

Is it possible to opt out of social networking? - indiejade
http://jonoscript.wordpress.com/2010/02/06/is-it-possible-to-opt-out-of-social-networking/

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rm-rf
Opting out of a social network doesn't sound possible, unless you can somehow
maintain separate e-mail and phone numbers for each of your contacts,
something that would be almost impossible to do, or if you managed to find a
circle of friends that understands the privacy implications of social
networks, something that is equally unlikely.

Internet social networks are like small town social networks where everyone
knows who is doing what to whom, except that instead of a few hundred locals
who like to gossip, the community is millions, and the motive is monitization.

------
Groxx
Opting out in that manner (not _existing_ as far as Facebook is concerned), is
effectively flat-out impossible. If other people know you exist, and a HUGE
amount of people are on a website, uploading all their info, you can't prevent
it. It's entirely out of your control.

As to his fear that they're associating friends by email addresses uploaded,
my personal experience implies that they either don't, or it factors in very
lightly. A few friends who I email with pretty regularly, and are on Facebook,
_and_ uploaded their email lists (which I am most certainly on) didn't come up
as possible-friends _ever_. It seems to be entirely friend-of-a-friend based,
and as they were in an entirely separate circle of friends, they never came
up. I never bothered adding them, because we already contacted each other as
needed through email / IM.

The friends it _did_ suggest to me, though, were almost universally friends of
my friends, typically with several connections, but I seriously doubt they
ever had my email (or many of the in-between links, if any).

~~~
grncdr
When I signed up for facebook it suggested friends that I had _no_ connection
to outside of e-mail, and afterwards has suggested friends that again I have
no connection to outside of e-mail, so my experience is in direct conflict
with yours.

They _do_ (or at least did) allow FB Connect using sites to check whether an
existing e-mail address was associated with a facebook account via submitting
a hashed copy (if memory serves, it's a plain md5 hash). Their developer site
is down at the moment so I can't verify the exact mechanisms they (claimed) to
be using to store e-mail addreses, and which e-mails they store, and what you
can access through the Connect API.

~~~
Groxx
* shrug * I may not have had enough friends-through-email for them to crop up. My experiences are also with an account that's been around since I started college 5 years ago, with friends who came at nearly the same time, so it could be that they added it later. Good to know for sure that they _do_ do this, though, thanks for the reply.

------
RK
A friend had a similar experience, except that he didn't even try to sign up
for Facebook. His email is first name + last name. @ gmail and apparently
someone signed up with his email on accident. After that my friend started
getting lots of automatic friend requests from people he knew. He was able get
the password sent to him, since it was his email afterall, and canceled the
account. Like the OP he was pretty freaked out about how much Facebook seemed
to know based solely on his email.

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marilyn
The email contact importer thing on facebook is something that many people in
my social circle thought was really neat because it made finding their friends
so easy. I'll admit, that I used it when I first joined facebook a few years
back.

In retrospect I wish I hadn't used it, as this article mentions, I not only
gave away pieces of my personal information, I gave away personal information
that didn't even belong to me, it belonged to my contacts. Now, it seems quite
dubious that facebook has the gall to ask for my email password. It is true
that hindsight it 20/20.

------
wedesoft
Eben Moglen's talk 'Freedom in the Cloud' from last Friday might be relevant
in this context: <http://www.isoc-ny.org/?p=1338>

~~~
bootload
_"... And they had a lot more than my email address. They had pictures of me,
uploaded by my friends and tagged with my name. They knew who my friends were.
They knew what my friends liked. They knew more or less how I would fit into
their social network. If they wanted to, they could deduce a lot of
information about the person behind the email address. ..."_

Thanks greatly for that link. Moglen is a great speaker and his idea of the
_"Freedom box"_ (personal servers where you own the logs) goes a long way, to
paraphrase Moglen: to put _"Zuc"_ into receivership.

------
philh
>Where do we draw the line between my right to control my data, and the right
of other people to exchange information about me?

When you make your data public, you no longer have a right to control it. The
alternative is that by making your data public, you impose a burden of secrecy
on those who hear you talking.

It's mildly creepy that facebook knows so much about you, but it's not a
particularly new phenomenon. ("You must be Danny, Jo talks about you all the
time! Tell me, did you really...") Facebook just hears more gossip than any
one person did in the past.

~~~
qjz
"I don’t think that Facebook as a company is doing anything unusual or
exceptionally bad."

Yet he offers an example in the article of Facebook prompting for the user's
email account password, which, in my book, is insidiously evil. Sending
sensitive emails to someone may not be wise, but it's hardly an example of
making your data public. Facebook claims to be harvesting email addresses
(which is bad enough), but the potential for abuse is enormous, considering
that the company is dedicated to monetizing the private details of people's
lives. Facebook shouldn't even ask for passwords, and this is one of the main
reasons it's banned in our household.

~~~
nikolayav
Any service that uses any sort of contact importer will need your password if
you would like to get any use out of said importer.

How can anyone read your GMail contacts without your logging into your
account?

If the utility of this tool is lost on you even though this password is
clearly not stored anywhere, you can manually go out and find on-Facebook
friends yourself.

~~~
roundsquare
Here's one way. Its a bit more inconvenient, but I think its worth the
inconvenience.

1) GMail has an export to csv feature. Export your contacts.

2) Facebook creates a "import contacts" feature. Import the list.

Done.

I can't think of any right now, but you may be able to come up with a feature
that _absolutely_ needs you to put in your email password. However, I suspect
that by adding a little inconvenience, one can find a way around it.

------
wicknicks
How much privacy does one share with his housemates/spouse/siblings? Pretty
much nothing. Facebook is one big house where everyone gets to know about each
other's activities. Though such sharing might be unacceptable to certain
people, most people (especially college under graduates and younger) love it.
So this is probably the future!

At the same time, it must be remembered that facebook never forces anyone to
share their personal information. You do have control over who sees what.

~~~
josefresco
Update your debate stats. Facebook's biggest growth is older women, and
they're losing the 20-somethings to Twitter and...

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GavinB
We're moving from an information-poor world to an information-rich one. There
is really no way to stop the loss of privacy. The draconian legislation
required would, themselves, create a tremendous loss of privacy.

We've moved from file sharing "piracy" to personal information "piracy." And,
ultimately, neither is preventable.

~~~
moe
_We've moved from file sharing "piracy" to personal information "piracy." And,
ultimately, neither is preventable._

Sounds catchy but makes no sense at all. The two are not even related.

Also "personal information piracy" is a strange description of people giving
out their information voluntarily. This can be trivially prevented by simply
not typing that information into a website...

~~~
GavinB
Piracy can be "trivally prevented" by not publishing content. The similarity
is that once it's out there in any form, you lose control over it. The two are
most definitely related.

The whole point of the article was that it's not _you_ giving the information
out. Once it's out in the world, via your friends knowing it, you can't choose
whether or not it gets entered. Tiny bits of periphery evidence end up being a
lot of information about you.

They're sharing something of yours without your consent. That's what the term
"piracy" is supposed to mean.

------
tptacek
Facebook doesn't need your consent to listen to your acquaintances about you.
Next soap opera, please.

~~~
roundsquare
I don't think the debate is, or should be, about if facebook is doing
something wrong. The bigger issue is making sure people understand the scope
of facebook's information.

------
SamAtt
The irony of this article is the only way for him to get the control he wants
is to be on Facebook and monitor what is put up about him. Only then will he
be able to see what he doesn't approve of and ask those people to not put them
up.

