Slashdot Mirror
Facebook Tracks the Status Updates and Messages You Don't Write Too
Jah-Wren Ryel writes "It turns out Facebook tracks the stuff that people type and then erase before hitting the post button. If you start writing a message, and then think better of it and decide not to post it, Facebook still adds it to the dossier they keep on you. From the article: 'Storing text as you type isn't uncommon on other websites. For example, if you use Gmail, your draft messages are automatically saved as you type them. Even if you close the browser without saving, you can usually find a (nearly) complete copy of the email you were typing in your Drafts folder. Facebook is using essentially the same technology here. The difference is that Google is saving your messages to help you. Facebook users don't expect their unposted thoughts to be collected, nor do they benefit from it.'"
Facebook has an option to download all your data. Do these texts turn up in these downloads as well? If not Facebook violates EU law.
I can see myself following a policy of "never type directly into a web browser, only copy and paste" in the near future. (And here's yet another reason to avoid "cloud" services and prefer local storage for anything personal.)
"The difference is that Google is saving your messages to help you."
Well, we hope at least. When Google's robot army kicks down my door for looking up subversive material, will we still be saying this?
..."Stasibook" and be done with it?
Must kill Zuckerberg, Must kill Zuckerberg, Must kill ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H
Must post cat video.
"The difference is that Google is saving your messages to help you."
Well, we hope at least. When Google's robot army kicks down my door for looking up subversive material, will we still be saying this?
Obviously drafts do help you ... but I wouldn't mind betting they also analyse the data and use it to predict your preferences in exactly the same way that Facebook does!
FTFA: "In their article, Das and Kramer claim to only send back information to Facebook that indicates whether you self-censored, not what you typed. The Facebook rep I spoke with agreed that the company isn’t collecting the text of self-censored posts."
Capturing a person's though process has a lot of value, sometimes more than the actual post written. Think of brand recognition, for a simple example. I like Pep... oops, I mean, Coke.
And that is quite harmless. Its if writing a draft "dear mum and dad I'd like to telly you I'm gay. I know its against your religious beliefs", then deleting it will result in adverts for gay support groups, or anything else that could give someone an idea of what might not have been said that there is a problem.
Chrome tracks everything you type in the address bar. They call it the omni bar, since this feature allows you to search right from the address bar, and get instant results as you type. It is still creepy that the save this data for several weeks, and then keep an "anonymized" version permanently.
Ironically, Canonical seems to get the most flack over this on Slashdot, not because they save any data (they don't), but because they send data to companies like facebook and google, which are the real problem.
Thankfully, this is slashdot, so a sensible discussion on how to practically exist on the internet using all its features while maintaining one's privacy will take place.
Time to create firefox/chrome add-on that types and then deletes all kinds of bullshit...
Facebook has become difficult to even type in the status box, because they're trying so hard to fill in suggestions and the like that the cursor jumps around. Half the time it jumbles up characters, likely because there's a crap-ton on javascript running with every keystroke.
So everybody should periodically type "Mark Zuckerberg is a douchebag" and delete it. ;-)
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Social Media was so 2013.
Get with it, its all about meeting up with people in real-time. Awesome. You make a call, talk to a person and arrange to meet up somewhere. Say for dinner or a drink. Maybe even a hook-up.
Using facebook in any way + caring about your privacy
= mutually exclusive.
but these are news from 2 years ago. /facepalm
Huffingtonpost, Facebook, and I wouldn't be surprised if they all di .
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Sounds like a great concept for a browser plugin.
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
FB and Google are far more insidious in what they collect and how they use it.
I don't save anything as drafts. I send them ALL!
...
Even the stupid ones!
Then when you sit down the NSA, they are in a poor bargaining position and say "Look, you are talking to a guy who sends stupid emails. Does my behavior suggest I have anything to hide?"
/NSA agent starts sweating
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
The actual paper this story is based off is quite interesting and worth a read (PDF). There's some really weird beat frequencies occurring in figure 2 that make me wonder if their data is valid. From the wording of both author's and Slate's article it appears that the collection of self-censorship data was started as a research project. If a user types 5 characters into a comment box, a boolean value is sent back to facebook if they decide not to continue, so it looks like its not sending what you type. I guess it's a good metric for measuring how much you distrust a person or system if you carefully revise statements before posting. Of course, perhaps if the self censorship data is interesting enough, Facebook's policy might change...
Yes, and the WWWBoard layout for the comments on this site is sooooooo 1998
Social Media was so 2013.
Get with it, its all about meeting up with people in real-time. Awesome. You make a call, talk to a person and arrange to meet up somewhere. Say for dinner or a drink. Maybe even a hook-up.
Ok .. I have friends and family on 4 continents, spread across numerous timezones. Can you please suggest how I am supposed to meet up with them all in real time, and in a timely manner, and without having to be independent wealthy?
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Facebook users don't expect their unposted thoughts to be collected, nor do they benefit from it.
The benefits given to you by Facebook for your unposted thoughts are on par with those for your posted thoughts: more tightly targeted advertising and the opportunity to receive special offers from Facebook's partners.
If you're going to go to the effort of typing something as insightful as "Mark Zuckerberg is a douchebag" I say go ahead and post it. What's he going to do, de-friend you?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Slashdot seems to send your stuff to the server as you type it, too. My phone has lags from half a second to 5 seconds in response time between keypress and letter appearance, while my desktop (with much faster and more reliable) does not.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Facebook is all about your public persona - your "brand" if you will (excuse me, I have to go wash my brain after typing that). It's exactly the opposite of privacy, and that's part of what makes it so great. I'm just lucky all of my young-and-stupid moments are only archived in old usenet threads.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
IRC.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I hear the computery folks have invented this thing called "electronic mail," which will let you send messages anywhere in the world without paying for airmail delivery (and fast, too)! They also made this thing called the "world wide web," where you can post things about yourself with special hypertext, and even pictures! You can even "instant message" family, with a live video feed (like seeing them on the television)! Thanks to the marvels of technology, one can communicate in real time with people all over the planet, without ceding control of every communication to advertizing/surveillance megacorporations.
Can and will be used against you.
Meh...there's already an app for that.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Facebook and other social media highly deceptive and manipulative personal information brokers who have no moral code other purpose other than their own bottom elicit, compile, memorialize and sell excruciatingly detailed and ruinous personal information dossiers to the highest bidder including but not limited to all your future employers !
Ha ha. Gotcha, sucker.
No they don't, that headline is very misleading and is a huge misinterpretation of the paper. For a small portion of the userbase, Facebook detect IF they self-censor and just transmit that. They only see metadata, and not the actual contents of the message. You can see that if you open the browser developer tools and watch network traffic.
Social Media was so 2013.
Real hipsters only communicate by fax anyway.
Will ads for gay support groups out you? There are plenty of other things that set this stuff off.
Various pro-sports forums (wrestling in particular) tend to complain when they start getting gay dating ads, which is rather amusing since they're all contextual based on the content of the posts in th eforum...
That's awesome, when did you think it up?
I'm with you. The benefits of the evolution of communications into personal digital communications across the globe has been stolen by corporate interests and the government and used to create a mindfuck situation of unbelievable proportions. It seems like not long ago the US federal government was arguing about how new digital telephone switches so impacted their traditional ability to intercept calls that they need special legislative provisions that required interception capabilities to be built into all telephony switches or else they would lose their ability to investigate crime. Now we all wonder if we have any privacy at all, even in our own homes (how do you know your cell phone hasn't been programmed to perform electronic eavesdropping of your every conversation?), never mind in our on-line e-mails, and now possibly even in our thoughts about blog postings. Its enough to make one paranoid!
You
Ok .. I have friends and family on 4 continents, spread across numerous timezones. Can you please suggest how I am supposed to meet up with them all in real time, and in a timely manner, and without having to be independent wealthy?
To get family on 4 continents takes some serious fucking money. I can't afford to travel to another continent, never mind live there. You can afford not to Facebook, but you just have different priorities.
I don't respond to AC's.
I'm pretty sure the USPS is outside the scope of automated NSA snooping. Which is cute in a way.
Someone needs to write a browser plugin that would simply write/erase random (but grammatically correct) sentences into that text field automatically when your FB page is open but not in the current tab.
Someone needs to write a browser plugin that would just generate random sentences into the text field, leave them there for a few seconds and then erase them again. Let it run when your FB page is in a background tab.
If ever there was an emerging example of the inherit evils of Capitalism, it is Facebook and Google, and as people here suggest their main tool may be javascript. While I might be tempted to hide from javascript because of the abuse of privacy, I might be tempted to do just the opposite, make my visiablity bigger and, try to find the deeper vulnerabilities of the business model and exploit it.
Facebook experimented ever so briefly with comment quoting a couple of years ago. That is the feature we have here on Slashdot where you can quote from a comment you want to reply to. It would be easy to do anyway, but you'd have to be careful to quote so that the autofil feature of the textarea widget didn't distroy your quoting. Quoting on Facebook might be disruptive enough because it is clear that they reason they don'r allow you to upload your own text is that they wannt total control over what is in that widget; it makes their data mining easier.. One thing I have done is to do screen captures of my own writing, rendered in a browser window and made into an image with screen capture. Then I upload the image to Facebook. That is several times more expensive to hem than if they allowed you to upload your own text files. There woild have to be a new layer of technology and even greater expense to them to use OCRt on an image, already aliased by their compression, I might add, to capture your world from that, and people who "abuse" their image uploading that way could have a significant economic impact on their policies.
As I write, I realize that I can use the image upload of rendered text to literally illustrate how replying to a post from there with the features of a forum, like a USENET newsgroup, is superior for holding a discussion than a blog. This has become one of my greatest dissatisfaction with social media, Facebook, in particular, and blogs on all manner of websites. Discussions are one dimensional, they often go no where; people get terribly frusturated by the destractions that happen in normal discourse. The blog is a failure at anything that gets convoluted, any issue that generates more than a few replies, anything with sub-conversations. The far greater evil of Facebook and Google, because it has embraced the blog for data mining for marketers, is that it prevents useful discussion and debate which this nation needs very badily. Most citizens shy away from contraversary and debate, and I think that the reason is that technology interferres with it. The blog is the main culpret here and it is just as many leaders in government and business want it. Slashdot is a bit of an exception,and think of what you can do here that you can't do on most websites with a blog, and that you can't do this usefully on Facebook.
The idea I have is to find the next comment I want to quote from and reply to; quote from the comment, write my reply, and convert it to an image and post the image. I know it might be hard to get a reply to my reply, but at least I could show in the image how contextual reply should be done, like it is here, and waste some more of Facebook's bandwidth. I am sure that the next time you want to post something to Facebook, you uploaded your remarks formatted anyway you like as an image, that Facebook might have to reconsider its editorial policy. Who knows, if we so desire we can put Facebook out of business this way.