cap I think on to message 30 people at once.