

Why I don't have a Facebook account - zackzackzack
http://zacharymaril.com/blog/2012/12/27/Why-I-dont-have-a-Facebook/

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jacquesm
6 Billion people don't have (a?) facebook. It's not as if it is special.

"$100 says that Facebook can predict, with a 95% confidence interval of 5
years, when you will die and how."

No they can't, at least not with any specificity. What a load of tripe.
Actuarial science can do just that in the aggregate, and facebook will be able
to do that in the aggregate as well. But on an individual basis, short of
hiring assassins they won't know when you will die or how.

The 5 year / 95% leaves enough of a loophole to drive a truck through, you
could take that bet with anybody and say '70', cancer for smokers, heart
attack for overweight people and old age for the rest and you'd probably make
money, maybe vary up by one year for females and down by one for males.

Similar flaws exist in the rest of these, I'll leave those as an exercise for
the reader.

I don't have a facebook account either, it doesn't matter that I don't (and
sometimes is a slight inconvenience), mostly because I think they're an
unethical company but that's based on past behaviour, I don't need a crystal
ball or a bunch of tea-leaves to tell me that in the future they'll likely
mis-behave again.

Facebook datamining your profile is a fact, but I highly doubt they care about
your menstrual cycle (which I believe applies only to a subset of the
population) and if they do they're even more perverted than I thought they
were.

Facebook engineers are welcome to confirm or deny this.

btw, it's 'a facebook account'.

~~~
zackzackzack
Thanks for the title correction.

Mostly this came about from a thought experiment in guessing what information
they can figure out about you based on your profile. Do I honestly think that
there is a whole team of engineers sitting around charting out menstrual
cycles for 50% of their users? Nope. Is there a nonzero chance that it might
be happening or could happen soon? Yeah I think so. My main beef is that
facebook can infer a ton of information about me that I don't want them to
know and that they could someday be selling to people who I really don't want
to know that information.

Also 6 billion people don't have a Facebook account, but condition on
Americans between the ages of 18 and 30, and the rate of account ownership
will probably go way way up. Those are the people who always ask me why I
don't have one. Almost everyone I know has one and I really do have to explain
once a week why I don't have one and don't want them to make one for me.

~~~
jacquesm
If you're worried about facebook, have a look at: your google search history,
your ISPs mandatory 'data retention', your mobile phone operator and so on.

Facebook is but one of a large number of companies that hold private data and
use it to their own advantage.

In fact, even without a facebook account they'll know about as much about you
unless you've blocked their domain/ips on all your devices because those like
buttons are _everywhere_.

Why do you feel the need to justify yourself about not having a fb account?
Simply blackhole and ignore them, then get on with your life and if people ask
you why not 'because I don't trust them' should be more than good enough, no
need to go into paranoid fantasies about what they could do.

If facebook wants EU style data protection / privacy laws in the US then they
should definitely try to sell your private data to insurance companies. I'm
pretty sure that would sway even the most pro-business anti-consumer
legislative body.

~~~
zackzackzack
For you and I, it's enough to say "I don't trust them". For the normal users
of Facebook, people like my classmates, friends, and family members, they have
no way of knowing what I mean when I say I don't trust Facebook. They cannot
imagine what you and I know to be possible, if not highly improbable. The
first question they ask after me saying I don't trust them is why? I've had to
explain some variant of this many many times lately and so I've written it up
as something I can send them.

And yeah, I'm worried about google, my bank, my phone operator(no smartphone
though), and my ISPs. Just because all of these other companies do it doesn't
mean it's alright for them to do. I hate that there are hundreds of files out
there that have data along the lines of "Zack Maril, Male, 21". I'd like to
find ways to prevent companies from collecting all of that information about
me. (Using DuckDuckGo and cash only would probably be a great start.)

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g2e
This is absurd. First of all, at least from personal experience, women DO NOT
post status updates about their menstrual cycle. People don't want to paint
themselves on Facebook as annoying, immature children.

Second of all, why am I the only person here that trusts Zuckerberg and the
goal he plans to accomplish with Facebook?

Let them data mine my account! Learn everything you want to know about me and
the interactions I have with my friends! So what? What difference does that
make to my life?

And lastly, I really doubt FB is having or going to have money problems
anytime soon. If they do they'll probably just 1-up advertising.

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mingpan
The other potential concern is that stuff of this sort could get accidentally
learned. Suppose there were some sensitive fact about some subset of the
population, and suppose it happened to correlate with response to some
advertisement. If FB were trying to optimize for better ad targeting and
response, they could happen to learn this trait, perhaps without even a human
operator realizing it.

Again, these are all relatively unlikely hypotheticals, but it is admittedly
unnerving that the potential could exist.

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aneth4
Does anyone care if Facebook knows when their menstrual cycle is? Or has a
prediction on when you are going to die? Or predicts when I'm going to get a
cold?

I don't care.

If you are this paranoid, you should stop using credit cards, phones, and
emails, as all that data is similarly being mined and sold or capable of such.

I do think we should have strong disclosure and privacy laws - I don't know
detail but I believe the EU does a better job of this than the US. We should
be entitled to know what data is gathered about us and what is sold, and much
of that should require consent.

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troyinjapan
If you're really betting $100, you'd be losing a lot of money on everything
you posted. I'll bet $100 the blog post was a total fail.

~~~
zackzackzack
I'll bet on each tweet I sent out once. I've already got somebody to take me
up on Facebook predicting sickness. Send me an email with the bet you want and
we can work out the terms of the bet for the tweet you think is a stinker.

~~~
jacquesm
> I'll bet on each tweet I sent out once.

Why so cautious? If facebook gets caught doing any of this stuff they're going
to implode like a balloon you should stick all your savings on put options.
The infinite downside should not concern you since you are so sure that they
will do all this and presumably more.

~~~
zackzackzack
From an earlier comment on here: >Do I honestly think that there is a whole
team of engineers sitting around charting out menstrual cycles for 50% of
their users? Nope. Is there a nonzero chance that it might be happening or
could happen soon? Yeah I think so.

I'm not so sure that they are doing any of this. I have no proof at all, I
don't think anyone outside of Facebook could have proof of anything. The point
of the article isn't that I think they are doing this right now, but that they
might have reason to do so in the future. Like you've pointed out, they would
be fucked if they tried any of this, but it doesn't mean they won't try
something similar in terms of data mining and selling your derived personal
information to interested 3rd parties.

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chrisringrose
My predictions:

\- Facebook _will_ make enough money from advertising

\- They _will_ make tons of money from all kinds of sources

\- They _will_ be here, and strong, in 10 years

\- You _will_ reactivate your account, eventually

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Fuzzwah
You can have an FB account and just be smart about the information you put on
it.

You know, just like everything else on the internet.

Also; <https://disconnect.me>

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borplk
Why is that tweet repeated 20 times across the whole article?

~~~
zackzackzack
Is it the same tweet every time? The first five words should be the same in
each tweet but the rest of each one should be unique.

~~~
borplk
Oops no sorry. I didn't pay close attention.

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bayan09
Damn.

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milkman
This is a brilliant, hard hitting post Zack. And pretty obvious when you think
about it. _Of course_ Facebook is going to sell user data to the highest
bidder. They already do to a lesser extent with their PPC advertising.

Readers: dismiss these warnings at your own peril.

EDIT: Looks like the crybabies and Facebook stockholders are flagging this.
You must have hit a sensitive nerve Zack. Good job.

~~~
jacquesm
Paranoid much? I'm about as anti-facebook as it gets and this post strikes me
as way over the top.

Simply install ghostery and adblock, delete your fb account and call it a day.

Facebook will not be selling of the information he suggests they've got on you
to insurance companies within 5 years. Not of they want to continue to exist
in some form.

You can't tell whether someone is an alcoholic by looking at their pictures,
most alcoholics are pretty quiet about it and manage to get away with it for
decades right under the noses of friends and family (son of an ex (deceased)
alcoholic here).

Facebook won't know you're sick before you and your doctor know about it.
Doctors have a hard enough time to figure out what you've got and if you've
got something when you're in front of them.

Facebook does not know how many sexual parters you've had, most spouses don't
even know how many sexual partners their significant other has had (I'll give
you that they might think they know).

They couldn't care less about your menstrual cycle, assuming they could detect
that you have one.

In fact, facebook finds it next to impossible to get rid of fake accounts,
can't deal with real names, has to accept pseudonyms (thanks .de!) and so on.

