Facebook has been invaluable to me for keeping in touch with friends and family from my entire life time. I've rekindled contact with lost friends, kept in touch with family living abroad, made new friends. Its a tool and like any tool there are instructions and warning labels. What more, this tool is free, and to be fair, costs millions of dollars a month to run. And we mustn't forget Facebook is also a business, and yes, we are not the customers - we are the product used to keep the machine running and make some people a healthy profit in the process. That is the nature of business. Remember that, accept that and use it right, and Facebook is great. You don't like - get off it but don't expect everybody to follow suit. There has been (are still are) many attempts to move the party else where. They all failed or will fail since the point of the 'party' is having everybody attend and attend all at once.
"[...] we are the product used to keep the machine running and make some people a healthy profit in the process. That is the nature of business."
Making a profit is the nature of business. Requiring payment in giving up privacy and control over your perception as the only options is not, and being a monopoly also is not.
"They all failed or will fail since the point of the 'party' is having everybody attend and attend all at once."
That is exactly why facebook must be faught, 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.
Also, you might want to consider that "having everybody attend and attend all at once" technically does not require a monopoly. The telephone network, for example, is also one telephone network where every participant can call every other participant, but still, there are multiple telcos offering access to the network, competing with one another. Something similar is true for most traditional internet services, and the internet itself. Every machine on the internet can send packets to every other machine on the internet, but there are plenty of providers to choose from. You can send email from every email account to every other, but there are plenty of email providers, and it's relatively easy to open your own. Every website hosted anywhere can be read by anyone, not matter which provider they connect through ... all of those technologies allow you access through one single telephone, email client, and web browser, but there is no single entity that controls all of it, and that is vital in order to avoid an unhealthy concentration of power that in the end is likely to affect not just those who choose to use facebook, but all of society.
The telephone network is interconnected. I can call anyone from any network to any network provider. Facebook is not. If I want to see my friends on Facebook I have to use Facebook. When there is a social network that aggregates all other social networks then it would be like the phone network.
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."
FB is valuable for me too but that doesn't mean I trust it. As you say, it's a business that exists to turn a profit and I am cattle. I don't like this arrangement but I don't really have an alternative (as you say).
However, that does not mean that people shouldn't draw attention to what FB is, what it captures and what it does in your name. Nobody reads the "instructions and warning labels" and even if they did, they're not going to comprehend them. Would you then admonish the user to RTFM? I'd call that victim-blaming. How many developers would dare blame the user for not understanding how to use their shiny new web-app? Why take the same approach to those who can't understand a ToS?
FB may be a tool but that's also an oversimplification. It's not anything like a 'hammer', or even a chainsaw. I'd consider it more like a drug (eg morphine), which is also a tool but is not really your friend. Those kinds of tools get regulated.
"but I don't really have an alternative (as you say)."
Which is another way to say that you in fact do have an alternative. People in oppressive regimes tell themselves the same, which is how they do get perpetuated. The change happens when people accept the fact that there is an alternative.
I don't think I would compare this to living under an oppressive regime. There are plenty of people in oppressed countries who speak out, and yet the regimes are perpetuated. Sometimes the readily available alternative is just another flavor of repressive regime. It's easy for people in relatively free societies to say, "they should just stand up for themselves", yet have no concept of what that would actually entail.
I didn't say "they should just stand up for themselves", and I didn't say that the alternative was "readily available", I just said that change comes from people accepting the fact that there is an alternative, and that considering the status quo as being without alternative perpetuates the status quo.
Also: No, an oppressive regime with plenty of people speaking out is not perpetuated. One in a million speaking out is not plenty, and half the people in a country speaking out won't leave the government much choice. That's why oppressive regimes suppress free speech. You cannot control a majority of a country by force.
Just because an individual's action may not amount to much, doesn't mean that there is any other way out than individuals' actions. The oppressor won't just give up, and the other side consists of nothing but individuals, whose inaction certainly won't change anything.
There is no contradiction between those two terms. Nation states are social networks, too, and some of them are oppressive regimes. One risk factor for becoming oppressive is a concentration of power. Facebook concentrates a lot of power. The concentration of power is why people feel that they have no alternative.
Note: Analogies are analogies because they are analogous, not because they are an exact copy.
Honestly, I'd rather they make it a paid service than a dystopian clusterfuck of advertising espionage.
I'm more likely to quit the wonnnnderful "free" service you describe and defend because it "costs millions of dollars a month to run". Those millions of dollars are just R&D on how to get advertisers more intimate data. If they didn't pay for all that gross research, the infrastructure wouldn't cost nearly as much.
I seriously doubt that 'millions of dollars a month to run' price-tag. There are alternative, even superior open source software solutions.
The only cost are the servers, but certainly, even with facebook's traffic, a well built stack could run on not more than a dozen. So I'd imagine facebook could be run on a few thousands of dollars a month, certainly the costs shouldn't be that much higher than wikipedia's.
The only thing that's valuable in facebook, and hard to replace, is the user-base, which was won through heavy marketing, and having a more attractive product at a critical stage (more attractive =/= technically superior).
According to this [1] Facebook has multiple data centers with around 60,000 servers as of 2010, probably a lot more now. If you know how to do the same thing with a dozen servers, I am sure they'd love to hire you!
In fairness, while I think the previous comment is a bit clueless myself, I'm inclined to ask how many of those servers would be necessary if FB wasn't logging so very much data on everyone.
If FB's job was once again just to show me my fucking posts, instead of building the most complete profile of a human being in the history of mankind so that it can sell me out to governments and corporations, it seems to me the data load would be a lot lighter.
I don't have a source for this right now, but I remember reading that the vast majority of disk space used by Facebook is taken up by users' photos. They are probably saving hundreds of uploaded photos per person (on average) and while they do compress them quite a bit this still has to take up a lot of storage space.
Of course they do also collect a lot of behavioral data, but I imagine all the data Facebook has collected on me probably uses up less storage than my profile pictures alone...
Also I remember reading that they keep 7 copies of everything at all time a few years back in an article about how deleting your account didn't actually delete your data, which became obvious after data from accounts deleted several years before had reappeared after the introduction of a new feature.
You cannot and you are right there. The only way to target individuals is by having specific lists of emails or ids that you can upload and create custom audiences (or via their notion of retargeting through pixel fires). Even then though you don't know WHO saw your ads. Its a walled garden and impossible to get per user data as you would in traditional retargeting campaigns. That is why the bidding system is impossible to game (despite some claims from some companies). You have no idea WHO is seeing your ads - only the DEMOGRAPHIC of the ad views/clicks and only if you segmented your campaigns in a way you can track that.
Right now, this would be insider stuff and asking for much trouble to reveal it. Meanwhile, you just have to wait for it to be obvious that facebook has failed and it will start selling user data directly, or that they get hacked and a dump is available on the black market.
In the meantime, find yourself a dodgy intelligence agent or sysadmin.
I wonder how many email servers are running today? Probably comparable within an order of magnitude. Yet those server are not owned by one corporation, they're multiple corporations cooperating to move data between each other.
It's too bad Facebook and Twitter are businesses, instead of multiple protocols and multiple businesses. Or in other words, it's too bad The Old Ones didn't think cat pictures and what they had for breakfast was important. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_pioneers
Its not comparable scale. WhatsApp are shifting messages from point A to point B and that's it. Even 100x less servers is still a LOT of servers just or that. They don't store data, just traffic it from one user to another.
Okay, 60,000 servers - for 1.23 billion active users. That's less than 0.0005 server per user. Facebook as such may cost millions to run of course, but the price they pay to keep your account active is so negligible that you're essentially selling your data for peanuts.
Not centrally, no. But many existing P2P networks prove that you do not need massive data centers to hoard everyone's data. You can use the collaborative effort of humanities existing computation devices.
That was not the point he was making -- he was making the point that "even with facebook's amount of traffic, you could host it on a dozen servers". That is just so far detached from reality I cannot take that seriously.
I agree that p2p social networks are an interesting alternative, but they are a whole different kind of product and a kind of apples / oranges comparison in terms of cost of operation.
Decentralization is less efficient. Instead of each piece of information being copied in a few place it would need to be copied to hundreds or thousands with a decentralized system.
I apologise in advance for the sarcastic tone (I could not help myself): If you can run Facebook at Facebook's scale with no more than a dozen servers, I'm going to hire you for my next project because man, that would be something! I suggest you send a CV to Google because they are running an even bigger scale than Facebook and if you can dilute them to say 100 servers - its a win!
Facebook's infra is unique. If it was built today it might have been different but it would still run on MANY servers across MANY geographical locations. It would still cost millions to run every month. This is why companies like Google are building data centres. Its cheaper for them in the long run to own the infra from the ground up, literally (i.e., owning the actual land the DC is on).
You can search and replace your argument with the automotive industry and it works pretty well. You can't be a successful adult without a car, no matter how loud an extremely small minority of the population claims otherwise, and the general public has pretty much no interest in the alternatives.
Yet, in contrast to the auto industry, no one thought it was great that Ford Pinto gas tanks would explode, or the cops punish people for the crime of "driving while black".
If as a company you insist on business practices or class of business operations that inevitably results in the destruction of any real free market probably via monopolization, you can expect criticism and regulation to at least try to reduce the harm.
I'm glad you're here to point out that I can't be a successful adult without a car. I hadn't realized that, but now that I'm clued in I can go buy one to fix the issue.
P.S. I think around 25% of my coworkers have cars, and we live in the US making six figures.
I don't own a car and almost never miss it. Granted I would miss it slightly more often if ride-sharing services didn't exist as sometimes I'm too lazy to cycle, but it'd still be perfectly doable. I live in the US.
You can't be a successful adult without a car? That's one of the most ridiculous things I have ever heard. That's like saying you don't love your wife unless you buy her a diamond. Granted one has more purpose than the other but essentially they are both material objects that we as humans place too much value on.
