> No one is forced to give their data to Facebook.
Neither do we have to. Facebook is grabbing it all anyway. With pre-emptive measures ala ad-, cookie and tracker blocking we can reduce the amount of data they get, but they still get something.
If they'd only collect data about their users, that would be totally fine. But they don't. They build shadow profiles of people who are not on FB and track them just the same way.
FB is a whole lot closer to Orwellian surveillance apparatus than it is to entertainment site.
It's interesting to me how upset so many people got about the level of detail that the NSA collected while so many hand over their entire digital presence to FB and Google.
Maybe they think "you don't have to use FB"... By that logic "you didn't have to use AT&T or the internet at all" either.
Public opinion is shaped a great deal by what and in what way the mass media covers a specific topic. There was a lot of uproar about NSA surveillance while it was in the news, which quickly died down as the headlines disappeared. Out of sight, out of mind.
And then there's also the thing that, arguably, Google and FB give those people something in return which they might consider worthwhile for just data. I'd question that the majority of the user population is aware of the implications of handing over data about themselves and specifically other people, who may or may not be okay with that.
The reason people were/are a bit more anxious about the NSA is because the government has the ability to put you in jail. And indeed we've seen some cases of evidence collected through mass surveillance being used in criminal cases through a mechanism called parallel construction.
All things considered, Facebook presents a similar level of risk, especially if nation states use it as a digital weapon as we've seen recently.
Facebook is worser, in a certain way. If they want, they can socialy isolate you, without you even noticing, they can make you run with a bad crowd, they can manipulate your interests towards topics that eat your time and do not help you progress in life.
They can manipulate your social network, help your wife find someone more interested in her posts.
When the state tells you its on, its at least to your face.
Being a public utility is not binary. Facebook is not as much a public utility than water, but more or a public utility than just being "an entertainment site".
Many social groups use Facebook to organize on. If an individual weren't on Facebook, they'd be much more socially isolated in the same way that if they didn't use a phone (considered a public utility), they'd also be more isolated. I suspect for some people, Facebook/Messenger/Whatsapp is more important than a telephone number.
Some services now require Facebook to use their service. For example, for people who can't afford to own a car, GetAround lets you rent neighbors cars, but they don't accept a government issued ID, only Facebook.
I am not a fan of calling FB a utility. Are you ready to pay the taxes for a 5x buyout of FB when the government attempts to nationalize it? And what do you think its going to happen after the state has reins on it. Only bad things.
Sure, some state-run universities are good. But that's just one example. There's many examples of things that govt's fail badly at. And many examples of things they manage OK, sometimes better than the private sector. It's not an closed case either way. I actually would be very worried if the US government were to run Facebook.
It's almost as if boiling something complicated down to "government vs private companies" and saying "one is good and the other is evil" is wrong and stupid.
Yes, obviously. Although those often are to some degree a result of corruption. But I am not claiming the government is universally worse at all things.
My preferred solution would therefore be along these lines:
- Universities develop social media algorithms that are provenly secure and respectful of privacy. "Federation" should handle issues of trust over network partitions.
- Governments (not a single one) decide if they want to provide computing infrastructure for said algorithms. Alternatively, users could host their own social networks or partitions thereof.
- Big companies provide hardware and maintenance. (And that's all they do. I.e., hands off of our valuable data).
Basically, that's a lot like how the internet functioned when it just started (Universities and DARPA developing the concepts, and companies doing just hardware).
As someone who spent a (wasted) decade in academia finding out a lot of published research was faked, keep your academic hands off of my business models. And keep your government hands off of my algorithms. FB stupidity and greed aside, I still trust the free market over its less-appealing alternatives.
I don't think it has to _stop_ per se. It's a political opinion and should be treated as such. Whether it is an opinion that has a place on Hackernews is another question.
With shadow profiles, they are being forced to give their data to Facebook or live like an outcast.
How intrusive are the shadow profiles actually? We will know only if their data collection process (as well as the data collection process for all these ad-first companies) is completely and thoroughly investigated.
I do see a problem that I dont know what data facebook has about me and how they are using it. If we consider that data to be part of your identity, there is no reason for facebook to have the exclusive access to it. I want it myself.
By having it myself, I have the technical capacity to cut the middleman, which is better for me and for the advertisers that target me.
Good tip! I will check it out right now. I suspect tho, that this information will not cover all the bases. Mainly, any piece of information facebook ever shared with a third party source should be included.
The above statement has a high reach: information fb uses to then deduce something for advertisers has to be included. It doesnt work immediately, so I will have to wait analyze what they share. Its certainly good that they do.
EDIT: just looked at the docs and it is better than I thought but might not be probably enough to get the effect I want to achieve.
ITs revelatory that it contains all the chats I ever had, and would find that hard to share with anyone, yet, clearly FB has it .
I tried several times to do that in the months leading up to finally deactivating my FB account and never received any of my own data, nor any acknowledgement of my requests to have my data deleted.
Is it? I've always seen it pitched as a communication service with emphasis on staying in touch with friends and always being connected with loved ones.
It is not a universal premise that anything formally voluntary is good and proper. That's more of a libertarian axiom, isn't it?
Most people recognize that behaviors that can be seen as voluntary agreements between independent parties can still be problematically imbalanced or in need of "regulation."
It's not reasonable to just ignore the power of network operators. How do you think about net neutrality?
The difference between Facebook and an ISP is that ISPs are, for all intents and purposes, a natural monopoly. There is an enormous cost associated with laying cable and negotiating the rights-of-way with the thousands of affected parcels to make even a tiny local network. It makes sense to enforce net neutrality because it's impossible to switch to a different ISP in many markets, just as it's impossible to switch to a different water provider or sewage system provider.
Facebook is a social media website. It doesn't provide a basic, necessary service. It doesn't operate under the physical constraints that utilities do, and it's not impossible to compete with Facebook, as evidenced by the numerous social media services out there like Snapchat, Tumblr, Youtube, Reddit, LinkedIn, Google+, Qzone (China), and Sina Weibo (China).
I'm certainly not against regulation as a general concept. The free market does not produce the best, ethical incentives in all cases. That being said, I fail to see why regulating Facebook is even necessary, and what that would look like in practice.
People on HN seem to take as a given that Facebook having loads of personal data is somehow a bad or dangerous thing. Why? Facebook has 2 billion users. That's 25% of the human population. 2 billion people voluntarily created profiles, provided details about themselves like their age and relationship status, and uploaded photos of themselves, their friends, and their families. For those 2 billion people, the "cost" of "losing privacy" was worth it to them. Face it, nobody outside of the tiny HN bubble cares about the security of their vacation photos or cat pics, nor should they.
Actually, Yes I am. If I attend an event, my friends and acquaintances will often upload pictures of me. I do not have a Facebook account, but they are known to operate shadow profiles.
I wonder how detailed they are. If a few friends of yours have your name and number in their phone, and they have WhatsApp, Facebook (which owns WhatsApp) already has your name, number and a network of your friends (especially if those WhatsApp users also connected their Facebook account, or entered their WhatsApp ID (their phone number) to their FB profile.
And people say Facebook allows companies to upload their customer data to Facebook so they can be targeted through ads on FB, so it would be possible (in theory, not sure about the practice) that Facebook has things like your address and income level as well, for example if you ever filled a marketing survey.
These social networks are becoming de facto public utilities. For example when I was trying to find out why my passport application was late, the only way to ask for an update was via Twitter.
No one is forced to give their data to Facebook. It's not a public utility. It's an entertainment site, first and foremost.