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Comment by the_snooze | Hacker News Reader

>They seem to take the Google approach that the person who owns the device is allows to consent for everyone else around them (or any data they share with certain people) when that is not ok.

This is what's often overlooked (intentionally so?) in discussions about privacy. Too much of privacy is framed as "I am OK with sharing this data." But too often the data you hold is actually about other people: contact lists, conversations, associations. When you let a third party sift through your information, you're also making that decision for everyone else you interact with. I think the right way to think about privacy is: even if I have nothing to hide, I respect the agency of those I communicate with, so I won't make that decision to disclose unilaterally.

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I flat out refuse to let an app go through my contacts, there is just no reason for it. Photos is always what I select and never full access. etc.

So when one of the social media sites recommends someone I may know, have no other contacts with this person and I recently shared my number with them. I get angry.

I will never understand how we got to the point that someone else can consent to a company gathering up my data just because it happens to be on their phone.

I don't think it's overlooked, some people talk about it. But a lot of companies try to push it away because they take "privacy" seriously while ignoring the consent problem.

When I lived in a shared house, Facebook learned about my relation to my housemates without my consent. I didn’t use a single Facebook product at the time and used a VPN on my devices. A few years later, when I signed up to Facebook, my ex-housemates were all “people I may know”.

I was wondering for a long time how it knew. I think it was because some of my ex-housemates shared their contacts with FB and it discovered us as a social group.

It is really an eye-opening experience to sign up to Facebook for the first time in recent years. It already knows so much about you and your interests. It’s as if there was already a profile with your name on it that they were building, without even approaching to ask for consent.

Facebook has done this for a long time. They're commonly referred to as shadow profiles. Profiles built up purely on information provided by other people's devices/tracking measures where the person in question doesn't directly have a Facebook account themselves.

Wow, that is exactly what I suspected — https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/11/17225482/facebook-shadow-.... I only didn’t know what it was called. Thanks

I had an Android phone with Facebook integration in the camera app. It would ping Facebook every time you started it up. No doubt with all the permissions of the camera app, including GPS access. From there it's trivial to infer your associations.

That is devious. I’m not sure if my phone did anything like that as it was an iPhone 6 at the time.

I will never understand how we got to the point that someone else can consent to a company gathering up my data just because it happens to be on their phone.

It's no longer "your" data if you gave it to someone else.

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