This is not the point. The point is:
Information in the wrong hands can become dangerous, period.
People change. Companies change. You have no guarantee Facebook will preserve the vision they have right now. You have no guarantee their new CEO won't have a different opinion... (wont be a "Trump").
Also you have to realize, how much pressure from authorities they have to handle. A Russian friend of mine (I'm originally from russia) used to work for "VK" which is (was) the biggest social network there. They literally got calls from surveillance agencies on a daily basis. At some point they were unable to fight the pressure and surrendered, the CEO was forced to resign and leave the country (Pavel Durov, he runs Telegram now), the stock were sold and the social network is basically controlled by the government now.
I do agree the article is a bit over dramatic. But that's just to gain attention from non-tech crowd I guess, who continue to happily post kitten-pics without thinking of the consequences.
The usual term of accusation was called: "Agitation and propaganda" for the imperialist/capitalist regimes.
So, why you might have been squeak clean, if your friend, or your cousin was not, then you were considered a problem just by association. When somebody got in jail, their whole family got 'interned' (means, they uproot the family and send them in some remote village). Doctors had to work farm fields, etc.
If you were just a cousin, or close friend then you were marked as a problem with not a clean history or biography. If you wanted the nice job, or good education, you would be rejected for it.
It seems like a far fetched distant dystopian reality, but during 1950-1990 was reality in half of Europe. Also, a reality in the US the 50s with McCarthyism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism
This isn't something that went away with fall of the Wall, it came back with a vengeance in western world under the guise of Patriot Acts, Anti-Terorrism acts and it's in many ways significantly worse than it was under KGB and STASI.
Fun, eh?
The reason I do not kill myself is hope, that I'll be able to get off here one day. That and antidepressants.
And please also post your passwords to Facebook and bank accounts.
On a more serious note, are you potentially related to anybody Muslim or Jewish? Have you ever posted political comments or links? Are any of your acquaintances hardline left or right wingers? All sorts of seemingly harmless things today will get you on a list tomorrow.
It's impossible to say that you don't have anything to hide, because you don't even know yet today what you may need to hide tomorrow.
Why would I give it to you? I don't understand that argument. If I say "I don't really care if a bird poops on me", does it mean I want birds to poop on me? Just as I won't stop going outside due to the risk of being pooped on, I won't stop using Facebook just because there's a risk of someone obtaining my data.
Do you have Jewish ancestry?
Of course the next "Hitler" probably won't be after Jews. Next time it would be Muslims or immigrants or Stalinist purges of anyone who disagrees with the administration.
You don't know today what opinions would get you put on a list tomorrow.
And if you've never said anything that anyone could ever find objectionable, you're probably doing something wrong.
Good luck proving you're not one of the targeted groups to someone in power who's not interested in your proof.
The primary goal is to prevent a system that can target anyone, but it is a historical fact that we have not always been able to achieve that goal. What happens then?
I didn't miss it, I deplore it. True "defense in depth" puts all civil rights aside. "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." -- Benjamin Franklin.
> What happens then?
Citizens fight back. The outcome that tyrants dearly wish for is a population that simply doesn't care, or that can be frightened into submission. It's my hope that we're not that population.
Even token resistance is better than none at all.
It seems, then, that the part you're missing is that in authoritarianism the authoritarians are the government? The entire concept of civil rights in general and privacy in particular is as a defense against a bad government.
> Citizens fight back. The outcome that tyrants dearly wish for is a population that simply doesn't care, or that can be frightened into submission. It's my hope that we're not that population.
Except that you didn't object to Facebook having all your information, so when the jackboots march in and seize their servers, they get everything they need to know to identify anyone with the inclination to resist and can dispose of them before they can organize.
Very benign things can activate very discretionary things in other people.
There are 7.4 billion humans on this Earth, and not all of them have the opportunities you do.
Also, I don't understand comments like yours. It seems like a fallacy. Just because you "have nothing to hide" doesn't mean you want everyone to get your whole file just for the sake of it.
Also, I don't understand comments like yours. It seems like a fallacy. Just because you "have nothing to hide" doesn't mean anyone should get your whole life just for the sake of it.
"...even if the next Hitler would get all my Facebook data I still don't care personally."
Sorry, i'm downvoting your post as you clearly seem to be trolling.
You seem to think it's black or white: either you want everyone to have your data or you die before risking to give it to anyone.
But in terms of the data collected by FB, especially the extent of it, your view is that it seems okay, considering the benefit you receive from FB and you're not bothered. This broadly places you in a category of people who have not experienced a negative experience / erosion of your position in a transaction due to information asymmetry. Either that, or you are in a significant position that this doesn't bother you much.
An example from the past - SS used to target dissenters in Germany by throwing bricks at their windows during the night, sending lewd anonymous letters to their partners and causing strains in family relationships etc.
Key to this was knowing your affiliations and information on when you were at/out of home, if you lived with a partner or not, what your address was etc. they collected this through extensive surveillance on the ground, storing this information on paper documents and sifting through them when needed.
In our case, we have an entity FB that can capture extensive amount of our information, through voluntary and non-voluntary means, store them easily with marginal costs and have the ability to sift through them in seconds. Now, it begs the question who gets access to these capabilities if they are being offered up for sale - a benevolent company will use it to market its services, an aggressive company will try to outmaneuver you at negotiations to maximize their profit and limit your savings, a benevolent government will use it to improve services to you, an authoritarian one will use it to crush you.
If you think about the actual operation of collecting this data, it's nothing more than the commoditization of detective services. What would take a human hours of work to keep track of your whereabouts, not how long you eat your food, what you possibly spend at different places, who you interact with and how much etc now is done through our devices for no cost.
Some of us believe this is not correct, that such information is being gathered on us, because some experience in our past has negatively impacted us, due to information access and asymmetry. We oppose this and seek out ways to curb this / put guard rails. Others like you, do not see the need for jede guard rails, which to me is a little naive indeed.
Yes. Very.
I don't "worry" about getting hit by a car every day, either. But still I always look both ways before crossing a street. Even one-way streets.
To which your answer to that was, basically, "But that's not very likely to happen."
Are you sure? Facebook has a patent on lowering your credit score based on who is in your friends list[1]. They also feed data to credit score companies who directly examine your posts and use it to tweak your credit score yet further[2].
It's totally possible that your use of Facebook has affected your ability to buy a car or house, or get a job[3]. The lifetime cost of your mortgage could be $20,000 higher than it need be due to your use of Facebook. Maybe you got passed over for that job that would have been in the perfect place for raising your new child, due to your posting. How would you know? Did you really think they were going to tell you?
Maybe you're not at a time in your life where these things have happened to you yet, but I have bad news. The data you've submitted to Facebook will never be deleted. It's invisible baggage, following you everywhere. Honestly, you have no real idea of what impact it's having on your life, because it's not in the interest of any of that data's consumers to tell you what they are doing with it.
[1] https://qz.com/472751/facebooks-new-patent-lets-lenders-reje... [2] http://www.ajc.com/news/national/how-your-facebook-profile-c... [3] https://www.creditkarma.com/article/why-some-employers-check...
The really scary possibility is that your non-use of Facebook has negatively impacted your credit score.
My (mostly) non-use of LinkedIn (which is even worse than FB IMHO) has almost certainly had a negative impact on my career.
At some point, we will have to start auditing and regulating the responsibility that companies owe to society once they come to dominate a field. There's a scary chance that LinkedIn might capture almost all the professional job market. Once that happens, we /need/ to be able to audit them to ensure they are fully complying with witness protection requirements, and to make sure their algorithms don't contain race biases.
Look forward to that one being the hot topic of 2025's legal circles.
Or it could be $20,000 cheaper if you're actually low-risk and their algorithms are better than the status quo...
> Maybe you got passed over for that job that would have been in the perfect place for raising your new child, due to your posting. How would you know?
If you didn't have Facebook, how would you know if you were missing out on opportunities because you've since lost touch with various acquaintances?
I'm sorry, are we now living on bizarro-earth where companies work with each other to develop new, exciting opportunities to make less money?
However, I have lived in Australia, where the banking competition is so bad that the consumer protection agency is having to explain in baby words to the national banks why they can't gang up on apple pay[2].
I have also lived in Iceland, a nation in which essentially all industries exist in tiny vertical monopolies, and the banks are no exception. It's hard to link citations here because fólk lesa ekki Íslensku[6][7], but go ask an Icelander if they think the national banks are in vigorous competition, they'll laugh in your face. Landsbankinn was genuinely shocked and puzzled when I moved all my accounts to Arion because they wouldn't give me a visa electron card so I could buy things off the internet.
That having been said, some quick[3] googling[4] suggests[5] that the USA isn't in great shape when it comes to competition either. In general, consumer competition is poor among banks, and they like it that way.
[1] https://hbr.org/2016/06/one-big-reason-theres-so-little-comp...
[2] http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-11-30/accc-rejects-the-banks...
[3] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/five-major-banks-agree-parent...
[4] http://www.reuters.com/article/us-banks-rigging-lawsuit-idUS...
[5] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-12-05/banks-sai...
[6] no one reads Icelandic
[7] please critique my grammar, I'm guessing here :(
If you have a better algorithm of determining credit risk you can make a lot of money undercutting the competition on the right borrowers.
Is it "fear-mongering" to bring up this episode again?
Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuck: Just ask
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don't know why.
Zuck: They "trust me"
Zuck: Dumb fucks
Also, yes, you can generally trust people to tell you what their real policies are. They might not be good policies, or well thought-through, etc., but there are very few people in the world who make it their business to lie and cheat every day.
Actually there are quite a lot of them.
Add some plain greed on top of that, and you'll end up with a lot of people. Grandparent is very naive.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/victorlipman/2013/04/25/the-dist...
In a just world filled with righteous people, that chat log would have doomed Facebook to oblivion long ago.
This is laughably, shockingly, categorically wrong. People can and do change, all the time. Your opinions, values, etc didn't change from when you were in college?
But, my character, my moods, my tells, and the fundamental flow of my thought processes have never changed. I'm the same lumpish animal I was when I was a tot. When someone says "People don't change", I think the core of that sentiment is that the brain wiring that makes random person X who they are never changes (save the brain becoming damaged or fading, of course.) I'm talking about the essence of a mind.
So I contend that a creep like Zuck doesn't uncreep himself. A sociopath is wired that way, even if they're proficient at hiding that fact. You might say, "Zuck's been exposed to and riding atop a business operating at a mind-blowing scale and pace - that HAS to change a person!" I think that's just projecting what one thinks would happen to themselves in such a situation. What change can you actually point to in Zuck?
But to get back to the subject of the original subthread: not enough for us to trust him running our national ID structure, thank you very much.
What's SNS?
I really doubt that's the case.
As well as attitude towards his users as human beings generally.
That does not happen with ordinary street surveillance footage, as far as I know.
So you might have pictures of you taken by street surveillance cameras as you walk around in big cities, but your face isn't ordinarily going to be recognized by anyone.
On the other hand, I guess it could do some inference, such as: person X seen at location Y is also seen going in to residence Z every evening and coming out of the same residence every morning for the last 6 months, therefore there's a high probability that this person's address is residence Z, and since John Doe is the only person registered as living in that residence, person X is probably John Doe, etc.
Right, which is exactly what would happen if law enforcement/governments could access FB's database.
Consider yourself lucky if you or your loved ones haven't been harassed or stalked because of information you've posted about yourself or your family online.
Some have not been so fortunate, and don't want to make themselves or their families any more vulnerable than they already are.
You might not have anything to hide now but you might in the future and even if you don't that doesn't mean you won't be harassed because you "might" have something to hide.
Immigrants from japan/germany/italy in the US during WW2. Those people all had nothing to hide on Dec 6th.
10 years later I still don't get the point of these articles besides fear mongering and at most to provide a technological challenge to engineers and developers on "the other side". I understand ad-blocker companies are fighting a messy war right now with both content and ad providers. I guess that is another way, albeit much slower, way to achieve progress. Hacking goes both ways.