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.
Regrettably there are numerous, well documented cases of Facebook doing exactly this. They've literally been taken to court over it several times (look into "Sponsored Stories," "Beacon," etc).
Even if you don't use it, they have a shadow profile of you over there waiting, with relationships pre-graphed, simply by virtue of being in friends' contact lists who do.
The site "Likes" things on peoples behalf just because they talk about it (even negatively!) with others. It occasionally automatically "friends" people because you looked at their profile and mutual friends in common. It constantly takes liberties with people's relationships, friends, and preferences, without asking. The mobile app turns on the damn mic to listen to ambient noise in the background so it can try learn what you're listening to or watching on TV!
None of this is to try to convince you to care or take up the pitchfork against Facebook, but they're not like other sites. Harvesting your contact info from your friends phone to add you to their graph is an invasion, in my view (glib app permissions dialog, notwithstanding).
If you don't mind, do you have any sources for this? (Not talking about the mic thing, but the automatic liking and befriending)
and subsequently a class action suit was brought against them over it: https://gigaom.com/2014/01/02/facebook-reads-private-message...
another suit brought over false likes: https://gigaom.com/2014/01/10/facebook-hit-with-lawsuit-over...
facebook recycling "likes" under guise of promoting "related stories" users didn't endorse: http://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2013/01/21/faceboo...
The autofriending thing is less publicized and I don't think they've ever been sued over it, so it probably hasn't been in the headlines. If you search Facebook's /help/community/ pages, you'll find a lot of users reporting it. It's happened to me. It's happened to my wife. I've had friends tell me similar stories. In every case, it seems like something algorithmic, like Facebook thinks the person is someone you should be friends with because of mutual connections or something like that. It isn't a spammy thing as much as it is...creepy, like you, as a user, don't have your own agency. It's weird and off putting to see an accepted friend request you didn't make, from someone you expressly don't want to have any contact whatsoever with, let alone be "friends."
I checked my iphone privacy settings because this sounded preposterous, and the Facebook app is not listed as having requested microphone permissions. Is it able to turn on the microphone without requesting permission?
This is the official announcement of the feature. They emphasize it being "optional" and "opt-in" so, it appears it is off by default, and/or at least toggling that control is more clearly delineated in iOS, etc.
http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2014/05/a-new-optional-way-to-sh...
I would say most of my friends have no idea that when they install the facebook app they are giving all of their contact info away to facebook. Sure, they click the button to give facebook permissions to "access their contact list", but I don't think most people assume the worst. That just what it takes to participate in the modern culture.
So when facebook is making a shadow account using my number and connections with friends, my privacy certainly feels violated. I did not choose to share anything with facebook. I chose to share things with my friends, and they unwittingly shared it with facebook. Giving your phone number to a friend is a reasonable thing to do. Someone wanting to install facebook on their phone is a reasonable thing to do. Facebook tracking connections of people who choose not to use (or participate in any way with) their service by essentially exploiting peoples naivete about its intentions, is not reasonable to me.
I can educate the people I know about it, but I doubt I will change anyones minds. Facebook has become a part of our culture, I certainly can't blame anyone for wanting to take part in it. I just wish facebook would leave me out of it and it doesn't.
Let me repeat that: THERE IS NO WAY TO NOT USE FACEBOOK.
Everyone's photos: Mine, yours, Stallmans, get posted to Facebook, annotated with our names (which is increasingly becoming easy enough to do with ML -- the human component will increasingly decline). If at least one of your friends uses Facebook, Facebook has profile information on you.
Stallman doesn't have a Facebook account, but things posted to Facebook identify where Stallman is, who his friends and peers are, who he interacts with, etc.
Signing up for a Facebook/Google Scholar/Researchgate/etc. simply gives you some level of control over the visibility of the information collected about you. If you care about your personal brand, there is strong reason to do it. It's almost blackmail. But if you don't do it, you're still on Facebook; simply without the EULA, and without any control.
photos - use google photos or dropbox
messages - who care about facebook posts anyways - they are useless
facebook groups - their are competitors in this space now
THERE IS A WAY TO NOT USE FACEBOOK, DELETE YOUR ACCOUNT AND LIFE CONTINUES WITHOUT IT
Read about 3 more lines of the post, and you'll see.
Your reading comprehension skills are lower than my toddler's. Fortunately, you're in good company, from the number of similar posts.
Why are you shouting? We know this. People aren't up in arms over this. Not because they don't understand what you're saying, but because they don't care and no amount of shouting will make them care.
Let me repeat that: THERE IS NO WAY TO NOT USE LIFE.
Simply substituting one word for another shows you how you just can't hold Facebook responsible for this. People are and have been able to share information in myriads of ways. Facebook is just one of them. They could be telling information person to person, via a phone call, via e-mail or simply standing in the street and shouting it out. I can be in the next room and a friend of mine could show photos of me to a stranger. I could be thousands of miles away and a friend of mine could reveal my private information to someone else.
What's stopping me to simply create a personal website where I post information about me and my friends? Who's responsible then? The server host? Or is it the me, the one who put all the information on the site, visible for everyone?
People complain about censorship, but basically what they're saying is that they want all information except the one kind where something is revealed about them. If you don't want this information to be shared, then ask your friends to stop posting your name, photos, e-mail, whatever.
Please note that I'm simply responding to the argument that Facebook mines all the data your friends put up. In my wildest dream I wouldn't call FB one of the good guys, nor would I condone most of their practices (e.g. their "Like" buttons on external sites). All I'm saying is that people seem very eager to hand off responsibility to software, machines, corporations. And in some cases that simply doesn't work.
Single word substitutions of words that have no relationship with each other do not prove anything. Facebook and life are from entirely different categories in the taxonomy of useful (and not so useful) terms.
The use of certain digital services should be voluntary, not implicit because your associates use it.
All I'm saying is that when a friend of yours decides to share information about you in public, you should hold them responsible and not the channel he is sharing this information. That's it.
Let me give you an example:
1) Friend shares when he went to the toilet. Is that a privacy violation by Facebook? If it's public, then it's not. If it was private, and then Facebook makes it public by changing the default settings, as it's done many times before, then that would be a privacy violation. But forget about pooping. What if you get drunk and post your drunk pictures to your friends and then Facebook makes them public so your boss (or future boss) can see them?
2) Here's a much worse example than that. Facebook is tracking people through the Like button without them even clicking on it. They never gave Facebook the permission to do that (and I mean in a very "opt-in" way, not just by automatically agreeing with Facebook's ToS). Even worse than that, Facebook has been caught tracking people who don't even have a Facebook account and building "shadow profiles" of them. How is THAT not a privacy violation?
So I think people who say "Facebook doesn't violate people's privacy - they just choose to overshare", are either oversimplifying all the issues and conflating them into a convenient one, or are not too educated about the topic.
Oh and if you want even more real examples, Facebook has just been found to infringe people's privacy in Europe, where the privacy right actually exists, unlike in US, where "digital privacy" seems to be treated as an abstract almost non-existent thing, and the laws protecting it are orders of magnitude weaker than the laws protecting "physical world" privacy - even though there shouldn't be any difference between say law enforcement getting your printed pictures and getting your digital pictures:
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/23/facebooks-...
When the first articles came out that said facebook saves everything you type in messages and status' even if you don't press save, I stopped using facebook for anything other than nondescript one line responses to groups I'm in. It's just so easy to realize that if you don't want incredibly personal things to be saved online for eternity, don't write those things online.
(excluding malicious intent of course)
I don't tolerate friends who do not respect my privacy.
And on top of that, you have companies like Facebook doing data analysis on your personal aggregate data and then feeding it to advertisement companies even without your direct consent (although it is implied, either by the user's ignorance or negligence). This is obviously true for other companies as well, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc etc.
Obviously, the main problem here is not the company, it's the people using the company and the peer pressure on everybody else to join in. But that's another story.
What do you consider the Like, Connect, etc. buttons that are tracking virtually every page you visit, Facebook user or not?
I'm sure it's hard. But doing the right thing often is.
Facebook isn't the only company doing stuff like this by any stretch of the imagination, but claiming that you can just "not use Facebook" if you want to avoid them is complete nonsense, hence my original comment.
You could use adblock or something similar on the desktop or android, but then you need to know about it first, and it opens another can of worm regarding site revenues etc.
Also if you're an iOS user you'll just have to live with it or abandon Safari for more limited browsers, and avoid opening any webview from any app ever.
Avoiding sites that use facebook widget is just not realistic. You're fine with it, and that's ok, but that's not really the point.
Black-hole everything coming from a Facebook domain?
> Also if you're an iOS user you'll just have to live with it or abandon Safari for more limited browsers, and avoid opening any webview from any app ever.
Convenient, then, that I don't use iOS. (I use Android, and I do have an /etc/hosts file to kill some things I don't want to see.)
We've picked the low hanging fruit of clever applications of the data analysis of 'the general population' to recommend us better movies, better things to purchase, search engines adapted to our tastes, and so on.
The absence of privacy is an absence of a safe mind. I grew up enjoying privacy on the internet (or the illusion of) because I was able to learn who I was, and I was able to have my own voice and my own opinions. When my mind became convinced that that was only an illusion, it mentally crippled me. I wasn't able to follow thought paths I deemed unsafe. The definition of unsafe comes from a collection of reasoning (or rationalization) that is mostly irrational - being that it is contextually formed without careful analysis and methodical direction. When one feels like every machine is stalking them, and can eventually be connected back to a person who can make a judgement on that individual's life path without the awareness and consent of the individual, I think we've made a big mistake as an intelligent species.
What we're seeing here is a conflict of opinion between the so called hackers and the people who think they're working on something that will be acquired by one of the tech giants.
However, not every modern tech-buzzed startup wins the market by rejecting privacy and playing the next Facebook. Consider Xiaomi, Uber or SpaceX good examples.
Or in other words: social media is not everything there is in the tech scene. The landscape is not simply a battle of bearded-hardcore-hackers vs brogrammers. Seriously, there's plenty for everyone.
Wouldn't it be great if someone at harvard had come up with an open social networking protocol instead?
People post things to Facebook with the intent of sharing that information with others. I'll admit there may have been some valid criticisms that their privacy settings are/were difficult for some people to fully understand but that's certainly not a blatant invasion of privacy.
As for taking information and using it for targeted advertising that's no different than what companies like Google or Amazon do (which have historically had a higher "reputation" on HN). If you want to consider such practices blatant invasions of privacy that's fine, but there are certainly far bigger offenders out there.
On the upside it's certainly complimentary to the perceived influence of HN.