By the time I deleted my facebook, no one even saw my goodbye post on their "feed." It was a different internet than the one on which I naively signed up. I, and a host of others, enabled that new internet. I have much less interest in this one.
The day FB was announced was the day I said “this is a bad idea.”
I and many others on HN have NEVER made a FB account, and my life seems to generally have been better for it.
But it was obvious then, and it is obvious now.
Matter of fact it frankly looks even worse today, since there really seems to be no solution, and the granularity of tools and regulation is too coarse to deal with this scenario.
The only real option I’ve seen seems to be to drop off the internet.
The "day FB was announced" it was exclusive to Harvard students and was just a cleaner version of MySpace and Friendster. It's unlikely you would have had strong opinions about Facebook, in particular, that you didn't also extend to those two, as well as AOL and sites like Digg.
And people clearly saw and pointed out the issues with privacy back then.
I had few issues with Aol, but it was still a simple service play - and had/has little at all in common with Facebook.
DIGG was never at the same scale or range - and from what I know it never depended on your real life profile as I recall.
Not pure semantics. It is important to focus on what you're actually talking about when you say "the beginning." Facebook has evolved over time, both in its service as well as its business model. So when you talk about "the beginning" it's important to know the beginning of what?
>DIGG was never at the same scale or range - and from what I know it never depended on your real life profile as I recall.
Nothing was ever at the same scale or range as Facebook. If they were, they'd have been as much of a threat as Facebook is now. That's kind of the point. A lot of the LiveJournal, Xanga, MySpace, etc. stuff from back then was all groping towards a functioning business model and it was Facebook's news feed that actually created one.
But even in the early stages the News Feed wasn't really about extracting data, just about creating a UI paradigm that made it easy to shove native advertising in your face. What really made the big data analytics game take off was when SEO and viral marketing started getting big, which wasn't really on Facebook's radar in the early days.
Advertising is different from Ad Tech. Ad Tech is about more than just Facebook's collection. People couldn't really have predicted the extent to which the media industry (new and old) was going to go whole hog into Facebook's platform. It has been their complicity that elevates Facebook's data collection from being "Wow The Facebook is nosy and annoying" to "Wow Facebook is a threat to the public sphere."
It was obviously privacy invasive and the harm type any of those systems could do was obvious. They didn’t have a business model when they started out - but that’s only because they had the runway to ignore it. Otherwise there was an obvious way they were going to make money and that was Ads. Powered by data harvested about you.
I mean that’s the whole point of the site? What else is it going to do?
This is facebooks business model - it’s also the business model for many other sites. And yes those other sites are also a problem.
Hey, I’m not stating an opinion, I’m stating a fact.
I don’t have a Facebook account and always viewed it as a threat to privacy. I’m not the only one.
All that’s happening now is one of many adversarial uses of this information is being made known to people who Don’t visit slashdot and hacker news.
Facebook was going to use your personal information to make money for itself. It was going to be harmful to you.
This has happened.
The business model for other parts of the web is the same. Those parts are going to cause similar issues but at smaller scales.
Google has the same model, but takes data privacy more seriously than Facebook does. It's disingenuous to conflate any data harvesting with the most unscrupulous and casino-inspired iterations of it.
Arguably, the micro-targeting model of advertising Facebook goes after is more faddish than effective anyway. Google uses the data analytics as much to build more salable products as it does to serve advertising, so the volume of collection serves some kind of function. But facebook's actual business need for most of its data is dubious at best.
>Facebook was going to use your personal information to make money for itself. It was going to be harmful to you.
It's not really the use of personal information that's the harm though. It's the addiction mechanisms they leverage to make you keep giving them personal information and the lack of protections or responsibility they put around it. It's not at all "obvious" that it's going to be harmful to anyone, and arguably it's not even harmful to anyone individually so much as harmful to society and the body politic generally. You can't have those problems at "smaller scales" because those problems don't exist at small scales, they're an emergent property of scale itself.
Further google does far too much as it is. I don’t want my emails parsed to figure out what ads to present, or my uploaded files.
The addiction mechanisms are a separate class of harm, and I recognize them from when games, far more than social media. They came much later, and were not part of business models back when Facebook etc. were created.
The misuse of personal data to harm people and privacy is a known idea. For example, they were warned about back in the day by people such as Huxley or Orwell.
Either way, this is an odd conversation.
These harms were clear and known.
If you are saying You didn’t see it, then that’s fine many others didn’t see it or believe it.
If you are saying I couldn’t see it, well I have long ago acted on what I saw and believed and oppose Facebook and other similarly privacy invading systems. I’m not happy with the old British surveillance state from the 90s - and I’m neither British nor American.
If you are saying the specific detailed break down of the harm to be caused was not known- sure. I cannot tell you which incident will finally trigger X event but I can predict that you won’t have autonomous cars, (since I see people driving in the wrong lane in the opposite direction of traffic very often where I live)
And a final point - the addiction mechanisms are just being cross pollinated from other systems, just like AB testing and other research helps ensure people stay on web pages.
Your deeper problem is that advertising, once a tool, has now become and end in and of itself.
This is just hindsight talking. It was hardly obvious from the beginning because it was hardly obvious how big the market for granular private data was going to be.
Facebook, in the beginning, was functionally just a stripped down personal page with a status update feature analogous to AIM. It didn't really ask for any information that you wouldn't have gleaned from a 10 minute conversation with a person and almost everything it got about you had to be volunteered (e.g. favorite music, movies, etc.)
The News Feed didn't get introduced until a few years in and it prompted massive outcry from Facebook users for how invasive it seemed, but even then most people assumed the problem was going to be that it violated some implicit social consensus where people should have to go looking for information about you, not have it sent to them in an notification blast. In other words: "stalking should be hard."
The ad-supported business model at the time didn't rely so heavily on micro-targeting by "revealed preferences," it was assumed they would target based on the declared preferences that you gave them (e.g. favorite movies, music, etc.) The idea that Facebook (or even data analytics as a field) would eventually become sophisticated enough to devour the news media in general and tailor you a bespoke reality based on your implied tendencies and personal weaknesses to manipulate you was, at best, fodder for some speculative cyberpunk fiction in the early days. In fact, Facebook didn't really even make forays into being a news clearinghouse/media aggregator until the mid 2000s when "going viral" became the hot trend in media, which is what ultimately led to the media world putting themselves over a barrel to social media companies by myopically chasing traffic in lieu of building an audience.