
Facebook employees opened a privately shared Google Sheet - madtrax
https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/79x7u3/facebook_employees_just_opened_a_privately_shared/?st=J9G8QTY5&sh=aa2fb1ed
======
KyeRussell
What an absolute joke of a thread. Very obviously a preview generation bot.
I've never actually visited /r/privacy but I am far from impressed. Way too
many unknowledgeable / alarmist comments and nobody with any visible technical
knowledge beyond an understanding of the various technologies that privacy
advocates tell other privacy advocates to use. It's amazing how many comments
are saying "use PGP stupid!" when there's nobody that knows how modern web
scraping works.

~~~
finnthehuman
Well, when everyone that understands exactly how the surveillance of the
modern internet works has a hand in building it, don't be surprised where
there's no one left to make the well informed case against the surveillance
apparatus.

------
ChuckMcM
Clearly there is a market need for 'facebook mask' which sends one version of
the link if it is being read by facebook and one if it is read by the intended
recipient.

Note, don't actually do this it will get you in trouble and likely banned from
facebook.

~~~
dvfjsdhgfv
Interesting, but how would you check if it's one or the other? By IP? Could
work for defined cases, but developing a universal technique could be tricky
if all previous communication happens via FB. Much easier to use another
platform.

------
s0rce
Seems like it could just be a bot fetching the link for a preview?

~~~
dmichulke
Would be two bots in this case, very inefficient.

~~~
Xylakant
Sometimes it’s harder to share the information gathered from the first bot
with the second than just doing the operation twice.

------
CaptSpify
I don't understand why it matters whether or not it is a bot. That's still
extremely shady to do

------
_Codemonkeyism
From the description it looks more like a bot then employees.

------
chrisper
Could it not just have been that parser or whatever it is called? Like when
you post a link it gets title + some kind of picture. So obviously if it
visits that link automatically it is going to show up as visitors.

------
edoceo
Send a link to a Honeypot, observe FB bots checking, solved. Very unlikely to
be humans.

------
throwaway613834
Maybe send a link to something behind a captcha and then check if it gets
solved?

------
merricksb
Discussed earlier:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15595705](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15595705)

~~~
chrisper
Now both are flagged...

------
dhoulb
It’s obviously bots.

Frustrating the number of commenters who jumped to the “Facebook is evil”
conclusion immediately.

