Tell your friends that you are not willing to accept their terms of friendship. On multiple occasions I've asked my friends/acquaintances to not post a specific photo that I'm in, and they've stuck to it. They might still keep it, as a keepsake, but it's not publicly available. If I wanted to go any further than that, I'd have to ask myself the extreme question of... "Why go out in public at all" due to all the times I'd have my face or actions tracked.
Unfortunately, it's not as simple as not uploading a single photograph. If Facebook has scraped your friend's (or grandma's) contact lists, the shadow profile has been created, and the friend tracking has begun.
When someone does something that prevents you from going outside, society generally makes that illegal. You might find that some of us are not all-powerful enough to make people do things simply by threatening to no longer be their friend.
Well, you need to look at it a little more objectively:
It "prevents" the individual from going outside because that individual has precluded the idea of going outside due to the possibility of being tracked/photographed.
I.e. Nothing about being tracked/photographed "prevents" an individual from going outside. But that, combined with an individual that fears/hates/morally_objects_to such a thing, makes it so that that individual is compelled to not go outside, lest they be forced to subject themselves to the thing they object to.
Additionally, it's not about "making people do things", and being not powerful enough to do so. That's quite an imposing/forceful line of thinking. It's about "thing X bothers me, what peaceful non-violent actions can I do to avoid X affecting me (negatively?)." And yes, making a regulation against X and forcing people to submit to it through the threat of imprisonment is quite violent.
You're assuming the friends gave the information knowingly.
Most people have no idea what modern image recognition and data mining techniques can do, and many don't understand what they are really agreeing to when they let some on-line service scan their address book.
I've never quite figured out how compiling shadow profiles doesn't violate all kinds of data protection laws in at least much of Europe, but our regulators seem to be gunning for Google at the moment rather than Facebook.
It is still personal data and theoretically regulated in Europe at least. It is hard for me to see how the information about non-users is legitimate from my understanding of UK data protection law but maybe they just stay inside the Irish law (which I know even less about).
Maybe so, but does a Facebook app uploading my phone number from a friend's phone to their servers, or turning on my friend's microphone while we are having an otherwise-private conversation, count as "freely posting"?
They've introduced an optional feature that records media around you. Based on their past record of changing defaults, I think it's a reasonable possibility that this feature will be turned on by default in the future.
Isn't the "shadow profiles" thing somewhat of an urban myth?
What would be the benefit for FB to store shadow profiles? If they can't use that data publicly or internally or with advertising partners, why would FB need shadow profiles?
I'm not convinced there's a secret hidden profile page with my details on FB. Unless of course they're planning to use that data one day to try to convince me to sign up to FB... this is about the only reason I can think of for them to have such data. Any other reasons you can think of?
It's not a myth. For example, if you tag someone in a photo who doesn't have a FB account, they'll do facial recognition and point them out in other photos you upload. They'll also create "Pages" for companies without their permission. I remember Jake von Slatt had to go to a lot of trouble to make them take down his Page.
No. I have never been on Facebook, but use to receive emails "Look all the friends you have on Facebook". It was slightly disturbing as there were pictures of, indeed, my friends. They've stopped sending these emails a few years back, but I'm sure they haven't dropped me from their graph.
Then you want to a a little experiment: Do sign up on facebook, using the e-mail adress that you normally use to communicate with your friends.
Don't enter any other correct information about you. Just have a look at the suggestions the sign-up wizard will be showing, based on nothing but your e-mail adress. You will be surprised.
(You should immediately delete the account again when you're done if you don't want to stay on facebook. In this case, make sure to clear your cookies.)
Maybe if it were simple as that, the 'war talk' would be avoided. However, as the article explains, facebook tracks people who don't even sign up to its terms.
To be fair, Facebook hires psychologists to basically get you addicted to Facebook and hides (as much as it can) the nature of its practices from its merchandise.
Maybe you should have read the rest of the sentence before deleting it? I'll reproduce it here for your benefit:
"[...], the name economics has for this is "network externality"[1] - the monopolization of a dominant communication system by one entity has a cost for those who don't participate, which is not acceptable."
Why the war talk? Can't people who are willing to accept Facebook's terms just use it, while those who are unwilling refrain from using Facebook?