IMHO privacy alone IS enough to negate the utility of Facebook. Privacy is not about just your name, gender and address. Nor even about what movies, music and books you enjoy. It's down to how you express yourself in words and what can be inferred by them. Your pics might seen harmless, but there's plenty you can infer from them too.
Sure, there's controls on which groups of facebook friends can see things, but in the end, this all goes into a FB database somewhere, which who knows has access to it, or backups to it. Enjoy being harvested voluntarily. Might not matter to you in particular.
On the flip side perhaps, humans might not be easily categorized and predicated like bits of data. That we become ok with reading about things that weren't intended for our demographic profile. But if I were to bet money on it, I'd bet against that.
IMHO privacy alone IS enough to negate the utility of Facebook. Privacy is not about just your name, gender and address. Nor even about what movies, music and books you enjoy. It's down to how you express yourself in words and what can be inferred by them. Your pics might seen harmless, but there's plenty you can infer from them too.
Sure, there's controls on which groups of facebook friends can see things, but in the end, this all goes into a FB database somewhere, which who knows has access to it, or backups to it. Enjoy being harvested voluntarily. Might not matter to you in particular.
On the flip side, maybe from a philosophical point of view humans might not be easily categorized and predicated like bits of data. That we become ok with reading about things that weren't intended for our demographic profile. But if I were to bet money on it, I'd bet against that.
I guess, I can say this since I've never been a heavy FB user and I see little of the benefits from it. Maybe I need to upgrade my friends. They say that to many, FB is the internet to them -- we'll see how this lasts in the long run.
> this all goes into a FB database somewhere, which who knows has access to it, or backups to it. Enjoy being harvested voluntarily.
Are you being ironic with a statement like this, or are you serious?
The second there's even so much as a bug that affects some obscure privacy setting, the TechCrunch pitchforks are out, and the brand is on the line. Do you really think that FB is just gonna let anyone rummage through their user's private data, just, you know, for fun? Can you even imagine how damaging that would be? Why do you think FB blows millions of dollars on engineer salaries to work on privacy features — which you just dismiss in a sentence like they're nothing?
The way I see it, you're already in a database somewhere, many of them, but the difference is you don't have access to that data — you don't even know what data exists, where. Facebook comes along and says "OK, fine, we'll play along, except we'll let the users decide what data they provide, and we'll try to help them benefit from it as much as possible" — and suddenly, Facebook's the bad guy. All the government, banking, insurance, direct mail databases out there and people have to go after FB, where every click has an associated privacy setting. It boggles the mind.
I believe that it's within reason that FB's internal controls are lax (like any other company) depending on what sort of access you have as an employee, contractor or family member of an employee ... or even a friend. It's totally possible for an internal employee to forget to encrypt a drive, or leave a backup somewhere of something. Or if a friend borrowed the password of an employee. I even think it's totally within reason that an employee could be paid off if the (extreme) situation deemed it necessary.
"OK, fine, we'll play along, except we'll let the users decide what data they provide, and we'll try to help them benefit from it as much as possible"
...sure that applies to the outer shell of it, and the official public stance. What else happens internally?
Disclaimer: my comments just are a result of trying to think critically. I could be totally/partially incorrect or correct. I do believe there is a truth out there about it, but that it's not in FB's interest to be super upfront.
I took time to word what I said, to match what I mean. It seems that what you read, were ones that you seem to have injected in.
It would be nice to know exactly what precautions are taken to prevent access from insiders. You may work for FB, but is storage or backups part of your role? Not that I think you have to be, how would I know as an outsider. Maybe as a developer you know how things are setup, and how well people adhere to policies.
And I'm curious, what are those? If users' data is taken seriously then wouldn't they make difficult to prevent casual snooping across the database? So that even if you had root access you couldn't get to it as an insider?
Probably not. The data is meant to feed an ad/marketing machine so, how locked down could the data be internally?
I don't expect these questions to be answered, but just throwing them out there in an attempt to reason things out.
The way I see it is this: Would I invite Mark Zuckerberg to be permanently and pervasively privy to my friends, my conversations with them, and all of my pictures?
Seriously - Facebook is Zucker's brain-child in that it face-scans, categorizes, and picks apart your words and photos. Its like inviting Zucker himself into your photo-album, allowing him to think and learn more about you while you are away.
Facebook is fucking creepy. I want a place I can go to have conversations with my friends privately, not a place I can put all of my friends conversations and hope that it doesn't get disclosed somehow later.
You could well need help with paranoia this strong.
Mark Zuckerberg is not going through your friends, conversations and photos. Nor is anybody else other than you and your friends. In fact due to its design your emails would be far easier to 'read' than Facebook would be.
Just because he isn't going it personally, doesn't mean that backend processes and features designed by him aren't fully automated. Thats almost worse - a robot Zuckers spying on me. At least if he was doing it himself he wouldn't be doing it perfectly and constantly.
Personally, I dont want a middle man for every social interaction. Then I don't own my relationships, Facecbook does.
Everything in that post seems valid but when it's coming from an entrepreneur, copping this attitude seems self-defeating. That person who just mistakenly or ignorantly referred to you as desktop support could be someone that could help you in the end.
Please take this as just frankly worded feedback: It's quite possible you think more highly of yourself (or your work) than you really should. You say you agree with Linus Torvalds quote, but chances are you are not at his level (yet) to have earned the right to get so snotty.
Bill Clerico came off as an Always Frustrated Chump. He needs to shake that off if he wants to be a ladies man. I suggest he start off with a few cover-to-cover readings of The Game.
They already got him started with some advice:
"if you want a 10 you got to be a 10 mentally and physically"
I stubbornly stand behind my words. An always frustrated chump is way behind the average frustrated chump. Nevermind I stand corrected. I do think it sucks how they edited it so the highlights of it were them hammering him with advice. It's a conspiracy against nerds. It's a SoCal entertainment industry conspiracy against the Silicon Valley. We all know which is better.
How about make a game about your situation? You seem to be emotionally charged enough so why not channel it into something that may lead you to other ideas?
Stick with college and finish up - you might stumble onto something that fits. And if not, at least you have a that piece of paper, which I used to think it was to impress people but really it's so the glaring absence of a degree doesn't jump out.
That said, you don't HAVE to finish. It will buy you time to discover, investigate other paths.
Back to the game idea, how about make the game about the future of your next 10 years?
Philosophically speaking, doesn't this boil down to having something meaningful to discuss? Otherwise you're just generating web noise but we're all guilty of that.
Sure, there's controls on which groups of facebook friends can see things, but in the end, this all goes into a FB database somewhere, which who knows has access to it, or backups to it. Enjoy being harvested voluntarily. Might not matter to you in particular.
On the flip side perhaps, humans might not be easily categorized and predicated like bits of data. That we become ok with reading about things that weren't intended for our demographic profile. But if I were to bet money on it, I'd bet against that.
IMHO privacy alone IS enough to negate the utility of Facebook. Privacy is not about just your name, gender and address. Nor even about what movies, music and books you enjoy. It's down to how you express yourself in words and what can be inferred by them. Your pics might seen harmless, but there's plenty you can infer from them too.
Sure, there's controls on which groups of facebook friends can see things, but in the end, this all goes into a FB database somewhere, which who knows has access to it, or backups to it. Enjoy being harvested voluntarily. Might not matter to you in particular.
On the flip side, maybe from a philosophical point of view humans might not be easily categorized and predicated like bits of data. That we become ok with reading about things that weren't intended for our demographic profile. But if I were to bet money on it, I'd bet against that.
I guess, I can say this since I've never been a heavy FB user and I see little of the benefits from it. Maybe I need to upgrade my friends. They say that to many, FB is the internet to them -- we'll see how this lasts in the long run.