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- Aardwolf 13y agoBut he has his photo and text on his website, so the NSA can see that, so a photo on Facebook would not add anything new?
- jd007 13y agoThe point is on his website, he chooses what photograph of himself is put there. On Facebook, you have no control when others are sharing photographs with you in them. On your own website you would presumably not post photographs of yourself that compromises your privacy, but when others do so on social networks, there is no guarantee like that (unless every single one of your friends on Facebook explicitly gets permission from you for every photo they post to Facebook that contains you before sharing, which never happens).
- neilc 13y agoOn Facebook, you have no control when others are sharing your photograph. The same is true of the Internet in general.
- jd007 13y agoYes it is true for the Internet in general. But Facebook is a bit special in that you can easily search for a person by name and have all photographs of him/her in one big organized pile, which is not possible on the Internet in general.
- randomdata 13y agoOnly the people of Facebook, or external entities who are explicitly granted permission, can perform that search though. It's not like I can just hop on Facebook and find all the picture of you, unless you have already permitted me to. If you are an entity like the aforementioned NSA, searching the entire Internet for your photo isn't really any more challenging than using Facebook. The computing resources necessary are considerably larger, but that is a relatively small barrier.
- schoen 13y agoI see at least two ways that having data in Facebook has the potential to help governments learn more about people: things (relationships, events, biographical data) are pre-structured in a single clear ontology, and Facebook has direct access to all of the facts in the system. If we imagine a more decentralized system, people might well still adopt a single ontology for events and relationships, but much "private" information might actually never be revealed to third parties, as opposed to disclosing all of it to Facebook and asking Facebook to limit whom they show it to.
- S4M 13y agoWell, there is the case of that douchebag who was running isanyoneup - this was on HN recently - that is a counter example. I could take pictures of you and associate them with your name so google would link to them when someone looks for you. I agree that it's much easier through facebook, though.
- tedunangst 13y agoIt's only a matter of time until somebody comes along and lets you search for pictures on the internet in general.
- dlsx 13y agoPlease don't argue for Facebook you come off as anti-human.
- dreamfactory 13y agoYou're spot on - social graphing/big data isn't some kind of facebook-exclusive superpower.
- davidjgraph 13y ago> On Facebook, you have no control when others are sharing your photograph. On a public web site you could simply copy a photo and put it on another web site. > On your own website you would presumably not post photographs of yourself that compromises your privacy, but when others do so on social networks Differing how from if they just posted it on a public web site other than Facebook?
- jd007 13y ago> On a public web site you could simply copy a photo and put it on another web site. On your own public website you can choose what photos you want to put there. If you put a photo on a public website, clearly you have no issue with the photo being seen by other people. This is not true for photos that others share with you in them. Your real life friends take photographs of you and publishes them on Facebook without your consent, some of which you may not want to be public. > Differing how from if they just posted it on a public web site other than Facebook? Most public websites do not index user photographs by time/event and are easily searchable by name. But yes, it is not that different in general fundamentally. Facebook just allows the information to be much more easily aggregated and browsed
- rtpg 13y agoBut if I had a blog and posted pictures of an event where Stallman is present, doesn't it come out to the same thing?
- jd007 13y agoIt is in a way. However it is much harder to aggregate all these pictures and data when you need to scrape everybody's personal blogs. Facebook makes it very easy to gather and use this data (they even make you organize it for them by putting photos into different collections). Fundamentally though there is no difference between posting it on your blog vs Facebook.
- rtpg 13y agoI can see how the searching can be an issue, but if someone is motivated enough, they can just use Google right? I dunno, I have issues with facebook but I actually like how photos and tagging automatically fill my timeline so I don't have to actually write to my family. Besides, most of the things you (if you were the NSA) could find through Facebook could almost trivially be found through looking through the guy's e-mail, or other sources. Nobody thinks Facebook to be private anyways, since its main purpose is for stuff to be published (to friends, but considering I have 300 on FB, it might as well be public)
- jd007 13y agoIt's always a balance between the value you get out of FB vs your privacy concerns. For most people, they value the features of FB (e.g. photo tagging) more than they value their own privacy, so they continue to share and use FB. For Stallman obviously the opposite is true.
- scholia 13y agoAgreed. In fact, I have no control over photos of me that anyone can post anywhere on the web, where Google indexes them and makes them searchable. At least with Facebook I can untag them and in some cases get them removed....
- davidjgraph 13y agoIt's not about what data is on Facebook or a public web site. It's about the so-called "social graph" sites like Facebook create. That is, the relationships between people indicated directly between people (friends) and the inferred relationships worked out by mining data.
- phy6 13y agoAlso, 22k people like his fan page. https://www.facebook.com/pages/Richard-Stallman/112830992063167 https://www.facebook.com/pages/Richard-Stallman/112830992063...
- worldsayshi 13y agoedit: Hmm, you probably wasn't trying to imply this.. But... that's not a fan page. It's just a wikipedia mirror. Like this one: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Quantum-Physics/110155939014122 https://www.facebook.com/pages/Quantum-Physics/1101559390141... Compare to this (a fan page): https://www.facebook.com/daftpunk https://www.facebook.com/daftpunk Difference being that the mirror is (semi-) automatically generated. This page: https://www.facebook.com/richardmatthew.stallman https://www.facebook.com/richardmatthew.stallman .. is probably what Stallman is referring to.
- dlsx 13y agoIf only the mainstream media would listen to humanitarians like RMS. Instead they choose to listen to greedy slime balls that end in BERG. Money is the root of all evil. Combine that with privacy, and Facebook IS the new root of all evil. I deleted my account years ago, and I know with 100% certainty it will never be purged. It's criminal, and I fucking loathe this fact. I would pay to cave in some of the faces at Facebook.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- valtron 13y agoYou forgot /stein$/ and /^Gold/. Also, you didn't mention "big-nosed"! What is this, a civil discussion??
- mikevm 13y agoIf OP was being anti-Semitic, then it would surprise him that RMS is also of the Jewish persuasion.
- killwhitey 13y agoRMS is an atheist
- mikevm 13y agoI guess I should've said "of Jewish ancestry".
- balabaster 13y agoWhile what you say may be true, the large majority of your rhetoric is unhelpful to this conversation. So it's no wonder someone it's flagged it.
- stan_rogers 13y agoRadix malorum est cupiditas. That is to say, greed (or in early English bibles, "the love of money") is the root of all evil. Money is a medium of exchange, a proxy token for barter. The need to have more than others (whether wealth in its various guises or power) is the corrupting influence. Or so the Pardoners would have us believe.
- throwawaykf02 13y agoTo save everyone the time, here's a typical Internet thread about Stallman: - He's crazy! - But he's right! - Right? He's just been stating the obvious all this time! - NSA surveillance! - Hadn't anyone heard about Echelon? - He stands for freedom of users! - But users don't care about those freedoms, they just want something that works! - He's antisocial and extremely rude! - Autism spectrum. - But he's not diplomatic at all, we don't want him as a spokesperson for Open Source! - It's GNU/Linux, not Linux. - See? It's nitpicking things like GNU/Linux that make even open source enthusiasts hate him! - Only the userland is GNU anyway. - GPL! - Emacs! - GCC! - HURD! - Toejam.
- AlexanderDhoore 13y agoThere should be an XKCD about this...
- jawns 13y agoI feel like he could reduce the crazy vibe by hiring a web designer to overhaul this page. Well-designed crazy usually looks a little more sane than poorly designed crazy.
- davidjgraph 13y agoI wonder why he doesn't suggest actively building a fake Facebook profile to dilute the accuracy of the information being mined? What's the worst that can happen, the account is blocked...
- lazyjones 13y ago> What's the worst that can happen Someone else might post something (wrong) that gets you in trouble because it's taken seriously.
- grecy 13y agoBy even going to the site, you are giving them data. They have your IP address, the unique attributes of your browser, etc. etc. Once they figure out the profile is fake, they list you in the "trouble maker" category and step up monitoring that IP/browser combination until they know who you are, then they link that with everything they have on the real you (bank account, property, job, etc.) Eventually, one day, you're trying to board a plane and you get denied because you've been known to disseminate "false or misleading information". Playing their game validates it. Just don't play.
- mateo411 13y agoWhat unique aspects of your browser? The User-Agent header will tell you the kind of browser you have. However, it's unlikely that you are using a browser that's very unique. They can use cookies to identify you. But you have to keep going back to their website.
- Double_Cast 13y ago> If you do as I do, and reject Facebook, you are safe from this form of snooping. Am I? As far as I understood, Facebook tracks internet users who have never even created an account.
- ams6110 13y agoThey do, you have to actively blacklist them in some way. /etc/hosts file, ghostery, etc.
- pilif 13y agoProbably not if you consume the web the way Stallman does (http://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html http://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html)
- balabaster 13y agoI concur - Facebook's plugins to every damn website means that they can tell where your IP address is visiting and correlate a "profile" over time based on the sites you visit. So while they may not know your name, they can tell (as long as it's a property they have a partnership with) where you've been. Site owners that care about privacy should reject all the social plugins that also do this. So if there's a Facebook Like button, or a Facebook comment system on the page, whether you utilize them or not, their plugin was called in order to load it and in turn, you've been tracked.
- mikevm 13y agoThat's why I use Ghostery.
- balabaster 13y agoThanks - just checking that out, looks potentially interesting.
- gitaarik 13y agoAlso check out https://disconnect.me/ https://disconnect.me/
- mark_l_watson 13y agoWow, that is a long (if sometimes repetitive) list! Hopefully Richard had help putting that list together. I have two general comments: 1. I am surprised how many non tech Saavy people I talk with are starting to understand privacy issues. 2. I had dinner last night with some Silicon Valley residents who were talking about what a horrible investment Facebook would be long term. New things will replace Facebook, and they will eventually have fewer active users. A bit off topic, but advice I like to give people is to use one specific web browser for social media connected sites like Facebook, GMail + Google+, Twitter, etc. and another web browser with locked down security for all other browsing. This is easy to do, lets people enjoy the social media stuff if they like, and still maintain some degree of privacy.
- easong 13y agoDisclaimer: I work for Disconnect https://disconnect.me/ https://disconnect.me/ is designed to allow people to protect themselves from being spied on across the internet by Facebook, Google, et al without the inconvenience of using a separate browser or similar methods. Anecdotally, I've also experienced a growth in non-techie interest in online privacy - in the pre Snowden era, I would have to explain myself and justify what I do every time I was asked where I worked. Nowadays, I get asked for a download link.
- dizzystar 13y agoI started using your service in place of ghostery. I like both of them and I truly appreciate what you guys are doing here. The only short-coming is that my browser sometimes freezes when it is blocking certain flash objects. I consider it a minor inconvenience and a worthwhile trade-off. In general, sites load way faster. I am often appalled when I see the amount of trackers being blocked on some of these pages. It shows why the web, despite running on faster servers and delivering content across faster networks to faster computers, appears to be slowing down year after year. It also reminds me that I have a responsibility to the users who visit my sites. I will never use any ad-tracking or social-media tracking software on my sites. I will host my own ads on my site and not depend on third-party companies to insert and regulate my ad presence. I will use minor tracking tools, but solely with the aim of improving user experience. In all, I am very glad that you guys are doing what you are doing. In some meta respects, I think you are improving not only the state of the uses who use your product, but also the general well-being of the entire internet. Once we can extinguish the abusive trackers out there, we all can learn how to monetize our sites in a respectful and appropriate fashion.
- _Simon 13y agoGetting a little bored of RMS now. He's becoming increasingly like chicken little rather that the boy that tells the emperor he's naked.
- hayksaakian 13y agoI think you might be getting bored of him because society has accepted that the emperor is naked and doesn't care.
- interstitial 13y agoSociety likes staring at the Emperor's junk and hopes he keeps tweeting it.
- hernan604 13y agoThe best thing about fecesbook is the UX. They have done such a great job even illiterate people can use it. Its a great tool to get UX ideas. Old timers will remember bbs, irc. And after Okrut was created, many people left the old services. Now, many of them migrated to fecesbook. That same people also are not interested in NSA or privacy. They just want to make noise, search and be found by other people like them.
- dingaling 13y agoI had occasion to use Facebook recently ( a relative asked me to upload a photo to her profile while she was busy ). I can honestly say I was utterly baffled by the UI. Eventually my 83-year-old great aunt came in and showed me what sequence of links to click to arrive at an upload icon. shrug I spend 10 hours a day on a command line.
- eonil 13y agoThis makes me curious of his thought on Google+
- apetresc 13y agoTake a wild guess. I'm sure you can guess it.
- lifeisstillgood 13y agoThere is a reason Linus is the figurehead of the Kernel project - he has a track record of choosing directions that later turn out to be fruitful. There is a reason GvR is the figurehead of the Python Language - he has a track record of choosing directions that later turn out to be fruitful. There is a reason Stallman ... Look the guy spotted the trends waaaaay earlier than anyone else and be put his money where his mouth is. The original GPL is no less crazy than this. Hell most of us agree with this one.
- eonil 13y agoAnyway, ideal implementation for accessibility and readability. Must be the standard of HTML styling.
- pfh 13y agoAlas the younger gnu is tempted by the facebook, heeding not the words of the elder. (And just a wave and a wink to any postsingular intelligence trawling the archives.)
- tarekmoz 13y agoHe never used Facebook, but oh gawd he loves to use <hr/>.. :)
- jokoon 13y agois there a way to make a browser block any access to those like widget, or any other facebook access ? I haven't been or used on facebook for years now, and those tracking things weird me out
- greenyoda 13y agoThere are lots of browser add-ons that can block Facebook widgets: AdBlock, NoScript, RequestPolicy, Ghostery, etc.
- drill_sarge 13y agojust put the facebook addresses in your hosts file, f.e. 0.0.0.0 www.facebook.com 0.0.0.0 facebook.com 0.0.0.0 login.facebook.com 0.0.0.0 www.login.facebook.com 0.0.0.0 fbcdn.net 0.0.0.0 www.fbcdn.net 0.0.0.0 fbcdn.com 0.0.0.0 www.fbcdn.com 0.0.0.0 static.ak.fbcdn.net 0.0.0.0 static.ak.connect.facebook.com 0.0.0.0 connect.facebook.net 0.0.0.0 www.connect.facebook.net 0.0.0.0 apps.facebook.com
- jokoon 13y agothanks a lot !
- jroseattle 13y agoMy only issue with Richard's rant here is -- why stop at Facebook? The social network/media economy is responsible for lots of business plans, with lots of people vested in their success. There are others out there besides Facebook.
- linux_devil 13y agoAgree , but I think drastic drop in number of active users will make them realize , people are actually concerned about their privacy and there was something wrong .
- gress 13y agoYeah - it seems weird to point at Facebook when the elephant in the room is Google.
- belorn 13y agoWhile Google is a larger issue regading privacy, facebook is a larger issue regarding lock-in. Anyone who do not have an facebook account know how often information is locked into facebook, never reaching anyone who chooses not to participating in giving facebook more information.
- greenyoda 13y agoThe link to an ACLU article on how Facebook censored an ACLU Facebook post on censorship was quite interesting: https://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty-national-security/naked-statue-reveals-one-thing-facebook-censorship https://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty-national-se...
- linux_devil 13y agoRealized this late , but saving lot of time since past 6 months . Deactivated facebook , and find more time to actually go out and socialize. Don't even know if it was adding to efficiency.
- RexRollman 13y agoI stay away from Facebook, Twitter, and Google for many of the reasons that Stallman lists. I treat email like a postcard and I do nothing on the Internet under my real name. That said, I know many people don't care about this stuff, and I applaud their lack of concern.
- adwf 13y agoAs much as I've avoided Facebook for so long, I've come to the realisation that if you want to use the internet, old-school "full" privacy is dead and gone. I've had a profile on FB for a long time now, but never ever used it. I've had the javascript blocked around in my general web browsing, never installed the phone app, etc. All I've ever received is the occasional email saying that someone has tagged me in a status/photo. These annoyed me a little, as I wanted to avoid FB as much as possible, whilst still being sociable with my friends. I came to a sad epiphany a few months ago however. I realised that even if I weren't aware of all the photos/tags being posted of me, I'd still be tagged by my friends regardless. Even if I completely cancelled my account, the photos are still going up because I still meet with my friends and have an active social life. This is when I realised what I needed to do. It is the exact same situation as when someone makes a small jest at your expense at a party. If it's a friend, you know they're just messing around and taking the piss, you laugh it off, not offended. If it's not a friend however, you might get a little offended by it. "Were they insulting me? Trying to embarrass me? Should I laugh it off as a joke?" It's potentially annoying, just as a violation to your privacy is. Inevitably, you have only a few choices: Laugh, insult them back? (guess it depends on your culture/how rude it was!) Some people might even just punch the guy... You can't punch Facebook. (I wish) It isn't gonna go away just because you're upset. So the question here is: Why do we laugh these little embarrassments off? The little invasions of our private self that we find annoying? Because it's a way of owning the situation. You can't be offended/embarassed by something you laugh off and apparently don't care about. "Yeah, my Karaoke is terrible, but I love it!", "Yeah, I do have a habit of giggling in a funny way, hahahaha!". It's exactly the same when you look at highly confident people, they never seem embarrassed by anything at all. They just smile and carry on. Well I made a decision a couple of months ago to take the exact same approach to Facebook, so I'm on it properly now. I can't punch FB in the face, but I can take ownership of my own public persona. My friends/aquaintances are going to be posting about me regardless, might as well take control of the situation and make sure I know everything is good. PS: And hey, there are still plenty of good uses of FB anyway, might as well enjoy the perks too. PPS: I'm aware that it's a shitty situation. I almost feel like I've got Stockholm syndrome and have just given in. But FB isn't going anywhere soon.
- satori99 13y ago
- thearn4 13y agoNo disagreement with RMS actually, but just out of curiosity: Back when land-line telephone subscription was more popular, did folks used to complain about the phone company putting their name and address (by default) in a large directly shared with the entire public? I know you could pay a fee to be unlisted, but didn't it strike anyone as a gigantic privacy issue in general?
- ceejayoz 13y agoEh, there are plenty of public records - births, deaths, real estate transactions, tax records, lawsuits, etc. It's hard to take a phone book listing and figure out who my friends and family are, who employs me, what I'm doing all the time, etc. as it is fairly trivial to do with Facebook et al.
- dredmorbius 13y agoTools to automatically search and utilize that data were somewhat limited. There were classes of people who could suppress their listing. And you could (generally) hide behind an initial and no-address listing as well (phone books listed _both_ phone number _and_ street address by default). It was a very, very different age in many ways. What ubiquitous cheap computing and fast connectivity creates is the possibility for thousands to millions of systems to attack a given person simultaneously (DDoS, distributed brute force attacks), or for a very small number of actors (as few as one) to attack from one to billions of people simultaneously. The phone book vector was, by contrast, limited in that: ⚫ It only listed your name, phone number, and street address. Not reams of additional information. ⚫ Utilizing it required a phone call (toll calls, remember those), postage, or a street visit. Attacks, in other words, cost real money (at least for most players). ⚫ There was limited additional data readily linked by those data. Again, not the mebabytes to gigabytes of information in a typical social networking profile. Yes, some players had access to more powerful tools -- but even marketing databases and the like were vastly more primitive than they are now, and hugely less available. Depending on when exactly you're talking about (1930s to 1980s), there might have been some computer capacity, but you'd likely have had to have spent several hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, even as late as the 1980s, to effectively utilize the data in an automated fashion. And yes, there were people who complained and concealed their listings, but the risks were very, very different in magnitude then.
- jgalt212 13y agoper Stallman: The NSA tracks Americans' social networks, and Facebook is just one of its sources. maybe so, but they don't seem to be doing it very effectively. If so, they would have been a. more closely following the the Boston Marathon bombers. b. would have been able to ID them from photos pulled from the surveillance tapes. so while the NSA and their recent "efforts" are pretty scary and de jure or de facto illegal, it is the government, so how effective can they really be at keeping an eye on us?
- tripzilch 13y agoOh it's effective alright, it's just that keeping you safe from terrorist attacks is not what it's effective at.
- martinvol 13y agoDid he check that all the websites he linked were fully open source? Just asking.
- drakaal 13y agoStallman is an idiot. When you post to your blog you tell the NSA what you know. When you attend a conference where Stallman speaks and paid with your credit card the NSA knows you support his ludicrous ideas. Stallman thinks information should be free, but apparently that doesn't include information about where you shop. Sure I get it. Information should be free unless he can charge you to hear him speak, or it is his information. You can't have it both ways. Also, is CSS bad in some way? Do themes support the Evil too? Cause for a famous guy that is one ugly website.
- smky80 13y agoI really would like to see Facebook broken up via the Sherman Antitrust Act, or some such legislation. As I see it, the "network externality effect" which keeps such monopolies in business could perhaps be mitigated by creating a sort of social network "DNS", which could be created by the government or a private corporation. Facebook/Google+/etc would be clients that would make requests for someone's data via the DNS. So it would basically serve as a "Bridge" or "Facade" to use a design pattern. Example if Suzy is on Facebook, and Lucy is on Google+, when Suzy rquests Lucy's photos, Facebook sends an API request to the DNS "request_photos('Lucy', 'Suzy')", the DNS sees Lucy is on Google+ and forwards the request there. The purpose of the bridge/facade then is to make it not really matter where a person stores their data or what client they use to view others. You just need some sort agreed upon API for determining where the data for each person is, an for sharing data between services. For someone with more strict privacy concerns, the DNS for such a person could simply record that the person uses this social networking service, which doesn't allow requests from outside. Again the benefit here of the API would be that to add yourself to that service would be as simple as "upload_photos(serverX, request_photos('Suzy', 'Suzy'))", etc. I'm sure there's a million things wrong with the above, but just a random thought.
- crystaln 13y agoRight... the solution to Stallman's concerns about government surveillance of social networks is definitely a government shutdown of Facebook and the development of a centralized social DNS created by the government.
- smky80 13y agoThe point was really just to push for decentralization of social networks, through some kind of mandated data-sharing interface. The "DNS" thing is probably actually unnecessary I guess, it was just a random thought. We don't let utilities just get a monopoly in an area and then just gouge everyone, and we shouldn't allow a social network to do so either. The NSA spying, by itself, is just a symptom of larger problem, which is the ability of a smaller, more cohesive group of people to leverage larger institutions like massive governments and corporations to control and extract rents out of the less cohesive masses. I doubt there is a technological solution to this, especially with so many engineers working for the bad side as Useful Idiots or straight up Defectors.
- sidcool 13y agoMay be this is an unpopular opinion, but facebook is a 'for profit' business. If we want to use it for free, we should be ready to pay some price for it. I am not a particular fan of facebook, except for it's ability to help me connect within closed private groups and tracking technology and programming news. I don't post photos or statuses on facebook. Again, this is not absolving facebook of their dark patterns of snooping on users and their broken privacy framework. Even Google is not an ideal in this case.
- SimHacker 13y agoI just uploaded a scan of the Copyleft (L) sticker that I mailed to RMS, which inspired him to use the term for free software. And I wrote up the story behind it: http://www.donhopkins.com/home/copyleft/ http://www.donhopkins.com/home/copyleft/
- tripzilch 13y agoAwesome. Thanks for the story. (btw you need to add a <meta charset="utf-8" /> or something similar to that site, some of the quotes get funky)
- evincarofautumn 13y agoOh Stallman, such a character. Some of these are legitimate concerns, some just gave me a great laugh. For example, weigh these two against one another: > Facebook deleted a statement by a human rights group, then said that was a mistake. That Facebook invited the group to post the statement again — instead of undoing the deletion — demonstrates arrogance. > Facebook permanently records everything you do, even what you look at, even items that are "deleted". Never attribute to conspiracy what can be explained by ineptitude! Either Facebook is an evil omnipresent observer, permanently recording everything…or some representative goofed up and they can’t undo the deletion of the data because they actually deleted the data. But hey, if he wants to avoid Facebook and recommend against it, that’s fine. We should all make our own value assessments and our own decisions about privacy concerns, though. Just consider that Facebook’s occasional privacy blunders might be…just that.