21 ms·

Reasons not to use Facebook

605 points by jestinjoy1 12y ago

Frondo 12y ago
My problem with essays like this is that they don't address the more critical underlying point: most people don't recognize privacy as a human right, and most people don't realize why privacy is important and worth protecting. To most people, "if you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide" sounds reasonable. That's the deeper problem at work here. With more people on board to why privacy matters, articles like this will be more of an "oh, yeah!" instead of a "so what?" kind of thing.
- tdmule 12y ago
  I disagree, I think a great many people are willing to trade some privacy for convenience and contact. Even if we take privacy as great thing, isn't staying in touch and making connections with some people who would otherwise slip away also a great thing? For example, a childhood friend messaged me recently on Facebook informing me of his upcoming wedding. Getting his message and engaging an old friend in a conversation is a compelling (at least to me) trade for some privacy.
  - Frondo 12y ago
    I don't think we actually disagree. Valuing and protecting one's right to privacy, while still being visible to the public, are compatible issues; a person can disclose some information (I'm Frondo, I live at the North Pole, Santa is my friend) while retaining other information for friends/loved ones/no one else/not online. In my other online life, I do put myself out there quite a bit, but the information I put out is of my choosing. I have been contacted by old friends from time to time, and it delights me. But I'm also not on any of the social networks that do image tagging, so e.g. there's no automated system linking my image to a profile among them. (As far as I know, facebook won't go so far as to tag non-users with non-facebook urls...) Privacy ought to work like other rights that we don't necessarily exercise at every opportunity; sometimes I bite my tongue even though I could speak freely, sometimes I stay home even though I could associate freely, sometimes I post information about myself even though I could keep it hidden away.
  - Puts 12y ago
    Why would you have to choose between privacy and convenience? You can have both. The idea that they contradict each other is just spin from companies like Facebook. If I were to follow you with a bullhorn shouting messages at you, it probably wouldn't be considered illegal, but It would be extremely rude. And the same thing with these internet companies. Just because they can track and follow you, pushing messages down your troth, does not mean they have to, because it may be legal, but it's simply rude. As a society we've lost the moral compass on the web, or rather we've never had one. Internet is like a third world corrupt country where you either take advantage of others your self or you are being abused. Now we have to start building a climate were you don't feel like you're missing out by treating your customers fair and with respect.
  - nly 12y ago
    You've built a strawman. You can have both privacy and keep contact with lost friends and loved ones.
- tome 12y ago
  > To most people, "if you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide" sounds reasonable. So what's the correct position, and why?
  - Frondo 12y ago
    "Whether you've done anything wrong, what you disclose is up to you." It is the correct position because privacy is a human right, just like the right to free speech or the right to a fair trial.
  - jon_black 12y ago
    There are many source online that refute the "nothing to hide" argument, and they can go into quite some details. Suffice it to say, you have a right to privacy. If you wish for something to stay private (for example, to protect yourself from harm) you have that right. Whilst in most free societies it's seldom required, there may come a time when tyranny takes over. If you've already given up your right to privacy, you'll find few protections left. History has many example of tyrants that, given the data mining capabilities of today, would have probably caused even more harm and suffering.
  - bottled_poe 12y ago
    Right and wrong are subjective terms, plus perceptions of those terms will change.
  - skwosh 12y ago
    For me the correct position is to recognise that the law isn't fixed and absolute, but dynamic (as interpreted through the courts) and evolving. Without privacy (or with pervasive surveillance), we might never have achieved the critical mass required to overturn historical legislation regarding blasphemy, homosexuality, drug use, etc. In other words, privacy provides the necessary sand-box for the evolution of law.
  - crdoconnor 12y ago
    There will always be times when the moral and just thing to do is to break the law. Without privacy, you are not free to break those laws. If you're happy living under a police state in meek compliance then you have nothing to hide. If you'd turn over Anne Frank to the authorities in a heartbeat then you have nothing to hide. If you ever plan on doing the right thing by disobeying the authorities, at any point in the future, then you need privacy now. Later might be too late.
- pdkl95 12y ago
  I suspect one of the reasons this "done nothing wrong" fallacy persists so well these days is how "privacy" has come to replace the word "freedom". Using "privacy" tends to imply some amount of shame, as if the you didn't (or shouldn't) have the freedom to do that act in the first place. The reason why people see that they have "nothing to hid", is that they have already self-censored themselves away from doing any supposedly-shameful activity. I've always liked a line from KMFDM's song "terror"[2] "They can't use our shame against us" Until people learn this lesson, shame will continue to be used as a threat, and people will continue to see the "logic" in the "nothing to hide" argument. [1] http://www.kmfdm.net/lyrics/terror.htm http://www.kmfdm.net/lyrics/terror.htm ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVhu3pn1Ou0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVhu3pn1Ou0 )
  - lazaroclapp 12y ago
    Privacy and freedom are different concepts, though. A world in which the government can monitor all of your phone calls, but it not allowed by law to stop them or prosecute you over their contents still preserves freedom very strongly, without any privacy (assuming the law constraining the government is enforceable, and extra judicial or spurious prosecutions are not a tool commonly available to the state). A world in which technology (or lack thereof) makes wiretapping impossible, gives a lot of privacy to people, but if you can still be arrested because of distributing a leaflet, it provides little freedom. Thing is, even in a world where freedom of expression were inviolable (and it isn't quite this world, so in reality, privacy helps support freedom of expression), we'd still want privacy to be a human right. Animals don't behave the same when they know they are always being watched. Pervasive surveillance inhibits thought, breeds abuse and unnecessarily limits human behavior. Also, in the end, we have the right to have things to hide. We have the right to say and do things we are ashamed of, or aren't sure are right, or we are not ready to defend under scrutiny of society at large. We have the right to share thoughts with others that we are not ready to defend from strangers, even if the law prevents such strangers from hurting us because our thoughts. Society needs to be able to discuss heresy, and revolution, and treason, because what for one generation is treason and heresy, for the next might be justice and freedom. But it also needs to be able to have some of those discussions in dark, private places, because a lot of great thoughts will only ever bloom in the dark. Even if mass surveillance worked (it doesn't), even if abuse could be curtailed (it can't), even if it gave us a world without crime (it won't), the price to pay would be a world where our thoughts are constrained by the fear of other's seeing them in their underdeveloped raw form.
- colmvp 12y ago
  > To most people, "if you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide" sounds reasonable. I know it's impossible, but I really recommend people who have that opinion to watch the TED talk by journalist Glenn Greenwald. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcSlowAhvUk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcSlowAhvUk
  - g_delgado14 12y ago
    I'd like to add to this by saying that Ed Snowden's documentary, Citizen Four, is a great and informative film.
- Qantourisc 12y ago
  Maybe I toughed of a simple reply for this phrase ? "And who is to say what is wrong ? And will it stay that way ?" Opinions ?
- anigbrowl 12y ago
  ~400 million people in EU disagree with you; that's one jurisdiction where privacy is a human right, and this is not just some abstract concept but the basis of legislation you can invoke to force companies to cough up the data they have on you and/or demand it be scrubbed from their databases, even if you originally shared it voluntarily.
  - tomp 12y ago
    No we don't. I personally think that EU's approach to privacy, especially when it comes to the internet (e.g. "right to be forgotten", "cookie law"), is completely fucked up. While EU's dysfunctional governing game (i.e. multiple countries with immensely different cultures, goals, histories and levels of development trying to act in unison) explains such things as the tax loopholes, no freedom of speech and the Euro, even this can't explain the mistakes in internet laws. Furthermore, history will not be on EU's side in this regard. Right to be forgotten and restrictive data storing laws will have to be revoked eventually (when we have robots - "Remind me what I was talking about on that dinner during Mauritius vacations!" "I'm sorry Jessica, that was more than 3 years ago, I don't remember."). Euro won't survive without a fiscal union / federation (like the US). Even the restrictions of data export don't help us much - sure, the companies legally can't export data to the US, but don't worry, GCHQ will!
  - msh 12y ago
    Well a lot of people in the eu, maybe even most, still buy into the "if you have nothing to hide" argument. That's at least my personal experience in Scandinavia and the UK, might be different in other countries.
- fit2rule 12y ago
  The corollary to this ridiculous argument: "if you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide" .. is this: If you've done something *right*, you will be the target of those you offend. When "right" can be defined variously as any one of: a) done something to reduce the effect of the criminal military-industrial complex on society, b) exposed corruption in the ruling elite, c) fought stringently for the rights of minorities who have been oppressed, d) fought valiantly to expose ecological and economic criminality on the part of the industrial elite, &etc. Just because they say its for fighting criminals doesn't mean that it won't be used to fight revolutionaries and upstarts who mean to bring justice to a destitute world. Every single technology under the sun can be used for good, or evil purposes - the only thing that makes the difference is the intention behind those who wield the technology. And as of right now, there is no way to monitor/control/adjust the intentions of the super-surveillance state: they, real people behind the masks, simply have too many secret powers.
- evincarofautumn 12y ago
  In the U.S., we aren’t even granted an explicit right to privacy. The closest we’ve gotten to a ruling on the matter is that time William O. Douglas wrote “…specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance. […] Various guarantees create zones of privacy.”
PebblesHD 12y ago
At this point in the evolution in technology, I find that Stallman is increasingly irrelevant when his commentary is basically stating every basic point of the site and then saying its bad. Don't want to use your real name? Don't join a site where the goal is to publicly connect with people you know. Don't want your privacy violated, post only what you feel comfortable with. With every new step in the advance of technology and the Internet of things, services such as, but not necessarily including Facebook will have access to an ever expanding array of information about our lives. This information can be used for good as well as bad, but this doesn't mean we shouldn't persue it.
- logn 12y ago
  Almost none of his complaints strike at essential features of a social network. Real names, censorship, tracking un-submitted text, etc are all just evil and not part of any functionality users care about.
  - cloakandswagger 12y ago
    Being able to search and find people by their real name is actually a feature I value very highly in a social network.
    - walterbell 12y ago
      This can be an optional disclosure made by people who wish to be found by their real name.
    - Sanddancer 12y ago
      Being able to search and find people by the names they actually use on a day to day basis is actually a feature I value very highly in a social network. Being able to hide from abusive people in one's past is actually a feature I value very highly in a social network. I know a number of people -- transpeople, people from other countries, people who just don't like their given name -- who don't use their "real" name in "real" life. Why should facebook require one's legal name when no in person congregation requires you to wear a name badge that identifies you with a name you may not be comfortable with?
cddotdotslash 12y ago
Yes, Facebook tracks you and complies with government requests in the countries it operates in. Is anything new or is the author just spreading FUD?
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
  - gaadd33 12y ago
    man ls, on my various servers, doesn't have an AUTHOR section, just HISTORY which says: An ls command appeared in Version 1 AT&T UNIX.
    - __david__ 12y ago
      You're probably on a Mac, which comes from the BSD heritage. Try "man diff".
      - tedunangst 12y ago
        HISTORY A diff command appeared in Version 6 AT&T UNIX.
        __david__ 12y ago
        Which Mac OS version comes with BSD diff?
        tedunangst 12y ago
        OpenBSD, so, uh, not a Mac. But you asked to try it. :)
        tbirdz 12y ago
        C'mon Ted, you knew what he meant, there's no reason to be that snarky. For anyone who does not know, __david__ is most likely referring to the GNU coreutils and GNU diffutils, which do indeed credit Richard Stallman in the AUTHOR section, not any BSD, AT&T or other versions of those utilities.
Yhippa 12y ago
Would he be better off creating a minimal verified profile to de-legitimize other fake profiles? I know he would never do that but it's an interesting thing to consider in today's world. Let's say you're not averse to social media/networking. Do you go ahead and claim your name so that someone with a list of compromised or usernames don't grab it before you do?
- kashkhan 12y ago
  wouldn't it be easy for facebook to deactivate the current fake account?
gaadd33 12y ago
> Algorithmic filtering can affect history, not just hide history. Facebook's filtering algorithm suppressed news about the thug riot in Ferguson until after it became national news. Calling all of the protestors in Ferguson "thugs" seems pretty off base. I'm surprised he characterized everyone there like that when his previous few points seemed to be in favor of the ability to protest the government. I guess he only feels that way when it's not in the US? It's interesting he drew that conclusion from the article he links to, given that they mention prior to things such as twitter it would only be characterized on the news as a place to avoid due to "looters, thugs, troublemakers" in a minor segment.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- cloakandswagger 12y ago
  I didn't interpret it that way. There was a large riot that happened in Ferguson and I'd say it's fair to characterize looters and vandals as "thugs".
- logn 12y ago
  I'd like to give him the benefit of the doubt in that the link where he writes "thug" is to an article that has this line: "We" hear it only through official statements, often dismissing local concerns, painting them as looters, thugs, troublemakers. So I don't think he was speaking from his point of view but from how it might have been presented to a common person.
- tree_of_item 12y ago
  You misunderstood, he's calling the cops thugs, not the protestors. If you read the rest of his website you will see that he refers to police as "thugs" regularly: > US citizens: call on Obama to curb militarization of thugs. > Everyone, call on Pasco to fire and prosecute the killer thugs > "Flood Wall Street" protesters have been acquitted of charges; the thugs' order for them to disperse was ruled unconstitutional. > It is good that they were acquitted, but there must be some penalty for thugs that violate protesters' rights. and so on.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
GigabyteCoin 12y ago
A friend of mine was turned off of a potentially new employee the other day because the candidate exclaimed that they recognized a customer from their instagram profile and that they followed it, loved it, etc. The customer was obviously embarrased, exclaimed that he had not used instagram in over a year, and promptly left the store. This left an uneasy feeling in my friend (the store owner). Which confused me to be honest. What did that customer expect when they placed their picture and basically entire lives on a public website with geotagged images? The new employee was told to be talkative with all clients as they worked in customer service, and so they attempted to strike up a conversation or at least a similar interest in the customer's publicly viewable leisure activities. That was how the candidate discovered him on instagram in the first place by the way. It was because he only posted pictures of the local area.
- atmosx 12y ago
  Oh men. Working with people is extremely complicated, yet very educative if have the right mindset. That was an accident IMHO, better not judge by one case scenario. I know a lots of guys and girls, especially youngsters who would love to hear about their facebook/twitter/instagram profiles.
- anigbrowl 12y ago
  Yeah, kind of a dubious move on your friend's part - how was the potential employee supposed to guess that the customer would feel embarrassed, in a bad way (as opposed to 'oh that picture was so embarrassing, haha')? Seems to me as it does you that it's the customer's reponsibility to own whatever s/he posts publicly. I guess some people think that their followers on social media must all be personal acquaintances/relatives and are then weirded out to discover that some complete strangers may take an interest in them, but that's their problem Obviously there are exceptions to this, it wouldn't be cool to start an argument with someone over old Twitter comments or to say 'oh hey, I say you on the revenge porn subreddit.' It's sad that I even need to delineate such boundaries, but there you go.
- Aoyagi 12y ago
  I believe a lot of people think Internet is an entirely different dimension. "What happens on the Internet stays on the Internet" or something.
abdias 12y ago
Considering that Zuckerberg is a great admire of China and apparently socialism[0], it doesn't come to me as a huge surprise that these "ethics" are guidelines for Facebook. “I’ve also bought copies of this book for my colleagues,” Zuckerberg was quoted as saying by a Chinese news website. “I want them to understand socialism with Chinese characteristics.” [0]: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/12/08/why-does-mark-zuckerberg-want-facebook-employees-to-read-the-chinese-presidents-book/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/12/08...
- jacobolus 12y ago
  I’m no fan of Zuckerberg or the CCP, but that’s ridiculous. Hosting a Chinese official at the Facebook office and telling a Chinese news site that he gave some copies of the Chinese president’s new book to his colleagues isn’t any kind of useful evidence about Zuckerberg’s personal political beliefs or Facebook’s governing principles.
  - abdias 12y ago
    It wasn't presented as evidence for any claim. "Apparently" isn't a claim. The correlations between the ideology and what happens with Facebook is synonymous though, so it's neither far fetched. But I guess you need to have some historic understanding to see that (and that's a little too broad to present in a comment field). (edit: for admin: I up-voted this post and got an "user mismatch" error as response page - perhaps something the devs want to look into).
    - scintill76 12y ago
      By some definitions, "apparently" does soften your statement, but you are still essentially claiming "Zuckerberg is a great admirer of China and socialism" with a citation that doesn't really support that. Going only by your quote, he could just be saying, "I think it will be valuable to my business for my employees to understand Chinese socialism." By other definitions, "apparently" strengthens your claim to an "obvious" statement of truth, so maybe people are reacting strongly because they read it that way.
paulsecwhatt 12y ago
I honestly don't understand why people value Stallman's opinions on these matters so highly. I completely disagree with him on essentially everything he writes about these topics. Granted, he's an incredible programmer who contributed immensely to the development of our modern operating systems and the tools we use, and people here love to bring that up ("what - you DON'T KNOW WHO STALLMAN IS? SHAME? HOW DARE YOU CRITICISE HIM?") Does this make his opinion on Facebook or privacy or freedom any more correct or valid? No. Just like I wouldn't listen to Usain Bolt if he were trying to teach me the biological mechanisms behind doping, I can't see why Stallman's opinion is considered so correct in these matters. IMO his ramblings about personal liberties and freedom being infringed by everything under the sun from Amazon to Google to Facebook are oversimplified and childish. The world isn't black and white and he obviously fails to understand the entire point behind many of these companies. When Facebook makes you use a real name it's not because theres some "Mr. Evil" at the top level plotting to steal your freedom, it's because it leads to a better working social network. Just his description of AirBnB is ridiculous: "Airbnb requires you to run nonfree software (an app, or Javascript). It puts you in a data base easily available to Big Brother (just like a hotel)." That's an immensely stupid argument, because any _viable_ company that wants to provide a service that a consumer other than Stallman himself will use will "infringe" on those two idiotic requirements. TL;DR. Just because he did something amazing in one field/area, doesn't mean he is not spewing complete BS. For a similar example, see: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/01/dna-james-watson-scientist-selling-nobel-prize-medal http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/01/dna-jam...
- hobs 12y ago
  There is literally 100 different links on that page, and you disagree with all of them? Stallman is an ideologue 100%, but if I had to choose Facebook or Stallman, I know which side I am on. (and I dont produce OSS or follow their belief system) Facebook wants a real name because it makes them money more readily when they can identify you more easily and determine your value, not whatever "a better social network" means. Just because Usain Bolt may not have a degree in biology, if he is also saying factual things, that does not make him wrong.
  - 12y ago
esfandia 12y ago
Here's one thing I like about Facebook: it has stopped the flood of chain-emails I used to receive from random "friends". They post that stuff on Facebook now instead. It's the perfect honeypot.
- killerpopiller 12y ago
  why not make a list of good things FB has done for you and compare? - less chain mails -
  - notfoss 12y ago
    - Shadow profile (So that I don't have to waste energy creating one) -
jfoster 12y ago
I view my decision to use Facebook as a transaction. Sure, I lose some "privacy", but I also get a lot of value in return. I use quotes around "privacy" because I'm not sure I understand it the same way that Facebook critics do. When I'm using a changeroom, I expect privacy. When I take on a pseudonym and don't identify myself by name, I expect privacy. When I'm knowingly uploading photos that I am happy for the world to see, I don't have much of an expectation of privacy, and without an expectation of privacy I'm not sure I have any privacy to lose. That said, I don't think about this too much, so would love to hear well-reasoned arguments against my point of view on that.
- Dramatize 12y ago
  I agree. I don't understand what the issue is. I know that anything I add to Facebook will be used to sell advertising to me(I use AdBlock). The best feature of Facebook is groups. It's the easiest way to keep up to date with my gym group, motorcycle group etc.
  - leni536 12y ago
    What was wrong with mailing lists? > It's the easiest way to keep up to date with my gym group, motorcycle group etc. Of course it is the easiest if they use a Facebook group in the first place. They could use a mailing list (or Google group) and you could keep track of it with any mail service (even your own) of choice.
    - FanaHOVA 12y ago
      Mailing list? What year is it? Barely anyone outside of the tech world still uses emails regularly.
      - leni536 12y ago
        > What year is it? Is this supposed to be an argument? > Barely anyone outside of the tech world still uses emails regularly. It's not true according to my experience.
pooogie 12y ago
His opinion may seem ridiculous to many here, but the following has happened quite a few times before: 1. Stallman shares radical opinion 2. He's ridiculed for his outlandish claims 3. Some news breaks or things happen gradually 4. Now people say 'Stallman called it' or realize he was right all along
- peteretep 12y ago
  Some examples, please
  - pooogie 12y ago
    Sorry I'm on mobile so I can give one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Right_to_Read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Right_to_Read
    - motbob 12y ago
      We are still far away from this short story reflecting reality. Do you have a better example?
      - kuschku 12y ago
        https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9151263 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9151263
      - kuschku 12y ago
        Another great example would be the example of stallman "In the future, debuggers will be illegal to use" and a recent court case where a person was sent to jail for accessing a website with a spoofed user agent using wget.
        peteretep 12y ago
        If you're talking about weev, I can not think of a more disingenuous way of describing what he was sent to jail for. Otherwise, I can't find what you're talking about with a simple search. I am completely unsure how you went from a prediction that hasn't come true to an unrelated computer crime.
revicon 12y ago
While I agree w/ some of the points Stallman makes, essays like this that rely on hyperbole to rile up readers turn me off and detract from the issues the author is trying to bring attention to. One example: Stallman states "Facebook's mobile app snoops on SMS messages" and links to this article: http://www.efytimes.com/e1/fullnews.asp?edid=128859 http://www.efytimes.com/e1/fullnews.asp?edid=128859 "... during installation, the Facebook mobile app for Android platform seeks certain 'permissions' with the latest update going a step ahead in asking users to allow the app 'Read your text messages (SMS or MMS)'." So during installation (on android), Facebook is asking permission to access SMS, which you can choose to enable or not. This is a far cry from his statement that "Facebook's mobile app snoops on SMS messages." There are good points in this essay, but the amount of alarmism mixed in makes it much harder to sift through.
- kragen 12y ago
  It is not correct to say that you can choose to enable this permission or not; or, rather, it is true only in a narrow technical sense — if you choose not to enable this permission, standard Android will refuse to install the Facebook app. And what legitimate reason could Facebook possibly have to request that permission in the first place? There may be some examples of hyperbole in that article, but the example you chose is not one of them.
  - tedunangst 12y ago
    Phone number verification? I have an iPhone, which doesn't ever let apps read text messages, which actually would be nice sometimes when my banking app would like to verify it's running on my phone, as opposed to somebody else's phone.
    - darklajid 12y ago
      Why would Facebook need to verify a phone number? It's a social network, used for jokes, farmville and whatnot. Most people I know that are on FB don't even use their 'real' name. IF someone provides a telephone number in his account details, FB can treat it like a string. I understand why FB would like to 'verify a number', but why should we allow that to happen? Why is this a valid reason to ask for permissions on my phone?
beartime 12y ago
this guy sounds like a sad, lonely douche
ramigb 12y ago
From an avid FB user who spent three hours a day to someone who has his account deactivated for more than a month, that is how much convinced i am that FB is nothing but utter garbage and i just had enough with it.
- zo1 12y ago
  I've also noticed a stark reduction in content from friends. Perhaps we're all growing up and posting less, perhaps Facebook's algorithms are hiding all their posts for some arbitrary reason, I don't know. All I know, is that if it weren't for the few vocal friends and pages that keep things mildly interesting, I would have no reason to be on Facebook at all.
- timdaub 12y ago
  Complete agree, deactivated also about a month ago or so. The thing is, once you ask everyone you truly want to be in touch with for their phone number, "staying connected" isn't that hard anymore. Also interesting: my friends tend to never talk about their online-facebook experience ever! I never noticed it, but there is literally no talk about their facebook-usage in real-life, while all of them still use it multiple hours a day.
zachrose 12y ago
I like: https://stallman.org/common/stallman.css https://stallman.org/common/stallman.css
- GhotiFish 12y ago
  why?
erodingvar 12y ago
> if you talk about your friends in Facebook, you're ratting on them This statement reveals the paranoid perspective behind this publication. While there are many valid reasons why some people may not want to use Facebook, I think it's as interesting to wonder reasons why people would be so opposed to everyone using it. I think had Stallman been less weird, he may feel differently about Facebook. For someone like him, any personal details visible to others is likely to result in harm to him. When you don't fit, everything hurts, and it's easy to feel like all those institutions are evil. But that's just you Richard. For most people, Facebook isn't much of a threat.
- codesuela 12y ago
  So what are you saying? Its OK to hurt people who don't fit in?
jdkanani 12y ago
> We call them "useds" rather than "users" because Facebook is using them, not vice versa. This line summarizes it all up.
junto 12y ago
Facebook is like a dentist. The benefit is that you get to spy on old friends who aren't really friends anymore, but you have to remember that a) the dentist is going to cause you pain, and b) he's going to invoice for for the pleasure of doing so. The difference is that the dentist has your best interests at heart, whilst Facebook has its own best interests as its primary focus, its customers secondary, and hint hint - you aren't the customer.
- blawa 12y ago
  Thank you, I was fearing I'll see an ad-hominem argument criticizing Stallman and thereby nullifying the arguments while actually not saying anything against the arguments. Your points are right, and personally, I don't see a reason to follow people who're not friends anymore
  - junto 12y ago
    My biggest problem with Facebook is that my contact details are uploaded to Facebook by my "friends" without my permission. I choose not to he Facebook user but people I know are persistently sharing my contact details with them and I assume even my contact details photo which they can later match using facial recognition to other photos uploaded by friends without my permission.
TheSpiceIsLife 12y ago
As a complimentary perspective: For those who haven't seen it, I think Slavoj Žižek and Paul Holdengräber on "Surveillance and whistleblowers" is worth a watch. The part about surveillance starts at 21:14 so this link will take you there https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIPjmmmh_os#t=21m14s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIPjmmmh_os#t=21m14s Žižek: "The most dangerous unfreedom is the unfreedom you don't even experience, as such. If some of you are feminists ... every good feminist will tell you the first step of feminism is just to realise your situation of oppression... We need something similar here. That's the first point. The second point ... I'm a little bit sceptic about this paranoia 'ooh we are totally controlled' and so on and so on, I think we shouldn't take this too seriously. And this doesn't make the situation any easier if anything it makes it more... it [paranoia] is justified, but we should be aware, again we go in to metaphorics again the NSA the Big Eye knows everything, again the mega-machinery is extremely stupid, they don't know what they know. Do you remember, this is a very superficial anecdote ... a guy in LA was Googling the ways to kill your wife something like that, a couple days afterward the FBI brutally entered his house arrested him blah blah blah. Why? Because Google reported this to FBI. But do you know what was the result, this guy was a was one of the you know all the [TV] series CIS / police investigation, we was simply writing a scenario and wanted to check you know, and you have this again and again or form China they told me a wonderful example of this stupidity a guy just before Tiananmen [Square] anniversary a guy was an English professor in Beijing was flirting with a lady in London, and since they were both educated he used a wonderful quote from Shakespeare, because you know in Elizabethan England the word "protest" meant also "I publicly declare" and he quoted to her "I protest my love to you" chop-chop and the conversation was cut short because the word "protest" was prohibited because of associations with Tiananmen, what I find so ridiculous is that if the guy were to be extremely vulgar and told the lady something like "I will fuck your brain out" everything would be okay, you quote Shakespeare... You know computers just give you immense amounts of data and you can play with it." Errors and omissions intentional as I'm directly transcribing Žižek talking. He then goes on to relate an experience as a young adult in Slovenia meeting with his friends and upon parting, knowing everything was recorded, they didn't hind anything and at the end of the conversation they would say something like "Mother baked a good apple pie" and then later found out this really confused the people monitoring their conversations.
Veedrac 12y ago
Since this seems to just be a braindump, I might as well add Veritasium's comments on the matter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9ZqXlHl65g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9ZqXlHl65g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag I found them pretty interesting listening from a content-distribution and -consumption side of things, rather than from a social-network perspective.
Aoyagi 12y ago
The worst thing about Facebook I personally see is the peer (or even professional) pressure to have an account there and be active. And them doing what all (American?) megacorps do: buying small companies, stripping them of assets, absorbing them and forgetting them. Then again, some people build start-ups for this very reason, don't they.
daminimal 12y ago
With 112 mentions of Facebook I'd say this is a great ad.
SeanDav 12y ago
There seems to have been a sea change in opinion of many HN posters here, especially among the more recent visitors to HN. A couple of years ago Facebook was considered by many here to be an invasion of privacy and just not worth the effort. That general opinion seems to have changed for some. A lot of newer posters seem to be of the opinion that lack of privacy is a cost worth paying for convenience and will apologize for, defend and even support companies like FB that blatantly invade privacy.
- u23KDd23 12y ago
  Facebook allowed a research project to experiment on people's emotions by modifying the content displayed on their news feed. Human experimentation in doing things like this is against all ethical principles important in science. If they are willing to commit such a blatant violation of ethics what makes you think they aren't participating in something far worse? I commend Stallman for sharing his opinions on facebook, a modern day societal cancer.
  - kretor 12y ago
    Universities have a lot of "ethical" requirements for experiments, that are, in a large part, over the top. We should get rid of most of those ethical requirements at universities, rather than expand them to Facebook.
- whybroke 12y ago
  Astroturf of course, notice the conversations around the FCC ruling. How to deal with it is an interesting and I'd say very important problem to community viability. On the upside it's certainly complimentary to the perceived influence of HN.
- karmacondon 12y ago
  Facebook doesn't invade anyone's privacy. They aren't going into your house and rifling through your things. People post things on facebook because they want other people to see them. If you don't want to do that, then don't use facebook. You can't stop other people from talking about you, or from taking pictures of you or relating stories that involve you. That's always been a part of social life. If you consider that to be an invasion of your privacy, then leave society and live as a hermit. It probably won't be fun, but it will be very private. I know several people who don't use facebook, myself included, because they just aren't interested in the service that it provides. Philosophical concerns about the nature of privacy don't really factor into it. The social fashions about what's cool and what isn't cool will change with the winds. It isn't worth paying attention to. If facebook or any other social software is valuable to you, then good, use it. If not, no sense complaining about what other people decide to do with their time.
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pain 12y ago
Reasons to support free http://www.getaether.net http://www.getaether.net and https://www.matrix.org https://www.matrix.org software. Desperate developers needing research time and money for supporting and advancing federatable networks.
mark_l_watson 12y ago
Another good article by Richard Stallman - his ideas keep gaining even more relevance for me. I do use Facebook to plug my books and to hopefully drive traffic to my blog articles, but I have been considering cancelling my account. I have similar issues with Google, but with Google I get much more value: using G+ to promote my own web properties, and generally really useful services. That said, I have switched to using my GMail address as a secondary email that I don't often check, and having the people most important to me use my own email address. Also, I give this advice all the time: choose one web browser like Chrome for use just with social media (Google, Facebook, and Twitter web properties) and another web browser for everything else.
- ericfontaine 12y ago
  > I do use Facebook to plug my books and to hopefully drive traffic to my blog articles The trick is configuring your blog to autopost to facebook, for which I use https://wordpress.org/plugins/add-link-to-facebook/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/add-link-to-facebook/ which also automatically grabs likes and comments from the facebook post and adds them to the wordpress comments database. Maybe this is acknowledging facebook's value, but at least I don't have to personally interact with facebook, nor are visitors to my blog tracked by facebook's javascript.
kartikkumar 12y ago
Although I can get the rationale of most things he says, I’m not sure that he’s always offering sane alternative options: > Don't be tracked — pay cash. I’m wondering how he imagines this would pan out. Is RMS also against banking, since banks mine your data too. Does he suggest stuffing your mattress full of cash? (serious question). In the US, where credit ratings are essential to be able to make any sizeable/significant purchases (car, house etc.), I’m wondering what he suggests as being the alternative. Or is he just supposed to reject all purchases that aren’t feasible with cash? I’m curious if he’s opposed to Bitcoin too. I’m not familiar enough with his writings to discern whether he’s simply a dissenter or also someone that has a view towards sane, realistic solutions.
- notthemessiah 12y ago
  > I’m curious if he’s opposed to Bitcoin too. He likes the privacy aspect of it, but has concerns with how it enables tax-evasion, and lack of monetary policy, hence why TALER (Taxable Anonymous Libre Electronic Reserves) is a GNU project: https://gnunet.org/taler2014ghm https://gnunet.org/taler2014ghm
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mtarnovan 12y ago
First I thought it was a typo, but it can't be, there are too many occurrences - looks like Stallman is intentionally referring to FB users as 'useds': > Facebook carefully studies all the text that its useds type in and then don't submit. > Facebook, as an "experiment", collected the text its useds started to enter as status updates and ultimately did not send.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  I often have multiple really dumb typos in my text when I'm using an unfamiliar keyboard and they're remarkably 'internally consistent'.
  - mtarnovan 12y ago
    This is not a typo, see jdkanani's comment.
- jdkanani 12y ago
  At the end, he wrote "We call them "useds" rather than "users" because Facebook is using them, not vice versa."
EGreg 12y ago
Why is "user" replaced with "used" everywhere? It isn't a typo, it's Stallman's NLP-style punning?
- dredmorbius 12y ago
  See the footnote in the article (also noted multiple times above): "We call them "useds" rather than "users" because Facebook is using them, not vice versa."
nerdy 12y ago
RMS is a strange duality. On the one hand he's a freedom advocate and has put considerable effort forward to make our world a better place; it's hard to not have a great deal of respect for him. On the other hand he's brilliant but quite frankly a lunatic, benign freedom extremist... and I don't even have a Facebook account! I can only imagine how he might come off to people who're hardcore social media consumers.
smutticus 12y ago
The #1 reason not to use FB is you cannot bitch about FB. I have little patience or sympathy for people who use FB and constantly complain about it. They should stop using it. I don't use FB, which means I have little reason to bitch about it, and if I do want to bitch about it I don't sound like a hypocrit.
Create 12y ago
“As your client knows, Mr. Zuckerberg goes to great lengths to protect the privacy of his personal life.” Which adds a wrinkle: Some people requiring nondisclosure are the very ones who have built an industry on its opposite, the disclosure of personal information.
whowhat 12y ago
Why did this topic fall to the second page on HN so quickly, despite its relatively high upvotes, activity, and recency?
hobarrera 12y ago
I've never understood why people insist on enumerating reasons why not to use facebook. There's already a lack of reasons to use it (unless you count funny games and cat pictures), shouldn't that be enough in itself?
vohof 12y ago
People tend to overthink this. The only reason alot of people use facebook is because that's where all their friends are.
AnonJ 12y ago
Stallman is becoming quite increasingly peculiar. Not really interested in his talks. His software was great but his ideology (and generally that of FSF) is probably a kind of out of touch with the reality.
patrickdavey 12y ago
If you haven't watched it yet, I can highly recommend the documentary 'citizenfour', which is about the meetings between Snowden and Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald and The Guardian intelligence reporter Ewen MacAskill. Free to watch here: https://thoughtmaybe.com/citizenfour/ https://thoughtmaybe.com/citizenfour/

605 points by jestinjoy1 12y ago

My problem with essays like this is that they don't address the more critical underlying point: most people don't recognize privacy as a human right, and most people don't realize why privacy is important and worth protecting. To most people, "if you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide" sounds reasonable. That's the deeper problem at work here. With more people on board to why privacy matters, articles like this will be more of an "oh, yeah!" instead of a "so what?" kind of thing.

tdmule 12y ago
I disagree, I think a great many people are willing to trade some privacy for convenience and contact. Even if we take privacy as great thing, isn't staying in touch and making connections with some people who would otherwise slip away also a great thing? For example, a childhood friend messaged me recently on Facebook informing me of his upcoming wedding. Getting his message and engaging an old friend in a conversation is a compelling (at least to me) trade for some privacy.
- Frondo 12y ago
  I don't think we actually disagree. Valuing and protecting one's right to privacy, while still being visible to the public, are compatible issues; a person can disclose some information (I'm Frondo, I live at the North Pole, Santa is my friend) while retaining other information for friends/loved ones/no one else/not online. In my other online life, I do put myself out there quite a bit, but the information I put out is of my choosing. I have been contacted by old friends from time to time, and it delights me. But I'm also not on any of the social networks that do image tagging, so e.g. there's no automated system linking my image to a profile among them. (As far as I know, facebook won't go so far as to tag non-users with non-facebook urls...) Privacy ought to work like other rights that we don't necessarily exercise at every opportunity; sometimes I bite my tongue even though I could speak freely, sometimes I stay home even though I could associate freely, sometimes I post information about myself even though I could keep it hidden away.
- Puts 12y ago
  Why would you have to choose between privacy and convenience? You can have both. The idea that they contradict each other is just spin from companies like Facebook. If I were to follow you with a bullhorn shouting messages at you, it probably wouldn't be considered illegal, but It would be extremely rude. And the same thing with these internet companies. Just because they can track and follow you, pushing messages down your troth, does not mean they have to, because it may be legal, but it's simply rude. As a society we've lost the moral compass on the web, or rather we've never had one. Internet is like a third world corrupt country where you either take advantage of others your self or you are being abused. Now we have to start building a climate were you don't feel like you're missing out by treating your customers fair and with respect.
- nly 12y ago
  You've built a strawman. You can have both privacy and keep contact with lost friends and loved ones.
tome 12y ago
> To most people, "if you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide" sounds reasonable. So what's the correct position, and why?
- Frondo 12y ago
  "Whether you've done anything wrong, what you disclose is up to you." It is the correct position because privacy is a human right, just like the right to free speech or the right to a fair trial.
- jon_black 12y ago
  There are many source online that refute the "nothing to hide" argument, and they can go into quite some details. Suffice it to say, you have a right to privacy. If you wish for something to stay private (for example, to protect yourself from harm) you have that right. Whilst in most free societies it's seldom required, there may come a time when tyranny takes over. If you've already given up your right to privacy, you'll find few protections left. History has many example of tyrants that, given the data mining capabilities of today, would have probably caused even more harm and suffering.
- bottled_poe 12y ago
  Right and wrong are subjective terms, plus perceptions of those terms will change.
- skwosh 12y ago
  For me the correct position is to recognise that the law isn't fixed and absolute, but dynamic (as interpreted through the courts) and evolving. Without privacy (or with pervasive surveillance), we might never have achieved the critical mass required to overturn historical legislation regarding blasphemy, homosexuality, drug use, etc. In other words, privacy provides the necessary sand-box for the evolution of law.
- crdoconnor 12y ago
  There will always be times when the moral and just thing to do is to break the law. Without privacy, you are not free to break those laws. If you're happy living under a police state in meek compliance then you have nothing to hide. If you'd turn over Anne Frank to the authorities in a heartbeat then you have nothing to hide. If you ever plan on doing the right thing by disobeying the authorities, at any point in the future, then you need privacy now. Later might be too late.
pdkl95 12y ago
I suspect one of the reasons this "done nothing wrong" fallacy persists so well these days is how "privacy" has come to replace the word "freedom". Using "privacy" tends to imply some amount of shame, as if the you didn't (or shouldn't) have the freedom to do that act in the first place. The reason why people see that they have "nothing to hid", is that they have already self-censored themselves away from doing any supposedly-shameful activity. I've always liked a line from KMFDM's song "terror"[2] "They can't use our shame against us" Until people learn this lesson, shame will continue to be used as a threat, and people will continue to see the "logic" in the "nothing to hide" argument. [1] http://www.kmfdm.net/lyrics/terror.htm http://www.kmfdm.net/lyrics/terror.htm ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVhu3pn1Ou0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVhu3pn1Ou0 )
- lazaroclapp 12y ago
  Privacy and freedom are different concepts, though. A world in which the government can monitor all of your phone calls, but it not allowed by law to stop them or prosecute you over their contents still preserves freedom very strongly, without any privacy (assuming the law constraining the government is enforceable, and extra judicial or spurious prosecutions are not a tool commonly available to the state). A world in which technology (or lack thereof) makes wiretapping impossible, gives a lot of privacy to people, but if you can still be arrested because of distributing a leaflet, it provides little freedom. Thing is, even in a world where freedom of expression were inviolable (and it isn't quite this world, so in reality, privacy helps support freedom of expression), we'd still want privacy to be a human right. Animals don't behave the same when they know they are always being watched. Pervasive surveillance inhibits thought, breeds abuse and unnecessarily limits human behavior. Also, in the end, we have the right to have things to hide. We have the right to say and do things we are ashamed of, or aren't sure are right, or we are not ready to defend under scrutiny of society at large. We have the right to share thoughts with others that we are not ready to defend from strangers, even if the law prevents such strangers from hurting us because our thoughts. Society needs to be able to discuss heresy, and revolution, and treason, because what for one generation is treason and heresy, for the next might be justice and freedom. But it also needs to be able to have some of those discussions in dark, private places, because a lot of great thoughts will only ever bloom in the dark. Even if mass surveillance worked (it doesn't), even if abuse could be curtailed (it can't), even if it gave us a world without crime (it won't), the price to pay would be a world where our thoughts are constrained by the fear of other's seeing them in their underdeveloped raw form.
colmvp 12y ago
> To most people, "if you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide" sounds reasonable. I know it's impossible, but I really recommend people who have that opinion to watch the TED talk by journalist Glenn Greenwald. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcSlowAhvUk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcSlowAhvUk
- g_delgado14 12y ago
  I'd like to add to this by saying that Ed Snowden's documentary, Citizen Four, is a great and informative film.
Qantourisc 12y ago
Maybe I toughed of a simple reply for this phrase ? "And who is to say what is wrong ? And will it stay that way ?" Opinions ?
anigbrowl 12y ago
~400 million people in EU disagree with you; that's one jurisdiction where privacy is a human right, and this is not just some abstract concept but the basis of legislation you can invoke to force companies to cough up the data they have on you and/or demand it be scrubbed from their databases, even if you originally shared it voluntarily.
- tomp 12y ago
  No we don't. I personally think that EU's approach to privacy, especially when it comes to the internet (e.g. "right to be forgotten", "cookie law"), is completely fucked up. While EU's dysfunctional governing game (i.e. multiple countries with immensely different cultures, goals, histories and levels of development trying to act in unison) explains such things as the tax loopholes, no freedom of speech and the Euro, even this can't explain the mistakes in internet laws. Furthermore, history will not be on EU's side in this regard. Right to be forgotten and restrictive data storing laws will have to be revoked eventually (when we have robots - "Remind me what I was talking about on that dinner during Mauritius vacations!" "I'm sorry Jessica, that was more than 3 years ago, I don't remember."). Euro won't survive without a fiscal union / federation (like the US). Even the restrictions of data export don't help us much - sure, the companies legally can't export data to the US, but don't worry, GCHQ will!
- msh 12y ago
  Well a lot of people in the eu, maybe even most, still buy into the "if you have nothing to hide" argument. That's at least my personal experience in Scandinavia and the UK, might be different in other countries.
fit2rule 12y ago
The corollary to this ridiculous argument: "if you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide" .. is this: If you've done something *right*, you will be the target of those you offend. When "right" can be defined variously as any one of: a) done something to reduce the effect of the criminal military-industrial complex on society, b) exposed corruption in the ruling elite, c) fought stringently for the rights of minorities who have been oppressed, d) fought valiantly to expose ecological and economic criminality on the part of the industrial elite, &etc. Just because they say its for fighting criminals doesn't mean that it won't be used to fight revolutionaries and upstarts who mean to bring justice to a destitute world. Every single technology under the sun can be used for good, or evil purposes - the only thing that makes the difference is the intention behind those who wield the technology. And as of right now, there is no way to monitor/control/adjust the intentions of the super-surveillance state: they, real people behind the masks, simply have too many secret powers.
evincarofautumn 12y ago
In the U.S., we aren’t even granted an explicit right to privacy. The closest we’ve gotten to a ruling on the matter is that time William O. Douglas wrote “…specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance. […] Various guarantees create zones of privacy.”

PebblesHD 12y ago

At this point in the evolution in technology, I find that Stallman is increasingly irrelevant when his commentary is basically stating every basic point of the site and then saying its bad. Don't want to use your real name? Don't join a site where the goal is to publicly connect with people you know. Don't want your privacy violated, post only what you feel comfortable with. With every new step in the advance of technology and the Internet of things, services such as, but not necessarily including Facebook will have access to an ever expanding array of information about our lives. This information can be used for good as well as bad, but this doesn't mean we shouldn't persue it.

logn 12y ago
Almost none of his complaints strike at essential features of a social network. Real names, censorship, tracking un-submitted text, etc are all just evil and not part of any functionality users care about.
- cloakandswagger 12y ago
  Being able to search and find people by their real name is actually a feature I value very highly in a social network.
  - walterbell 12y ago
    This can be an optional disclosure made by people who wish to be found by their real name.
  - Sanddancer 12y ago
    Being able to search and find people by the names they actually use on a day to day basis is actually a feature I value very highly in a social network. Being able to hide from abusive people in one's past is actually a feature I value very highly in a social network. I know a number of people -- transpeople, people from other countries, people who just don't like their given name -- who don't use their "real" name in "real" life. Why should facebook require one's legal name when no in person congregation requires you to wear a name badge that identifies you with a name you may not be comfortable with?

cddotdotslash 12y ago

Yes, Facebook tracks you and complies with government requests in the countries it operates in. Is anything new or is the author just spreading FUD?

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- gaadd33 12y ago
  man ls, on my various servers, doesn't have an AUTHOR section, just HISTORY which says: An ls command appeared in Version 1 AT&T UNIX.
  - __david__ 12y ago
    You're probably on a Mac, which comes from the BSD heritage. Try "man diff".
    - tedunangst 12y ago
      HISTORY A diff command appeared in Version 6 AT&T UNIX.
      - __david__ 12y ago
        Which Mac OS version comes with BSD diff?
        tedunangst 12y ago
        OpenBSD, so, uh, not a Mac. But you asked to try it. :)
      - tbirdz 12y ago
        C'mon Ted, you knew what he meant, there's no reason to be that snarky. For anyone who does not know, __david__ is most likely referring to the GNU coreutils and GNU diffutils, which do indeed credit Richard Stallman in the AUTHOR section, not any BSD, AT&T or other versions of those utilities.

Yhippa 12y ago

Would he be better off creating a minimal verified profile to de-legitimize other fake profiles? I know he would never do that but it's an interesting thing to consider in today's world. Let's say you're not averse to social media/networking. Do you go ahead and claim your name so that someone with a list of compromised or usernames don't grab it before you do?

kashkhan 12y ago
wouldn't it be easy for facebook to deactivate the current fake account?

gaadd33 12y ago

> Algorithmic filtering can affect history, not just hide history. Facebook's filtering algorithm suppressed news about the thug riot in Ferguson until after it became national news. Calling all of the protestors in Ferguson "thugs" seems pretty off base. I'm surprised he characterized everyone there like that when his previous few points seemed to be in favor of the ability to protest the government. I guess he only feels that way when it's not in the US? It's interesting he drew that conclusion from the article he links to, given that they mention prior to things such as twitter it would only be characterized on the news as a place to avoid due to "looters, thugs, troublemakers" in a minor segment.

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cloakandswagger 12y ago
I didn't interpret it that way. There was a large riot that happened in Ferguson and I'd say it's fair to characterize looters and vandals as "thugs".
logn 12y ago
I'd like to give him the benefit of the doubt in that the link where he writes "thug" is to an article that has this line: "We" hear it only through official statements, often dismissing local concerns, painting them as looters, thugs, troublemakers. So I don't think he was speaking from his point of view but from how it might have been presented to a common person.
tree_of_item 12y ago
You misunderstood, he's calling the cops thugs, not the protestors. If you read the rest of his website you will see that he refers to police as "thugs" regularly: > US citizens: call on Obama to curb militarization of thugs. > Everyone, call on Pasco to fire and prosecute the killer thugs > "Flood Wall Street" protesters have been acquitted of charges; the thugs' order for them to disperse was ruled unconstitutional. > It is good that they were acquitted, but there must be some penalty for thugs that violate protesters' rights. and so on.

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GigabyteCoin 12y ago

A friend of mine was turned off of a potentially new employee the other day because the candidate exclaimed that they recognized a customer from their instagram profile and that they followed it, loved it, etc. The customer was obviously embarrased, exclaimed that he had not used instagram in over a year, and promptly left the store. This left an uneasy feeling in my friend (the store owner). Which confused me to be honest. What did that customer expect when they placed their picture and basically entire lives on a public website with geotagged images? The new employee was told to be talkative with all clients as they worked in customer service, and so they attempted to strike up a conversation or at least a similar interest in the customer's publicly viewable leisure activities. That was how the candidate discovered him on instagram in the first place by the way. It was because he only posted pictures of the local area.

atmosx 12y ago
Oh men. Working with people is extremely complicated, yet very educative if have the right mindset. That was an accident IMHO, better not judge by one case scenario. I know a lots of guys and girls, especially youngsters who would love to hear about their facebook/twitter/instagram profiles.
anigbrowl 12y ago
Yeah, kind of a dubious move on your friend's part - how was the potential employee supposed to guess that the customer would feel embarrassed, in a bad way (as opposed to 'oh that picture was so embarrassing, haha')? Seems to me as it does you that it's the customer's reponsibility to own whatever s/he posts publicly. I guess some people think that their followers on social media must all be personal acquaintances/relatives and are then weirded out to discover that some complete strangers may take an interest in them, but that's their problem Obviously there are exceptions to this, it wouldn't be cool to start an argument with someone over old Twitter comments or to say 'oh hey, I say you on the revenge porn subreddit.' It's sad that I even need to delineate such boundaries, but there you go.
Aoyagi 12y ago
I believe a lot of people think Internet is an entirely different dimension. "What happens on the Internet stays on the Internet" or something.

abdias 12y ago

Considering that Zuckerberg is a great admire of China and apparently socialism[0], it doesn't come to me as a huge surprise that these "ethics" are guidelines for Facebook. “I’ve also bought copies of this book for my colleagues,” Zuckerberg was quoted as saying by a Chinese news website. “I want them to understand socialism with Chinese characteristics.” [0]: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/12/08/why-does-mark-zuckerberg-want-facebook-employees-to-read-the-chinese-presidents-book/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/12/08...

jacobolus 12y ago
I’m no fan of Zuckerberg or the CCP, but that’s ridiculous. Hosting a Chinese official at the Facebook office and telling a Chinese news site that he gave some copies of the Chinese president’s new book to his colleagues isn’t any kind of useful evidence about Zuckerberg’s personal political beliefs or Facebook’s governing principles.
- abdias 12y ago
  It wasn't presented as evidence for any claim. "Apparently" isn't a claim. The correlations between the ideology and what happens with Facebook is synonymous though, so it's neither far fetched. But I guess you need to have some historic understanding to see that (and that's a little too broad to present in a comment field). (edit: for admin: I up-voted this post and got an "user mismatch" error as response page - perhaps something the devs want to look into).
  - scintill76 12y ago
    By some definitions, "apparently" does soften your statement, but you are still essentially claiming "Zuckerberg is a great admirer of China and socialism" with a citation that doesn't really support that. Going only by your quote, he could just be saying, "I think it will be valuable to my business for my employees to understand Chinese socialism." By other definitions, "apparently" strengthens your claim to an "obvious" statement of truth, so maybe people are reacting strongly because they read it that way.

paulsecwhatt 12y ago

I honestly don't understand why people value Stallman's opinions on these matters so highly. I completely disagree with him on essentially everything he writes about these topics. Granted, he's an incredible programmer who contributed immensely to the development of our modern operating systems and the tools we use, and people here love to bring that up ("what - you DON'T KNOW WHO STALLMAN IS? SHAME? HOW DARE YOU CRITICISE HIM?") Does this make his opinion on Facebook or privacy or freedom any more correct or valid? No. Just like I wouldn't listen to Usain Bolt if he were trying to teach me the biological mechanisms behind doping, I can't see why Stallman's opinion is considered so correct in these matters. IMO his ramblings about personal liberties and freedom being infringed by everything under the sun from Amazon to Google to Facebook are oversimplified and childish. The world isn't black and white and he obviously fails to understand the entire point behind many of these companies. When Facebook makes you use a real name it's not because theres some "Mr. Evil" at the top level plotting to steal your freedom, it's because it leads to a better working social network. Just his description of AirBnB is ridiculous: "Airbnb requires you to run nonfree software (an app, or Javascript). It puts you in a data base easily available to Big Brother (just like a hotel)." That's an immensely stupid argument, because any _viable_ company that wants to provide a service that a consumer other than Stallman himself will use will "infringe" on those two idiotic requirements. TL;DR. Just because he did something amazing in one field/area, doesn't mean he is not spewing complete BS. For a similar example, see: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/01/dna-james-watson-scientist-selling-nobel-prize-medal http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/01/dna-jam...

hobs 12y ago
There is literally 100 different links on that page, and you disagree with all of them? Stallman is an ideologue 100%, but if I had to choose Facebook or Stallman, I know which side I am on. (and I dont produce OSS or follow their belief system) Facebook wants a real name because it makes them money more readily when they can identify you more easily and determine your value, not whatever "a better social network" means. Just because Usain Bolt may not have a degree in biology, if he is also saying factual things, that does not make him wrong.
- 12y ago

esfandia 12y ago

Here's one thing I like about Facebook: it has stopped the flood of chain-emails I used to receive from random "friends". They post that stuff on Facebook now instead. It's the perfect honeypot.

killerpopiller 12y ago
why not make a list of good things FB has done for you and compare? - less chain mails -
- notfoss 12y ago
  - Shadow profile (So that I don't have to waste energy creating one) -

jfoster 12y ago

I view my decision to use Facebook as a transaction. Sure, I lose some "privacy", but I also get a lot of value in return. I use quotes around "privacy" because I'm not sure I understand it the same way that Facebook critics do. When I'm using a changeroom, I expect privacy. When I take on a pseudonym and don't identify myself by name, I expect privacy. When I'm knowingly uploading photos that I am happy for the world to see, I don't have much of an expectation of privacy, and without an expectation of privacy I'm not sure I have any privacy to lose. That said, I don't think about this too much, so would love to hear well-reasoned arguments against my point of view on that.

Dramatize 12y ago
I agree. I don't understand what the issue is. I know that anything I add to Facebook will be used to sell advertising to me(I use AdBlock). The best feature of Facebook is groups. It's the easiest way to keep up to date with my gym group, motorcycle group etc.
- leni536 12y ago
  What was wrong with mailing lists? > It's the easiest way to keep up to date with my gym group, motorcycle group etc. Of course it is the easiest if they use a Facebook group in the first place. They could use a mailing list (or Google group) and you could keep track of it with any mail service (even your own) of choice.
  - FanaHOVA 12y ago
    Mailing list? What year is it? Barely anyone outside of the tech world still uses emails regularly.
    - leni536 12y ago
      > What year is it? Is this supposed to be an argument? > Barely anyone outside of the tech world still uses emails regularly. It's not true according to my experience.

pooogie 12y ago

His opinion may seem ridiculous to many here, but the following has happened quite a few times before: 1. Stallman shares radical opinion 2. He's ridiculed for his outlandish claims 3. Some news breaks or things happen gradually 4. Now people say 'Stallman called it' or realize he was right all along

peteretep 12y ago
Some examples, please
- pooogie 12y ago
  Sorry I'm on mobile so I can give one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Right_to_Read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Right_to_Read
  - motbob 12y ago
    We are still far away from this short story reflecting reality. Do you have a better example?
    - kuschku 12y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9151263 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9151263
    - kuschku 12y ago
      Another great example would be the example of stallman "In the future, debuggers will be illegal to use" and a recent court case where a person was sent to jail for accessing a website with a spoofed user agent using wget.
      - peteretep 12y ago
        If you're talking about weev, I can not think of a more disingenuous way of describing what he was sent to jail for. Otherwise, I can't find what you're talking about with a simple search. I am completely unsure how you went from a prediction that hasn't come true to an unrelated computer crime.

revicon 12y ago

While I agree w/ some of the points Stallman makes, essays like this that rely on hyperbole to rile up readers turn me off and detract from the issues the author is trying to bring attention to. One example: Stallman states "Facebook's mobile app snoops on SMS messages" and links to this article: http://www.efytimes.com/e1/fullnews.asp?edid=128859 http://www.efytimes.com/e1/fullnews.asp?edid=128859 "... during installation, the Facebook mobile app for Android platform seeks certain 'permissions' with the latest update going a step ahead in asking users to allow the app 'Read your text messages (SMS or MMS)'." So during installation (on android), Facebook is asking permission to access SMS, which you can choose to enable or not. This is a far cry from his statement that "Facebook's mobile app snoops on SMS messages." There are good points in this essay, but the amount of alarmism mixed in makes it much harder to sift through.

kragen 12y ago
It is not correct to say that you can choose to enable this permission or not; or, rather, it is true only in a narrow technical sense — if you choose not to enable this permission, standard Android will refuse to install the Facebook app. And what legitimate reason could Facebook possibly have to request that permission in the first place? There may be some examples of hyperbole in that article, but the example you chose is not one of them.
- tedunangst 12y ago
  Phone number verification? I have an iPhone, which doesn't ever let apps read text messages, which actually would be nice sometimes when my banking app would like to verify it's running on my phone, as opposed to somebody else's phone.
  - darklajid 12y ago
    Why would Facebook need to verify a phone number? It's a social network, used for jokes, farmville and whatnot. Most people I know that are on FB don't even use their 'real' name. IF someone provides a telephone number in his account details, FB can treat it like a string. I understand why FB would like to 'verify a number', but why should we allow that to happen? Why is this a valid reason to ask for permissions on my phone?

beartime 12y ago

this guy sounds like a sad, lonely douche

ramigb 12y ago

From an avid FB user who spent three hours a day to someone who has his account deactivated for more than a month, that is how much convinced i am that FB is nothing but utter garbage and i just had enough with it.

zo1 12y ago
I've also noticed a stark reduction in content from friends. Perhaps we're all growing up and posting less, perhaps Facebook's algorithms are hiding all their posts for some arbitrary reason, I don't know. All I know, is that if it weren't for the few vocal friends and pages that keep things mildly interesting, I would have no reason to be on Facebook at all.
timdaub 12y ago
Complete agree, deactivated also about a month ago or so. The thing is, once you ask everyone you truly want to be in touch with for their phone number, "staying connected" isn't that hard anymore. Also interesting: my friends tend to never talk about their online-facebook experience ever! I never noticed it, but there is literally no talk about their facebook-usage in real-life, while all of them still use it multiple hours a day.

zachrose 12y ago

I like: https://stallman.org/common/stallman.css https://stallman.org/common/stallman.css

GhotiFish 12y ago
why?

erodingvar 12y ago

> if you talk about your friends in Facebook, you're ratting on them This statement reveals the paranoid perspective behind this publication. While there are many valid reasons why some people may not want to use Facebook, I think it's as interesting to wonder reasons why people would be so opposed to everyone using it. I think had Stallman been less weird, he may feel differently about Facebook. For someone like him, any personal details visible to others is likely to result in harm to him. When you don't fit, everything hurts, and it's easy to feel like all those institutions are evil. But that's just you Richard. For most people, Facebook isn't much of a threat.

codesuela 12y ago
So what are you saying? Its OK to hurt people who don't fit in?

jdkanani 12y ago

> We call them "useds" rather than "users" because Facebook is using them, not vice versa. This line summarizes it all up.

junto 12y ago

Facebook is like a dentist. The benefit is that you get to spy on old friends who aren't really friends anymore, but you have to remember that a) the dentist is going to cause you pain, and b) he's going to invoice for for the pleasure of doing so. The difference is that the dentist has your best interests at heart, whilst Facebook has its own best interests as its primary focus, its customers secondary, and hint hint - you aren't the customer.

blawa 12y ago
Thank you, I was fearing I'll see an ad-hominem argument criticizing Stallman and thereby nullifying the arguments while actually not saying anything against the arguments. Your points are right, and personally, I don't see a reason to follow people who're not friends anymore
- junto 12y ago
  My biggest problem with Facebook is that my contact details are uploaded to Facebook by my "friends" without my permission. I choose not to he Facebook user but people I know are persistently sharing my contact details with them and I assume even my contact details photo which they can later match using facial recognition to other photos uploaded by friends without my permission.

TheSpiceIsLife 12y ago

As a complimentary perspective: For those who haven't seen it, I think Slavoj Žižek and Paul Holdengräber on "Surveillance and whistleblowers" is worth a watch. The part about surveillance starts at 21:14 so this link will take you there https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIPjmmmh_os#t=21m14s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIPjmmmh_os#t=21m14s Žižek: "The most dangerous unfreedom is the unfreedom you don't even experience, as such. If some of you are feminists ... every good feminist will tell you the first step of feminism is just to realise your situation of oppression... We need something similar here. That's the first point. The second point ... I'm a little bit sceptic about this paranoia 'ooh we are totally controlled' and so on and so on, I think we shouldn't take this too seriously. And this doesn't make the situation any easier if anything it makes it more... it [paranoia] is justified, but we should be aware, again we go in to metaphorics again the NSA the Big Eye knows everything, again the mega-machinery is extremely stupid, they don't know what they know. Do you remember, this is a very superficial anecdote ... a guy in LA was Googling the ways to kill your wife something like that, a couple days afterward the FBI brutally entered his house arrested him blah blah blah. Why? Because Google reported this to FBI. But do you know what was the result, this guy was a was one of the you know all the [TV] series CIS / police investigation, we was simply writing a scenario and wanted to check you know, and you have this again and again or form China they told me a wonderful example of this stupidity a guy just before Tiananmen [Square] anniversary a guy was an English professor in Beijing was flirting with a lady in London, and since they were both educated he used a wonderful quote from Shakespeare, because you know in Elizabethan England the word "protest" meant also "I publicly declare" and he quoted to her "I protest my love to you" chop-chop and the conversation was cut short because the word "protest" was prohibited because of associations with Tiananmen, what I find so ridiculous is that if the guy were to be extremely vulgar and told the lady something like "I will fuck your brain out" everything would be okay, you quote Shakespeare... You know computers just give you immense amounts of data and you can play with it." Errors and omissions intentional as I'm directly transcribing Žižek talking. He then goes on to relate an experience as a young adult in Slovenia meeting with his friends and upon parting, knowing everything was recorded, they didn't hind anything and at the end of the conversation they would say something like "Mother baked a good apple pie" and then later found out this really confused the people monitoring their conversations.

Veedrac 12y ago

Since this seems to just be a braindump, I might as well add Veritasium's comments on the matter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9ZqXlHl65g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9ZqXlHl65g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag I found them pretty interesting listening from a content-distribution and -consumption side of things, rather than from a social-network perspective.

Aoyagi 12y ago

The worst thing about Facebook I personally see is the peer (or even professional) pressure to have an account there and be active. And them doing what all (American?) megacorps do: buying small companies, stripping them of assets, absorbing them and forgetting them. Then again, some people build start-ups for this very reason, don't they.

daminimal 12y ago

With 112 mentions of Facebook I'd say this is a great ad.

SeanDav 12y ago

There seems to have been a sea change in opinion of many HN posters here, especially among the more recent visitors to HN. A couple of years ago Facebook was considered by many here to be an invasion of privacy and just not worth the effort. That general opinion seems to have changed for some. A lot of newer posters seem to be of the opinion that lack of privacy is a cost worth paying for convenience and will apologize for, defend and even support companies like FB that blatantly invade privacy.

u23KDd23 12y ago
Facebook allowed a research project to experiment on people's emotions by modifying the content displayed on their news feed. Human experimentation in doing things like this is against all ethical principles important in science. If they are willing to commit such a blatant violation of ethics what makes you think they aren't participating in something far worse? I commend Stallman for sharing his opinions on facebook, a modern day societal cancer.
- kretor 12y ago
  Universities have a lot of "ethical" requirements for experiments, that are, in a large part, over the top. We should get rid of most of those ethical requirements at universities, rather than expand them to Facebook.
whybroke 12y ago
Astroturf of course, notice the conversations around the FCC ruling. How to deal with it is an interesting and I'd say very important problem to community viability. On the upside it's certainly complimentary to the perceived influence of HN.
karmacondon 12y ago
Facebook doesn't invade anyone's privacy. They aren't going into your house and rifling through your things. People post things on facebook because they want other people to see them. If you don't want to do that, then don't use facebook. You can't stop other people from talking about you, or from taking pictures of you or relating stories that involve you. That's always been a part of social life. If you consider that to be an invasion of your privacy, then leave society and live as a hermit. It probably won't be fun, but it will be very private. I know several people who don't use facebook, myself included, because they just aren't interested in the service that it provides. Philosophical concerns about the nature of privacy don't really factor into it. The social fashions about what's cool and what isn't cool will change with the winds. It isn't worth paying attention to. If facebook or any other social software is valuable to you, then good, use it. If not, no sense complaining about what other people decide to do with their time.

deleted 12y ago

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pain 12y ago

Reasons to support free http://www.getaether.net http://www.getaether.net and https://www.matrix.org https://www.matrix.org software. Desperate developers needing research time and money for supporting and advancing federatable networks.

mark_l_watson 12y ago

Another good article by Richard Stallman - his ideas keep gaining even more relevance for me. I do use Facebook to plug my books and to hopefully drive traffic to my blog articles, but I have been considering cancelling my account. I have similar issues with Google, but with Google I get much more value: using G+ to promote my own web properties, and generally really useful services. That said, I have switched to using my GMail address as a secondary email that I don't often check, and having the people most important to me use my own email address. Also, I give this advice all the time: choose one web browser like Chrome for use just with social media (Google, Facebook, and Twitter web properties) and another web browser for everything else.

ericfontaine 12y ago
> I do use Facebook to plug my books and to hopefully drive traffic to my blog articles The trick is configuring your blog to autopost to facebook, for which I use https://wordpress.org/plugins/add-link-to-facebook/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/add-link-to-facebook/ which also automatically grabs likes and comments from the facebook post and adds them to the wordpress comments database. Maybe this is acknowledging facebook's value, but at least I don't have to personally interact with facebook, nor are visitors to my blog tracked by facebook's javascript.

kartikkumar 12y ago

Although I can get the rationale of most things he says, I’m not sure that he’s always offering sane alternative options: > Don't be tracked — pay cash. I’m wondering how he imagines this would pan out. Is RMS also against banking, since banks mine your data too. Does he suggest stuffing your mattress full of cash? (serious question). In the US, where credit ratings are essential to be able to make any sizeable/significant purchases (car, house etc.), I’m wondering what he suggests as being the alternative. Or is he just supposed to reject all purchases that aren’t feasible with cash? I’m curious if he’s opposed to Bitcoin too. I’m not familiar enough with his writings to discern whether he’s simply a dissenter or also someone that has a view towards sane, realistic solutions.

notthemessiah 12y ago
> I’m curious if he’s opposed to Bitcoin too. He likes the privacy aspect of it, but has concerns with how it enables tax-evasion, and lack of monetary policy, hence why TALER (Taxable Anonymous Libre Electronic Reserves) is a GNU project: https://gnunet.org/taler2014ghm https://gnunet.org/taler2014ghm

deleted 12y ago

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mtarnovan 12y ago

First I thought it was a typo, but it can't be, there are too many occurrences - looks like Stallman is intentionally referring to FB users as 'useds': > Facebook carefully studies all the text that its useds type in and then don't submit. > Facebook, as an "experiment", collected the text its useds started to enter as status updates and ultimately did not send.

jacquesm 12y ago
I often have multiple really dumb typos in my text when I'm using an unfamiliar keyboard and they're remarkably 'internally consistent'.
- mtarnovan 12y ago
  This is not a typo, see jdkanani's comment.
jdkanani 12y ago
At the end, he wrote "We call them "useds" rather than "users" because Facebook is using them, not vice versa."

EGreg 12y ago

Why is "user" replaced with "used" everywhere? It isn't a typo, it's Stallman's NLP-style punning?

dredmorbius 12y ago
See the footnote in the article (also noted multiple times above): "We call them "useds" rather than "users" because Facebook is using them, not vice versa."

nerdy 12y ago

RMS is a strange duality. On the one hand he's a freedom advocate and has put considerable effort forward to make our world a better place; it's hard to not have a great deal of respect for him. On the other hand he's brilliant but quite frankly a lunatic, benign freedom extremist... and I don't even have a Facebook account! I can only imagine how he might come off to people who're hardcore social media consumers.

smutticus 12y ago

The #1 reason not to use FB is you cannot bitch about FB. I have little patience or sympathy for people who use FB and constantly complain about it. They should stop using it. I don't use FB, which means I have little reason to bitch about it, and if I do want to bitch about it I don't sound like a hypocrit.

Create 12y ago

“As your client knows, Mr. Zuckerberg goes to great lengths to protect the privacy of his personal life.” Which adds a wrinkle: Some people requiring nondisclosure are the very ones who have built an industry on its opposite, the disclosure of personal information.

whowhat 12y ago

Why did this topic fall to the second page on HN so quickly, despite its relatively high upvotes, activity, and recency?

hobarrera 12y ago

I've never understood why people insist on enumerating reasons why not to use facebook. There's already a lack of reasons to use it (unless you count funny games and cat pictures), shouldn't that be enough in itself?

vohof 12y ago

People tend to overthink this. The only reason alot of people use facebook is because that's where all their friends are.

AnonJ 12y ago

Stallman is becoming quite increasingly peculiar. Not really interested in his talks. His software was great but his ideology (and generally that of FSF) is probably a kind of out of touch with the reality.

patrickdavey 12y ago

If you haven't watched it yet, I can highly recommend the documentary 'citizenfour', which is about the meetings between Snowden and Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald and The Guardian intelligence reporter Ewen MacAskill. Free to watch here: https://thoughtmaybe.com/citizenfour/ https://thoughtmaybe.com/citizenfour/