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Comment by stickfigure | Hacker News Reader

open up their networks to interact with other services using an open protocol such as Mastadon or Matrix

And here is where the two camps of Facebook-haters will go to war with each other:

* The decentralization mavens want open protocols and distributed control.

* The privacy mavens want to control information as it flows through the network, preventing friends from oversharing "your" data.

These two camps are mortal enemies, but they apparently haven't figured it out yet. You cannot share data with open protocols and still maintain control of that data.

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It does not work like that.

If you have shared a bit of data, you have relinquished and lost control over it, passed it to someone else. This is what sharing means. If you want to keep a secret, don't share it, at least not with parties who are not legally required to keep your secret secret.

Privacy advocates ask for different things.

One desire is that entities who technically have access to someone's data, even in passing and partially, would stop snooping at these data and sell them. The primary way to do that is to encrypt everything end to end, rendering snooping useless. Simply not sending the data is also a popular measure where applicable, hence ad blocking and tracker blocking. Another way is seeking legal protection against over-sharing where concealing the data is impossible, like with medical or financial information.

Another desire is that entities with legal power to snoop and eavesdrop would have their powers explicitly curtailed. This is quite an uphill battle; powers that be don't want to yield a piece of the power.

There is only power in that information because our society imbues that power. Knowing someone's medical details (as an example) shouldn't be something that could be exploited for personal power and financial gain, but here we are.

Our information is valuable because it gives leverage, either by the knowledge itself or by the threat of being revealed.

You can do your best to keep your information to yourself, but it does slowly slip between your fingers. Information wants to be free, after all. You can't put something back in the box, once it has been revealed.

Interestingly, the ones who gain the most from other people's information, are also extremely guarded about their own private lives. They know how much damage they do, and are desperate for it to not happen to them as well.

>preventing friends from oversharing "your" data.

I don't think this is really what privacy advocates are typically after. At least I'm not, and I'd consider myself one of them. It's more about what data the provider has access to, not your friends.

If you don't trust your friends, uh... get better friends?

Every privacy advocate I've met seems to be most incensed at Facebook over Cambridge Analtyica. To recap: CA built a quiz app that recorded data that your friends shared with you; many users installed this quiz app and accepted the "share your friends' data" permission.

Facebook didn't share your data with Cambridge Analtyica; your friends did. Facebook was just the medium.

With a distributed social network, there's no feasible legal or technical means of stopping your friends from installing another Evil Quiz App. It's barely possible to stop with a centralized system - it's slowed down only because FB put enough friction in the process.

> Facebook didn't share your data with Cambridge Analtyica; your friends did. Facebook was just the medium.

Facebook shared data that people had shared with their friends with Cambridge Analytica. That's not remotely in dispute - both Facebook and CA have admitted that. CA used Facebook's API and Facebook's servers gave CA the data.

People's friends didn't share that data with CA.

It didn't like, round trip through them. But people's friends did authorize CA to read that data; otherwise CA wouldn't have been able to use the API to get it.

That's not true. People's friends had no relationship with CA. They ran an app by a third-party (Aleksandr Kogan) which harvested the data and then he sold it to CA.

A genie grants you one wish; <poof> Facebook has been replaced with a decentralized social network based on open protocols.

To your horror, your friends _still_ install insipid quiz apps and grant them permission to all of "your" data. And now there is nothing to stop it and no one to blame.

From a systems perspective, the fact that the medium is currently named Facebook is irrelevant. The primary actors in the Cambridge Analytica Scandal are your friends. You can remove Facebook and the same narrative remains - you shared data with your friends, and they shared it with someone you don't like.

I had not looked at it this way before..It is possible to be prudent with your data but once you share with other who are maybe not so prodent, who knows?

I'm not sure why you think your hypothetical changes the fact that facebook actually did share the data with Kogan (and thereby Cambridge Analytica) in the real case, and blaming the "friends" avoids responsibility by the actors in this case who provided the medium and those who knowingly exploited it.

"We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can’t then we don’t deserve to serve you. I’ve been working to understand exactly what happened and how to make sure this doesn’t happen again. ...

Given the way our platform worked at the time this meant Kogan was able to access tens of millions of their friends’ data....

This was a breach of trust between Kogan, Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. But it was also a breach of trust between Facebook and the people who share their data with us and expect us to protect it. We need to fix that." - Mark Zuckerberg as reported https://qz.com/1234956/read-mark-zuckerbergs-full-facebook-s... and elsewhere)

You could as usefully blame yourself for sharing anything with your friends - after all if you had not done so, they couldn't have shared it with someone you didn't like. "He who would keep a secret must keep secret that he has a secret to keep" as Goethe wrote.

It's certainly conceptually possible to design a system without facebook such that your friends share data they shouldn't. The real world also works in this way - people are indiscreet and share things which were told them in confidence.

In the real facebook/CA case, the friends did not knowingly share their network's data with CA, they did a personality test quiz set by a social science researcher. That quiz used the facebook API to grab data on the social network of everyone who participated which was then sold to Cambridge Analytica by the developer. Given that facebook's privacy settings have been the subject of studies in UX "dark pattern" design (eg https://fil.forbrukerradet.no/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/201... and elsewhere) it seems unreasonable to consider this 3rd party sharing to be consensual.

Facebook shared data with Kogan the same way that Google shares my email with people on the To list when I click the 'send' button.

A human being installed a stupid quiz app and explicitly answered "yes" to a dialog saying "would you like to share your friends' info with this app?" We can argue if the UX was good or bad or if users are dumb, but the actor in this situation is not Facebook.

FreeNet would disagree.

Plus, from ActivityPub / Fediverse land there's a handful of folks looking at doing both by clever use of OCAP, encryption, and content addressing routing to have both privacy and an open network (sneakernet compatible too).

There's a whole history of peer to peer networking that died in the late 90's and early 2000's that most software engineers in the valley are too hip to learn and care about.

The privacy mavens are going to lose. Controlling what can and can't be shared is just like copyright enforcement. If they want privacy, the answer is to not share information at all or share only with trustworthy people. If some post leaks, all bets are off. There is nothing they can do about it and that's how it should be.

> copyright enforcement.

Ahh, but copyright won the last war, by moving to centralised platforms. The privacy mavens are going to lose, but they are going to lose to Big Brother, not to decentralisation.

They won by making services that are good enough for most people to not bother infringing, not by enforcing copyrights. Now they're getting greedy and fragmenting the market, making life needlessly difficult for consumers. I have no doubt lots of people will turn to "piracy" because of that.

> If they want privacy, the answer is to not share information at all or share only with trustworthy people.

Living in the information age and not sharing information at all is like dancing in the rain and not getting wet. The cameras are always on and the gorgon always staring. It might be your friends post, their camera or a corporations.

It's worth considering that privacy wasn't guaranteed in the old days either, save for the laws people created to enabled it. In the past, if a tyrant wanted to find a thief, they'd search every home. This situation is unreasonable to a free people. So folks relied on laws then, as we must now, to ensure that a person's rights are protected.

If a companies tech is capable of tracking a person, selling it or making it available to the public unrestricted would violate their 4th amendment rights. Because government agents could also use the data unrestricted to peer into your life. All without having to break down the door to your home. So while it might be technically possible to know everything about a person in the information age, the right to that information belongs to the individual.

There's an analogous difference between pro-censorship and anti-censorship factions.

This is still somewhat true today anyway. Companies archive tweets for the public record and users can take screenshots or copy paste.

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