| > This is not wikipedia. This is Hacker News. I actually expect higher standards of this place. > I fail to understand how exactly it is news: party friends are not true friends, drug friends are not true friends, facebook contacts are not true friends either. You seem to believe that "Facebook network" and "real life network" are distinct networks. They're not. Usually there are only few points when they don't overlap - because in reality, you have one social network and Facebook is a convenient tool to manage it. So yes, I if I get into an accident or get thrown into a jail I expect a lot of my Facebook friends, who are also real-life friends, to show up. Hell, I expect many more to come than without Facebook, because there really is no other widespread way of keeping many people updated about each other's day-to-day life. > And I phrased mine to show that your counter argument works both ways, except facebook is preventing outside people from getting in touch with inside people, not the other way around. I accept that it works both ways. In most discussions, people actually bring up only the side from your counter, completely forgetting about the one I wanted to remind OP about. > You may have confused a few concept here, data that is public can also be sensitive, see social engineering. Part of the problem of social engineering is that people treat "public but sensitive data" as anything but public. If I know your birthday or address or bank account number, it doesn't prove anything about my relationship to you. People who ignore it end up becoming victims of social engineering attacks. I think it's a part of basic security training to make them understand that this data is to be assumed public knowledge. > a random innocent example: girl has crush on boy, stalks his facebook for birth date, find out his astrology sign, renounces for astrocompatibility bs. Boy unknowingly missed opportunity to explore bases. Well, so what? Things like these happen all the time with any random things. She may have overheard his birth date in a conversation. Or maybe he put a fake date and she thought it's true and gave up even though both were astrocompatibile and believed in the BS. It's easy to invent such examples to prove just about any point. |
> You seem to believe that "Facebook network" and "real life network" are distinct networks. They're not. Extraordinary claims requires extraordinary evidence. Having a look in a teen's facebook versus his/her real life should be enough to see by yourself the reality is not what you claim. But I'll rather introduce you to Robin Dunbar and the Dunbar Number: "orry, Facebook friends: Our brains can't keep up["1] and "The Limits of Friendship"[2]
> In most discussions, people actually bring up only the side from your counter, completely forgetting about the one I wanted to remind OP about.
And there is a reason for that, which is simply that facebook added an artificial barrier between people as tool to force people to register to facebook. The wall of the so called walled garden.
> Part of the problem of social engineering is that people treat "public but sensitive data" as anything but public.
Ok, it seems I have failed to express myself correctly and my simple and innocent example failed to get through. Allow me to reformulate: - A birth date is personal data, for it is indeed related to a specific person. -Personal data is sensitive data. - That's it, there's nothing more to it.
I suppose you live in a place and time too far away from the last attempt at rounding people for mass killing and attempted extermination to remember how important and sensitive personal data is.
I guess those who fail to remember history are doomed to relive it.
[1]: http://www.cnet.com/news/sorry-facebook-friends-our-brains-c... [2]: http://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/social-medi...