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Comment by bsbechtel | Hacker News Reader

This is tangentially related to this, but apparently their mobile app now automatically downloads all the photos on your phone if you give permissions to access photos? My wife and I recently had a child, and when I opened up the app to post one single photo of our child, Facebook was showing in my newsfeed a video they made with all of my photos I had taken. This seems like a gross violation of my privacy. Is there any way to prevent this aside from deleting the app and no longer sharing photos with family and friends via FB?

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So - what you saw was automatically generated on your phone, and not uploaded to facebook. It's just displayed on your phone in the newsfeed view, and you can opt-in to having it posted.

This happened to a friend of mine who is an ex-FBer, and he posted on FB about it, and a number of people from the FB team who worked on the mobile app piece of it confirmed that indeed no data had left his phone without him requesting that it be posted, but that they were going to make that behavior more clear in an upcoming release.

Yeah, it's happened in the past where they show you little thumbnails of your photos album to encourage you to share/post, but the fact that they created a video (during an eventful, emotional, and exciting but very private time) was a bit much. Your comment is a little reassuring, but the fact that FB doesn't have the greatest track record, and this is hearsay on HN, I'm still concerned/annoyed.

That's crazy, does that rendering happen in the background while the phone is in your pocket?

It's all just slides and pans -- stuff that can be previewed in real-time locally on your phone. Stuff that would run on a computer with 1/10th the compute/graphics/memory in 1998.

You're using FB. Talking about a 'gross violation of privacy' is almost laughable.

Delete the app and just use the mobile website.

That is what I did, and it works pretty well in general.

It also has the advantage (for me) that you don't get any notifications.

You're not redirected to use the Messenger app when trying to check messages on mobile. For a bit, while on the B side, I could request a desktop site on Chrome for Android and then still use the m.facebook.com subdomain. Now that I'm on the A side, I can't use that workaround.

I've been told other m.facebook.com wrappers like Tinfoil were affected by this as well.

Use mbasic.facebook.com. Works like a charm! (so far)

That's even an option on the laptop!

FaceSlim currently works great as a Tinfoil replacement until they work around redirect.

That's probably what I'm going to have to do. Thanks for mentioning this!

Plus this works without uploading your contacts to FB.

I use the mobile web now instead of the phone app now. I realize it's probably paranoia but there have been far too many times when I've talked about something and a related ad magically appears in my news feed.

Hasn't been a problem since I deleted the app.

Reminds of these ads.

http://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-...

I'm not sure if the option is there on iOS, but on Android N, you can revoke the Microphone permission. I use the web app on Chrome but relented on installing the Messenger application ever since they crammed using that on mobile users. Yes, I admit defeat.

Doing so has also saved me a considerable amount of battery. I delete the app before any travel to ensure battery drain isn't as much of an issue.

https://www.facebook.com/help/409007099162779/

Apparently the feature is opt-in and will be sunsetted soon anyway, but you can disable it.

I think what I'm talking about is something different. I never opted in, and I also can't adjust the settings at the location the help page directed me to.

On android, there are unofficial apps which act as shells on the mobile web interface (the ones I have are "Tinfoil for Facebook" and "Swype"). IIRC these are capable of uploading photos, but they won't upload any that you don't explicitly choose to upload.

If you care at all about maintaining control over this kind of data, consider abstaining from facebook and running your own service e.g. owncloud or nextcloud.

You're using Facebook and linked Facebook to your phone. You shouldn't do that unless you want all your private data to go to Facebook servers.

Should you be using the mobile application if _you_ care about privacy?

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