[icehawk219]

“People will give up their privacy to get something they want,” he said.

And there in lies the problem I have with this. The sad thing is that a large percentage of people would give up their privacy because the old "if you have nothing to hide then what are you worried about?" is still sadly a common mindset.

I would expect there to be a greater push from Facebook, Twitter, etc to crack down on companies trying to do this though. Because at the end of the day the way to avoid this surveillance is to not use their services.

[breischl]

Why would they crack down on this? It's not much different than what those companies are already doing - it's just that they strip-mine your data and sell it to advertisers instead of landlords.

If anything, I would expect them to buy that startup, or build a competing product, rather than just shutting it down entirely.

[niftich]

But that's the point, isn't it? It's fair game if FB does it to their own data, but if they're being scraped by a company that makes the news, they might decide to revoke their API keys or otherwise use technical or legal ways to limit their access.

[twblalock]

Why is it sad, and why should it be prevented? If I decide to trade my privacy for something I want, I should be able to do that.

[krapp]

It's like breaking herd immunity by choosing not to vaccinate - your lack of privacy weakens the community and presents a danger to everyone else.

[cinquemb]

Which is why I don't mind not having a "real" fb account, or feeling like I have to go along with the other banal decisions the herd might make, I'd rather stay cut off from the parasitic choices of others to the extent than I can and engage to the extent of my abilities on my own terms.

[twblalock]

How exactly would my lack of privacy weaken anyone else's privacy? Is this just a generic slippery-slope argument? What is the causal mechanism that would cause my lack of privacy to effect anyone else's?

[krapp]

The network effects of popular but privacy invading platforms are what allows the lack of privacy to spread. If you use Facebook, as an example, then everyone else who uses Facebook in order to interact with you, or anyone whose face is included in a Facebook photo by you has their privacy affected by extension. Someone who's not even on Facebook but just happens to know you now has a shadow profile and their biometric data indexed somewhere in Facebook's database.

[twblalock]

> The network effects of popular but privacy invading platforms are what allows the lack of privacy to spread.

That's just a bunch of handwaving. Be specific about causality. "Network effects" is pretty much equivalent to "stuff just happens for some reason."

> Someone who's not even on Facebook but just happens to know you now has a shadow profile and their biometric data indexed somewhere in Facebook's database.

I don't believe that for a second. That's a wild accusation made with no evidence.

[krapp]

>"Network effects" is pretty much equivalent to "stuff just happens for some reason."

"network effects" simply means "everyone I know is on Facebook (or social media platform x), so I should probably be on (x) as well."

>That's a wild accusation made with no evidence.

It's a straightforward extrapolation based on what's known about the way Facebook operates.

Facebook creates "shadow profiles" of people who may not even be members, based on data provided about them by third parties:

https://motherboard.vice.com/blog/facebooks-shadow-profile-b...

Facebook also has facial recognition algorithms which allow it to identify the subject of photos, to automate tagging:

http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/05/18/477...

It's not unreasonable to assume that they build shadow profiles on every potential subject they can identify and can begin to graph relationships from, including every face they can isolate from a photograph, even if those faces don't belong to Facebook account holders.