Of course it is, it's funny that there even is any arguing about that in the comments. Since when it's even a question? The real question is: so what can we do about that? I, for one, don't really see an answer to that. All this babbling by Snowden or anyone else for that matter is worth nothing. If there is any war going on, FB is hopelessly winning and I don't see any attempts (or even possible attempts) to change anything. Fuck, nobody even uses any somewhat "secure" messenger, people use WhatsApp and Telegram (and even dare to speak about them in terms of "privacy", which is mind boggling) and nobody gives a fuck about anything — and "somewhat secure messenger" isn't even that hard to achieve if people would really want it. And here you are talking about FB or Android being evil — yeah, of course they are, but they don't even have any plausible alternative to cover people's needs, so what do you expect…
Yes, but you not only have to just quit -- you also must do more.
Before deleting your account overwrite everything with garbage data. If you simply close or delete your account, FB saves everything (in case you might come back, they can offer you a better experience, don'tcha' know?). At least overwriting garbage may give you a slightly better chance.
You also need to use NoScript or the like and deny all FB scripts. FB tracks and maintains profiles on everyone, even whether or not you are members. They are being sued over this in the EU.
Also find and delete their hidden Super-cookies; 200kb of data, including all your other browsing habits, Amazon purchases, etc. Several tutorials are searchable online.
Don’t forget that all of your friends and family who use Facebook are potentially leaking your data as well. FB has become quite the tentacled monster!
Had to explain this to my now aging mother who likes to post photos of me without my permission. She gets it in the moment but weeks later back to the same behavior haha. I can't control it if I tried.
"Fuck, nobody even uses any somewhat "secure" messenger, people use WhatsApp and Telegram (and even dare to speak about them in terms of "privacy", which is mind boggling) and nobody gives a fuck about anything"
So I was wondering, why you did not mention Signal or Diaspora then?
It is easy to bitch, but there are actual things you can do. Even it is only tell people of alternatives. And while I by myself don't even tried Diaspora yet, I like that it exists and getting more mature. And Signal I do use and see no downside compared to WhatsApp, except most people beeing too lazy to change or having, oh my god, 2 installed messengers.
And my main issue with signal, that it uses Google Servers, is something that could be changed in the future, as far as I know, but till then, it is still 100% open source and private
I would like to mention Matrix/Riot instead. It's not good enough still, but if anything will be in a foreseeable future, I believe it has the biggest chance.
Could you expand on WhatsApp? You are conflating privacy and "secure" and I am confused. I thought WhatsApp had end to end encryption, even if FB can probably see who chats with who.
I'm not sure if it's good enough to foil the US government agencies and their boundless stockpile of zero days. It did, however, make some judges here feel very impotent and powerless. They really, really wanted the messages in order to investigate some crime and couldn't understand why WhatsApp was resisting their requests. They ended up ordering ISPs to block the messaging service for a while as punishment.
Sure, it's true that people won't be able to audit the thing... But I think it's significant that a huge number of people are using end-to-end encryption by default without even realizing it. That's gotta count for something. It's a lot better security-wise than whatever it is we used before, and most certainly objectively a lot better than facebook messenger or SMS.
> I think it's significant that a huge number of people are using end-to-end encryption by default without even realizing it
> most certainly objectively a lot better than facebook messenger or SMS
Sure, I wouldn't argue with that. Doesn't make up for making me use Google Services (or a phone & a phone number, for that matter) and sharing all my contacts with FB though. It might be even making me angrier about whole situation: it's so close to being good that it makes it obvious, how much technologically possible it in fact is to have a sane messenger. We don't have it though. And no surprise, because who would pay for it, if money cannot be made out of our metadata?
Please see my answer to @kruczek in the same thread. This might be quite broad (maybe unconventional) definition of "secure" I'm talking about here, but the point is: everything that leaks important personal data to the 3rd party (I mean "not me and not the person I'm talking to", so FB is a 3rd party) leaking which is not absolutely mathematically necessary to perform its most basic functions — is not "secure" in my book. It doesn't matter if data end ups leaked because of using ROT13 for message encryption, or because it shares it with FB by design. Sharing my whole contactbook with FB, using proprietary closed-source app and protocol, requiring to have a real phone number (and sharing my access code via SMS with my mobile network operator on the first login — this is truly brilliant for a "secure" app, although I don't quite remember if it was WhatsApp or something similar) is not absolutely necessary for its most basic features and thus is not secure.
I want to be clear that `conflating privacy and "secure"` is intentional — violating my privacy automatically harms my security in most direct way. If something quite literally puts me in danger it shouldn't be considered "secure" by definition, no matter how good its crypto is on paper.
FB can definitely see who chats to who (and from what kind of device, and from what IP address, etc.) - they own Whatsapp. While the content is secured by end-to-end encryption the metadata is still incredibly valuable.
We roll through new generations of computer-using society every year, and every 4 - 5 years, after some intensive studying, new waves of developers and "computer people" evolve from being clueless teenagers, to clued-in members of society.
This is of course, of benefit to society at large - but there is a deleterious effect at play here, as well. While cramming hard to graduate, people keep their heads down - and/or in the sand - and tend to ignore the wider, broader aspects of society in the meanwhile.
And this is why we must continually rehash themes that we - living in the static world - consider to be 'old news'.
Always remember - ALWAYS - that there is a generation of kids on the cusp of making their way into society, and no matter what we adults do, no matter how hard we try and cry and pound our fists on the table, these kids were NOT paying attention to the important issues in the last few years.
So this is why we must consistently push key social issues to the forefront, no matter how tiresome it becomes. Its the kids who are coming to this scene who can do something about it, before its too late - before they too, become jaded adults who just want to pay the mortgage.
Between these two worlds is a no-mans land of social issues, and a war being waged by all the special interests to obfuscate and confuse and devolve the issues, such that the powerful young new adult elite don't put them in their spotlights.
"Since when its even a question?" - every day, there are people learning the extent to which our society has devolved. It is ALWAYS a question.
> people use WhatsApp and Telegram (and even dare to speak about them in terms of "privacy", which is mind boggling)
I don't know about WhatsApp, but from what I recall about Telegram, its main criticism is the fact that it isn't using secret chats (i.e. private conversations) by default. However when using secret chats, the communication is end-to-end encrypted. Is there anything else wrong with it?
The main criticism of Telegram is that it created it's own cryptography. It does not use a well established cryptographic scheme. Instead the creators of Telegram created their own scheme, and that has not been checked as thoroughly.
The mostly strict rule in these things is, don't roll your own crypto. This is reiterated in [1] and an attack on telegram [2]
First off, I consider no e2e enryption by default a big deal, given even WhatsApp does that. In Telegram it's so inconvenient — "they" obviously don't want you to use it. So yeah. But for me all these apps are broken on more fundamental level. First, as somebody else already noted that I'm "confusing security and privacy" let me introduce my custom definition (or rather a trait) of "security" for the sake of this argument: no 3rd party can access any data of mine without explicit permission, unless it's absolutely necessary for the app to work. So any messenger that must use a phone number for a log in without giving me any choice is shit, regardless of whether its crypto is broken or not. Any messenger that can non-locally access all of my contacts without asking me which contacts I agree to share — is shit. Any messenger that won't work without Google Services or cannot be installed without Google Play account — is shit. And so on.
That said, Matrix/Riot probably is the only messenger out there that has any chance of becoming not-shitty messenger. But nobody uses it.
Am I the only one who thinks that Google is getting off easy? When it comes to 1) tracking people and 2) contributing to the perverse incentives which are transforming the media industry into an enemy of democracy, I think of Google and Facebook as equally guilty and toxic.
Yet Google seems to get only a fraction of the negative coverage, both in the press and in the tech community. Why is that?
Perhaps this question is naive, but other than biasing what information people are shown via their search engine, could you mention concrete instances of Google "contributing to the perverse incentives which are transforming the media industry into an enemy of democracy"?
Google is seen as progressive institution, and that's also how the majority of the media classifies itself I'd say. Their core audience is more techy as well and cares about information.
Facebook is more on the populist side of things, their core audience are common people focused on maximizing their reputation.
It also reflects their core businesses, Googles ad business centeres more about search and information, and Facebook more about persuation, and call to action.
> Their core audience is more techy as well and cares about information.
Why do you think so? Google having ~80% of search traffic seems to suggest otherwise. I mean, everyone I know is using Google, including my grandfather who is not a "techy".
Core audience means people who know how to search and dig out the information they want to find. Not everybody using search knows how to do that, or search for keywords before they start their main search.
But many people use Google Search, Maps, Mail, Analytics... And of course the endless tentacles of Adsense, Adwords, Recaptcha, Doubleclick.
In my opinion the reach of Google, and therefore their ability to cause harm, is even greater than Facebook's, and beyond the veneer of perceived benevolence they are just as unethical.
The reason Google isn't getting much backlash is because they played their cards right. They're much more discreet, their ads look like any other ad except for the tiny adsense symbol, they give the appearance of a free, open search engine etc etc. How many people know that the search suggestions don't really reflect the most popular terms? How many know that Google will go through your emails to pick up information about you? How many know that they actively derank websites, essentially deleting them off the internet, based on political choices?
It's also quite possible that people aren't aware of critisism against Google simply because Google chooses to hide it. They're that powerful right now.
Usually I like Snowden, he seems to be fairly level-headed about most things. This seems like a bit of a nothing statement though. No evidence to back up his statement, no call to action.
I was thinking about reasonable ways to protect personal information. People always say that they delete FB outright, but I don't think everyone has that luxury. It's also a pretty good way of staying in touch with others. I came up with a couple ways of at least making it harder for them to track you.
1. Whatever email you use for FB, stop using it for other things. My understanding is that a lot of how they can put your purchase history together with your facebook profile is that companies that collect purchase data joins it on e-mail.
2. Stop using the FB apps. I think the "FB is listening to me" thing is mostly BS, but apps in general give away a lot more information than websites.
3. Log out of facebook when not using it. A huge reason that Facebook was allowed to reach "beyond" they're own website is the Facebook pixel, which allows FB to know where you're browsing when you're not on the site.
Of course, these won't work 100% (I have no idea if they'll work at all, this is all stuff that I gathered from working as a data scientist at a much much smaller social media company), but I think they're reasonable measures to take to protect your data if you can't just stop using FB outright.
I’m just replying to your comment as it jogged lose an example of what I see as a missing piece of the issue.
Namely, a course of conduct in self protection needs to have an understanding of what the potential harm is from a given threat.
As I see it, the big danger is not from these corporate data vacuums like Facebook, directly.
The biggest threat is the use of this aggregated data by bad actors.
I have yet to hear of a major tech company undertaking actions to directly harm the users of their products. In fact, they are highly incentivized to minimize harms to users.
I don’t see targeted advertising as a bad thing. If I’m going to see adds, I prefer they reflect my interests. I actually find out interesting things from such adds.
Because the overall system has become so complex and monolithic, I think taking steps to thoughtfully minimize personal information leakage is prudent.
But inconveniencing oneself to no discernible benefit is counter productive, and can easily backfire.
For example, if you move your email service to one provided by your shared website host, you open yourself to many potential woes.
Emails from private domains are more likely to get lost in spam filters. I’ve had unfortunately breakdowns in relationships because people who needed to reach me thought I was blowing them off.
Last time I had an email address a private domain, the spam filtering was so bad, it rendered it almost useless.
You’re also hosting your mail on god knows what server, controlled by a company with a lot less security resources than Google.
So there is a substantial cost in avoiding the free email services like Gmail, for nebulous benefit.
I am very concerned about the issue of personal information security. But everything comes at a cost.
The question of whether allowing law enforcement back door access to private communications is worth it is not so straightforward as many commenters seem to imply.
>>> In fact, they are highly incentivized to minimize harms to users.
You may be right. But it really depends who the users are and the kind of Don Corleone proposal the management of the social media company might get. (hint : some group of very powerful people can be the most important users of FB and can make it a proposal that they can't refuse; people like a shady government bureau)
>>> You’re also hosting your mail on god knows what server, controlled by a company with a lot less security resources than Google.
The question is not security. The question is who manages the server and who he abides to. Security doesn't mean nothing as as long as the server is cracked/owned, all your data will be open.
Why is this even a subject for discussion? A typical HN user already knows about this, while the general masses don't give a f* about their privacy.
Also, for the most part, FB is not getting your data without your permission(like a surveillance company), rather, it asks you to give it(eg: upload contacts so we could find your friends), or people voluntarily give data to it(eg: uploading selfies, with location and time metadata as bonus).
There are only two things of concern here, 1. How to make more people aware about the privacy implications of their online actions. 2. How to make these firms more responsible for properly protecting the data they have.
Regarding #1, when I told people about myactivity.google.com, at least one person switched to DuckDuckGo(although I don't know if he sticked with it). Attempts to make people switch to Signal have miserably failed, forcing me to use WhatsApp as well. No one ever quit FB though, rather they got deeper into the rabbit hole by using Instagram as well.
Regarding #2, countries should learn from EU and make stronger privacy laws.
> Also, for the most part, FB is not getting your data without your permission(like a surveillance company), rather, it asks you to give it(eg: upload contacts so we could find your friends), or people voluntarily give data to it(eg: uploading selfies, with location and time metadata as bonus).
Me uploading pictures of you and a large part of your social graph, and Facebook correlating that with a shadow profile built with tracking pixels etc isn't exactly passive? Or with your explicit permission?
It's a subject for discussion, because these days a lot of what Snowden does is prop up his own fame by catching headlines. The line about Facebook being a surveillence company is great headline bait and Snowden knows it.
Snowden's premise is also historically a vague, unsupported claim at best. Ford knew incredible details about its customers and workers, as did Standard Oil. Neither were routinely described as being primarily surveillence companies.
The only thing that has actually changed, is that Facebook can do it easily today, as their users willingly provide the information in a convenient technological manner even after the Snowden revelations.
Surveillance and privacy... these are terms that typical "social media" users don't really care about. We can brag about it, we can delete our accounts, block them, do whatever we want and nothing will change because brainless mass will still use it to post hundreds of private information daily. They are addicted to this and if you take this "toy" away from them they will start behaving like hungry junkies.
Addiction is the power of Facebook and nothing more.
To fight with Facebook you have to set up another social media addiction that will dominate the market and expect that after a few years it will not be the same again...
"Facebook makes their money by exploiting and selling intimate details about the private lives of millions, far beyond the scant details you voluntarily post."
Facebook doesn't sell information, it sells ads. It's in Facebook's best interest to share as little of this information as possible with third parties so they continue buying ads.
1. You're quibbling over semantics. Facebook profits by selling ads. The value of those ads is that they can be precisely targeted. That precision comes from all the private data Facebook collects on you. So Snowden's quote is true.
2. In the past, Facebook has sold info to advertisers and tracking companies:
That article is a little old, and Facebook may have changed their policy. But the recent story about Cambridge Analytics shows that, at least in some cases, Facebook still shares your information with third parties.
I figure we must promote your calming beliefs. We must allow the the socials' privacy violation pressure cooker to build up its internal pressure to WMD levels. When it finally blows, the socials will be destroyed by the combination of regulatory over-reaction and lawsuits.
If Facebook and Google are like Stasi and KGB, how about we start dealing with collaborators? By default, Facebook and Google can only surveil you on their own premises - on facebook.com, *.google.com, some parts of Android experience, etc. But lots - likely most - of their data comes from wilful collaborators - people and companies that put Google analytics, social plugins, and other adtech ware in their products.
What I worry about is that even if (through a miracle) Facebook gets slain, someone else will quickly step up to take their place. In the world of adtech, surveillance is a free market.
The bigger problem is unwillingly sending them even more private information than participating on their sites. Sending a referer and a cookie with every ad (or like button) delivered is far more intrusive. Or isn't that how it works?
facebook like button is how they scoop data from non-facebook web properties about people who don’t have a facebook account or aren’t logged into facebook
The present perfect tense does not necessarily mean that the action is recent.
I chose the present perfect because I think Facebook still derives utility from being a social network and is not solely a data-mining machine. It's a process that I think is probably inevitable but is not completed yet.
I agree. When they must have started to monetize their platform through ads, they must have realized how useful their data was. For e.g., search engine advertising is based on customer's intent because they know what the customer is searching for, whereas a social network's knowledge runs deeper than that.
This is when they must have decided to turn into a surveillance company, to become a data-crunching behemoth it is today.
I'd widen this to include search engines, forums, much of the rest of the internet, phone companies, cable companies, banks, and many other companies. Everyone seems to want to get in on the spying game these days, most every company wants to know as much as possible about their customers.
Of course, Facebook differs from most companies in the amount of data it manages to collect about its users. A cable company isn't going to know nearly as much about its typical customer as Facebook knows, but they can still probably infer a surprising amount from your viewing habits -- including political views based on which news programs you watch, for instance.
Web forums could know even more than cable companies, as many people are quite candid in discussing what they think and care about on them. Then there are communications companies like Skype, which have access to all sorts of confidential and sensitive communications.
The list goes on and on, and I'm really not sure how this runaway freight train of voluntary participation in surveillance can be stopped at this point, as for most people all these services are too damn convenient, and virtually none of them were built with strong privacy, much less anonymity in mind.
Commenters on Internet forums don’t see them as surveillance platforms, from which they must hide their views.
These are platforms for speech. People crave and seek such platforms, and frankly I think they provide a valuable service in disseminating ideas that corporate entities have no incentives to.
It verges on absurd to criticize platforms designed to transmit public speech on the grounds that they might leak that information.
There seems to be a quaint archetype floating in the collective consciousness with an image of privacy that has never existed, outside of recluses living in exile from their community.
Historically, anyone living in a small community had such a lack of privacy, that it would be intolerable to many modern city dwellers.
There needs to be a more nuanced and realistic concept of how personal information is managed, by all entities who touch it.
> Historically, anyone living in a small community had such a lack of privacy, that it would be intolerable to many modern city dwellers.
We're talking about information age though, where the information can be gathered in massive quantities and processed and used in ways such past communities would not even dream about.
These days someone can be harrased by some idiot/criminal from other side of the globe.
So the issue is not really comaprable, and risks are different.
> most every company wants to know as much as possible about their customers
And it's crazy that we're allowing them to do that in the "data breach era". Companies should should be incentivized/penalized to keep the absolute minimum information it needs for its services. The less data, the better, and the less it would be penalized in case of a data breach. The more data it stores and the more data it exposes in a data breach, the bigger the penalties should be for it.
Companies would ignore that at their own peril, as the penalties should be a big percentage of the global annual revenues. So a company like Equifax would have to come out either crippled or bankrupt out of a data breach where it exposed all of the US adults' information.
Build the right system, and companies will be "incentivized" to do the right thing. This is why the EU is doing the right thing with the GDPR, and if the US Congress wasn't completely captured by corporations by now, it would probably do something like that, too.
But even GDPR doesn't go as far as I'd like, to the point where companies would be incentivized to use minimum amounts of information and switch to end-to-end encrypted systems (which by default would bring minimum to zero penalties in case of server data breach).
What and how will they lose? What kind of potential harms do you foresee happening to the users of social media, as a consequence of that use?
There has been some discussion here about China’s plan to increase use of social media as a means of societal control.
Is the problem that people are sharing to much information, or is the problem that China has an authoritarian government with little respect for the rights of its citizens?
Information is a potent substance. Kind of like fissile material - tricky to handle, and can be used for a lot of good and bad things, depending on who manages to get their hands on it.
That said, I somewhat agree with you here; I feel there's way too much focus on data handling, and way too little focus on who's doing what with it. The problem isn't information. The problem in China is an authoritarian government. The problem in the West is that we've managed to somehow convince ourselves that lying to people, and maliciously manipulating them, is a legitimate and respected profession (that now happens to finance the Internet).
Sure, you don't want to have information lying around for bad actors to make use of. But I think we should also start dealing with the fact that there already are so many bad actors doing bad things with information, and maybe we should have less bad actors in the first place.
From whichever perspective you look at it, this definitely rings true. Facebook gained popularity as as a way for college students to stalk each other, and as a corporation it makes money from tracking users and gaining detailed/intimate information about them.
Combined with the fact that it actually requires effort NOT to be tracked by facebook - much of the tracking is involuntary - facebook is clearly a surveillance company. I wish more people would realize this.
For those advocating for more awareness of the loss of privacy, some more precision would be helpful.
What Facebook does is not the same as a “surveillance company”.
To throw out the term, with the obvious negative connotations, might attract attention, but muddies clear understanding of the dynamic flows of networked information that we are part of, and the incentive structures of the entities involved.
I’m saying, just getting a clear understanding of what is happening is hard enough, never mind determining the possible consequences of various paths of action.
There are a lot of unexpected, emergent properties of such a complicated system as the global internet, which has billions of autonomous agents as fundamental components.
A prime example is the current examination of the influence of the “Russian Trolls” in the 2016 election. I doubt many people foresaw the current controversy around this subject. I cant think of any parallels to the phenomenon.
Knee jerk reactions about such complicated systems, which from people influenced by the “hacker” ethos tend to the anti-corporate, anti-government point of view, severely misrepresent the threat environment that a common citizen confronts.
From my point of view, the biggest threat to an individual is from criminal activity. People like to rag on Equifax for the security breach, but I don’t come across similar screeds against the actual perpetrators of the breach.
The phenomenon of these large scale hacks of personal information is an unintended property of the current business, consumer, and governmental conduct.
A “surveillance company” is a whole different category of threat.
The Stasi and KGB would have given everything to have something like Facebook. Here they were installing listening devices, torturing people, following them, getting family members to spy on each other. They just needed Facebook and none of that would have been necessary. People would voluntarily log in and type everything they do, where they travel, what food they are eating, what political parties they support, who their friends are, everything connected nicely in a pretty graph with nodes and edges.
This tedious trope jumped the shark years ago. Somehow you managed to combine it with a neo-Godwin. That's an Olympian manoeuvre!
There's much to say by way of critiquing Facebook, but obviously the "dumb fucks" bit is not it. That's merely an excuse to feel superior, and the discussions it spawns are predictable, therefore uninteresting, therefore off topic for Hacker News.
All: if you can't think of something stupid or bad you said as a teenager, dig deeper.
> This tedious trope jumped the shark years ago. Somehow you managed to combine it with a neo-Godwin. That's an Olympian manoeuvre!
Well, good point. It was pretty provocative.
> All: if you can't think of something stupid or bad you said as a teenager, dig deeper.
But I am not the CEO of a company that has all the intimate details of hundreds of millions of users private life. Those in power can handle a bit criticism, it's different than saying it about a random person on the street. Also 26 is not quite a teenager. While people report wild personality changes after that age, it usually doesn't happen.
> There's much to say by way of critiquing Facebook, but obviously the "dumb fucks" bit is not it.
It goes with the paragraph above on how people volunteer the information and even the designer of the service things is pretty ridiculous.
> and the discussions it spawns are predictable, therefore uninteresting, therefore off topic for Hacker News.
It's not a question of whether Zuckerberg can take the criticism (that's his problem), but of the effect it has on discussion quality here (that's our problem).
(I appreciate the polite reply. It's surprisingly rare when there are that many volatiles in the air.)
People can dismiss this saying he was a teenager, and just randomly chatting to a friend privately.
But I've been developing programs since I was 15, and created my first startup (hardware) at 18 with an engineer 10-years older than me.
Never once did I ever refer to any of our customers or clients as "dumb fucks". Why? What did they do to Zuck?
Although, I did refer to AOL executives, FBI agents, Secret Service agents, federal prosecutors and lame wannabe hackers as dumb fucks. Both then and now. And I work with the federal government, with an agency that's often unfairly demonized by a variety of people.
Which makes me think of a new phrase: dumb zucks.
Quasi wannabe devs who build products and services not to advance the hacker ethos or crypto-anarchy but to get rich being essentially technical marketing partners for the FBI and corporate America.
EDIT- Facebook's address is 1 Hacker Way. Zuck is not a hacker. He is the opposite of one.
> Never once did I ever refer to any of our customers or clients as "dumb fucks". Why? What did they do to Zuck?
> Although, I did refer to AOL executives, FBI agents, Secret Service agents, federal prosecutors and lame wannabe hackers as dumb fucks. Both then and now. And I work with the federal government, with an agency that's often unfairly demonized by a variety of people.
Your argument against the possibility someone has undergone personal growth is that you yourself have not experienced personal growth?
Some of us can imagine having conversations like that, jokingly or seriously, in our teens while having better taste/a better worldview now as adults.
>> Never once did I ever refer to any of
>> our customers or clients as "dumb fucks"
Did they ever send you their SSNs? I mean, I’m not going to whitewash what he said, but you gotta agree, sending your SSN to some random dude in a college dorm is pretty darn dumb.
Meh, if Mark Zuckerberg has only that one, same, tired sideways quote dragged out and tossed around every time criticism is leveled against him, then Christ almighty if he isn't squeaky clean. A little too clean, if you really wanted my opinion.
His attitude and all-around conduct is pretty much that of a boy scout, and to be honest, I find it boring. Linus Torvalds curses like a sailor, and he doesn't spare anyone's feelings with his criticism, whether it's an individual or a broad generalization. Would you mistrust Linux based on the principal developer's language, or is it more about the project's overall opacity?
Mark Zuckerberg's general demeanor can be read from many obvious tells across all the things he touches. He's not dating super models, he's not buying people Audis, his flagship website has one theme for everyone, two colors (blue & white), five uninteresting emojis, and all the personality of AOL and Yahoo! combined. Yet this reveals nothing about what goes on across Facebook's backplane.
If you're going to criticize his character, you have to criticize the depth and breadth of whatever the faustian bargain is, according to the Snowden leaks. You can compare Zuckerberg to Snowden in terms of choices made, but you really can't fault Zuckerberg for using harsh language in casual conversation. It comes across as whiny and pathetic, like some petulant child. Actions speak louder than words, as they say.
The fact that it's posted often doesn't change its power. And that you rush to defend Zuck says quite a lot.
One thing is true: Those at the top rarely mean what they say. They are masters of dissembling, because they understand how dangerous it is to reveal one's true feelings.
This was a rare glimpse into raw, unfiltered Zuck. And what we find is that he's just like the rest of those in power. No wonder they love him so much.
We're the dumb fucks to them. And that should be at least a little worrying.
Raw, unfiltered me fifteen years ago was probably a misogynistic "nice guy" on a regular basis. Raw unfiltered me right now is all for feminism and social justice, and hates the shit out of that guy I was fifteen years ago.
If the worst quote attributed to him shows him calling people dumb for throwing their personal info at someone they have no reason to trust...that's not a very strong indictment of his character. And even though it's reasonably bad, there's no way fourteen years of responsibility won't change people.
The idiot who said "dumb fucks" is an entirely alien person to the person now. And the quote calling people dumb for giving some online rando their personal data doesn't exactly demonstrate a conclusive disregard for the value of that data. If anything, it's an insult to people's intelligence because they should care more.
It doesn't make him a hero, but doesn't make him a villain, either.
Assuming he's the same person as back then but hides it better, do you think that his true self thinking people are dumb to give an unknown and untrusted online service their information extremely freely is wrong? Or just an asshole at the time?
Point is, as much as it might color his character, so does his observable conduct in all the years since. Reiterating: with context (would appreciate if you don't forget I'm not disregarding it and talk past me) - it really doesn't give much context, though it's an amazingly compelling soundbite.
Well, besides that quote there's also the part where he's running and expanding the world's biggest (or second biggest?) corporate surveillance machine which might indicate that he is a person of questionable character.
But other than that, I'm sure he's a great guy to have a beer with... most evil people are quite nice when you get to know them.
Zuckerberg called his users dumb for the very act of using his website. Did Linus ever call people dumb for the very act of using Linux as it is intended to be used?
You're focusing too much on the swear word and too little on the meaning of the sentence.
I don’t think that’s more than a meme. The Stasi collected information you didn’t want to share, and what you put on Facebook willingly is typically the same sort of front you would have put up publicly in the DDR. As in the best version of you.
There is some truth to what you’re saying though, but that’s in the data Facebook collects about you, without your knowledge.
I think the facial recognition program is a good example. Even if you don’t have a Facebook account, or even if you do but didn’t share any pictures of your vacation, Facebook might still know you went. They know by recognizing you in pictures of other people. If you get caught in someone’s Instagram selfie in an airport or at a popular tourist spot, then Facebook knows you where there.
Stasi would have loved that, but that’s not information people share willingly.
That’s the crux of the issue now with Facebook though - it’s become so pervasive that people don’t even realize what they’re sharing:
* It follows you around the internet via the Share/Like plug-ins so your entire internet browsing patterns become exposed
* Via the psychological analytics they’ve been applying, you think you’ve just liked (eg) a sports personality page and a TV show, but that’s actually confirmed a whole host of implied personality traits that are then ‘known’ about you.
> The Stasi collected information you didn’t want to share, and what you put on Facebook willingly
I am not on Facebook though I once had a profile a decade ago.
I don't believe that profile has been deleted, I do believe that facial recognition on the photos has included me, I do believe that they've applied said facial recognition to the historical data, and so I believe that I do have a profile that is alive and well within Facebook, and that even receives fresh content... it is just not public.
I am so looking forward to the GDPR coming into effect.
Such a security apparatus would collect any and all information it can get its hands on, and then use it whenever it needs it. For instance to protect the state, to protect itself, to influence and manipulate situations to its advantage and to the advantage of those in power, to destroy opponents and of course for fun and profit.
A contemporary Stasi would control Facebook and use all algorithms and all available data sources to figure out who the persons of interest are. Even assuming that the StasiBook app wouldn't auto-upload all pictures and microphone data (why would an upstanding citizen turn off their mic?), they could still correlate many invisible patterns.
So all in all, I think they'd be the biggest fans.
The point of the Stasi wasn't the information. They didn't give two shits about truth or verifiable fact, it was the awareness of survailence and the mistrust it created that was useful to them.
I don't know, from their actions it looked quite like they actually wanted the information. They needed it, among other things, to sow mistrust among the right groups.
Equifax leaked 142M SSNs alongwith name, email, dob and address for all Americans with credit history. KGB most assuredly already have that data. Why is people's photographs (most of them of which are already public on Instagram) and friend list (which if KGB wanted to get for their targets, they can get in a day) so critical? Google has location data for each and every person globally at almost every minute - I feel that is much more useful than what FB has - if you think from KGB's perspective.
You might not fully be aware, but there is much more to tracking, then the information you biblically post. Every website you visit they know know of, messages you send, they have (incl. private) every transaction you make with your credit card is being gathered/received (indirectly) and collected leveraged by Facebook. The amount of information the possess is unbelievable - and those are the things we know about, reality is probably that there are many other sources where they gather intelligence about you.
Yeah - but so does Google and I would argue they know far more than FB does given they own a mobile OS, searches, have credit card info including transactions, have major partnerships with publishers who share data etc. Why is the backlash only against Facebook?
I think Google is pretty much under the same scrutiny, it just happens that recently this Cambridge Analytica news brokw lose, and that dataset appears to have its origins at Facebook. So naturally the focus is on them right now.
I dunno - with the Stasi the stakes were higher: people could actually end up in jail for stating the wrong opinion. Nowadays facebook is all about pushing adds, so there is less drama in the plot.
However i guess the analogy is more fitting for Baidu. The Chinese state has some very restrictive laws that are applied in practice.
And in Russia you can get sentenced for a wrong repost, so yandex.ru or ok.ru/vk.ru is in the same league.
This makes a nice story. However, please consider the following. Right now we use Facebook and share personal details, but the USA does not generally act on the information that is shared. People are not being disappeared, shot, or sent to work themselves to death in the Gulag. If activists and political opponents kept disappearing, you and I would surely shut stop sharing on Facebook so freely.
It’s very well known that the information being discussed is “acted on” constantly. It informs advertising, political propoganda campaigns, lawmaking, voting districts.
Bullet point comparisons of a historic authoritarian state to a contemporary capitalist society is rarely a helpful exercise but we should remain humble either way.
America maintains the largest prison population per capita of any nation on Earth.
America experiences more than 39,000 gun deaths per year.
This is why Snowden is a mixed figure. While I admire what he did and what he stands for, blatant statements like this reduce trust and makes one question whether he is indeed righteous.
The pivot to surveillance is pretty old now, I guess we could say that at the absolute start of Facebook, they really wanted to create a social media but that shift was pretty quick.
But if they claim to be a dishwasher company, and they started with making dishwashers before eventually pivoting to clocks, you don't call them "rebranded as a dishwasher company". Rebranding implies a certain temporal order that does not fit here. Some people get hung up on bad arguments getting used for a good cause, I'm one of them.
Yes - FB does all the things it does because it wants to sell your data off to Russia. That is its mission statement. Awesome right since that is what you want to hear. Lets go back now - party is all over.
It might be just the matter of time. He already said told us all the surveillance news he could. Now, with no access to additional secret knowledge, he's just a regular privacy activist - and the only way to get previous levels of media exposure is to say something controversial.
Some secrets are hidden in plain sight. They're there, but because most people get information from news outlets, and they don't cover these topics, it's like public information becomes a secret, buried underneath a mountain of noise.
