Hacker News Reader

Comment by tzakrajs | Hacker News Reader

By granting access to your messages, they are also implicitly gaining access to your friend's messages with you.

All people should have an expectation of privacy that when they send a private message to someone, that someone does not have the right to disclose the conversation.

View on HN

So you would also like to impose a ban on email forwarding then right? Because that means the person who received your message took it, and exposed it to others that you didn't authorize. I can tell you that at least in the US, legally, your position doesn't hold water.

We're getting a little ridiculous here. There are valid complaints against Facebook in all of this - this just doesn't happen to be one of them.

> So you would also like to impose a ban on email forwarding then right?

The difference is that email forwarding is part of the RFCs and IETF standards that define email, e.g.:

https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc5322.txt

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5598

http://arc-spec.org/

What do RFC's have to do with his comment that he has an expectation of privacy when he sends people messages? Regardless, at least under US law, he's way off base.

If two or more parties are communicating via a standardized protocol, then using that standard constitutes an implied agreement between the parties communicating.

Whereas with Facebook, while one or more parties might be bound by some agreement with the company, that doesn't create any clear agreement between users.

This is a pretty weak argument. Using a standard established by an RFC implies a user has read that standard about as much as using Facebook implies a user has read the TOS. The TOS establishes a transitive condition that the user agrees to about as much as they agree to one-to-one commumication under the RFC.

If you have a problem with usage implying consent to a TOS then you can make that argument, but this one is flimsy.

You think people using email know anything about email standards? RFCs?

They see a "forward" button in their email client. Just like Facebook Messenger has a "forward" button on messages.

No one is expecting a different level of privacy in Facebook Messenger over email because of the IETF.

Email as a protocol explicitly does not come with any guarantees (of privacy, or sender's identity, or receiver's identity, or anything else as far as I can tell).

Facebook makes a lot of noise about privacy (using their own definition, naturally, being 'preventing anyone outside Facebook from seeing your data') so it's reasonable for a nontechnical user to not expect that an acquaintance installing a "what's your pirate name arrr" app should lead to their 'share with friends only' info being acquired and sold by a data broker.

With GDPR, you may get in hot water pretty quick when forwarding thoughtlessly. At least in a corporate setting, you may think twice about it.

Edited to add: Granting for instance access to your contacts fro an app is controversial from a legal perspective in Europe. Data protection agencies at least in Germany have the opinion that you need opt-in consent from everybody in the address book to do that.

When the first person goes to prison for restoring an iCloud backup, I hope we’ll collectively realize how insane that is.

I am not sure if I understand you correctly. I for sure am very uncomfortable about giving my email address and phone number together with my full name and address to third parties without my consent. I regularly get "invites" from LinkedIn. I don't like to be in their database and I never consented to that. LinkedIn surely will get some uncomfortable requests after May, 25th.

> So you would also like to impose a ban on email forwarding then right?

No. I would impose a ban on selling our conversations for money or for services.

Edit: to clarify, I believe users on Facebook were bartering with data that wasn't theirs for access to Facebook's services.

It's been years since anyone should have had that expectation.

That doesn't make it ok

That expectation has never existed. If you share something private with someone else, it belongs to them now, and they can forward it to whoever they want regardless of the sharing medium. The system is based on trust, not some arbitrary security measures.

The Canadian Supreme Court disagrees with you (5-2):

> "The court here has taken hold, embraced the challenge of the technology and caused the law to catch up with the technology, in line with Canadians' values," Lonsdale said. "Canadians can expect that their private, one-on-one communications with each other remain ones that they have a reasonable expectation of privacy."

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/supreme-court-texting-privac...

Funny, I feel like there have been a bunch of _revenge porn_ legal cases recently that disagree with your assessment

Reply on news.ycombinator.com