If she's happy with this level of privacy though, what's the problem? Maybe she does fully understand the implications but has a different value system to you?

I feel that when people on this site are talking about Facebook, there's this assumption their friends using Facebook are failing to understand what Facebook does in the background and if they could somehow get them to understand their friends would all leave. People can be fully aware of what Facebook is and simply choose a different balance between privacy and convenience to what you prefer.

The problem is that it's not just her privacy she's violating, but the privacy of everyone else, including OP, whose photos get shared by said cousin.

When I got back from a trip I took abroad with my family earlier this year, my friends mentioned that they'd seen the photos that "I" had posted to Facebook. Except... I hadn't posted any photos to Facebook. I have a Facebook account, but I deliberately have a very minimal presence on it. What my friends were seeing was the photos that my mother had posted, and which I had been tagged in. My privacy was violated by someone else's inability to understand Facebook's privacy settings.

Ironically, it was your OWN inability to understand Facebook's privacy settings.

Go to Settings -> Click " Timeline and Tagging Settings" -> Edit " Who can add things to my timeline? " section : " Review posts that friends tag you in before they appear on your Timeline?" make " Enabled "

There, you will never be tagged in another photo or post, and you now have a review process for anyone who attempts those things, so you can manually up or down those things.

Keeping people from tagging you is pretty close, though.

Asymptomatic carrier.

An asymptomatic carrier is one who exhibits no symptoms of the illness but is carrier who can infect others. I don't believe that is the right analogy here.

With herd immunity you have a group with a large rate of participation, which effectively immunizes those that haven't been.

Facebook is the opposite in that you may not be "infected" but if everyone around you is "infected" you might as well be, because Facebook will piece together your information based on what your friends make available.

Plague almost starts to sound like a better analogy...

If Facebook didn't exist, people would still show photos to people in other ways. If someone takes your photo they're more than likely going to show it to somebody so I would assume a low level of privacy by default.

I suspect this is not the issue or what the parent means by privacy.

Rather, they probably mean specifically that they don't want their metadata enriched photos being made available, without their explicit knowledge or consent, to Facebook the company (and therefore also indirectly to any number of other companies / advertisers).

If Facebook didn't exist, people certainly wouldn't do that! That's purely an unavoidable side effect of Facebook's current business model.

That does protect you to some level. But throw in machine learning with image processing and simple metadata extraction and while your friends might not see the photo, Facebook can potentially figure out if you're in the photo whether or not you've been tagged, where the photo was taken, what camera the photo was taken with, what mood you're in, who's with you, what clothes you're wearing etc etc. And then they'll sell that data without ever telling you.

I have a bigger issue with that happening than I have issues with friends seeing photos I may not have wanted to posted myself, to be honest.

And how should I do that if I don't have a Facebook account? How do I tell Facebook to not steal my phone number and texts from phones of my friends?

https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/03/fact-check-your-call-an...

"Call and text history logging is part of an opt-in feature for people using Messenger or Facebook Lite on Android. ... This feature does not collect the content of your calls or text messages"

Your friend has a copy and can do whatever they want with them, including share them with Facebook, the NSA/FBI/police, their friends, or anyone else they want to.

If you don't want them shared with Facebook, don't give the people who are sharing them with Facebook a copy.

So while yours is a interesting thought I highly doubt a lot of people Actually understand the full issue.

Found his Facebook. He didn't have any family listed, for privacy. Friends list wasn't visible either. However his dad and sister, both easily identifiable as such, I found since they had both liked the same profile picture a few years ago, and I could view their relationship (handy trick, go to someones user account, add ?and= followed by the user ID of another user and you can view relationships between anyone). Saw that they had a few mutual friends, <10. Found two which fit the criteria for possibly being my boss's mum. Searched both names in the electoral register and got rough locations. One of them lived in the same city my boss had listed as his birthplace, and co-habited with the person I previously identified as his dad. She was using her maiden name on Facebook (there goes security questions). I paid £1-2 for the full address.

For the next week or so I sent him random bits of information about his mum whenever he made a bad "your mum" joke at me (if it was good I didn't particularly care). Previous addresses, streetview screenshot of her house etc. Despite streetview blurring her car's license plate, I could see what make/model/colour it was, which was enough to find the license plate by skimming through photos posted on various sites which let you search by location. So I sent him MOT and road tax reminders too. It was fairly easy to find what schools she had gone to, previous marriages, a company she had started etc. He stopped making "your mum" jokes after a week.

Bear in mind: this was someone who worked in computer security and was actively privacy conscious, and within an hour I had enough information that I could have probably stolen his identity.

We had a overly 'social' secretary which didn't understand privacy implications until she met our team :) we pointed out every joint, cheap vodka bottle, or even slightly awkward things found in mirror selfies until she started to really rethink her privacy.

Or there is a old social network many people in my country kept for the email. They encouraged to write or at least post poems. Lot of awkward lines to be found there to make some heads red.

So without a direct social graph, specialised interest groups, more direct connections, more 'privacy' at least in terms of how public the data is available.

The lure of being more famous than her friends is too much to resist. Not sure if wrong or right. I would like being famous on HN, StackOverflow, tech blogs etc. Perhaps it's similar.

It's awesome to watch massive shifts in values and priorities.

Smoking used to be seen as cool, sexy, even healthy. Now it's widely seen as unhealthy and disgusting.

Same thing with high-fructose carbonated beverages.

I remember people using terms like "retarded" and "gyp" without hesitation. Today even people who hate political correctness don't talk like that in public.

It wasn't long ago that men abusing women in the workplace was routine and unremarkable. Now it's outrageous and shameful.

Things change, slowly at first, and then all at once. People are waking up and it will never be the same for Facebook.

Anything that changed from a medical perspective since I am smoking is that we know by now that a 'smokers lung' is not actually that and most never get it. Otherwise all the risks are well known for 15+ years.

Tldr: I don't think people actually care about dying earlier (or more cruel), at least in countries with working or cheap health care.

That isn't really the issue, smokers have been aware of the negative consequences for quite a while. Many are okay with it due to the relief the smoking brings them from stress and other issues, it's a trade-off. Just like alcohol ain't that healthy for you but many people still chose to drink it.

But on the other hand you have massive companies who've spent decades and billions of $ in making tobacco as addictive, and easy to smoke, as possible. So once the customers are hooked it's extremely difficult for them to kick the habit and even when they manage to kick it, many will still get cravings for years, if not decades, to come.

Which could be explained by this: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/01/11/schizophrenia-no-smoki...

But I would bet that it's much larger.

Wrong wrong wrong. They still do these a lot.

Seriously though, kids used it all the time when I was growing up — I didn't even know "gyp" was derogatory until I was perhaps in my 30's. If I had to guess, young me would have suspected it was spelled "jip" anyway.

We told Pollack jokes too and I didn't even know it meant someone from Poland.

I was not very cosmopolitan as a kid.

When was this?

But covertly? It’s happening even now, all over the world.

It's a slur against the Roma (gypsies).

Social media is socializing now, whether you like it or not, and whether you're along for the ride or not.

In that light, it's strange when people say it's "addicting," like that's a bad thing. It's supposed to be - we're social creatures.

Sharing things about your life with friends and family is not some horrible drug we need to curb.

Several studies have proven the ill effects of social network. So you are only partly correct.

I've heard worse. Plain "I don't care" and "I like that people know what I do all the time".

> It's like a smoking addiction

I'd say that tt's more like a drug. Most people seem to seek for an attention (in a comments/likes form).

I know few people who use even PhotoShop-like software to make themselves "more beautiful" to gather more attention; however they don't look even similiar to their pictures.

(it's like drug addicts do weird shit to get their dose of their favourite drug)

It is literally like a drug, former FB execs have explained how they trigger dopamine responses in your brain

Situation b: Mom and Dad knows what I did last night. Result: I get grounded.

Doesn't Facebook "remind" people to wish their "friends" a happy birthday? That kind of changes the meaning of those birthday wishes from "these people were thinking about me" to "these people clicked a button because an advertising corporation told them to".

As for condolences, the idea of deaths and other bad events increasing "engagement" (and therefore ad exposure and profit) for Facebook should make all involved feel dirty.