5 ms·

I've read a couple of articles in the past that linked Facebook and Google to CIA and that's a fair thought given the business that they're in. Of course the NS

by atmosx 12y ago

I've read a couple of articles in the past that linked Facebook and Google to CIA and that's a fair thought given the business that they're in. Of course the NSA and the CIA would like to have access to their data (and most probably they do in one way or another). That said, doesn't take anything away from Facebook as a service. Facebook adds extreme value to your social life connects you with people that you don't see daily, lets you know about birthdays, events, comments and what not. It's excellent at what it does IMHO and if used properly is really what web-2.0 is all about. I can say that if Zuckerberg didn't invent Facebook in ~ 2004, it would have been invented by now, by someone else because that was what people needed badly to stay connected. Facebook is just a tool. If you are in the intel business or you are a possible target (e.g. prominent figure of some sort) and fairly young to understand how the internet works, you use FB for PR and nothing else. Maybe not even that. Every social network can be used for data mining from intelligence agencies. Do most people care? No. Why? Because they don't see any kind of real threat. It doesn't interfere with their lives. The HN crowd is composed mostly by hackers. It's natural for us to see where all this might go wrong, because that's what we do and it's natural for others not to care until the shit hits the fan. I'm eagerly waiting for her Snowden related movie/documentary.

selmnoo 12y ago
> Facebook adds extreme value to your social life But you fail to catch a crucial part of this: it adds value to your social life at the expense of so many other things. It may add some social value to your life, but corrupts and molds society at large. I think the tradeoff is absolutely not worth it. I touched on this in a comment below as well. Social networking is a task that should probably be left for a 'Public Benefit Corp.' to do, as Ello seems to be trying to do. I'm hoping and praying that these sorts of companies start to take off, that pay-for-service becomes cool and commonplace again.
- rhino369 12y ago
  Most people don't see a threat in a lack of online privacy. Since the beginning of mass commercial internet use our online usage has been tracked. It is sort of absurd to think what you do online is private. Your computer might in your bedroom, but the internet certainly isn't. You might prefer using sites and apps that guarantee your privacy, but most people simply don't care.
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 12y ago
    "Most people don't see a threat in a lack of online privacy." That they don't see it does not mean there is no threat (to both their privacy and to their lives in general as secondary effects of the global loss of privacy). "It is sort of absurd to think what you do online is private." I find it absurd that you say that. I chat with friends via our own jabber server, for example, via TLS connections - how is it absurd that that is in fact perfectly private? I find neither the expectation of privacy absurd, nor the fact that that is in fact private. "Your computer might in your bedroom, but the internet certainly isn't." I don't get what you are trying to say here. Are you just stating the obvious fact that those people who do transport your data technically can look at it, or are you implying that therefore they have the right, they should have the right, that you should have no expectation of them not looking, ...? Before you answer, please consider: Do you think the same applies to letters? To phone conversations on analog phone lines?
    - xnull 12y ago
      It's worse than 'can technically look at it'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stored_Communications_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stored_Communications_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for_Law_Enforcement_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for_...
- acgourley 12y ago
  I think society is molding Facebook more than Facebook is molding society. I'm not trying to detract from your complaint, but I do feel it's too convenient to point it at Facebook alone when what you're really upset with is the emergent properties of your society at large.
karmacondon 12y ago
Hear hear. If you're worried about the privacy implications of Facebook, don't use it. I don't have a facebook account and I'm still alive. I talk to my friends via text or email or in person. It's possible that I'm missing out on something great, but, whatever. I have other friends that don't use facebook either, and we feel no sense of loss. Thinking about it though, the NSA probably knows as much about me as they would if I had a facebook account. My social network can be put together from texts, phone calls and emails, plus potential access to the content of all of those things. My Google history would fill in any gaps about my interests or moods. I can't think of a lot of things that people put into facebook that wouldn't be reflected somewhere else. Screw it, use facebook. If the government paints a target on you, it doesn't matter what you do. Any privacy concerns may be best addressed through legislation and oversight.
- selmnoo 12y ago
  > Hear hear. If you're worried about the privacy implications of Facebook, don't use it. I don't have a facebook account and I'm still alive. I hear that a lot, and it frustrates me very much, because it fundamentally betrays an understanding of Facebook's true nature. I do not have a FB account, never have, and never will. Yet, my pictures are on there. Because my peers inevitably do use FB and take pictures of social gatherings where I'm at... and I get tagged. I have really no real recourse to this. At this point I actually cannot tell my friends to not take pictures of me... because that is not a reasonable request. A group picture has me in addition to other folks... the other folks may want the picture to be up on FB. So now, if I don't want to be on Facebook, I have to kill my social life.
  - tedunangst 12y ago
    What happens if your friends post a picture of you on flickr? or wordpress? or livejournal? Or is FB the only picture service your friends use?
    - acqq 12y ago
      FB is much worse. When my girlfriend logs in from some device for the first time, FB asks her to write who is on some picture to let her in. So even initially untagged pictures can get tagged for FB and even double/triple checked -- people who know that the wrong answer would keep them out of FB will tell the truth. And everything goes to THE DATABASE. Recently I haven't seen this, but I saw it personally more times.
logn 12y ago
> The HN crowd is composed mostly by hackers. It's natural for us to see where all this might go wrong, It's already gone wrong. People will accept their reality and continually redefine what going wrong means. Read Slashdot circa 2003 and see how the mindset has already shifted.
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 12y ago
"It's excellent at what it does IMHO [...]" Is something that achieves a goal but has tons of externalities excellent at what it does? It's often said that democracy is pretty inefficient due to all the friction in the decision processes. Does that mean that dictators are excellent at what they do? Or are you just ignoring all the negative effects in order to make that statement? "I can say that if Zuckerberg didn't invent Facebook in ~ 2004, it would have been invented by now, [...]" You are implying that the only way to achieve the benefits of facebook is by operating like facebook. How do you know that a different system that provides roughly the same services, but without a central agent that sees everything and can influence everything couldn't have been invented instead? "Do most people care? No. Why? Because they don't see any kind of real threat." So far, I would agree. "It doesn't interfere with their lives." That, though, I think, is probably false. How do you know what opportunities we as a society are missing because of the dominance of facebook? I totally agree that people don't notice it, but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen. It's misleading to think of this as just "things that might happen". The effects are already happening, and not just a little bit.
- atmosx 12y ago
  Sorry but comparing a dictatorship to Facebook is a little off, by any standards. Yes, there were several projects that opted for a decentralized version of Facebook and all of them failed to gain any traction. Why? What are the facts that are already happening related to Facebook that affect the populations?
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 12y ago
    "Sorry but comparing a dictatorship to Facebook is a little off, by any standards." Nope, you are confused about the difference between comparing and equating. It is perfectly reasonable to compare an amoeba to an elephant, and to highlight similarities between the two (for example, both use DNA for genetic information), and the confusion is on your part if you think that therefore an amoeba weighs multiple tons. "Yes, there were several projects that opted for a decentralized version of Facebook and all of them failed to gain any traction. Why?" What do you think? You made the claim, it's not my job to provide the evidence. "What are the facts that are already happening related to Facebook that affect the populations?" Just read this thread for examples? The most obvious example: Some people who value their privacy are excluded from some parts of social life due to network effects/social pressure from facebook, even where the loss of privacy is not an inherent part of the respective activity. That's a loss for these people at the very least, and not unlikely to also be a disadvantage for society as a whole, if such people are effectively removed from the social fabric of society.
7Figures2Commas 12y ago
> I can say that if Zuckerberg didn't invent Facebook in ~ 2004, it would have been invented by now, by someone else because that was what people needed badly to stay connected. What does "stay connected" mean? Is having a larger number of weak connections better than a smaller number of strong connections? Are online connections as meaningful and satisfying as offline connections? I'm always somewhat skeptical about psychology studies for a number of reasons, but the studies that have been conducted on Facebook and online social networking are consistent enough to suggest that your argument warrants deeper analysis. Many of these studies, like this one[1], find that Facebook increases feelings of loneliness and unhappiness. I think you should consider that Facebook and services like it implicate a number of human emotions and desires, many of which are not always a positive influence's in one's life if indulged without limit. That doesn't mean that Facebook is without positive value, but I think its success is a lot more complicated than it "connects you with people that you don't see daily, lets you know about birthdays, events, comments and what not." [1] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2419419/All-lonely-Facebook-friends-Study-shows-social-media-makes-MORE-lonely-unhappy-LESS-sociable.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2419419/All-lonely-F...
- cwyers 12y ago
  People move around because of school and work. I have old friends who live very distantly from me that I haven't seen in over a decade. Using Facebook, I can see pictures they post, see what jobs they're in now, etc. If it weren't for Facebook or something like it, I wouldn't know what these people are up to anymore.
  - coldtea 12y ago
    And thanks to Facebook who don't have to connect in real life with your nearby friends and neighbors anymore too!
- atmosx 12y ago
  The only way for me to stay connected with my peers from the military was via Facebook. Same with many peers from school and soon university. Social networks are there to complement real life connections IMHO not to substitute them.
coldtea 12y ago
>That said, doesn't take anything away from Facebook as a service. Facebook adds extreme value to your social life connects you with people that you don't see daily, lets you know about birthdays, events, comments and what not. Yeah, extreme value. It's a wonder how people got anything done in the dark ages, like the mid-nineties. Not to mention those unfortunate to not even have internet, like Einstein, Onasis, Henry Ford, Tesla, Hemmingway, Churchil, etc etc.

by atmosx 12y ago

selmnoo 12y ago

> Facebook adds extreme value to your social life But you fail to catch a crucial part of this: it adds value to your social life at the expense of so many other things. It may add some social value to your life, but corrupts and molds society at large. I think the tradeoff is absolutely not worth it. I touched on this in a comment below as well. Social networking is a task that should probably be left for a 'Public Benefit Corp.' to do, as Ello seems to be trying to do. I'm hoping and praying that these sorts of companies start to take off, that pay-for-service becomes cool and commonplace again.

rhino369 12y ago
Most people don't see a threat in a lack of online privacy. Since the beginning of mass commercial internet use our online usage has been tracked. It is sort of absurd to think what you do online is private. Your computer might in your bedroom, but the internet certainly isn't. You might prefer using sites and apps that guarantee your privacy, but most people simply don't care.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 12y ago
  "Most people don't see a threat in a lack of online privacy." That they don't see it does not mean there is no threat (to both their privacy and to their lives in general as secondary effects of the global loss of privacy). "It is sort of absurd to think what you do online is private." I find it absurd that you say that. I chat with friends via our own jabber server, for example, via TLS connections - how is it absurd that that is in fact perfectly private? I find neither the expectation of privacy absurd, nor the fact that that is in fact private. "Your computer might in your bedroom, but the internet certainly isn't." I don't get what you are trying to say here. Are you just stating the obvious fact that those people who do transport your data technically can look at it, or are you implying that therefore they have the right, they should have the right, that you should have no expectation of them not looking, ...? Before you answer, please consider: Do you think the same applies to letters? To phone conversations on analog phone lines?
  - xnull 12y ago
    It's worse than 'can technically look at it'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stored_Communications_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stored_Communications_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for_Law_Enforcement_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for_...
acgourley 12y ago
I think society is molding Facebook more than Facebook is molding society. I'm not trying to detract from your complaint, but I do feel it's too convenient to point it at Facebook alone when what you're really upset with is the emergent properties of your society at large.

karmacondon 12y ago

Hear hear. If you're worried about the privacy implications of Facebook, don't use it. I don't have a facebook account and I'm still alive. I talk to my friends via text or email or in person. It's possible that I'm missing out on something great, but, whatever. I have other friends that don't use facebook either, and we feel no sense of loss. Thinking about it though, the NSA probably knows as much about me as they would if I had a facebook account. My social network can be put together from texts, phone calls and emails, plus potential access to the content of all of those things. My Google history would fill in any gaps about my interests or moods. I can't think of a lot of things that people put into facebook that wouldn't be reflected somewhere else. Screw it, use facebook. If the government paints a target on you, it doesn't matter what you do. Any privacy concerns may be best addressed through legislation and oversight.

selmnoo 12y ago
> Hear hear. If you're worried about the privacy implications of Facebook, don't use it. I don't have a facebook account and I'm still alive. I hear that a lot, and it frustrates me very much, because it fundamentally betrays an understanding of Facebook's true nature. I do not have a FB account, never have, and never will. Yet, my pictures are on there. Because my peers inevitably do use FB and take pictures of social gatherings where I'm at... and I get tagged. I have really no real recourse to this. At this point I actually cannot tell my friends to not take pictures of me... because that is not a reasonable request. A group picture has me in addition to other folks... the other folks may want the picture to be up on FB. So now, if I don't want to be on Facebook, I have to kill my social life.
- tedunangst 12y ago
  What happens if your friends post a picture of you on flickr? or wordpress? or livejournal? Or is FB the only picture service your friends use?
  - acqq 12y ago
    FB is much worse. When my girlfriend logs in from some device for the first time, FB asks her to write who is on some picture to let her in. So even initially untagged pictures can get tagged for FB and even double/triple checked -- people who know that the wrong answer would keep them out of FB will tell the truth. And everything goes to THE DATABASE. Recently I haven't seen this, but I saw it personally more times.

logn 12y ago

> The HN crowd is composed mostly by hackers. It's natural for us to see where all this might go wrong, It's already gone wrong. People will accept their reality and continually redefine what going wrong means. Read Slashdot circa 2003 and see how the mindset has already shifted.

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 12y ago

"It's excellent at what it does IMHO [...]" Is something that achieves a goal but has tons of externalities excellent at what it does? It's often said that democracy is pretty inefficient due to all the friction in the decision processes. Does that mean that dictators are excellent at what they do? Or are you just ignoring all the negative effects in order to make that statement? "I can say that if Zuckerberg didn't invent Facebook in ~ 2004, it would have been invented by now, [...]" You are implying that the only way to achieve the benefits of facebook is by operating like facebook. How do you know that a different system that provides roughly the same services, but without a central agent that sees everything and can influence everything couldn't have been invented instead? "Do most people care? No. Why? Because they don't see any kind of real threat." So far, I would agree. "It doesn't interfere with their lives." That, though, I think, is probably false. How do you know what opportunities we as a society are missing because of the dominance of facebook? I totally agree that people don't notice it, but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen. It's misleading to think of this as just "things that might happen". The effects are already happening, and not just a little bit.

atmosx 12y ago
Sorry but comparing a dictatorship to Facebook is a little off, by any standards. Yes, there were several projects that opted for a decentralized version of Facebook and all of them failed to gain any traction. Why? What are the facts that are already happening related to Facebook that affect the populations?
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 12y ago
  "Sorry but comparing a dictatorship to Facebook is a little off, by any standards." Nope, you are confused about the difference between comparing and equating. It is perfectly reasonable to compare an amoeba to an elephant, and to highlight similarities between the two (for example, both use DNA for genetic information), and the confusion is on your part if you think that therefore an amoeba weighs multiple tons. "Yes, there were several projects that opted for a decentralized version of Facebook and all of them failed to gain any traction. Why?" What do you think? You made the claim, it's not my job to provide the evidence. "What are the facts that are already happening related to Facebook that affect the populations?" Just read this thread for examples? The most obvious example: Some people who value their privacy are excluded from some parts of social life due to network effects/social pressure from facebook, even where the loss of privacy is not an inherent part of the respective activity. That's a loss for these people at the very least, and not unlikely to also be a disadvantage for society as a whole, if such people are effectively removed from the social fabric of society.

7Figures2Commas 12y ago

> I can say that if Zuckerberg didn't invent Facebook in ~ 2004, it would have been invented by now, by someone else because that was what people needed badly to stay connected. What does "stay connected" mean? Is having a larger number of weak connections better than a smaller number of strong connections? Are online connections as meaningful and satisfying as offline connections? I'm always somewhat skeptical about psychology studies for a number of reasons, but the studies that have been conducted on Facebook and online social networking are consistent enough to suggest that your argument warrants deeper analysis. Many of these studies, like this one[1], find that Facebook increases feelings of loneliness and unhappiness. I think you should consider that Facebook and services like it implicate a number of human emotions and desires, many of which are not always a positive influence's in one's life if indulged without limit. That doesn't mean that Facebook is without positive value, but I think its success is a lot more complicated than it "connects you with people that you don't see daily, lets you know about birthdays, events, comments and what not." [1] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2419419/All-lonely-Facebook-friends-Study-shows-social-media-makes-MORE-lonely-unhappy-LESS-sociable.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2419419/All-lonely-F...

cwyers 12y ago
People move around because of school and work. I have old friends who live very distantly from me that I haven't seen in over a decade. Using Facebook, I can see pictures they post, see what jobs they're in now, etc. If it weren't for Facebook or something like it, I wouldn't know what these people are up to anymore.
- coldtea 12y ago
  And thanks to Facebook who don't have to connect in real life with your nearby friends and neighbors anymore too!
atmosx 12y ago
The only way for me to stay connected with my peers from the military was via Facebook. Same with many peers from school and soon university. Social networks are there to complement real life connections IMHO not to substitute them.

coldtea 12y ago

>That said, doesn't take anything away from Facebook as a service. Facebook adds extreme value to your social life connects you with people that you don't see daily, lets you know about birthdays, events, comments and what not. Yeah, extreme value. It's a wonder how people got anything done in the dark ages, like the mid-nineties. Not to mention those unfortunate to not even have internet, like Einstein, Onasis, Henry Ford, Tesla, Hemmingway, Churchil, etc etc.