I feel like there is something bigger in play. All the various from state access to "private" communications, social networks becoming more public and all the different miscellaneous privacy issues are all different aspects or consequences of the Thing.
The move towards complete availability of all digital information seems to be a force of history. Privacy advocates are beginning to sound like copyright advocates, demanding that the universe continue providing for them in the manner to which they have grown accustomed.
Like copyright/IP, privacy is more about use getting used to (and in some cases legislating) how things happen to be, not predesigned or derived from first principle rules or morality. If 99% of your existence occurs within a community of 150 people, very little is private. When you live in a 20th center city, you get a lot of anonymity. You can keep private life (even several of these) separate from your professional life. etc. Those were just inevitable consequences of how those societies were structured.
The internet was at first an anonymous place. Pre-2000 most people seemed to share the feeling that if their real name found its way to the world wide web, serial killers would come. Then 2000-2005 people started keeping online diaries, online photo libraries, online lots of personal information. Facebook catalyzed this process with a semi private system of friends that matched what people were used to in their normal lives.
The force of history that is 'all your data available to everyone everywhere' feels unstoppable. Data is data. It doesn't care if it's an email, SMS, baby photo or GPS log. It doesn't get deleted.
Maybe "Information wants to be free" was an understatement.
I feel very awkward trying to describe this, a clear sign that I don't understand it. I wish pg Joel Spolsky, Chris Anderson (or ideally, Douglas Adams - I really wish we still had him) or someone else who's good at this sort of abstract thing would write a good piece on it.
This is a very interesting take on privacy and the direction of history. Another direction of history I'd like to compare this to is the unification of humanity.
No matter what our opinions on globalization, or diversity of cultures are, the humanity is inevitably moving towards one culturally homogeneous world. This may not seem obvious if we look at history on the scale of a few centuries, but it becomes apparent if we look at our entire history as species. We started with tens of thousands of completely separate "worlds" that had nothing to do with one another, and slowly, through trade and money, religion and imperial expansions we have become a single "world" without a single completely independent culture left on Earth. Slowly we are also all agreeing on moral and political values, such as "democracy", "human rights" or "equal opportunities" (incidentally, values spread across the globe by western imperial expansion). If you want to object that there are still tons of cultures left that are all so different, that's simply not true. Can you imagine Indian cuisine without chili peppers? Or the Russians/Irish without potatoes? Or the Italians without tomatoes? The whole world smokes, no culture openly accepts slavery, and so on, and so forth. And all these things and ideas were introduced just in the past few centuries, an almost negligible amount of time compared to the rest of our history.
Anyways, so the idea of openness of information, free data, etc. definitely seems to be a similar force. Again, if we look at the evolution, for most of our history we lived in small bands where privacy was non-existent, the ability to gossip was what gave us a major evolutionary advantage over other species. Still, even today most of things we spend our time talking about is pure gossip (just think about the proportion of HN articles about the "celebrity" programmers going to this or that company). So this idea of privacy, secrecy, etc. is something very new and I guess only the history can show whether it'll stick or not (as you conjecture).
Mostly I agree except for the statement "Privacy advocates are beginning to sound like copyright advocates, demanding that the universe continue providing for them in the manner to which they have grown accustomed".
Some copyright defenders are like that, because their fortunes depend on interfering in other people's lives and devices, or getting the government to police people for them - because that is inherently the only way copyright restrictions can be maintained.
Privacy requires just the opposite - only a freedom from interference. It does require state enforcement, particularly a ban on companies requiring personal data as a condition of business. But people can still stay off Facebook, without thereby causing any harm to anyone else.
And we can have private communications, if only government allows people to set up secure digital systems. The only things preventing privacy are government snooping and laissez-faire economics; with real democracy and regulation of exploitive business practices we'd have a better balance. (But copyright would be unenforceable.)
It might be more accurate to state - The move towards complete availability of all digital information for commercial gain seems to be a force of history.
Perhaps individuals are just the low-hanging fruit and these are just the early stages of the process. However it strikes me that all the forces pushing for open-ness stand to profit from it and the relationship is rather one sided at this point. Facebook, to pick the obvious example, does not seem too forthcoming with information on who has access to the data you so freely and readily provide to them and what is done with it.
Perhaps once people connect the dots and realise that the reason their life insurance premuims are going up is because they are posting too many photos of themselves drinking at parties then the pendulum will swing the other way.
I cannot wait until we get founders / decision makers at these social network companies that have to hide from an abusive spouse / ex so that safety of users might be somewhat of a priority.
The "well, don't use it" response is utter crap given how many real life functions are being tied into these social networks.
I certainly support the argument that this type of option should be the users' choice, but I'm curious by how many people seem to want to subvert this so that they remain unsearchable.
I use Facebook so that I can connect with people I meet. If I don't exchange contact info with someone I meet, but they know my name, it's great for them to search and find me on Facebook. I don't want my Facebook connections to solely be people I choose to friend.
I guess it boils down to how people use the service.
Real Question: Why do you have an account, but not want people to be able to find you?
EDIT: Thanks for the responses, some of them make a lot of sense that I didn't think of initially.
Lots of people need that. Teachers, doctors, social workers, care workers, people who work in/out of prisons, people who have had violent spouses/family members and this is just off the top of my head. The list goes on.
It is frustrating that the largest social media network is darn right hostile to large swathes of people.
Lots of events and groups solely exist on facebook. I think it is kind of awful that we let a company cut people out of their real life social networks just because they have stronger privacy requirements than 'normal' people.
> Why do you have an account, but not want people to be able to find you?
I signed up when I was young, and now my FB account is a liability I have to manage. (Which FB keeps making more difficult.) I communicate with friends to share, not to present an image to the world at large. I stopped adding FB "friends" years ago to prevent future issues, and I would rather people just believe that I don't have one until I can unwind the youthful indiscretion of signing up in the first place.
Because I want to share 'things' with the people in my social network and have no desire to share things with people outside of it like: employers, prospective employers, lawyers, police officers, people I do like but didn't want to hang out with more than that one night, etc.
It seems that GTAV's parody of Facebook as "LifeInvader" was even more spot-on than Rockstar Games realized.
(I wasn't among those that objected to the "Friend Request" mission. After all, who hasn't wanted to blow Zuck's head off at one time or another? :-) )
I've always defended Facebook and found it really useful. However recently I've noticed how little I use it and that I could (and would like to) delete my account.
There is one thing holding me back though. Photos. When I'm out with friends etc. I don't take photos. There are usually one or two people who do and I can rely on those photos being made available to me through Facebook/tagging. If I delete my Facebook account I lose the opportunity to view/save those photos.
I deactivated my Facebook profile for several months. Didn't miss the photos. Came back. Photos start to look silly, pointless, trivial. If I really, really want to see something, I'll ask a friend to show it to me over his/her phone.
Not exactly on topic, but related: with all the revelations around the NSA spying, I've started thinking about the internet as basically a non-private space. It's a distributed network, and data passes through myriad corporate and governmental infrastructure. Anything you want to keep a secret, you just can't put it on the internet. On some level, the power of the internet is connected with this non-private nature.
I've never understood what the argument for widespread adoption of encryption on the internet was. To get the same utility, you'd have to have a huge "private" network, which would quickly become non-private again.
In light of this, it is disturbing that more and more systems of society are being moved on to the internet. Health records being particularly omninous. You can choose not to post or have profiles on social networks. It looks going forward we will no longer have the option to keep private medical info private.
I know several people that misspell their own name on Facebook for this purpose. I imagine that if people still want to be unsearchable, this is what they'll do.
I know several people that are quite bright in real life but only post cat pics and unfunny quotes on facebook, then like random useless uninteresting crap. They are ruining the "experience of facebook/social networking" for everyone on their friend-list willfully as a slow sabotage.
That is kind of the best thing one could really do to subvert the facebook. It isnt enough to change name, or to misinform or deactivate etc, the best thing is really to offer the lower the quality of everything below crap, to drive others away too. To more fertile and free lands of networking. Whatever that is, it will be somewhere soon enough.
Same here. Most of my friends that do this are either teachers or clinicians of some sort that don't want their pupils/patients finding them. This is a much simpler approach than the privacy morass Facebook has intentionally created.
I, and other people I know, replace a letter in our names with an accented one. As long as you stay in the UTF-8 Latin alphabet, Facebook won't complain about the name change; and as far as I can tell this completely removes me from searches containing my real unaccented name.
I would be horrified that people have to go to those lengths to preserve privacy but then again, we're dealing with Facebook. I'm barely surprised, all I can think of is "That's a good idea. Why didn't I think of that?"
No, facebook's main advantage was that you had enough room to write messages with some content in. And that there was a dedicated events-organizing system.
For many who have exited an abusive relationship, this represents nothing less than a complete betrayal by Facebook.
I have a family member in such a situation. Fortunately, they have stayed away from Facebook and other social media out of fear of something like this.
Congratulations, guys (and I choose that term somewhat deliberately, with reference to gender bias in domestic violence statistics): You've just branded yourselves as well as your product assholes.
To be honest, I don't think they are going to go through with this. They are feeding news sites with this, people will "outrage" and then facebook will pull back and it'll seem like they actually care about privacy. Nice publicity stunt.
Many people are suggesting that we delete our profiles. Don't, if you ask me. I will explain.
1) Because, certain information can be considered valuable - For example old comments from friends/family on relevant photos, semi-private get-togethers/events, etc. Because all these can be considered as good memory/archives of your personal life and the stuff that reminds people of their relationship with you. For me I consider, these valuable, so it's a no no to delete my profile as I will end up losing these. I can technically take a back up if I want, but who opens their backed up index.html once a week, if not daily?
However, leaving your profile undeleted means you lose a lot of privacy. So how am I going to hide my profile if it's publicly searchable?
First, understand that your live profile is not only searchable, but also indexable by google.
Facebook ALSO hands over the stuff you 'like' to search engines. So, you now like a famous pornstar's fan page/even her post? Well, good luck getting it removed from Google!
All I need to do to find out what you've liked on facebook is search for your name in quotes:
"<insert your name here>"
or even:
site:http://facebook.com "<insert name here>"
While this heavily depends on the uniqueness of your name, it also means that it sucks if you are a professional seeking a job or in a similar situation and all Google returns for querying your name is a list of pornstars you've liked on Facebook. Pornstars are probably an over-rated example, but in many cases it could really be awkward - your views against a particular ideology (feminism/masculism/atheism, for example) and sensitive stuff like that. Because if you like something, it means you "support it". That's how it's perceived, atleast.
2) So, back to my point. Deleting is too extreme. Why? Because deleting also makes you lose control of what's out there. If I am correct, I've observed in the past that even deleted profiles are not actually deleted, but are assigned an empty profile with just your name and the default profile picture and this stuff is still sent to search engines. So, if you delete your profile, you lose control over this.
What I may suggest doing is temporarily deactivate your profile (There's an option for this.). This will actually make your profile totally invisible (from search and indexing) and also from my observations, temporarily un-index you from search engines. This is good because you still have control over your profile, you own your data and search engine visibility.
So, what I technically do is, login into Facebook to check what my friends are upto, say once or twice a month, and then deactivate it. For example, I like to keep additional family and friends separate and hence I maintain multiple additional profiles for them, distinctive from my main profile, instead of using Facebook's unreliably stupid privacy system (circles). Now, I wouldn't want my friends to discover my family profile and vice versa. Then, there's the list of dudes whom I will never want to add me, ever. So, maintaining multiple profiles also, helps me maintain a fake presence on Facebook, while also masking my search engine visibility of my real profile with the fake profiles. This works well for me, ymmv. So, just think twice before deleting your profile.
Downloading a backup from your Facebook account before deleting it let's you save all of your valuable information. If you then choose to never open this backup, well I guess the information is not THAT valuable for you.
Deleting my Facebook was very easy and straightforward. 1) downloading the backup. 2) permanently deleted my account, not deactivate . 3) communication to my friends I no longer use Facebook and how they can reach me. I still recieve invitations and photo's via IM and mail, no big deal!
[+] [-] netcan|12 years ago|reply
The move towards complete availability of all digital information seems to be a force of history. Privacy advocates are beginning to sound like copyright advocates, demanding that the universe continue providing for them in the manner to which they have grown accustomed.
Like copyright/IP, privacy is more about use getting used to (and in some cases legislating) how things happen to be, not predesigned or derived from first principle rules or morality. If 99% of your existence occurs within a community of 150 people, very little is private. When you live in a 20th center city, you get a lot of anonymity. You can keep private life (even several of these) separate from your professional life. etc. Those were just inevitable consequences of how those societies were structured.
The internet was at first an anonymous place. Pre-2000 most people seemed to share the feeling that if their real name found its way to the world wide web, serial killers would come. Then 2000-2005 people started keeping online diaries, online photo libraries, online lots of personal information. Facebook catalyzed this process with a semi private system of friends that matched what people were used to in their normal lives.
The force of history that is 'all your data available to everyone everywhere' feels unstoppable. Data is data. It doesn't care if it's an email, SMS, baby photo or GPS log. It doesn't get deleted.
Maybe "Information wants to be free" was an understatement.
I feel very awkward trying to describe this, a clear sign that I don't understand it. I wish pg Joel Spolsky, Chris Anderson (or ideally, Douglas Adams - I really wish we still had him) or someone else who's good at this sort of abstract thing would write a good piece on it.
[+] [-] 11001|12 years ago|reply
No matter what our opinions on globalization, or diversity of cultures are, the humanity is inevitably moving towards one culturally homogeneous world. This may not seem obvious if we look at history on the scale of a few centuries, but it becomes apparent if we look at our entire history as species. We started with tens of thousands of completely separate "worlds" that had nothing to do with one another, and slowly, through trade and money, religion and imperial expansions we have become a single "world" without a single completely independent culture left on Earth. Slowly we are also all agreeing on moral and political values, such as "democracy", "human rights" or "equal opportunities" (incidentally, values spread across the globe by western imperial expansion). If you want to object that there are still tons of cultures left that are all so different, that's simply not true. Can you imagine Indian cuisine without chili peppers? Or the Russians/Irish without potatoes? Or the Italians without tomatoes? The whole world smokes, no culture openly accepts slavery, and so on, and so forth. And all these things and ideas were introduced just in the past few centuries, an almost negligible amount of time compared to the rest of our history.
Anyways, so the idea of openness of information, free data, etc. definitely seems to be a similar force. Again, if we look at the evolution, for most of our history we lived in small bands where privacy was non-existent, the ability to gossip was what gave us a major evolutionary advantage over other species. Still, even today most of things we spend our time talking about is pure gossip (just think about the proportion of HN articles about the "celebrity" programmers going to this or that company). So this idea of privacy, secrecy, etc. is something very new and I guess only the history can show whether it'll stick or not (as you conjecture).
[+] [-] ds9|12 years ago|reply
Some copyright defenders are like that, because their fortunes depend on interfering in other people's lives and devices, or getting the government to police people for them - because that is inherently the only way copyright restrictions can be maintained.
Privacy requires just the opposite - only a freedom from interference. It does require state enforcement, particularly a ban on companies requiring personal data as a condition of business. But people can still stay off Facebook, without thereby causing any harm to anyone else.
And we can have private communications, if only government allows people to set up secure digital systems. The only things preventing privacy are government snooping and laissez-faire economics; with real democracy and regulation of exploitive business practices we'd have a better balance. (But copyright would be unenforceable.)
[+] [-] smackay|12 years ago|reply
Perhaps individuals are just the low-hanging fruit and these are just the early stages of the process. However it strikes me that all the forces pushing for open-ness stand to profit from it and the relationship is rather one sided at this point. Facebook, to pick the obvious example, does not seem too forthcoming with information on who has access to the data you so freely and readily provide to them and what is done with it.
Perhaps once people connect the dots and realise that the reason their life insurance premuims are going up is because they are posting too many photos of themselves drinking at parties then the pendulum will swing the other way.
[+] [-] jchung|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JoeCortopassi|12 years ago|reply
delete's Facebook account
[+] [-] snarfy|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] christangrant|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ryanhuff|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] electronous|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] protomyth|12 years ago|reply
The "well, don't use it" response is utter crap given how many real life functions are being tied into these social networks.
[+] [-] judk|12 years ago|reply
Your stalker already had access to that from every tag and mention of you anywhere on Facebook.
[+] [-] EvanKelly|12 years ago|reply
I use Facebook so that I can connect with people I meet. If I don't exchange contact info with someone I meet, but they know my name, it's great for them to search and find me on Facebook. I don't want my Facebook connections to solely be people I choose to friend.
I guess it boils down to how people use the service.
Real Question: Why do you have an account, but not want people to be able to find you?
EDIT: Thanks for the responses, some of them make a lot of sense that I didn't think of initially.
[+] [-] glomph|12 years ago|reply
It is frustrating that the largest social media network is darn right hostile to large swathes of people.
Lots of events and groups solely exist on facebook. I think it is kind of awful that we let a company cut people out of their real life social networks just because they have stronger privacy requirements than 'normal' people.
[+] [-] jared314|12 years ago|reply
I signed up when I was young, and now my FB account is a liability I have to manage. (Which FB keeps making more difficult.) I communicate with friends to share, not to present an image to the world at large. I stopped adding FB "friends" years ago to prevent future issues, and I would rather people just believe that I don't have one until I can unwind the youthful indiscretion of signing up in the first place.
[+] [-] Balgair|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marquis|12 years ago|reply
It's a placeholder for Pages, and for the rare case I want to see baby photos.
* edit: not to encourage FB but would probably pay for a business page that didn't need a personal email or setting up a fake account just carry it.
[+] [-] erbo|12 years ago|reply
(I wasn't among those that objected to the "Friend Request" mission. After all, who hasn't wanted to blow Zuck's head off at one time or another? :-) )
[+] [-] joeblau|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] k-mcgrady|12 years ago|reply
There is one thing holding me back though. Photos. When I'm out with friends etc. I don't take photos. There are usually one or two people who do and I can rely on those photos being made available to me through Facebook/tagging. If I delete my Facebook account I lose the opportunity to view/save those photos.
[+] [-] visakanv|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] b1daly|12 years ago|reply
I've never understood what the argument for widespread adoption of encryption on the internet was. To get the same utility, you'd have to have a huge "private" network, which would quickly become non-private again.
In light of this, it is disturbing that more and more systems of society are being moved on to the internet. Health records being particularly omninous. You can choose not to post or have profiles on social networks. It looks going forward we will no longer have the option to keep private medical info private.
[+] [-] hawkharris|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] k3n|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] recursive|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antocv|12 years ago|reply
That is kind of the best thing one could really do to subvert the facebook. It isnt enough to change name, or to misinform or deactivate etc, the best thing is really to offer the lower the quality of everything below crap, to drive others away too. To more fertile and free lands of networking. Whatever that is, it will be somewhere soon enough.
[+] [-] psbp|12 years ago|reply
The degree to which users are accommodating Facebook's increasingly onerous privacy policies is becoming ridiculous.
[+] [-] dclusin|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 8_hours_ago|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] k3n|12 years ago|reply
E.g. replace "a" (97) with "а" (1072).
[+] [-] philip1209|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ancarda|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jstalin|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ape4|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lmm|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adrr|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pasbesoin|12 years ago|reply
I have a family member in such a situation. Fortunately, they have stayed away from Facebook and other social media out of fear of something like this.
Congratulations, guys (and I choose that term somewhat deliberately, with reference to gender bias in domestic violence statistics): You've just branded yourselves as well as your product assholes.
[+] [-] logicallee|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tonyplee|12 years ago|reply
Lawyers can now test market your class action lawsuit with $100 of FB ads.
MVL - Minimal Viable Lawsuit. Like/G+ by Eric Ries. :-)
[+] [-] tekk|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheLoneWolfling|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neya|12 years ago|reply
1) Because, certain information can be considered valuable - For example old comments from friends/family on relevant photos, semi-private get-togethers/events, etc. Because all these can be considered as good memory/archives of your personal life and the stuff that reminds people of their relationship with you. For me I consider, these valuable, so it's a no no to delete my profile as I will end up losing these. I can technically take a back up if I want, but who opens their backed up index.html once a week, if not daily?
However, leaving your profile undeleted means you lose a lot of privacy. So how am I going to hide my profile if it's publicly searchable?
First, understand that your live profile is not only searchable, but also indexable by google.
Facebook ALSO hands over the stuff you 'like' to search engines. So, you now like a famous pornstar's fan page/even her post? Well, good luck getting it removed from Google!
All I need to do to find out what you've liked on facebook is search for your name in quotes:
or even: While this heavily depends on the uniqueness of your name, it also means that it sucks if you are a professional seeking a job or in a similar situation and all Google returns for querying your name is a list of pornstars you've liked on Facebook. Pornstars are probably an over-rated example, but in many cases it could really be awkward - your views against a particular ideology (feminism/masculism/atheism, for example) and sensitive stuff like that. Because if you like something, it means you "support it". That's how it's perceived, atleast.2) So, back to my point. Deleting is too extreme. Why? Because deleting also makes you lose control of what's out there. If I am correct, I've observed in the past that even deleted profiles are not actually deleted, but are assigned an empty profile with just your name and the default profile picture and this stuff is still sent to search engines. So, if you delete your profile, you lose control over this.
What I may suggest doing is temporarily deactivate your profile (There's an option for this.). This will actually make your profile totally invisible (from search and indexing) and also from my observations, temporarily un-index you from search engines. This is good because you still have control over your profile, you own your data and search engine visibility.
So, what I technically do is, login into Facebook to check what my friends are upto, say once or twice a month, and then deactivate it. For example, I like to keep additional family and friends separate and hence I maintain multiple additional profiles for them, distinctive from my main profile, instead of using Facebook's unreliably stupid privacy system (circles). Now, I wouldn't want my friends to discover my family profile and vice versa. Then, there's the list of dudes whom I will never want to add me, ever. So, maintaining multiple profiles also, helps me maintain a fake presence on Facebook, while also masking my search engine visibility of my real profile with the fake profiles. This works well for me, ymmv. So, just think twice before deleting your profile.
Cheers.
[+] [-] spectrum|12 years ago|reply
Deleting my Facebook was very easy and straightforward. 1) downloading the backup. 2) permanently deleted my account, not deactivate . 3) communication to my friends I no longer use Facebook and how they can reach me. I still recieve invitations and photo's via IM and mail, no big deal!
[+] [-] joeblau|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] inversesquare|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]