Eh, disable location services for your facebook app. I assumed they already did this.

And if you don't want facebook to know anything about you, you can still use facebook. Here's the secret: just don't tell facebook everything about yourself. It's not hard to do.

Nah, I have a fake gps location app. Just use that and set your location to where ever you wish. The best campaign again those that seek to collect data is to feed them incorrect information.

The problem with that is your friends indirectly tell Facebook. Facebook can fill in the rest.

This is only true if your private information is visible to your friends. I don't feel compelled to put anything in facebook at all except the stuff I'd normally put in a public-viewable blog. My profile is 100% blank except for my profile picture, which is a monkey in a nice wool coat.

The only reason I actually use facebook at all is for party invites, if my friends could find a different way to wrangle party invitations I'd dump my account like it was myspace in 2007.

Facebook IQ: you cannot exceed the IQ of the stupidest friend of all of your friends.

Also known as the Randi Conundrum.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/randi-zuckerberg-be...

I'm curious, a lot of my information is snarky (location: Antarctica, religious views: Nihilist, etc) -- I wonder if they're able to realize that I'm obviously being intentionally inaccurate?

To put it another way, you don't have to talk to a person to 'know' them to varying degrees of certainty. You can gather bits of information and build your own image with out ever meeting.

I don't see why anyone would treat places that they go carrying a smartphone as private data. The phone has the data and cell phone networks (in the US, at least) do collect the data (or used to)[1]. Giving Facebook the data basically just de-anonymizes it since it seems perfectly conceivable and natural that some of the collectors of this data would take it in aggregate, anonymize it, and sell it to companies, if for no other reason than they can make money off of this data. The solution to this kind of tracking (if it bothers one) is to not use a cell phone. And if you don't want facebook to know anything about you then you should not use facebook (instead of or in addition to, not using a cell phone).

[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/cellphone-companies-will-...

My bank knows about most of my purchases, but it is still considered private data. My health care provider knows about my medical history, but it is still considered private data. Why should a cell phone provider be any different?

I see no reason why banks couldn't in principle do the same thing with purchasing data that carriers do with location data. There ought to be a distinction between private as in confidential and private as in "confined to multiple parties each of whom the data's subject knows of". Health data is so sensitive that it is protected under various laws and in most developed countries (the US being the largest exception) health care is run by the government rather than private companies. Unlike with health data, it is possible to avoid having banks and cell phone carriers collect data about you - always use cash and don't have a cell phone. In addition to being a very paranoid course of action, this is impractical for most especially when the privacy trade off is likely to be worth it in most cases. When those who already have your location data is considered, giving up your location data to Facebook oughtn't be too big of a stretch when they already know about birthdays, weddings, funerals, your friend network, etc. Retailers will already piece together private information about you from purchasing data that they can collect[1] and this is the position which apps seem to currently be in - neither Facebook nor Target want to make guesses at the rest of your private life but it is impractical for Target to make a request directly while Facebook has no qualms about doing so.

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targe...

> Health data is so sensitive that it is protected under various laws

There is no reason we can't pass laws preventing Facebook from tracking and using such information. We don't have to settle for "don't use a cell phone" or "don't use Facebook."

I upvoted you even though I disagree heartily with what you are saying; and I would like to point people to pg's essay http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html to remind them that this site is not reddit, and that the downvote should be used rarely, and mostly to quell noise and abuse.

That said, one should not have to give up using a cell-phone to avoid being tracked. Nor should ones willingness to use facebook to talk to family be taken as a blanket permission to mine your personal data stream for every last bit of value in it.

What you describe is not supposed to happen on Reddit either. But idiocy takes over whenever a group of people gets large enough.

if you have a core group which is caring about the health of the community then you might have not this problem. but if the community gets overuned by trolls the admin should take some steps to prevent it. (kick the trolls, close registration temporaly, etc.) (sorry, if my english is broken. i'm a german guy)

Hard to kick people for downvoting stuff, would have to be done manually and that doesn't seem feasible. Cheers from another German;)

Sigh, I wish I could make a Facebook with just the keep in touch with friends feature, and nothing else. Facebook itself it turning into a 70's horror movie, The Blob.

I think Google already does that. There's a Google Map process which runs on Android in the background. It comes back even if you turn it off.

At least Google's process has a bit more benefit than Facebook's: you can see the location data they collect from your phone by turning on Latitude and its history app. They also use this data to improve traffic and map data and (if you have WiFi on) to improve their coarse location data.

Related story: "People without Facebook accounts are suspicious."

I'm quickly losing respect for Forbes lately.

This is why I won't carry a cell phone from which I can't remove the battery.

Blocking the location permission or going into airplane mode would be another option.

This does not bode well for those people for whom Facebook is a pre-installed (and often unremovable) app on new phones.

You can however disable pre-installed apps on newer Android (4+?) phones.

Privacy issues aside isn't this going to reduce battery life dramatically?