Ubisoft has released a unique promotion for the video game, Watch Dogs point it at your facebook account and it will use the information there to build a dossier on you as if you were the target of an assassination plot. It includes things like expected daily schedule, likely passwords based on your birthday and friend's names, etc.
While the result might scare some people into being more cautious, it doesn't make much effort to educate people what they can do to protect themselves short of "don't use facebook" which is not really an option for most of the people who currently use facebook. At a minimum it ought to generate a list of things you can lock down using facebook's privacy settings. Can you suggest a comprehensive and up to date guide for where to go on facebook and what settings to change in order to improve privacy for the average facebook user?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Thursday April 24 2014, @08:21PM
Why is "don't use facebook" no option? I somehow managed to avoid it without missing anything.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Ezber Bozmak on Thursday April 24 2014, @08:46PM
> Why is "don't use facebook" no option? I somehow managed to avoid it without missing anything.
Obviously you aren't the kind of person he's talking about. What with all the "for people who currently use facebook" part of the quote that you snipped out. What is it with geekholes like you who think that selectively quoting to justify their deliberately misunderstanding adds value to the discussion?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by RobotMonster on Thursday April 24 2014, @09:15PM
So if you're currently using Facebook, why is stopping not an option?
Surely there is some type of twelve-step program or something?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Ezber Bozmak on Thursday April 24 2014, @09:23PM
> So if you're currently using Facebook, why is stopping not an option?
What is with geekholes who think it is clever to be wilfully stupid?
Yes, technically it is possible to quit. Just like it is technically possible to quit everything in life.
The issue is the trade-off between value and cost. Clearly people who use facebook find value in it, many of them find significant value in it. The risk of facebook knowing about you and the risk of other entities using facebook to find out about you are two different things. A person may be fine with the cost of entrusting their information to facebook (presumably most of the billion or so users who do it every day are fine with it) but not happy to share that information with anyone else.
But you knew all of this already, you just wanted to act a fool because it made you feel smart.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 24 2014, @09:53PM
Uhm, what?
Telling facebook IS the same as telling everyone else, since facebook will sell your info to anyone who wants it, it's their whole buisness plan.
(Score: 1) by Ezber Bozmak on Saturday April 26 2014, @07:01PM
> Telling facebook IS the same as telling everyone else, since facebook will sell your info to anyone who wants it, it's their whole buisness plan.
Obviously not true, as demonstrated by the linked article where the demo builds big dossiers on some people but others with their settings set for more privacy have practically empty dossiers.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by RobotMonster on Friday April 25 2014, @05:37AM
Come on Mr Zuckerberg, there is no need for name calling. Perhaps it makes you feel smart?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 25 2014, @06:13AM
Indeed. Liberate yourself today! [suicidemachine.org]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 24 2014, @08:21PM
I fail to see why some people MUST use facebook. You didn't need it ten years ago. You do not need it now.
Oh yes and I know I will hear complaints, like how else am I supoused to look at pictures of my cousins friends neighbors new poodle. Screw off, you dont NEED that, and if you want it there are other ways.
(Score: 3, Funny) by tbuddy on Thursday April 24 2014, @08:26PM
I'm going to guess that you aren't one of the 9673 people who follow my dog on Facebook.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by plover on Thursday April 24 2014, @08:43PM
Do they pick up after your dog ?
That might make Facebook of some use.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by pendorbound on Thursday April 24 2014, @08:48PM
I'm kind of surprised to see such a luddite response on a tech news site... There's LOTS of things you didn't need 10 years ago that are really quite useful to have now. You're not going to die without them sure, but at least for me there's a bit more to life than not-dieing-yet.
No argument you don't NEED Facebook, but there is most certainly a level of human interaction that you miss by shunning it. While there are plenty of other ways of sharing poodle photos, relatively few people have the technical knowledge to use something that isn't point & drool simple. Additionally, even many who *could* use other means find the integrated photo, pseudo-blogging platform to be more convenient that using something specifically photo oriented.
You're free to hate on Facebook's privacy record, but you have to admit that when even my 80 year old grandmother can figure out how to login and post photos, they've done something right in terms of user interface. To any but the most technically savvy of users, an interface with crappy privacy settings that they can use to do the things they want to do is going to win out over a privacy respecting site (much less several separate sites) that add even one extra step to what they have to do to use them.
Realistically, at the point that our government actively collects all online traffic and has hoarded vulnerabilities that allow them to trivially break encryption, regardless of the cost leaving vulnerabilities unfixed would have, it really does seem a bit over the top to worry about advertisers knowing who you're friends with. When the people who can put you in jail already know everything there is to know about you, does the people who can shove targeted ads at your eyeballs knowing really have much of a net impact on your life?
(Score: 1) by acid andy on Thursday April 24 2014, @10:22PM
That's a defeatist attitude.
I also think it's a stretch to say it's a luddite response saying people did without facebook 10 years ago.
Sure, bandwidth has increased for many people over those 10 years and people have access to the internet more frequently through their smartphones and other devices but there's not really anything fundamental facebook is offering that wasn't already easily achievable 10 years earlier. E-mail, messaging, blogging, finding new friends, were all fairly straightforward before facebook existed. A luddite shuns technology but the tech for these things was already there. facebook just put everything on one site and data mined everyone to hell.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 1) by pendorbound on Tuesday April 29 2014, @02:34PM
"Easily achievable" is a relative measure. What geeks can easily achieve is background noise in terms of the market compared to what the proverbial grandmother can easily achieve. That's the difference between a geek's toy and something with mass market appeal.
Sites / services (or even self-hosted webapps) that allow me to easily achieve communication with the relatively few uber-geeky people I know are interesting toys. Sites that allow my much less technologically advanced friends & family to do the same are of more interest to me.
That said, I self-host WordPress and store my photos in either that or Gallery3 on my own server at MacMiniColo.net. But whenever I post anything, I still send a link to it off to Facebook, often Twitter, occasionally Tumblr, depending on which subset of my friends I think might find it interesting. That's a good balance for me between control versus visibility of my content. As far as my mother (or even my fairly technical girlfriend) doing the same? Might as well ask them to fly. That type of technology is indistinguishable from magic to them, and it always will be. They're interested in using the Internet to communicate with people they care about. Whatever enables that is what they'll use.
Similar to the way it's technically been possible to fire up ICQ on a PDA tethered to a 2G cell phone and chat with geek friends since the late 90's (possibly earlier), but my mother didn't start communicating with me via "text" until her cellphone made it easy (IE real keyboard...) to do so via SMS. For the vast majority of technologies, "first"" is near enough to worthless as compared to "intuitive".
(Score: 4, Insightful) by snick on Thursday April 24 2014, @09:14PM
Cave paintings were good enough for your father, and your father's father. They should be good enough for you!
Now, get off my lawn.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Thursday April 24 2014, @09:20PM
What about HD cave paintings?
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 24 2014, @09:44PM
There are plenty of other ways to get someones photos, even technologically, without ever having anything to do with facebook.
Email, SMS, IM, create your own website, use a photo sharing service, etc. All of these methods are better at maintaining your privacy then facebook.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by urza9814 on Friday April 25 2014, @02:30AM
Email and SMS don't let you look someone up by name though. And they're much more prone to spam -- Facebook is whitelist blocking, Email is blacklist blocking, SMS is in practice no blocking short of getting a whole new number! People are reluctant to give our their Email and phone number because you can't really take that back. On Facebook I can change what information someone sees -- and what I see from them -- on a freakin' daily basis if I feel like it. And as a side-effect of the spam issue, a lot of people change email and phone numbers pretty often. I've kept both of mine since I was first invited to Gmail/when I first got a cell phone, but I have some friends who have changed their phone number two or three times in a single year. And how do they let everyone know about the new number? Facebook.
And build your own website? Seriously? People reading this, sure. The average Facebook user? No way in hell.
Oh, and IM and photo sharing service? To most people, that's *exactly what Facebook is*!
(Score: 1) by Leebert on Friday April 25 2014, @02:59AM
Not to mention the fact that I'm not going to presume that all 506 of my Facebook friends are interested in that neat sign I found in the conference room yesterday [facebook.com], but it got 17 likes. I'm pretty sure I'd get blocked on at least 17 phones if I texted or called all 506 of my Facebook friends about it.
I'm certainly not going to visit 506 people's websites on a daily basis, but I'll at least skim what they post on Facebook.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Bartman12345 on Thursday April 24 2014, @09:21PM
Until they started using it, crackheads didn't NEED to smoke cheap coke either.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by hybristic on Thursday April 24 2014, @09:32PM
You didn't need a computer 30 years ago, but try and get by now without one. It's not an easy task. Want to keep up with your family and friends all around the world? guess what the simple way to do that is Facebook. Idk about you but I am glad people stopped using mailing lists for everyday conversations and sharing pictures.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday April 25 2014, @02:20AM
In my experience, if you're under 25 and don't have Facebook, you just never get invited to any public events. From protests to parties, everything is organized on Facebook.
I'm planning to delete my account in a couple weeks (after I get a new laptop, letting my re-purpose my old one as a home server, after which I plan to drop a hell of a lot of online services). Probably going to keep *some* of it though (likely will just lock down my profile but leave it live) for messaging and invites and such.
A lot of people use Facebook instead of texting too. Seeing that less now that unlimited texting is becoming cheap, and unlimited data is disappearing, but still among most of my friends ALL of our online communication is via Facebook. More than half of them probably I don't even have any other option -- don't know their phone number, don't know their email, don't know anything anymore. This is gonna be a bit of a challenge...
Congrats if you managed to never sign up for it, but those of us who got sucked in sometime last decade have some serious lock-in to disentangle ourselves from...we fucked ourselves over pretty bad :(
Although...still not sure which is gonna be harder -- Facebook or Gmail. No *humans* other than my family really have my Gmail though, because they all talk to me on Facebook (and I have consistently refused to add any family on Facebook, which is why they still use my email).
(Score: 3, Informative) by Sir Finkus on Thursday April 24 2014, @08:24PM
Bullshit. Nobody "needs" a facebook account.
Join our Folding@Home team! [stanford.edu]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Bartman12345 on Thursday April 24 2014, @09:06PM
Nobody "needs" a facebook account.
True, but sometimes, (want) >= (need)
(Score: 2) by Dunbal on Thursday April 24 2014, @09:01PM
People still play Ubisoft games?
(Score: 4, Funny) by Bartman12345 on Thursday April 24 2014, @09:12PM
Pirates do, gamers who purchase legit copies can't get past the DRM.
(Score: 2) by Pav on Thursday April 24 2014, @09:14PM
We could not log you in: You can't log in to this app because you do not meet this app's requirements for country, age or other criteria.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by FakeBeldin on Thursday April 24 2014, @09:32PM
Sounds quite similar to this app: http://www.takethislollipop.com/ [takethislollipop.com].
I've seen that one in action, and it takes a lot of data from your facebook account and inserts it into a creepy video of a very shady stalker of you who is on his way to you.
Of course, the creepiness of the video depended heavily on the amount of details you have on FB... with enough details it's creepy, with less details some of the creepiness is just blanks.
(Score: 2) by TK on Friday April 25 2014, @04:58PM
but there is one use case that it is perfect for.
Go to party.
Meet awesome people of the same or opposite sex. (Whatever floats your boat.)
Don't get phone number that night.
Next morning, look them up on facebook.
Send friend request.
Go from there.
The fleas have smaller fleas, upon their backs to bite them, and those fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 25 2014, @05:12PM
Seriously. If you care about privacy you don't use Facebook. Period. If you use Facebook, you do not care about privacy. Ignorance is no excuse, since if you cared about privacy you would've done 5 minutes of due diligence to see Facebook sells you.