I feel like there is something bigger in play. All the various from state access to "private" communications, social networks becoming more public and all the different miscellaneous privacy issues are all different aspects or consequences of the Thing.
The move towards complete availability of all digital information seems to be a force of history. Privacy advocates are beginning to sound like copyright advocates, demanding that the universe continue providing for them in the manner to which they have grown accustomed.
Like copyright/IP, privacy is more about use getting used to (and in some cases legislating) how things happen to be, not predesigned or derived from first principle rules or morality. If 99% of your existence occurs within a community of 150 people, very little is private. When you live in a 20th center city, you get a lot of anonymity. You can keep private life (even several of these) separate from your professional life. etc. Those were just inevitable consequences of how those societies were structured.
The internet was at first an anonymous place. Pre-2000 most people seemed to share the feeling that if their real name found its way to the world wide web, serial killers would come. Then 2000-2005 people started keeping online diaries, online photo libraries, online lots of personal information. Facebook catalyzed this process with a semi private system of friends that matched what people were used to in their normal lives.
The force of history that is 'all your data available to everyone everywhere' feels unstoppable. Data is data. It doesn't care if it's an email, SMS, baby photo or GPS log. It doesn't get deleted.
Maybe "Information wants to be free" was an understatement.
I feel very awkward trying to describe this, a clear sign that I don't understand it. I wish pg Joel Spolsky, Chris Anderson (or ideally, Douglas Adams - I really wish we still had him) or someone else who's good at this sort of abstract thing would write a good piece on it.
This is a very interesting take on privacy and the direction of history. Another direction of history I'd like to compare this to is the unification of humanity.
No matter what our opinions on globalization, or diversity of cultures are, the humanity is inevitably moving towards one culturally homogeneous world. This may not seem obvious if we look at history on the scale of a few centuries, but it becomes apparent if we look at our entire history as species. We started with tens of thousands of completely separate "worlds" that had nothing to do with one another, and slowly, through trade and money, religion and imperial expansions we have become a single "world" without a single completely independent culture left on Earth. Slowly we are also all agreeing on moral and political values, such as "democracy", "human rights" or "equal opportunities" (incidentally, values spread across the globe by western imperial expansion). If you want to object that there are still tons of cultures left that are all so different, that's simply not true. Can you imagine Indian cuisine without chili peppers? Or the Russians/Irish without potatoes? Or the Italians without tomatoes? The whole world smokes, no culture openly accepts slavery, and so on, and so forth. And all these things and ideas were introduced just in the past few centuries, an almost negligible amount of time compared to the rest of our history.
Anyways, so the idea of openness of information, free data, etc. definitely seems to be a similar force. Again, if we look at the evolution, for most of our history we lived in small bands where privacy was non-existent, the ability to gossip was what gave us a major evolutionary advantage over other species. Still, even today most of things we spend our time talking about is pure gossip (just think about the proportion of HN articles about the "celebrity" programmers going to this or that company). So this idea of privacy, secrecy, etc. is something very new and I guess only the history can show whether it'll stick or not (as you conjecture).
No matter what our opinions on globalization, or diversity of cultures are, the humanity is inevitably moving towards one culturally homogeneous world.
In terms of geographically-based culture, which I think you mean, I agree entirely - increasing interconnectivity is causing increasing similarity between different countries. However I think there's a countercurrent to this at play too: an explosion in non-geographically-based subcultures, caused by the same increasing interconnectivity, which allows communities to maintain critical mass despite their members being geographically disparate.
Take for example, emo subculture, or hipsters, or death metal, or political activists of a thousand different kinds, a huge (and increasing) number of distinct communities: but if you go to San Francisco, or London, or Melbourne, you'll find a very similar mix.
Those cities are all extremely diverse and highly interconnected examples of course, but I think it's hard to disagree that's where things are headed globally.
There is currently a great course on Coursera named "A Brief History of Humankind"[1] that is exploring those ideas. If you have another source that goes deeper into the subject I would be interested to know it.
Mostly I agree except for the statement "Privacy advocates are beginning to sound like copyright advocates, demanding that the universe continue providing for them in the manner to which they have grown accustomed".
Some copyright defenders are like that, because their fortunes depend on interfering in other people's lives and devices, or getting the government to police people for them - because that is inherently the only way copyright restrictions can be maintained.
Privacy requires just the opposite - only a freedom from interference. It does require state enforcement, particularly a ban on companies requiring personal data as a condition of business. But people can still stay off Facebook, without thereby causing any harm to anyone else.
And we can have private communications, if only government allows people to set up secure digital systems. The only things preventing privacy are government snooping and laissez-faire economics; with real democracy and regulation of exploitive business practices we'd have a better balance. (But copyright would be unenforceable.)
I think we're looking at things from fundamentally different perspectives. You're using liberal/libertarian paradigms. Your placing the government and its decisions at the center (or the beginning). I'm seeing/contending that the government here is an agent of a more fundamental force. A technological progression force, kinda.
IE, governments' access, collection & analysis of our "private data" is a sort of inevitability. One agent of an unstoppable force. BTW, governments' themselves are also victims of "private" information being accessed, collected & analyzed. That's what the wikileaks & (ironically) Snowden stuff was. Data getting free.
I'm hesitant to put my thoughts int a strong abstract statement because as I said, I don't feel like I have a good understanding of it. But "All your data available to everyone everywhere" might be where I'd start to construct it.
Once it's in gmail, Google have access to it and probably a few spy organizations. That's a few places that we know of. It will never be deleted and who knows who else will end up with it. Proliferation goes one way. It never goes back. One of these stores will eventually leak to the public like the US embassies' emails leaked to the public.
I'm claiming (hesitantly, please be nice) that I think that maybe this isn't a matter of policy or laws. It's not about what a government will decide to do. It's a tidal wave that we can't keep out. Computers store, copy and distribute information. All our information is digital. Eventually it will all get out into the wild. So if there's a photo in your phone. An email in your gmail account or a GPS log in your watch, that is future public information.
It might be more accurate to state - The move towards complete availability of all digital information for commercial gain seems to be a force of history.
Perhaps individuals are just the low-hanging fruit and these are just the early stages of the process. However it strikes me that all the forces pushing for open-ness stand to profit from it and the relationship is rather one sided at this point. Facebook, to pick the obvious example, does not seem too forthcoming with information on who has access to the data you so freely and readily provide to them and what is done with it.
Perhaps once people connect the dots and realise that the reason their life insurance premuims are going up is because they are posting too many photos of themselves drinking at parties then the pendulum will swing the other way.
We see the movement in the geopolitical annexation of the Internet, as well. Brasil looking to bypass US network infrastructure, Germany's continuing struggle with loosening GEMA's grip on content, are just more stories in the slow march toward governments learning how to make the net "theirs" instead of leaving it free.
Though, obviously, the whole "Let the NGOs in the US guide and manage the world's Internet, we'll be cool and keep our hands off, honest!" argument has been blown to bits as the Internet hasn't really ever been free-and-in-the-open.
That is one of the things that really, really, really bugs me.
I want to tell my friends "don't ever put up pictures that include me on facebook" but I can't because it's too big of a request at this point, and I'd end up being too much of a dick if I started making that demand. I really struggle with this. Facebook, that evil behemoth, has won big. I really just wish that it would get hacked or something so people stop trusting social networking sites. Come on blackhats, do your thing.
I can understand why you would want to do this. But, I don't think it is in society's best interest to think of information about a person as being generally owned by them. I can see restricting certain harmful things you might want to do with that information, but I think you're correct in your conclusion that such a request would be a significant overreach.
Plenty of societies function pretty well on the principle that information about a person is generally owned by them.
In fact, the US is one of the few Western countries that doesn't recognize that principle, most others are only strengthening their legislation in that regard, against heavy lobbying from the US government and Silicon Valley corporations.
> "I don't think it is in society's best interest to think of information about a person as being generally owned by them."
What is the worse case scenario of people start widely adopting that notion? It becomes harder to run certain types of businesses that count on that not being true? We have to adopt new social etiquette for public photography if we don't want to appear rude?
Pictures are a subcategory of information generally. It would be really awkward not to be able to talk about your friends (online or otherwise) without their explicit permission. And what about strangers? Criticism and news of all kinds would violate such a more, and I don't see how that could be a good thing. You can imagine a world in which people demand that the Wikipedia page about them being taken down, and simple politeness militates that it is.
I suppose you could make a special case for photos, but I don't really see anything that specifically commends it relative to other information about you.
> It would be really awkward not to be able to talk about your friends (online or otherwise) without their explicit permission.
Would this concept of ownership of information be particularly stronger than our existing concept of ownership of creative works? If I tell a friend a story then I and he consider myself to be the "owner" of that story, but I certainly don't tend to mind if he retells the story as his own in a noncommercial context, so long as I am not present. However if he gets my story published, then I am going to be rather upset.
If a friend wants to talk about me with other people at a bar, that is fine I guess. If he writes a book about me, I would absolutely consider that a considerable breach of trust. I have no problem with being on the receiving end of this notion of privacy.
While the bar is a noncommercial setting to tell stories, it's hardly a private one. The analogy seems to suggest that the distinguishing feature that triggers the more is on one side commercialism and on the other side publicness, but then it doesn't quite keep it consistent. So I guess I don't quite get it: why, under this reasoning, is it OK for him to tell the story about you at the bar?
Not at the moment of the conversation, but there's nothing stopping one of the people there from blogging about it once they get home (think Silicon Valley "overheard" product leaks).
The fact that a piece of information passes through a volatile medium before ending up in a more permanent form doesn't change the value or ownership of the information.
On a tangent, Google Glass passive audio and video recordings will be much more damaging to one's privacy than photos shared intentionally by friends.
Unless you have a model relase, its not clear you should be publishing the likenesses of others. Facebook is using these images for commercial purposes, period. While this is a devil's argument case, its not without merit.
That's an interesting angle. But presumably if someone comes along and creates a non-commercial FB competitor and people post photos of you there instead, that doesn't really address the real issue here, right?
Non-profits are subject to the same restrictions, it would seem. The red cross cannot sell fake designer goods to raise money "for charity" (and the $1MM CEO salary), etc. Nor can they use the likeness of Rihanna or Beyonce to further their ad campaigns without writen permission.
File this under "fun facts", and I can certainly understand not knowing, but the singular of "mores" is "mos". I seem to remember that it might have different meanings (in Latin) in the singular and plural, but that could easily be a false memory or a transference from vis/vires.
That is an insufficiently imaginative worst case scenario, especially if you're going to put "Orwellian police state" on the other side of the scale -- with apologies if you were not planning on going there. How about: it becomes a crime to do an unauthorized biography? Someone is jailed for writing an angry blog post about their ex? Etc.
Honestly, I think I could cope. That sounds easily preferable to the path we are on today.
However it is certain that putting the brakes on the rampant disregard for privacy does not have to result in such a pleasant extreme. "Banning unauthorized biographies" is many steps removed from "the public loses their trust in centralized social networks"
Sorry, I didn't go as far as I could. Let me try again: it becomes a crime to think about or discuss someone who has asked not to be thought about or discussed. There. That's pretty much the worst I can think of.
I hope you'll be OK, because it is almost inconceivable to me that the future will be more private with the progress of technology and miniaturization, and given how much people seem to care about it now.
Don't worry about me jamesaguilar, I'm good at coping.
I really can't say that I am bothered at the notion of somebody owning the information about themselves. If I write a story, I own that currently and other people cannot use that story without my permission. I'm just not seeing ownership of my life story as a particularly more bothersome concept.
Hell, throw a bone to historians and keep a concept of public domain after a period of time. I don't get to own other sorts of data forever, so that is fine.
Is information in your head your information or mine?
Stories have many characters. If I cheat you, lie to you, call you names, win over your girlfriend, and steal your dog, can I prevent you from using my story without permission?
This notion of information ownership is relevant in practical things. Look at the use of SLAPPs [1], for example. Or credit reporting, or Yelp, or even reporting crimes. All could be impacted by the radical version of personal ownership of personal data.
The right of ownership of fiction is mainly a commercial right: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." So it doesn't really apply in non-commercial contexts. It's very limited in practice.
The book The Quantum Thief [2] has an interesting society where information ownership extends that far. If you don't have contract agreement to see or remember somebody, you won't.
Oh don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it would be ideal, I am saying that I could cope. Certainly fear of this sort of future would not put me off campaigning for slowing the erosion of privacy, as it seems to for jamesaguilar.
Nevertheless, I think you are seeing problems where there would be none. Reporting a crime involves violating the perpetrates privacy? Well sometimes stopping a crime or defending yourself violates the perpetrators right to not be struck or even killed. We seem to operate pretty well with self-defense exceptions to general bans on violence. It is easy to imagine analogues.
Our lawmakers agree with you, which is why the US has laws specifically excluding public persons (politicians, celebrities, etc.) from being able to claim many breach of privacy violations a normal private citizen is afforded.
There's a very big distinction between my likeliness in society, and private photos taken in my living room though. If I am out on the street and I am published doing some kind of public, visible activity I am fine with that. What's not cool is when I am at home, in my own bedroom, doing a puzzle with my child and a visitor comes in takes a picture and posts that on Facebook.
I go a step further, I generally ask not to have photos taken. Other than pictures of me as a child, my family and friends actually have no recent photos of me. For the most part, people are quite compliant of that request.
I want you to know that I feel the same way, and I've felt that way since long before the Internet. I actually think that it runs in my family a bit - we're very private people.
Honestly, I prefer to live life rather than live the process of creating a record of a life. I also prefer things to be ephemeral, rather then so every-decision-you-make-is-permanent. I think people are less adventurous when they feel like they're performing for posterity.
Of course, I also have a healthy dose of paranoia. The news lately has made me very happy about the choices that I was making before 9/11.
People are generally good about it. If people want to take a picture of you or write about you in their blog or something, it means they like you. They'll probably be amused that you're so private. Of course, you probably will have to give your best friends a picture once every 10-15 years, but they already know you're a weirdo, and won't be posting it anywhere.
>I actually think that it runs in my family a bit - we're very private people.
I completely agree. I think a lot of decisions I make are based off cultural reasons. My family has always had respect for privacy, although only "offline". ie. they'll knock before coming in. However, as they don't know much about technology, they all use Facebook and tag every photo. I feel like they seem to believe the privacy they enjoy offline extends online somehow.
To be fully honest, I'm not entirely sure. I don't like the idea that photos of me end up on the web and stay archived forever. Something about that is chilling. In a post-PRISM world, I suppose my way of pushing back is simply asking for the right to be forgotten. Rather than asking people to never post images online, I just ask them not to take them.
My honest opinion is if you were to hang out with friends, a photo or two is fine. Enjoy your live. But if that's what you choose to do, I can't stop you. But thought I'd give out my little useless 0.2 Bitcoin.
Others already commented similar reactions: You're attitude is rather strict. I certainly sympathize with your stance here, understand in parts why you'd do that, but .. aren't you looking at the wrong part of the problem?
Family and friends taking pictures (and potentially spreading them) is one thing, but I guess you do fly or buy your groceries somewhere while a camera is watching. In other words: Why this rather strict policy with family and friends, if you cannot help being 'remembered' anywhere you go in public?
Aren't family and friends asking the same question? What do you answer?
Friends & family members don't ask any questions which is why I posted "people are quite compliant of that request". Yes, there's plenty of CCTV footage of me, I suppose the difference is there's no connection. Footage isn't tagged and is really only kept for security purposes; if something happens in the area. Of course, if facial recognition were implemented in CCTV, that would be a different matter all together.
It just feels like we're heading towards 1984. The way we use technology is changing. Prior to the internet, I'd have little reason to complain about photography. It's only with the advent of tagging on Facebook that I have become a lot more strict.
On the other hand, unless you have some rational reason to not have your existence recorded, this sounds like passive aggressive self-destruction and hatred.
I swear nobody knows what passive aggressive actually means. They asked not to have their picture taken (presumably politely) and the request was complied with. End of story.
In psychology, passive-aggressive behavior is characterised by a habitual pattern of passive resistance to expected work requirements, opposition, stubbornness, and negativistic attitudes in response to requirements for normal performance levels expected of others. Most frequently it occurs in the workplace where resistance is exhibited by such indirect behaviors as procrastination, forgetfulness, and purposeful inefficiency, especially in reaction to demands by authority figures, but it can also occur in interpersonal contexts.
The phrase passive-aggressive is used to describe behavior or a personality trait that involves acting indirectly aggressive rather than directly aggressive. Passive-aggressive people regularly exhibit resistance to requests or demands from family and other individuals often by procrastinating, expressing sullenness, or acting stubborn.
Passive-aggressive behavior may manifest itself in a number of different ways. For example, a person might repeatedly make excuses to avoid certain people as a way of expressing their dislike or anger towards those individuals.
They were direct in their request (not passive) and not aggressive either (no negative behaviors).
Passive-aggressive behavior is a pattern of indirectly expressing negative feelings instead of openly addressing them. There's a disconnect between what a passive-aggressive person says and what he or she does.
For example, a passive-aggressive person might appear to agree — perhaps even enthusiastically — with another person's request. Rather than complying with the request, however, he or she might express anger or resentment by failing to follow through or missing deadlines.
Specific signs of passive-aggressive behavior include:
Resentment and opposition to the demands of others
Procrastination and intentional mistakes in response to others' demands
Cynical, sullen or hostile attitude
Frequent complaints about feeling underappreciated or cheated
I'm more-than-a-quarter-less-than-half Lakota (one of the early peoples to settle North America). I tell people I feel that pictures steal a bit of my soul. It has nothing to do with my heritage, but people generally accept it.
For a moment I thought I was on 4chan or something. The fact you create a throwaway account suggests your just a troll out to provoke a reaction. I don't do either of those 3.
You have absolutely every right to request your friends don't post pictures of you on facebook (or anywhere else). If they don't respect that... then I know who the "dick" is.
You really can. In my experience, people respect your choices. They may pity you (if they're the type that generally pity anyone different than themselves), they may find it funny, they may actually lean toward feeling the same way, but just not feel as strongly. People still respect your wishes.
Sometimes I feel that people have reached a point where a vast majority couldn't understand why a person would want to write a novel under a pen name, or donate anonymously, or work quietly. They can understand wanting to make up a name, but just to have a cooler name, not as a misdirection.
Sure, you can make a request, and most people will respect it. But you can't make it as a demand. If I want to tweet "I was out partying with pessimizer last night" there is no reasonable way (short of libel laws) to stop me.
This is the part I don't understand. ok, we shut down Facebook tomorrow. All those people talking about you aren't going to move to LiveJournal or whatever? Are we going to shut down flickr and wordpress, too?
Good heavens, imagine the clusterfuck it'd be if everybody ran their own server, as advocated by at least one HN post per week. You'd never be able to shut them all down!
The concept is called a "photo release" and it's standard in print media before they will publish a photo of someone who is clearly identifiable (public figures/celebrities excepted).
I don't know if they are legally required though. If they are, what you want is a court case that finds that Facebook needs a photo release from each person before allowing that person to be "tagged" in a posted photo.
I don't use Facebook, but would be unsurprised to find that somewhere in their terms of use you grant a blanket photo release to them.
Eliminating facebook would definitely prevent any pictures with you in them from being shared. There's just nowhere else to post pictures, and nothing would ever replace them.
All my close friends, who regularly take pictures where I'm in, know not to put me on Facebook and most certainly never, ever to tag me. I tell them this from time to time. I guess they find that funny but they also respect it.
Whenever someone new photographs me or my children and it's in a private setting, I tell them to not post it on Facebook and also explain why. They generally understand. I don't care they think I'm weird and I guess I can't prevent it when they do put it on Facebook. But I communicate my wishes all the time and generally people respond very well.
Seriously on some level of informtion security, if people need to talk about real life it can be pretty powerful information if we do not forget so seriously.
Computer give us information aged weller, posts people trust with their very real life, because of that fact information-life-and-death is no longer our primary fight for humanity, if infopsychotech functions that we truly can not forget alll our friends.
Our real diasporas may have real life informed people who can respond to all our lives equally intact, if with infotech promises we can relate, can be a humanizing force if humanity can no longer delete our life facts.
Facebook is just shooting themselves in the foot. Instead of accommodating for it's users it wants its users to accommodate for facebook. These decisions are just silly and a slap in the face to anyone who wants a shred of privacy.
> Facebook actually will recognize if a name sounds "too fake" and reject it
Not all fake names! About six months ago I went to interview on-site at Facebook. I have two Facebook accounts, a legacy from before testing accounts were actually available on the platform. One's my real account, the other is under the name of 'Johnny Appleseed'.
When you arrive at Facebook you check-in using the e-mail address you've been using to communicate with your recruiter. What I didn't realise was that Facebook's systems then automatically look up that e-mail address, and pre-populate your visitors badge with information from that account.
So the upshot of this was that for the rest of the day I was 'Johnny Appleseed'. Given I was interviewing for a iOS role this raised a few eyebrows with my interviewers. The receptionist told me this happens a lot for software engineering interviews.
Wow that explains something I've been wondering about for a while. I interviewed there a few months back (using an email address not tied to a Facebook account) and all of a sudden I started getting emails about how I had joined Facebook using that address, and hadn't added any friends. I guess if you don't already have an account, they make one for you?
>Instead of accommodating for it's users it wants its users to accommodate for Facebook.
No, they are absolutely accommodating for their users -- and their users are advertisers. That is THE problem. Facebook Inc's #1 priority is making money (like all for-profit enterprises), and therefore their #1 priority is to make advertisers happy.
Why should advertisers care if you incorrectly 'spell' your name? All Facebook should care about, to support their income, is engaging real users - real names or no.
Advertisers want engaged, affluent users. Affluent users don't like getting trolled or harassed (supposedly). Real names create accountability, reducing trolling and harassment (supposedly). An application of the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, if you will.
That's interesting, I recently had a friend change his name to something analagous to "SunBurned".
I thought it was bizarre, and maybe just temporary, but it's there, and since I have my contacts merged in my phone, I have to remember to search for SunBurned rather than his name when I want to text him.
My name is very unusual, so unusual that other family members haven't been able to sign-up with our surname for the three or four years as it's "too fake".
>Facebook actually will recognize if a name sounds "too fake" and reject it, saying that you can only use a real name
They say they will, but I've had a ton of friends change their names to obviously very fake names that Facebook has allowed, including "Sauce Money" (a rapper).
I cannot wait until we get founders / decision makers at these social network companies that have to hide from an abusive spouse / ex so that safety of users might be somewhat of a priority.
The "well, don't use it" response is utter crap given how many real life functions are being tied into these social networks.
The moment that you wrongly publish something as public and he his monitoring your account, or when Facebook decides that addresses/events are public too, you are ed up
I just... What? Do people really consent to share that kind of their information? I'm just surprised that people would use Facebook as such an "everything" platform for all the bits of data in their lives.
I guess I've always kept relatively tight control over my data, at least whether I want aspects of data about me to be public. I say that even though I make a tremendous amount of information about me very accessible (name, age, address, family, phone number, email address, etc). However, for other people who don't have that luxury, I wonder why in the world they're using Facebook?
Are those people trying to hide from stalkers? If you're avoiding an abusive spouse, some behavioral modifications are going to be necessary. You can't keep going to the same bar for quizzo night, regardless of whether you post about it on Facebook or not.
Maybe they're not trying to avoid someone now. It's very difficult, to say the least, to structure your entire online interactions around the possibility that someday someone you love or even someone you haven't met yet will turn into a stalker.
The entire point of Facebook is to entice people to share every sordid detail about every thing they do in their lives, no matter how pointless or trivial. In fact, the more sordid and pointless, the better--because that's a reflection of a person's "true" priorities and a much better measure of how they actually live their daily lives than any self-censored, banal content they'd put up if they understood the concept of privacy and discretion at all.
>Facebook decides that addresses/events are public too
Events are public if the event creator makes them public.
Have you ever tried to find your own address? Mine is published and easily accessible if you know my name. Same for the address of the house I grew up in. Same for all my family members. I never put it on Facebook or anywhere else public... My brother never had a Facebook. I guess they got it from public records, however I rent. It somehow made its way into the public sphere and it makes me pretty uncomfortable.
Once a friend of mine was looking for addresses to send wedding invitations. He was able to find every single address that he needed without asking anyone. For some reason he didn't want to ask anyone their addresses if he didn't have to.
I certainly support the argument that this type of option should be the users' choice, but I'm curious by how many people seem to want to subvert this so that they remain unsearchable.
I use Facebook so that I can connect with people I meet. If I don't exchange contact info with someone I meet, but they know my name, it's great for them to search and find me on Facebook. I don't want my Facebook connections to solely be people I choose to friend.
I guess it boils down to how people use the service.
Real Question: Why do you have an account, but not want people to be able to find you?
EDIT: Thanks for the responses, some of them make a lot of sense that I didn't think of initially.
Lots of people need that. Teachers, doctors, social workers, care workers, people who work in/out of prisons, people who have had violent spouses/family members and this is just off the top of my head. The list goes on.
It is frustrating that the largest social media network is darn right hostile to large swathes of people.
Lots of events and groups solely exist on facebook. I think it is kind of awful that we let a company cut people out of their real life social networks just because they have stronger privacy requirements than 'normal' people.
Many of my high school teachers' profiles were easily located, but it was pretty easy for them to keep their information protected and simply explain that district policy prevents them from friending students. The only information you leak is the fact that you have a Facebook profile.
If someone has interacted with a public page/event, you don't need to see the person's profile, you just need to see the public/page event (which is indexed by Google).
> Why do you have an account, but not want people to be able to find you?
I signed up when I was young, and now my FB account is a liability I have to manage. (Which FB keeps making more difficult.) I communicate with friends to share, not to present an image to the world at large. I stopped adding FB "friends" years ago to prevent future issues, and I would rather people just believe that I don't have one until I can unwind the youthful indiscretion of signing up in the first place.
Because I want to share 'things' with the people in my social network and have no desire to share things with people outside of it like: employers, prospective employers, lawyers, police officers, people I do like but didn't want to hang out with more than that one night, etc.
My understanding is the privacy settings will still exist and function. You have every ability to decline friend requests from the people you listed. I suppose there are social ramifications to declining a friend request from people you may see semi-regularly.
It seems that GTAV's parody of Facebook as "LifeInvader" was even more spot-on than Rockstar Games realized.
(I wasn't among those that objected to the "Friend Request" mission. After all, who hasn't wanted to blow Zuck's head off at one time or another? :-) )
I've always defended Facebook and found it really useful. However recently I've noticed how little I use it and that I could (and would like to) delete my account.
There is one thing holding me back though. Photos. When I'm out with friends etc. I don't take photos. There are usually one or two people who do and I can rely on those photos being made available to me through Facebook/tagging. If I delete my Facebook account I lose the opportunity to view/save those photos.
I deactivated my Facebook profile for several months. Didn't miss the photos. Came back. Photos start to look silly, pointless, trivial. If I really, really want to see something, I'll ask a friend to show it to me over his/her phone.
I personally enjoy looking back on old photos every now and then. It's not really so I can look at them the next day. I know for sure I would miss that every now and then.I guess the solution is just for me to take more pictures instead of relying on other people.
Not exactly on topic, but related: with all the revelations around the NSA spying, I've started thinking about the internet as basically a non-private space. It's a distributed network, and data passes through myriad corporate and governmental infrastructure. Anything you want to keep a secret, you just can't put it on the internet. On some level, the power of the internet is connected with this non-private nature.
I've never understood what the argument for widespread adoption of encryption on the internet was. To get the same utility, you'd have to have a huge "private" network, which would quickly become non-private again.
In light of this, it is disturbing that more and more systems of society are being moved on to the internet. Health records being particularly omninous. You can choose not to post or have profiles on social networks. It looks going forward we will no longer have the option to keep private medical info private.
"Then, if you'd like your account permanently deleted with no option for recovery, log into your account and fill out this form."
So it is possible to delete your account "completely". I did this once and I have never been more happier. I actually spent time being tense when Facebook rolled out a new privacy blunder and would rush to check all settings. Imagine the time wasted.
So to all those who are contemplating deleting the account but can't - do it. It's totally worth it.
What I was referring to is the fact that they likely never delete your info, they just set disabled=1, recoverable=0. I have heard anecdotal accounts[1] and read the writing on the wall[2], along with a hunch, that they would rather not delete data unless compelled to. Disk space is probably the cheapest its ever been, and there's a lot that you could learn from one's profile data, and they undoubtedly data-mine (and probably sell) it regardless of your disabled status. A 3rd party might be more interested in your data, say maybe if they determined that their demographic shows a strong inverse correlation with FB activity. Or maybe the 3rd party feels that they've already saturated the FB market, and is looking for leads in new markets. Facebook themselves would stand to gain from crunching numbers to try and determine why people leave, since that is lost revenues for them.
Although, I hear that the EU (or maybe just the UK?) has strict provisions around keeping data, and so those users who choose to delete their account really do have their data wiped. But not the rest of us.
"When you delete an account, it is permanently deleted from Facebook. It typically takes about one month to delete an account, but some information may remain in backup copies and logs for up to 90 days. You should only delete your account if you are sure you never want to reactivate it. You can delete your account here.
Certain information is needed to provide you with services, so we only delete this information after you delete your account. Some of the things you do on Facebook aren't stored in your account, like posting to a group or sending someone a message (where your friend may still have a message you sent, even after you delete your account). That information remains after you delete your account."[1]
"Maybe that was true in the past, but today when you delete your data it is gone. Trust me, I wrote it myself. The law enforcement guidelines that have been circulating recently corroborate this."[2]
I do wonder what sort of "things you do on Facebook" aren't stored on your account, though.
I deleted, really really deleted my Facebook account a couple of years ago and always suspected they kept it alive. I am in Europe, so Facebook falls under the EU privacy directives. Recently I requested them to hand over all information they have on file about me. This was done through official channels, also involving the Data Protection Commissioner. The response was they had nothing about me on file. It's possible that they even lied about this, but it seems unlikely at this point. So at least for Europeans it seems you can really have your information purged.
No option for recovery by the person whose account it was. Facebook is probably still holding the data. I hope I got out early enough that I may have actually gotten deleted at some point. I can't remember how many years ago it was, but it was after a few facebook creep cycles (things like this that hit the news) not super-early like some people.
Even though @PeterHunt apparently wrote this deletion feature, and stated on HN that your information really is deleted [1], I still don't believe him. Even if he is genuine, there is nothing to prove that since he wrote it, Facebook haven't changed that policy.
That is Facebook's core problem. They are the boy that cried wolf. We have seen them lie about privacy. We have seen how they have eroded our privacy, sometimes deliberately and sometimes by mistake. More importantly, we have seen them make these invasions into our privacy, and genuinely not seem to care.
The take-way from this, is that Facebook has become untrustable. As more people realize that, the more people will start deleting their accounts.
The challenge is (as a person that has deleted their Facebook account), is that you have to overcome the addiction and then the deal with the loss. You have to finally accept that the things you think you are missing out on really aren't that important. I personally found this quite hard to accept.
Giving up Facebook and giving up smoking are relatively similar, and I've done both.
After you choose to "permanently" delete your account, you'll get a message that says, "Your personal account was recently disabled by Facebook" two weeks later.
I know several people that misspell their own name on Facebook for this purpose. I imagine that if people still want to be unsearchable, this is what they'll do.
If you stop using facebook, then you also lose the benefits of facebook. Some people want to use facebook, but not be searchable by name. It is not difficult to change one's name on facebook, so I hardly think it's a ridiculous response.
So real question: I've changed mine a while back and removed all the vowels - not machine readable but still human recognizable. At one point they did have my actual name and I imagine they still do. What is to say they don't tune their search to include previous names used on a profile?
I also remember last time I changed my name I had a hard time getting around their validation. Any hints on how to defeat that check using an alias?
I just checked and it seems they have also limited the number of times you can change your name. Apparently I only have 4 changes left.
The benefits of facebook? What, that they're holding my relationships hostage behind a wall? Again, the lengths that users are going to so that they can use a basic utility without being manipulated and taken advantage of is ridiculous.
Nearly all of my friends use Facebook for scheduling events. If you can tell me how I can convince them all to switch to another service, I'll delete my Facebook account.
Ideally, this plan will also work for when that service becomes a burden, so I can continue asking my friends to switch to new services.
Also, I know I could just talk to my friends more often, and ask them regularly if there are events they've forgotten to invite me to, but that will make me sound needy and pathetic, much like someone refusing to own a telephone, and instead showing up at their friends' houses unannounced, just in case they had something to communicate.
I do it over email. Or even text. Or voice even. It works just fine.
Really, it is entirely possible to schedule events without Facebook. It was possible to do so when FB was not there, and it is possible to do it now :)
You don't. People change the way they schedule events, or more likely they make an exception for you. A lot more people do that than people who just don't invite me to things.
They want me there, so why shouldn't they make an effort? If they don't want me there at least that badly, why would I want to be there? Luckily, I don't have that problem - people text me, or email me, or try to run into me or something.
Which is fine - people make an exception for you. But the original point was that other people use Facebook to schedule things, and the response was "Well, I schedule things over email and text." Which misses the point, because we're talking about other people's behavior, not your own.
I don't have a facebook account. My friends that do generally just send me (and a few others without facebook accounts) an email when they are hosting an event. Is it really that much of an effort to remember to invite people who aren't on facebook?
Agreed. I find it pathetic and depressing that people are making phony excuses for not deleting themselves from an internet website that continually subverts their privacy and data. This has been Facebook's history since the beginning.
"Won't get invited to events." What?
Pick up the phone, text, email, IM, irc, smoke signals, TALK ffs!
Or instead, be honest and admit you're hooked like any average user.
>Pick up the phone, text, email, IM, irc, smoke signals, TALK ffs!
Here is a cute notion. Something you apparently are incapable of thinking of. Acquaintances. Friends. Not bffs. Just friends. And people you want to stay in contact with.
How many do you have? By your talk, I am guessing none. And if everyone would be like you then yes, no need for facebook because we all could just "pick up the phone" and talk to the one friend we all have.
It may sound strange to you, but many of us have a lot of friends and acquaintances. People we are still interested in to learn what is going on in their life but at the same time people we don't want to call as if we were bffs.
So, given that situation, what do you propose? Making like it is the 1990s and start mass emailing all these people what you normally just put up on facebook? Everyone in bcc so they don't see each other? Keeping the tone of the post as general as possible cause you can't mention any names?
Great stuff. Especially since that is grad a spam as not everyone might want to read your stuff. But they will if you keep stuffing their inbox. When they go on facebook, they want to check up on everyone they added. When I go check my email I want to check my email and not start treating it like my facebook newsfeed!
So why don't all you mindless bashers pack it in, leave the internet altogether and start using your proposed smoke signals and enjoy your hipster elitism and privacy heaven. Just so you know, if I am seeing smoke, I am calling the fire department. So you might want to pick something even more private.
Same here. Most of my friends that do this are either teachers or clinicians of some sort that don't want their pupils/patients finding them. This is a much simpler approach than the privacy morass Facebook has intentionally created.
I, and other people I know, replace a letter in our names with an accented one. As long as you stay in the UTF-8 Latin alphabet, Facebook won't complain about the name change; and as far as I can tell this completely removes me from searches containing my real unaccented name.
Their searching does transposition too. I'm able to search for Russian friends of mine who use their Russian-spelled names by typing in transliterated English.
I would be horrified that people have to go to those lengths to preserve privacy but then again, we're dealing with Facebook. I'm barely surprised, all I can think of is "That's a good idea. Why didn't I think of that?"
I guess, but what is this loss? It seems like being non-searchable is effectively "security through obscurity", not any kind of actual information restriction (like not giving data you don't want known to FB in the first place). What's the tangible badness in this?
You have a point. You could find someones profile by entering their username or their ID but that's impractical. After thinking about it, ultimately it doesn't make a lot of sense; if you have a Facebook account, you should be able to find people using friends-of-friends or by other means.
I guess the primary use-case is to help prevent cyberbullying?
I know several people that are quite bright in real life but only post cat pics and unfunny quotes on facebook, then like random useless uninteresting crap. They are ruining the "experience of facebook/social networking" for everyone on their friend-list willfully as a slow sabotage.
That is kind of the best thing one could really do to subvert the facebook. It isnt enough to change name, or to misinform or deactivate etc, the best thing is really to offer the lower the quality of everything below crap, to drive others away too. To more fertile and free lands of networking. Whatever that is, it will be somewhere soon enough.
Sounds like you might be interested in this function that I keep in my bashrc, which prints a random line from Uncyclopedia (note, output may contain NSFW language and mangled unicode characters):
mknoise(){
curl -Ls http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Special:Random/ | sed -n '/<p>/,/<\/p>/p' \
| sed -e 's/<[^>]*>//g' -e '/^*$/d' -e '/article/g' | \
perl -MList::Util=shuffle -e 'print shuffle(<STDIN>);' | sed -n '/^.\{35\}/p' | head -n1
}
When we signed up long time go when we trusted the tech community and facebook, we went in with good intentions. But then facebook breaks our trust and sells us out to anyone who is willing to pay, something they explicitly said they wouldnt do when we signed up. Slowly and carefully like a psychopath working its victim, facebook is removing any sense of control and privacy from its users. Like for example removing this feature in the headline.
Back in time I remember we users had control of our news feed, we could actually stay in touch with friends, these days we have very little control of what gets shown the news feed, we dont even know how the algorithm works. Far too often we miss important information because facebook decided to post ads was more important. Well. Bring it on facebook, here is more inane crap.
Rose tinted glasses. I remember what facebook was like in 2005; if anything there was less privacy (you could search by course, or by relationship status), and the news feed was so full of junk as to be useless.
No, facebook's main advantage was that you had enough room to write messages with some content in. And that there was a dedicated events-organizing system.
For many who have exited an abusive relationship, this represents nothing less than a complete betrayal by Facebook.
I have a family member in such a situation. Fortunately, they have stayed away from Facebook and other social media out of fear of something like this.
Congratulations, guys (and I choose that term somewhat deliberately, with reference to gender bias in domestic violence statistics): You've just branded yourselves as well as your product assholes.
How is this detrimental to those with an unusual name? I ask because I have an unusual name (I've never met another "Leland") and I never set my name to be unsearchable, and I've not had any problems because of this. What bad things are going to happen?
If your name is Mike Smith or Chris Wong or Jane Lee, you can murder and rape and pillage with the confidence that once you are out of prison, you'll be "anonymous" on social media - you can hide in plain sight.
On the other hand, if the spelling of your name is unique in the digital world, as mine appears to be, everything you say and do online can be traced to you individually. (By employers, for instance. Who want to know how old you are, or whether you're married, or how you spend your spare time. To pick a bland example from among hundreds.)
I find your idea pretty shock. I never thought of that. But then again, if there is a crime, there is certainly an evidence. The thing is that evidence is hard to trace. For example, hair and dead skin. it's just hard to find - you can end up with 10000 individual hair sample on the crime scene.
It's just unfair, users aren't on equal footing with respect to privacy. anyone you send a resume to can search for your facebook and know for sure it's you, for example. (just one example).
To be honest, I don't think they are going to go through with this. They are feeding news sites with this, people will "outrage" and then facebook will pull back and it'll seem like they actually care about privacy. Nice publicity stunt.
Many people are suggesting that we delete our profiles. Don't, if you ask me. I will explain.
1) Because, certain information can be considered valuable - For example old comments from friends/family on relevant photos, semi-private get-togethers/events, etc. Because all these can be considered as good memory/archives of your personal life and the stuff that reminds people of their relationship with you. For me I consider, these valuable, so it's a no no to delete my profile as I will end up losing these. I can technically take a back up if I want, but who opens their backed up index.html once a week, if not daily?
However, leaving your profile undeleted means you lose a lot of privacy. So how am I going to hide my profile if it's publicly searchable?
First, understand that your live profile is not only searchable, but also indexable by google.
Facebook ALSO hands over the stuff you 'like' to search engines. So, you now like a famous pornstar's fan page/even her post? Well, good luck getting it removed from Google!
All I need to do to find out what you've liked on facebook is search for your name in quotes:
"<insert your name here>"
or even:
site:http://facebook.com "<insert name here>"
While this heavily depends on the uniqueness of your name, it also means that it sucks if you are a professional seeking a job or in a similar situation and all Google returns for querying your name is a list of pornstars you've liked on Facebook. Pornstars are probably an over-rated example, but in many cases it could really be awkward - your views against a particular ideology (feminism/masculism/atheism, for example) and sensitive stuff like that. Because if you like something, it means you "support it". That's how it's perceived, atleast.
2) So, back to my point. Deleting is too extreme. Why? Because deleting also makes you lose control of what's out there. If I am correct, I've observed in the past that even deleted profiles are not actually deleted, but are assigned an empty profile with just your name and the default profile picture and this stuff is still sent to search engines. So, if you delete your profile, you lose control over this.
What I may suggest doing is temporarily deactivate your profile (There's an option for this.). This will actually make your profile totally invisible (from search and indexing) and also from my observations, temporarily un-index you from search engines. This is good because you still have control over your profile, you own your data and search engine visibility.
So, what I technically do is, login into Facebook to check what my friends are upto, say once or twice a month, and then deactivate it. For example, I like to keep additional family and friends separate and hence I maintain multiple additional profiles for them, distinctive from my main profile, instead of using Facebook's unreliably stupid privacy system (circles). Now, I wouldn't want my friends to discover my family profile and vice versa. Then, there's the list of dudes whom I will never want to add me, ever. So, maintaining multiple profiles also, helps me maintain a fake presence on Facebook, while also masking my search engine visibility of my real profile with the fake profiles. This works well for me, ymmv. So, just think twice before deleting your profile.
Downloading a backup from your Facebook account before deleting it let's you save all of your valuable information. If you then choose to never open this backup, well I guess the information is not THAT valuable for you.
Deleting my Facebook was very easy and straightforward. 1) downloading the backup. 2) permanently deleted my account, not deactivate . 3) communication to my friends I no longer use Facebook and how they can reach me. I still recieve invitations and photo's via IM and mail, no big deal!
The move towards complete availability of all digital information seems to be a force of history. Privacy advocates are beginning to sound like copyright advocates, demanding that the universe continue providing for them in the manner to which they have grown accustomed.
Like copyright/IP, privacy is more about use getting used to (and in some cases legislating) how things happen to be, not predesigned or derived from first principle rules or morality. If 99% of your existence occurs within a community of 150 people, very little is private. When you live in a 20th center city, you get a lot of anonymity. You can keep private life (even several of these) separate from your professional life. etc. Those were just inevitable consequences of how those societies were structured.
The internet was at first an anonymous place. Pre-2000 most people seemed to share the feeling that if their real name found its way to the world wide web, serial killers would come. Then 2000-2005 people started keeping online diaries, online photo libraries, online lots of personal information. Facebook catalyzed this process with a semi private system of friends that matched what people were used to in their normal lives.
The force of history that is 'all your data available to everyone everywhere' feels unstoppable. Data is data. It doesn't care if it's an email, SMS, baby photo or GPS log. It doesn't get deleted.
Maybe "Information wants to be free" was an understatement.
I feel very awkward trying to describe this, a clear sign that I don't understand it. I wish pg Joel Spolsky, Chris Anderson (or ideally, Douglas Adams - I really wish we still had him) or someone else who's good at this sort of abstract thing would write a good piece on it.