[rayalez]

Look, I know that nowdays it's popular to pay attention to security and privacy, and I understand that it's important. But can we for once not immediately assume ill intentions?

I mean come on, do you seriously believe that programmers at facebook are rubbing their hands and laughing at how smart they are, figuring out how to turn on your mike for 15 seconds? Is that really what you believe is going on?

Or is it just trendy to scream "creepy! surveilance!" on every occasion?

[afro88]

It's unhealthy to choose to not be skeptical because you're annoyed that it's becoming popular to care about security and privacy.

It's a good thing that people care about privacy and security. It's a good thing that people question new free features and the motivation behind them.

Facebook exists to gather data about you so it can target advertising at you better than the rest and get paid more by advertisers using it's platform. Facebook will use this feature in any way it can to gather more data about you, and that's creepy and literally surveillance even if only for the time you're writing a status update.

[smoyer]

I don't believe the programmers at Facebook have evil intentions - I think they're just trying to build something that's technically cool. The problem is the MBAs will trying to build something businessy out of it and won't care whether it requires evil if it might possible make them some money.

There can also be a temporal factor. Today there might be no evil intentions but in a couple years someone might find that "we have this whole data set we could do X with".

[forgetsusername]

So you think the engineers are innocent and altruistic, and the MBAs are evil, huh?

What an incredibly naive viewpoint. Which one is Mr. Zuckerberg? I recall him have a few choice words for the "suckers" who sign up for his service and hand over their data.

[smoyer]

Of course not - I'm skeptical of everyone's intentions and specifically think through how to best protect my own privacy (I don't have a Facebook account). Of course, Facebook didn't choose "Don't be evil" as their slogan so you can assume the standard "Make money by any means possible" slogan. Yes, I'm appropriately jaded.

In any case, the comment I responded to was pretty specific in asking us to trust that the programmers motives were pure. I wanted to point out that things could turn creepy later in the business life-cycle even if the original motives were non-evil.

[microtonal]

Look, I know that nowdays it's popular to pay attention to security and privacy, and I understand that it's important. But can we for once not immediately assume ill intentions?

Not really. If I find it important to mention what I am watching or listening too, I can add it myself.

Obviously, the goals is not surveillance, since 15 seconds would be a too small amount of time. The goal is getting an even more fine-grained idea of your preferences for advertising.

A company who knows more and more about me, removing privacy one small step at a time, is creepy.

[rayalez]

I see your point, it's just.... Sometimes people do things simply to add a nice convenient feature.

People distrust big corporations, and that makes sense to a degree. But if I imagine a team of programmers that work on that stuff, when I visualise actual human beings that make the decisions, I have very hard time believing that this is the kind of thoughts that go through they heads.

Sure, maybe there's some manager somewhere who literally thinks "lets decrease people's privacy so we could squeeze extra few cents out of our users", I just believe that in 95% of cases it's just people like you and me, trying to do good things and build a new fun feature.

I understand your concern about the remaining 5%, but it seems unlikely to me in this case.

People who work at facebook probably have enough money to not be desperate about earning more, and to be free to focus on just making cool things. I think it's bad when everything google/apple/facebook/etc does is met with hostility, and in this particular case that reaction seems to be the result of group think, it isn't warranted by the information that we have.

[ssivark]

> People who work at facebook probably have enough money to not be desperate about earning more, and to be free to focus on just making cool things.

But Facebook as a company is under tremendous pressure to boost earnings! Facebook stock has a Price/Earnings ratio of about 70; that means that at the current rate of earning, it will take them 70 years to justify the value of the share price. There's no way shareholders are going to be willing to wait that long. Strong market forces are pushing Facebook to quickly grow profits, and in that process, privacy just happens to be an externality that's not worth protecting.

All employees will definitely feel the pressure (directly or indirectly) to contribute to profits, because Facebook management "owes" that to shareholders who've funded this whole operation (under current market ideology).

[forgetsusername]

It isn't that complicated.

Facebook's whole business model is predicated on collecting vast amounts of personal data and selling you advertising. Every feature they add is a means to that end. All of them.

[jsjohnst]

The thing I think you are missing is that once the feature exists, it can be misused, even if unintentionally by Facebook. A malicious employee could abuse their trusted position, a government level actor could intercept the transmission, a hacker could break in and dump them, etc. These are all very real scenarios that have happened before.

[dagw]

People who work at facebook probably have enough money to not be desperate about earning more

Based on casual observation of my surroundings, some of the highest earners I know are also the ones that are the most desperate to keep and grow their earnings.

[DanielBMarkham]

I hate crowds. If everybody went to the left, I'd go to the right. I'm a natural contrarian.

But you are asking for some really heavy lifting here. You're positing that we have two choices: assume ill intent on the part of Facebook or assume it's all good.

These are not the only choices, and they're not opposites of each other. Most likely is that FB folks are actively trying to help posters as much as they can. Most likely is that the average poster enjoys all this cool stuff. Most likely is that this is a terrible feature that should have never seen the light of day because of where it's taking the industry -- deeper down a pit of the surveillance/security state. Most likely a lot of folks complain about it simply because it's trendy.

All of these things can be true at the same time.

So I'm not really sure what to say. Sucks to work at Facebook, I guess. Too many developers and a mission to own the planet. Maybe they should have just stuck to "pictures of people you know and what they've been doing lately"

[aswerty]

It reminds me a bit of http://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Leonard_of_Quirm from the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett. A brilliant engineer who is absolutely naive as to the harm that could be wrought using his inventions. So I'd agree the engineers in Facebook aren't rubbing their hands and laughing but this doesn't mean they aren't part of a larger more ominous trend of technological advancement and privacy invasion.

[stingraycharles]

My thoughts were that this is probably quite similar a technology to Shazam and other song identification apps. The usage is a bit different, and as long as they're really, really clear about when they're listening (for example, Shazam has an "auto-shazam" feature that highlights a big red bar on my iPhone), I would be okay with this.

[zxcvcxz]

>But can we for once not immediately assume ill intentions?

IMHO we should always assume ill intentions. Always.

[kedean]

It's not really about their intentions, it's about the possibilities. Even if everyone involved right now has good intentions, who's to say everyone in the future will? The problem with collecting big swathes of data, or setting things up such that it easily could be collected, is that you're enabling future evil.

[mrweasel]

>But can we for once not immediately assume ill intentions?

Sure, but what if we're wrong? Once Facebook and it's advertisers have access to this information there's no way to be sure that they've deleted everything, just because you asked nicely.

When it's impossible to undo an action it's best to proceed with caution.

[johnflan]

That is really not the point, firstly they are been underhanded by misrepresenting the fact that conversations maybe stored in a datacentre without their permission.

Secondly, as with the Snowden leaks - say the engineers at FB are well intentioned, having that data travel over the air exposes more than the user is aware.

[code_duck]

Programmer at Facebook? No. Investors and advertising partners and government surveillance agents? Maybe.