The instagram TOS debacle some weeks ago was the straw that broke the camel's back for me. I recently stopped using Instagram, and requested account deletion from Facebook.
Graph search and its creepy implications were then nothing I needed to find personally objectionable anymore.
I no longer have to complain about the other sleazy, move-the-goalposts, amoral aspects of Facebook Instagram.
This latest one, I have to say, should not be surprising to anybody.
DELETE YOUR ACCOUNT if you don't like it. You will still have friends, I promise :-)
Before you file for account deletion, you might want to do two things:
1) use http://www.picknzip.com/ to download the pictures of you from other people (I have a couple that I liked that I can use for other profile pics, etc.). (The other photos in my facebook albums that I uploaded myself, I already have elsewhere.)
2) associate your facebook account with a yahoo email address. You can download all the contact information of your facebook friends that way (I don't know if this still works, but it did last year)
This is, AFAIK, the only way to export your facebook friends' data
3) go to your full friends list, scroll down until the infinite scrolling loads the whole list. copy and paste this in an email to yourself.
These three steps should ensure that you don't "lose" any data about your friends on facebook, and will allow you to email them later.
"DELETE YOUR ACCOUNT if you don't like it. You will still have friends, I promise :-)
"
Yes, you still will have friends, but you will lose friends, connections with businesses, and other abilities. I swore off facebook for one year after having been on it since...I don't know...maybe 2004 or 2005ish?
The modern Facebook account has everything from a person's college girlfriend, to the pictures of their first born. Yes it has some mundane things like what you ate for lunch, it also has messages from you and your friends debating over the Affordable Health Care Act. For a lot of people, it isn't just flipping a switch. You will not speak as often to that person that now lives on a different coast even though you both have each other's email.
Then there are the things that impact you even though you're still friends with people. For example, invites to events like Halloween parties are often sent by things like Facebook, so even though you see those people once or twice a week, you still become the asshole that has to be filled in while everyone else is already up to speed already.
Then you have local businesses and chains that only have their hours and specials on Facebook (or at least their Facebook account is the only one they actively maintain) Old Chicago in my area is an example. They have a national website, but the specials that change every Tuesday night are only posted to their Facebook page.
Nothing convinced me to invest in Facebook more than quitting Facebook.
Is it OK if I just don't care and keep my Facebook account anyway? I've never used Instagram (why would I want a camera app with built-in filters to make everything look shitty when I have a perfectly good camera app that makes everything look OK?) and I don't keep anything private on my Facebook account anyway.
You can also use a tool like the iMacros plugin [1] for Firefox to automate the deletion of your wall posts, photos, etc., for whatever good that does. It's not like they actually get deleted from the server, but makes me feel a bit more comfortable.
Like FB or not (I don't), it provides a lot of value to a lot of people. While it might not promote the ideals some of us "hacker" types have, on the whole, it is not flat-out evil like, say, some of those toolbar companies or botnet groups.
Additionally, apart from writing in PHP, there must be tons of technical fun and deep problems to solve that makes FB fairly unique.
And also, I'm not really sure how unethical it'd be to work for them, even if you felt they were wrong. Unless you're bringing some rare 4-sigma value to FB, it's likely they'd just get someone else. Might as well be you, where you have a chance to influence things.
In addition to that, they do some good for the larger community, such as starting the Open Compute Project (http://www.opencompute.org/). That effort is what has me considering Facebook as a next career step (I would love to work on that stuff).
Now, this is not an attempt to defend Facebook's actions here or in their other recent efforts. I am merely providing another point of evidence to support MichaelGG's point that Facebook is not flat-out evil, and provide a reason someone might want to work for them despite their recent behavior.
Yes, I know all of that but weighed against the new social graph search and (what appears to me) to be a disingenuous and constantly shifting privacy policy, it isn't much.
I still remember SPYW, when sharing across Google services got overblown. It is nothing compared to Facebook automatically making your data public that wasn't public before.
I don't know about them, but I know someone from a different company who has it all figured out. Every time their company does something nasty, they just donate to the EFF.
It seems like a legitimate way to reconcile one's conscience with the realpolitik of modern IT employment, engaged as we are in building the surveillance state/police state/nanny state we were all warned about by 20th century novelists and historians.
I try to do this when I buy an RIAA-published album or watch a Hollywood film. I make sure I donate an equivalent amount to civil-liberties orgs (EFF, ALA, and others) during that year.
Kinda funny, when I inadvertently buy a TV show or movie that features global warming propaganda, I donate the same amount of money to Climate Audit or Bishop Hill.
I have to admit it is quite astonishing to see someone denying climate change is a huge issue on a site dedicated to computer-logic based businesses that are future-focused, a site populated by many under 30.
Climate change is the primary challenge for the next few generations, and once we move on from 'debate' we see that there are a wealth of opportunities in mitigation, reduction of CO2 output and coping with the impact. Just ask Elon Musk.
Considering that the movement of money is all that ever changes anything in today's world, I don't think that's a bad idea. I'd listen to their pitch, put it that way.
It sounds like you need to take a moment to consciously reflect on the fact that not everyone cares about privacy to the same extent you do. I don't just mean the privacy of others, but their own privacy as well. To many people, the loss of privacy that comes from being searchable is more than offset by the value they get out of Facebook.
I've never bought the excuse about "needing to pay the bills". If you are wiling to compromise your convictions for money, how strong are those convictions in the first place.
It reminds me of a friend of mine whose wife works for the TSA at the airport. Honestly, I have zero respect for her, but hey, at least she can pay her mortgage right?
While Facebook isn't on the same level as working for the TSA, it is definitely a company that appears to be run by people of questionable moral character, and I would absolutely not want to be associated with them.
People can have different opinions about the ethical implications of their job. Even if you think organization X is doing some wrong things, do you try to change it from without, or from within? I think that's each person's individual decision to make. Rather than second-guess their choice, why not focus on what their company or organization is doing wrong or could do better?
1st ¶: surely you've never been in the situation where you didn't have a parent to pay your rent or daily needed meals. Prove than and then you'll have the right to question how others make their money,
2nd ¶: your friend loves her, and she helps him to lift the weight. Who are you to question that?
3rd ¶: thank god your parents are such great persons.
I currently deliver pizza for a living. There have been times in my past when I ate a dollar menu burger from McDonald's once every couple of days. I am well aware of what poverty is.
That's irrelevant though. Is morality relative to your current financial situation? Is it ok to do wrong in order to make money?
There are plenty of jobs available. People just want to be picky about what jobs they take. If a person justifies a salary because other jobs are "beneath them" or they don't provide the standard of living they desire, that person has compromised themselves.
I have done many things in my past of which I am not proud, but I try every day to keep that list from getting longer. The only way the world will improve is if we all become more conscious of our actions and their consequences. Any other course is selfishness.
Mike Krieger (Instagram co-founder) here. Just wanted to offer some clarification since there's some speculation about the reason & scope for the verification mentioned in the article.
When we receive evidence of a violation of our site policies, we respond. This isn't a recent change, but the way we've run our community from the beginning. In some specific cases, for verification purposes, we request that people upload a government issued ID in response. This is the case for a very small percentage of accounts, and doesn't affect most Instagram users. The ID is used only for account verification, and not retained permanently.
>The ID is used only for account verification, and not retained permanently.
Do you ask to cover the license number/address as well, the way Facebook.com does? If yes, doesn't it make it trivially easy to send a fake picture of a license your way?
I hate to play the paranoia card, but this reads like a push from the government for Facebook to start cataloging people. If it wasn't happening already, this is probably the missing piece in court evidence to show that a person is who they really are. This is really, really dangerous (especially when the majority of their users probably aren't bright enough to understand the implications).
You mean, they needed something other than your birth date, birth place, real name, current residence, work history, current job, name of your parents, cousins, grandparents, not to mention the rest of your graph, to correlate you to a database somewhere?
Yep. Technically I could lie about all of that, but a gov issued ID is 100% factual and has my photo. Also, this suggests requiring a birth certificate in some situations which is even more extreme.
The only thing FB has from me that is real or accurate is my birthday. All the other things you listed are either totally false or out of date. (Then again, I don't "friend" my family… IRL or online.)
Until now-ish (or the near future), FB had no way of verifying that, or forcing me to!
How do you connect? If you aren't actively and intelligently taking precautions, they may well have enough network address history to be fairly definitive.
Also, do you block their widgets on other sites/pages?
Not that I disagree with the "Big Brother" concerns that this "Ihre Papiere, bitte." activity raises.
P.S. Aside from government(s), of what value is a proven identity to commercial interests? Being able to prove that you/they are targeting exactly who they want.
Hmm... Amongst other things, I understand that process servers are already attemtping to use FB as a accepted means of delivery. And I've read that debt collectors are using accounts having profile pictures of bikini clad young women, in order to successfully "friend" those they wish to hound.
The government has that information. This is an attack by Facebook on the idea that you control your identity, or that you can have identity outside the confines of a private company over which you have no power.
Well, Facebook is a catalog of people. Most of them use real identities. 15% of the world's population willingly share their lives online with full tracking available. It's a dream come true to any secret agency.
Push for real identities is beneficial to both - government and social networks. First get more control over their citizens, second more ad revenue.
I'm thinking of a visual catalog. Where if I commit a crime and Facebook can be used as evidence, if one of my photos is my license, it guarantees that it's me. Maybe catalog isn't the right word, but some means for quickly matching a profile to an individual.
I don't think this is new. I abandoned FB about 2 years ago, and maybe a year ago I re-established my account just to setup a developer key using OAuth2 for an app I was building. I also got locked out of my FB account at that time, and it prompted me to scan my driver's license and upload it -- at which point I promptly said F U and scratched Facebook OAuth support off my list of features.
I had the same experience. I signed-up, then turned up all of the privacy settings just so I could use it to test oauth, then FB disabled my account. I guess it's suspect when you turn off all of the account features.
I tried to explain what I was using the account for to their account reps, but they wouldn't unlock it unless I sent them the ID scans. I can't believe that there is not a bigger uproar about a non-governmental, for-profit asking for government issued ID, in electronic format no less, that relies on the unwitting user to hide pertinent data prior to scanning it.
Fucking ridiculous if you ask me. Instagram should be equally ashamed of themselves.
What concerns me is that I doubt the average user will understand the potential ramifications of entrusting a copy of their ID to a third party. If these documents are not well-protected or the user does not bother to or is not capable of covering up information that can be used for the purposes of identity theft, this could be catastrophic for some users.
With business customers, even if we ask for ID to confirm larger contracts, they'll send everything. Full IDs, credit card scans, etc. Technical customers regularly just email root passwords to financially-valuable systems when they have the slightest problem.
Also, try this: run an ad on Craigslist offering $500 a day for whatever. Ask for personal info and photos. You'll be deluged with people ready to hand every detail over without second thought.
"Clearly show your name, picture, birthday"
"Cover up any personal information we don't need to verify your identity (ex: address, license number)"
Most Facebook users have already given their name, birthday and profile photo. For most users they wouldn't be giving anything else than those pieces of information on a ID card.
Now, that doesn't get into the secondary requests as the article states, but it certainly isn't "entrusting a copy of their ID to a third party."
Why add any of your data to FB? Why not just use it like an idiot box where you never create content but only consume it? I rarely, if ever, upload/update anything on FB, using it only to view updates/uploads from FB friends. No likes, comments, replies, tags. If I see anything worth replying or writing in response to what someone posts on FB, I prefer to use side-channels like email/texting or the phone. Has worked great for the last 5 years. Clearly, mine may be a single data point/unique case :-)
I wonder just how much friction Facebook users are going to put up with until we start seeing news of record account deletions. I doubt any Facebook executive wanted to do this. This is a decision made by lawyers. This is Facebook getting to big for its own good.
People, get off Facebook. I'm in college and haven't touched it in 11 months. I'm doing just fine. Nobody needs it.
I wonder how this correlating data can be used in cases of copyright infringement where the alleged infringer is only identified by IP address. Could a correlation between IP address and real-world identification be made by subpoena of FB records?
A hundred bucks this is tied in with photo-tagging and facial recognition. The advantage of a government photo is that you're no longer allowed to smile and are expected to provide a neutral face, all the better for facial recognition. I wouldn't touch Facebook with a ten-foot pole right now.
Seriously? Fire up picasa or iphoto or Facebook and then tell me whether facial expression is any part of facial recognition all. Recognition works because it uses immovable bone structure.
Taking their words at face value, what does someone's identity have to do with whether they've violated terms of service? How would it fix any issue? (On Instagram; according to the article Facebook wants your true name as part of their TOS.)
If social networks are so adamant, I will just create my website have all relatives and friends contact me via the said website. Or may be by email before social networks actually caught up.
I will say that social networks like Facebook have introduced some interesting dynamics and engagement that could have not existed otherwise such as Caine's Arcade.
I think we're all waiting for the social network we all want and pay the $10-$12/year for privacy, transparency and complete ownership over our data.
The problem will be getting everyone onto that network. Although I now understand (and value) privacy and data ownership, there was a time when I'd refuse to pay for anything if there was a free alternative.
I'm currently working on distributed systems/networks which could form the basis of a 'social graph' but there are questions about how to make it profitable (hence self-sustaining). Getting people onto a network is only part of the problem.
Isn't that what App.net is supposed to be? Or are there problems with it I can't identify (being too poor to deem $5 a month on a social network a valid expense).
The main issue is that the cost barrier stops people from signing up just to try it out, in in that sense that app.net really ought to have a 'free' tier. Even if it was particularly restive, it would let their users get a feel for it before paying.
The OP says Facebok asserts that I is requiring his documentation of certain users with a high number of subscribers...but it seems possible that they'll turn this on any one who has been flagged for having a non real name, or when there are similar accounts (I.e. nearly all the same friends, except one is the person's "fake" account) on the same computer
If this is an official Facebook thing then the screen cap in the article where driver's license is spelled "Driver's liscense" doesn't do them a lot of favors. In particular one of the first hints that something is a phish is that the grammar or spelling is phonetic but incorrect.
This notion has been floating around for a while now and it seems less and less unlikely. I for one am not willing to accept a company taking charge of my ID. Actually, the day facebook asks me for my ID will be the day I quit it. It's total abuse.
A database that spans 1/7th of the worlds population. Facial recognition, relationships and locations. It really is the dream as far as fully validating an identity goes.
> It really is the dream as far as fully validating an identity goes.
It really is a dream as far as intelligence agencies (FBI, CIA and their less public counterparts) go. It used to be ridiculously hard to find the info about how to reach a person, or which buttons to push. Now, almost everyone offers it freely about themselves, and the few who don't get ratted on by their friends.
Validating identity might be a by product. But it's not anything that's hard to do anyway.
It can't. That's the whole reason they're having this problem in the first place. They don't do anything in an official capacity to verify that you are who you say you are. They're relying here on Gov't agencies that require more proof with official documents before giving you another official document(ID card) to certify that you are who you say you are.
It can never be a valid ID, because they are never involved in the certification and registration process of your "official" existence.
I'm fairly sure that most people could get a fake government ID without any significant trouble. A Facebook account it hard, because you've got to make up a lot of history and back story.
There are a number of startups working on products in this space, such as use of social media accounts as verification to screen for and prevent fraud.
On the other, at least it's still a reset option. That might sound silly at first, but I lost access to an old MS Live account that I had foolishly left on auto-login on my Xbox for years and eventually lost access to the old Hotmail account (yeah, I made this account a long time ago) it was tied to. No amount of offering to show that I was the credit card holder for the hundreds of dollars in games or anything would convince them it was my account.
For the people to whom their Instagram account is really important, this might be a nice option (even if it is rather invasive).
Well, it's not Facebook who's doing the asking, but Facebook's closer than you might think to having genetic information: https://www.facebook.com/23andMe
I wonder exactly what violations they're dealing with. My son's junior high is full of kids using Instagram. They see it as an underage Facebook. That could be it. Or is there some wave of people using an assumed name.
FB & G+ are pushing so much to have data on their users actual identities, I wonder what they want to do with that database. Considering the move polarises some users.
HN, I will be disappointed if by this time tomorrow I don't see "Show HN: government id image generator (no numbers, so it can't be used as an fraudulent ID)"
For FB's, they have to excuse from making an open source client side pre-upload number-removing tool.
If you're generating them with blacked-out DL number and address, that's not really a fake identification card, is it? Not to mention you'd be generating an image, not an actual ID. Creating real-looking ID cards is much more difficult than creating real-looking ID card scans.
The most difficult elements would probably be faking the font, and post-processing it to ensure the text looked real (pixel-perfect accuracy and color for text would be a dead giveaway of computer generation).
> If you're [...] that's not really a fake identification card
I'm not a lawyer, nor a law enforcement officer, nor a prosecutor, nor a judge.
While agree that something to allow you to use a website shouldn't be a serious criminal offence it's easy to imagine that it could be painted as such: unauthorised access to website services after a clear warning; fake id instruments; etc etc etc.
This. Plus, if the service your using wants your ID, theres no point trying to trick it. Supporting them is like drinking poison then stomach pumping a few ounces of it and leaving the rest.
Graph search and its creepy implications were then nothing I needed to find personally objectionable anymore.
I no longer have to complain about the other sleazy, move-the-goalposts, amoral aspects of Facebook Instagram.
This latest one, I have to say, should not be surprising to anybody.
DELETE YOUR ACCOUNT if you don't like it. You will still have friends, I promise :-)
Before you file for account deletion, you might want to do two things:
1) use http://www.picknzip.com/ to download the pictures of you from other people (I have a couple that I liked that I can use for other profile pics, etc.). (The other photos in my facebook albums that I uploaded myself, I already have elsewhere.)
2) associate your facebook account with a yahoo email address. You can download all the contact information of your facebook friends that way (I don't know if this still works, but it did last year)
This is, AFAIK, the only way to export your facebook friends' data
3) go to your full friends list, scroll down until the infinite scrolling loads the whole list. copy and paste this in an email to yourself.
These three steps should ensure that you don't "lose" any data about your friends on facebook, and will allow you to email them later.