It's not that simple. There are many many ways that your information can end up being referenced in an identity graph and be discoverable by Facebook that don't involve signing up for Facebook at all. It's more - don't sign into a public wifi network, don't hand over your email address at a checkout, don't sign up for a store card.. oh, and don't sign up for Facebook either.
Not just that, but even if your number is not shared with Facebook, but Facebook knows that ten of your friends all contact you three times a week, you're still in the graph even if you're not personally receiving advertising.
That practice can be fought more easily in courts. Also the more user deleting they're accounts the less "friends" you have that share your number with facebook.
"Don't use these tools if you value privacy" is not that far off from "If you have nothing to hide, why are you afraid of surveillance?"
An observed life is not a free life. Many people have to use social media to communicate with family, work associates, etc... In many cases, facebook messaging has replaced methods of communication that did not rely on the content or metadata of messages for profit.
All that really matters is if this was legit and FB assumed people would have no problem with it then they would not have hidden it.
You said a whole lot but never actually articulated your point. I'm assuming it's something about how it's not fair that you find Facebook to be useful. Could you clarify?
I find Facebook to be a boring site, with friends complaining about the same things day in and day out, with an occasional link about something interesting, but mostly filled with inspirational memes and images that I don't particularly find relevant. Sure, I could better curate my friends list and follow a wider range of pages and topics, but then aren't we back at something like MySpace, where the idea was to follow everyone and everything you found interesting?
The problem with Facebook's usefulness isn't that I find it useful, it's that everyone else in my circle finds it useful. This means that any event, major life change like marital engagements and announcements of expectancy or child birth, and general updates of wellbeing from my elderly family are all communicated via Facebook. For example, a friend of mine from high school recently had a child. I had not logged into Facebook for over a year, and suddenly found myself embarrassed for my lack of keeping up with her when I ran into her at the grocery store while she was chasing down a toddler who had escaped down an aisle. I did not have the slightest clue as to her family status, because I stopped logging into Facebook to receive those updates and she stopped going out to parties and bars where we normally would run into each other (to avoid drinking and cigarette smoking), and it just appeared like we drifted apart.
Even now, some friends of mine are planning a trip together, and it's entirely done within a closed group on Facebook. There is no way for me to participate in this trip without maintaining some status on Facebook, else my significant other will have to just relay all that information, which is tiring, and prone to the "telephone" effect.
And that's life. Perhaps you weren't that close enough anyway to find about the child. And that's life too.
The notion of "being connected" with all the people you knew is is similar then the "I need to be happy, if not something is wrong with me" and got introduced with modern social media (particularly Facebook).
But is it easier to 'drift apart' from people you know if you're the only one they need to remember specifically call or send email to, when they can in general assume that all their friends sort of follow their FB updates? But it's awkward if you're the only one who keeps contacting them.
If you have already hard time building very durable friendships and are sort of hang-around member of your social circles, the social media -- if you refuse to use it -- does not exactly make your life easier.
Yeah, the social media caters to peoples laziness (hence "connect to all the people you know easier"). But this connection is very shallow and as you said if you're the only one who is trying to maintain a connection apart from consuming "social broadcasts", well, then the relationship is destined to drift apart.
I guess it's a matter of personal preference, I rather have 3 good connections then 10 (not to mention 100, which is ridiculous) shallow ones and when we randomly see each other, there's no "guilt" looming around the meeting.
IMHO this coincides with two recent HN posts about accepting mediocrity [1] and stopping to eternally seek happiness [2].
You don't have to find facebook useful or like it to be coerced into using it. If your friends and family organise everything by facebook because they find it useful, you have to use it or you'll miss out. Much like if you don't use gmail and hate it, google still have enough of your mail to put you in prison because at least half the people you're emailing do use it.
It's like opting out of electricity - pretty theoretical. So we regulate it so it doesn't f. us over too badly. This is what needs to happen here.
Regulation isn't the only option. Decentralization would work better: it would make impossible for any big company to exploit the information of Billions of people, not just illegal.
We don't need Gmail. We could have Freedom Boxes to host and send our mail instead (and filter whatever spam gets out our infected Windows machines). Right now we can't because of the spam filtering policies of most big players, but if everyone have a Freedom Box that's no longer an issue.
Likewise we don't need Facebook, though since I don't use it unless coerced to I don't know what a replacement should look like.
We don't need Twitter.
We don't need YouTube. Or at least we won't need it when our broadband finally get freaking symmetric as it always should have —not happening any time soon despite making absolute sense on the fibre. Then we could just upload our videos from our Freedom Box with a peer-to-peer protocol.
We don't need Dropbox. Distributed backup is a thing, and keeping those backups secure is easy —except for the master passphrase, but you can at least write it down if you're afraid of forgetting it.
Search engines… well, we don't know how to decentralise them yet. The rest is a solved problem: we only to get the logistics and usability straight –a rather daunting task unfortunately.
I've thought about building something that gives a social network type experience that is built on top of email. Any status update would get sent out to an email list of your connections, and all the emails could be put in a specific mail folder using standard rules. A front end app would then scan that folder and give you a personalized page that represents the latest status based on what it sees in that folder. The raw messages themselves may contain various control messages (such as "friend requests" and "drop requests", but otherwise can be directly viewable too. But the main interface would be from a front-end app that runs on the user's PC or mobile device.
I recall (but can't find) having seen a social network built on Keybase.io's encrypted filesystem (KBFS), where your public data is signed stored in your public folder, and your private data is encrypted and shared with only those you choose. Everything is based on files.
I love this idea (if only for the motivation behind it).
How would your "normal" mail client filter out the messages that are for this app? People have lots of different mail clients which they might not be able (or willing) to configure. Or would you expect a dedicated address.
The app would run on the user's local PC or phone, and it would access data directly from their mailbox (and create a local DB from that data). So no backend server to worry about.
Without a third-party managing associations, how do you maintain that "friendship" is consensual? In other words, how do you prevent "I have your email address" from meaning "you're my friend now."
When you send a friend request to someone, their stuff is shared with you only if they accept the request on their end. If they reject the friend request, then anything coming from you that they don't want can be handled as spam (the client side software would just filter the content itself in that case).
Almost all email clients have some sort of filtering. And the email messages would all have a keyword in the subject line, so filtering could be accomplished by that (or via an x-header). The app itself could automatically create the filters for various web hosted email systems too.
Email is also under marketing surveillance, unless you refuse to correspond with anyone using gmail. I've known only one person willing to go to those lengths to make a point.
Make that surprisingly easy. Been doing it for more than a decade now, just on my house ADSL connection. It helps that a friend has agreed to host a backup MX.
If you send email directly from your machine by looking up MX records from a home ADSL line, then yes this will happen. Instead, you should send your mail via your ISP's outgoing SMTP server, using the mail submission port number 587. Your ISP should provide this service, and you will probably have to authenticate using your username/password associated with your internet connection.
It is pretty good but they are directed messages and I think people look for something where they can check on their own terms what a person is up to.
I recently opened an account on Diaspora using the sechat.org pod. It has been a fun experience so far. The network effects mean that moving your friends over to it will be another matter. But it has been fun to use.
There is not, and has never been, an inalienable right to use somebody else's property (aka Facebook's network) to communicate. You are not entitled to coerce Facebook into building their product to work the way you want. On the contrary, it's Facebook's right, as the owner and creator of their platform and network, to handle all of the network traffic that you are voluntarily sending them however they want.
There are more communication methods available today than ever before. If a person you are trying to contact has stubbornly refused to use all of them except Facebook, that is not Facebook's problem, and it doesn't make them obligated to you in any way whatsoever.
If you don't like it then send an email, send a text message, call them, write them a letter, visit them, hire a courier, fax them, use another social network, etc.
Opining on the fact that FB messenger has replaced traditional forms of communication is not the same as an endorsement for an inalienable right to privacy everywhere.
It's far too complicated of a topic to be boiled down to a talking point. It isn't even the core issue here. The problem is that FB knew this was wrong, so they hid it and hoped no one would notice.
> "If you don't like it then use X or Y"
If you are not aware that a service you're using is spying on you how are you supposed to know you don't like it in the first place? The cynical answer is that you can just expect them all to spy on you by default. Well if that's the case then we are getting back to the debate about privacy being an inalienable right.
By your argument, it is the right of Fedex/UPS/whatever to handle all of the parcels that you voluntarily hand over to them in whatever manner they want.
Huh? I don't use facebook, and yet it knows about me because I am in other people's contacts and some of those people had to share their contacts with facebook.
That doesn't work because it's not just what you share with the social networks but what others share about you and how they're able to link those little facts to create a full picture. (Or what the social networks collect on you from other places.)
It's not enough to not use these tools, it becomes a requirement not to share your personal information with any VC-backed startup in case it's sold in the future. Which is a ridiculous standard to hold users to.
That's like saying "If you don't want to eat horse meat, don't eat fast food." Your solution works, but it's entirely reasonable for a consumer to want to get the positive parts of a good or service (even a good or service you don't like) without the negative parts. Market pressure and regulation are both good ways to make it happen.
In this case, market pressure derives from users deleting their accounts.
For a long time people where saying that ads/tracking is good because nobody is willing to pay for software/service/social media. Well users were paying for whatsapp. There was no need to sell it to facebook, nor there was a need for facebook to use these dark patterns with whatsapp.
Regulation should be an exception. Free markets work pretty well in practice.
There are very simple blockers that can block all Facebook cookies on other homepages. uBlock for example has the option to remove all social media icons and that includes the tracking cookies.
This argument is become less and less valid as social media accounts become more and more indispensable for leading a normal modern life.
Sure, you can still e-mail, call, sms or heck, even visit your friends and family IRL. But not having a social media account sure makes it more inconvenient. All your friends use these networks.
In a couple of years not having a social media account will be seen as equivalent to not having a bank account, or a passport, or a phone number. Sure, it's possible to live like that. But it sure is inconvenient.
Aside from that, as others have mentioned in this thread, even if you don't have an account Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, etc. have your data already. You can be sure one of your friends has uploaded their contacts to WhatsApp, including your phone number and mail address. Facebook has detected your face in a photograph your cousin uploaded. Google has all of your self-hosted mails because all of your friends use Gmail.
If you don't want your personal information to be shared, you need to live like a hermit.
I just found another one (while trying my 'free trial' of LinkedIn Premium):
* You have to enter a credit card number to begin the 'free trial', for a 'seamless experience' (ie. so we can bill you if you forget to cancel).
* You have to cancel your free trial 1 day or more before the end of the trial period to avoid being billed for the next month (at least I hope it's "1 day or more" and not "exactly 1 day"... the exact wording is "If you wish to avoid being charged for your free trial, you must cancel the trial one day prior to the auto-renewal.")
* You can't then delete your payment method at the same time, and must remember to do so after the end of the billing cycle.
There's a reason most people don't like hearing that: it's not a solution. I could try to explain, but Moxie Marlinspike did it a lot better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eG0KrT6pBPk
I suspect that you'd be familiar with LinkedIn dark patterns [0] too.
[0] https://medium.com/@danrschlosser/linkedin-dark-patterns-3ae...