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Yandex can now search for Facebook posts
- na85 13y agoSurprised something like this hasn't happened sooner. That social networks like FB sell personal user data to advertisers is the industry's worst-kept secret. At least now they're dropping any pretense that they give a rat's ass about privacy.
- ryanmerket 13y agoFacebook doesn't sell data to advertisers. Do you have a source for your claim?
- beagle3 13y agoDon't know if this is still the case, but in the past it was possible to pay facebook for ads targeting e.g. 25-30 year olds in the US, and color that add with a cookie, so that when you saw the same browser later, you'd know it was a 25-30 year old from the US. (It went much deeper than that - marital status, month of year, a few other things I can't remember). So, while they weren't directly offering and selling this information as is, you could buy it from them by buying ad space on the demographics you cared about. (Yes, this also required you had other access to ad networks, real time exchanges, etc -- but if you really want info on people, it was chump change)
- NickSharp 13y agoFacebook "partners" with several large 3rd party advertisers. I'm not sure how you would define "sell data", but other advertisers are using that data for targeting at scale already.
- DominikR 13y agoThese post were public anyways, therefore I fail to see how this will affect anyones privacy. Also, like ryanmerket said: Facebook doesn't sell data, you are just misinformed.
- nitrogen 13y agoA lot of Facebook users are making public posts without realizing it, and a lot more don't understand the ramifications (difficulty traveling, job risk, stalkers, ID theft, etc.)
- skymt 13y agoAs the article notes, this did happen eariler: Bing has the same level of access.
- ryanmerket 13y agoAccess to the firehose != access to database. Bad reporting.
- lucb1e 13y agoI have a Facebook account nowadays, mostly for private chats, reading friends' statuses and a few groups with classmates, but any posts I make are strictly set to public. I know I shouldn't expect them to be private on Facebook and this forces me to think a little about what I post. Pseudonymously, I don't use my real name on Facebook, but still.
- guard-of-terra 13y agoI guess it's only for Russian and Turkish-language posts.
- slezyr 13y agoRight, most likely only Russian/Ukrainian languages. I don't think they will index English posts.
- DangerousPie 13y agoThe title makes this sound much more severe than it is. According to the article they only get access to _public_ posts, i.e. posts they would have been able to access by crawling the site anyway.
- gojomo 13y agoNote, though, that Facebook's robots.txt and Terms-of-Service typically prohibit the crawling of these 'public' posts. Users shouldn't be surprised that others can see them; they may still be surprised at the new level of discoverability by strangers and via other sites. Developers may still be a bit miffed at the mixed meaning of 'public' here – world-readable to the extent it benefits Facebook (and negotiated partners), but not allowing downstream automated indexing/analysis/excerpting by the general public.
- nly 13y agoHonoring robots.txt isn't a legal requirement, and I don't think a crawler can read or agree to TOS. Personally I'm in favour of anything publicly accessible being fair-game for indexing purposes, but this kind of news about database access makes me uncomfortable.
- gojomo 13y agoRe: honoring robots.txt isn't a legal requirement In common-law jurisdictions (like the US), I wouldn't be so sure of that. It has a lot of precedent behind it, as a longstanding convention for indicating site-owner/rightsholder wishes. Ignoring it – deploying software designed or configured to be oblivious to it – could create legal risk. A literal reading of copyright law and laws about 'authorized' use of computer systems would assess all bulk copying/reuse of web content without explicit advance permission as illegal. It's the force of traditional/reasonable industry practices (like robots.txt), and offsetting considerations like fair-use, that make it legally defensible.
- jonknee 13y agoWell, they're getting the firehose which is a lot more valuable (real time).
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- antihero 13y agoWhat part of "public" do people not understand?
- GrinningFool 13y agoTypically same part that includes such complex terms as "access" and "third party".
- TallGuyShort 13y agoThe part that is subject to change at Facebook's whim
- res0nat0r 13y agoFrom public to "more public?"
- TallGuyShort 13y agoNo, from private to public. They are notorious for changing privacy policies with effects that are not obvious to most users.
- beagle3 13y agoOnly the public posts. However, Facebook has a long history of changing their privacy policy and settings, and always in a way that (by default) makes public some things that previously were private. Usually with a couple of weeks to a month notice, not more. So, unless you are diligent enough to review/delete your private stuff every time Facebook makes such a change, it is likely that in the future, stuff you marked "private" today will, in fact, be publicly indexed and searchable by yandex tomorrow. Which is why, as has always been the case, you should assume everything you do on Facebook is public. Either because Facebook will decide to make it that way one day; or because of a security breach of some sort (hasn't happened yet, as far as I know), or because NSA/MI5/Mossad has access to it and will use it against you at the most inopportune moment (for you; it's a great moment for them).
- ctrl 13y agoThis is ridiculous speculation. Source?
- aroch 13y agoWell, they went from allowing you to have a private profile (ie. not searchable and non-friends see no info) to making name/age/gender/profpic/email/friends list public. There's quite some evidence that Facebook is using private messages in targeted ads (meaning the ad buying now knows private information about you).
- ctrl 13y agoHave you ever created a facebook ad?
- sp332 13y agoThey've apparently been targeting ads based on things said in private messages. http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/01/facebook-sued-for-allegedly-making-private-messages-into-public-likes/ http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/01/facebook-sued-for-al...
- NigelTufnel 13y agoA year ago Yandex made an iOS app "Wonder" that could search in Facebook and other social networks. Facebook blocked this app one month later. Good to know that now Yandex and Facebook have signed an agreement.
- linux_devil 13y agoI am deactivated since long time, do I need to worry ?
- gtirloni 13y agoI don't know if you need to worry but you shouldn't assume that deactivating your account means your data is not there anymore. I have deleted my FB account once and waited the amount of time they say is needed for data to be deleted. In fact, I stayed out of FB for >6 months. When I decided to create an account again using the same email address, at the first login, FB was ready to remind me of all the friends I "probably knew" (sure enough, they were all people I had added as friends before deleting the account). So that information is unlikely to be deleted. To get a somewhat vanilla experience I had to create an account using a different email address. Then it behaved as not knowing me (too much).
- harvestmoon 13y agoI tried deleting an account recently. It was surprisingly easy. You just had to find the right page and push delete. Now, my account hasn't gone poof yet (it takes 2 weeks, they say), but I'm optimistic.
- epochwolf 13y agoYes. I deactivated an account per their instructions for permanently removing an account over a year ago and haven't logged into it and it's still active. The information on it is still available. Facebook has also reset all of my account's policy settings to the most public options twice since I've been on facebook. My posts kept their privacy settings but everything else, my friends list, likes, etc become public instead of only visible to myself. I suspect it was a bug related to data migration since both times it happened during site upgrades. Still, I do not trust facebook with anything I do, ever. I assume it's just as public as the information on my blog. I aggressively censor posts and tags because of that.
- startupclarity 13y agoI still think yandex is underrated outside of Russia. It's webmaster tools[1] seem to get better and better whereas Google's seem to remove more and more information. [1] http://webmaster.yandex.com/ http://webmaster.yandex.com/
- staticelf 13y agoI deleted my facebook about a year ago now. feelsgoodman.jpg
- jonknee 13y agoFWIW, here's Facebook's robots.txt file. While this was a firehose agreement and not subject to robots.txt, it is an interesting look: https://facebook.com/robots.txt https://facebook.com/robots.txt They give the Internet Archive the most access, but oddly go out of their way to block their TOS and privacy policy from them and not anyone else. Sneaky. Update: scratch that, I missed that they were Allow statements for ia_archiver. The Internet Archive has by far the least access.
- mapleoin 13y agoThey give the Internet Archive the most access, but oddly go out of their way to block their TOS and privacy policy from them and not anyone else. Sneaky. It's actually the opposite. They allow IA access to their terms and policy, but block everything else: User-agent: ia_archiver Allow: /about/privacy Allow: /full_data_use_policy Allow: /legal/terms Allow: /policy.php Disallow: /
- jonknee 13y agoDuh, all the others were Disallow statements and I just missed that the IA ones were Allow. Thanks for the tip.
- csharp_gooru 13y agoUser-agent: ia_archiver Allow: /about/privacy Allow: /full_data_use_policy Allow: /legal/terms Allow: /policy.php Disallow: /