This is my main quibble with people who are shocked at what Facebook (and Reddit) do with their data.
These companies can't do anything with your data if you don't give them any. Yet, people are willingly giving them such detailed personal information. Even as detailed as telling them their exact location at a particular time.
They're then shocked when the company does something with it.
You can't give someone a gift and then dictate what they do with it.
What's even worse is that these same people are then giving these companies OTHER people's information by, for instance, posting photos of others who aren't on the platform.
Facebook collects tons of private data across the whole of the web that we don’t generally consent to giving them. They are an advertising company, after all.
The Irish data protection commissioner has
recommended widespread changes to improve
privacy on Facebook.
Facebook says:
[the] Data Protection Commissioner (DPC) ... report
demonstrates how Facebook adheres to European data
protection principles and complies with Irish law.
These don't seem entirely consistent, and to put it simply - I don't trust Facebook. They are a company, hence they are trying to make money. The users are the product, and Facebook is in the business of getting, keeping, and in the long run, selling as much information about them as they possibly can.
I know Facebook is cancer and all but I'm still surprised they'd be leaking them as their business model relies on capturing personal data but not giving it away.
My only point is - your entire statement is basically "trust facebook" - no one should trust facebook.
Personal information is the product facebook sells - it should surprise no one when that data is sold.
Question for you all.
A bit ago, I posted the following, which was in minutes at -5 and counting:
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This is disturbing. Yes, Facebook was sharing your information before -- it was the source of all their ad revenue. But now, instead of individual pieces of data (location, specific interests, etc.), they have the potential to share (read:sell) an entire person's worth of data in a lump. Not saying it will happen immediately, or at all, but I see some serious possibility for harm here. (Cross-site behavior tracking just got a whole lot scarier, if you can link it to a FB profile...)
Of course, there could be some serious academic applications to this, too.
And it makes them look more open, and access to your own data is good.
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I'm on HN to learn, but the downvotes told me nothing. (No child comments.) So in the interest of writing better comments (and hopefully improving my own analyses), what's wrong with this one?
Is it the cynical outlook? Is there something factually incorrect? Is mine just an unpopular opinion?
I'm looking for feedback, because I didn't expect my comment to bomb like it did.
haha, this reminds me of those posts you'd see on facebook all the time from uninformed users: """I do not give Facebook or any entities associated with Facebook permission to use my pictures, information, messages or posts, both past and future. With this statement, I give notice to Facebook it is strictly forbidden to disclose, copy, distribute, or take any other action against me based on this profile and/or its contents. The content of this profile is private and confidential information. """
It's kind of funny when it's a big corporation doing it.
Do not miss the Facebook articles linked from the page.
"We disagree: personalization doesn’t have to come at the expense of privacy. We can do both, and we can do both well. We’ve built products that lead the industry in transparency and offer settings and controls to help people manage their privacy."
"So if you recently bought a hiking backpack from a local outdoor gear supplier and are no longer looking for a new one, you can choose to remove the outdoor gear supplier from this list of businesses, and disconnect that information from your account."
For a company that prides itself with transparency, you could start with not lying to people in such a blunt and despicable way. See, I don't want you to know that I bought a hiking backpack. Why should you know? Why do you think you are the arbitrer of the market, that people cannot do their own research and that small business need you? This is a false premise, and your position is a blatant JOKE that at this point is also sad and unremarkable.
Stop lying to people, you sad surveillance capitalists.
"... My generation has long been bizarrely comfortable with being looked at, and as performers on the Facebook stage, we upload pictures of ourselves cooking dinner for our parents or doing keg stands at last night's party; we are reckless with our personal information. But there is one area of privacy that we won't surrender: the secrecy of how and whom we search. ..."
I listened to a sobering talk by "Eben Moglen, 'Freedom Businesses Protect Privacy', mp3, 18Mb, 40min" ~ http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail1897.html about just this scenario about data and the rights to infer, think, collect, evaluate and express. The key takeaway, these users are living with giving away their data without contractual agreements and are ignoring the consequences.
The biggest threat to privacy is private company data miners who you freely give data. Inference drawn the data is private property. But it's not all doom and gloom but do you trust those who have bailment over you own data? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailment
"... But there's no way Facebook would allow such a program to exist: the site is popular largely because it enables us to indulge our gazes anonymously. ..."
That's not true. There is a Fb internal application that works out the probability of 2 people who will go out together based on Fb data. So don't bet on it.
Facebook collected this data for years but only recently started disclosing it. There's no reason to trust that they're disclosing all the data they're collecting.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2011/11/29/facebooks...
HN Thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3292225
"Facebook promised users that it would not share their personal information with advertisers. It did."
I wonder why so few news sites picked up on this.
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