
Facebook Makes A Huge Data Grab By Aggressively Promoting Photo Sync - iProject
http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/01/facebook-photo-sync-data/
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pav3l
Facebook is not going anywhere. These are all smart business moves to make it
an almost necessary part of our lives. "Facebook is like chairs" seems to
quite literally describe the end goal of their campaign. I would argue they
are doing a very good job, perhaps on par with De Beers and Coca Cola in their
time.

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JoeAltmaier
People flee gimmicks for new gimmicks in a hearbeat. Facebook will evaporate
one day, like all the fads before them.

Sure there is inertia to social patterns. But to overcome it, you don't have
to convince 1B people in a row; you have to create impetus enough to overcome
one person, times 1B in parallel.

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endlessvoid94
What makes you think facebook is a fad?

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muuh-gnu
All the other similar fads before them.

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gojomo
Facebook has already remained vital and growing longer than the
Friendster/MySpace precedents, and the Geocities/Angelfire precedents.

They're looking more like email or the web itself. Or the telephone.

Or did you have other 'similar fad' examples in mind?

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JoeAltmaier
Now that you mention it, email! Its going the way of the 1st-class stamp.

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s_henry_paulson
As much as I dislike Facebook, and don't use their services myself, in the end
I think this will be a good thing for the average Facebook user.

I'd say 80%+ of people out there fail to have a backup of digital photos and
eventually lose them all either through hardware failure, physically losing a
device, or some other sort of negligence (on top of not keeping proper
backups).

I see this being ultimately beneficial to lots of people, as well as a good
move for facebook to continue to try and keep people locked onto their
platform.

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jackalope
This will provide even more fuel for Facebook's face recognition technology,
which I believe will one day be Facebook's most valuable product, eventually
marketed in sometimes disturbing (and secret) ways. As a fellow nonuser of
Facebook, it bothers me a bit that I don't even have to participate for them
to develop an accurate facial recognition profile of me; my friends, family
and colleagues will gladly do it for them.

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iSnow
Over time this is going to secure a healthy stream of "jailbait" nudes to
4Chan and the likes of it. I can see some ruined high school careers come off
this.

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TazeTSchnitzel
This is probably just to compete with Google+, which does the same thing, and
which Google has advertised on YouTube about (man loses phone with pictures of
baby daughter, oh look, they're safe on Google+!).

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travisp
It's an effective ad, but I've wondered if it wasn't misleading by implying it
was basically a backup service: Google+'s auto upload feature doesn't save the
full resolution of the photos. Somewhere out there is a disappointed father or
mother who thought Google was backing up their photos, only to find out at the
wrong time that Google only saved a reduced size copy (better than nothing,
but still...).

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TazeTSchnitzel
I'm not sure many users will notice, to be honest.

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james-skemp
It'll be really interesting to see the politicians that come from those who
are teens now.

They'll have been connected most of their lives, and have quite the online
presence. And hopefully have a better grasp of technology.

On-topic: is anyone actually surprised by this?

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sami36
Why should we ? Google+ does it, Apple does it, Dropbox does it. I've disabled
this feature on all of them, but this is hardly new. It's obvious now that
social networks have moved past micro-blogging & articles. Pictures are the
new focal point of sharing. They're all angling to make their apps more sticky
by lowering the friction of photo sharing.

As long as they provide commonsensical & easy to understand privacy controls &
a way to download all your data, I'm fine with it. I can even accept the
argument that it's a nice convenience to have, phones get stolen, devices are
starved for local storage, sensors are getting bigger & so is the data they
generate.

The problem is, & it's a HUGE one, is an account is a password away from being
hijacked. People better educate themselves about security (two step auth) & be
careful what they upload.

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ChiperSoft
I pity the damned fools who agree to it thinking "oh that's an awesome idea"
and then a month later take a naked photo of themselves.

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ampersandy
Photo Sync only syncs your photos, you have to selectively publish them. Even
if someone did take a nude photo, no one else would see it unless they shared
it explicitly.

<https://www.facebook.com/help/photosync>

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jamesbritt
_Even if someone did take a nude photo, no one else would see it unless they
shared it explicitly._

Or until Facebook once again changes how things work.

Anything and everything you give to Facebook is a candidate for public
exposure.

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pseut
Jesus, part of why I left facebook was because I got sick of the photo dumps
where someone would upload 50-100 unedited pictures of their kid's birthday
party. Who could possibly want to look at all of those pictures? I can't
imagine that this change is going to make anyone enjoy using Facebook more.

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frdgr
Besides making security/authentication even more critical, this challenges
photo ownership. In Facebook terms of service, the photographer retains rights
on their pictures, but transfer to Facebook certain rights to use the work.
Want that?

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jrockway
I'm pretty sure the rights you give Facebook are basically the right for
Facebook to display your photo to people you share it with. That's pretty much
what any photo service would require you to consent to.

