Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

6 Billion people don't have (a?) facebook. It's not as if it is special.

"$100 says that Facebook can predict, with a 95% confidence interval of 5 years, when you will die and how."

No they can't, at least not with any specificity. What a load of tripe. Actuarial science can do just that in the aggregate, and facebook will be able to do that in the aggregate as well. But on an individual basis, short of hiring assassins they won't know when you will die or how.

The 5 year / 95% leaves enough of a loophole to drive a truck through, you could take that bet with anybody and say '70', cancer for smokers, heart attack for overweight people and old age for the rest and you'd probably make money, maybe vary up by one year for females and down by one for males.

Similar flaws exist in the rest of these, I'll leave those as an exercise for the reader.

I don't have a facebook account either, it doesn't matter that I don't (and sometimes is a slight inconvenience), mostly because I think they're an unethical company but that's based on past behaviour, I don't need a crystal ball or a bunch of tea-leaves to tell me that in the future they'll likely mis-behave again.

Facebook datamining your profile is a fact, but I highly doubt they care about your menstrual cycle (which I believe applies only to a subset of the population) and if they do they're even more perverted than I thought they were.

Facebook engineers are welcome to confirm or deny this.

btw, it's 'a facebook account'.

Thanks for the title correction.

Mostly this came about from a thought experiment in guessing what information they can figure out about you based on your profile. Do I honestly think that there is a whole team of engineers sitting around charting out menstrual cycles for 50% of their users? Nope. Is there a nonzero chance that it might be happening or could happen soon? Yeah I think so. My main beef is that facebook can infer a ton of information about me that I don't want them to know and that they could someday be selling to people who I really don't want to know that information.

Also 6 billion people don't have a Facebook account, but condition on Americans between the ages of 18 and 30, and the rate of account ownership will probably go way way up. Those are the people who always ask me why I don't have one. Almost everyone I know has one and I really do have to explain once a week why I don't have one and don't want them to make one for me.

If you're worried about facebook, have a look at: your google search history, your ISPs mandatory 'data retention', your mobile phone operator and so on.

Facebook is but one of a large number of companies that hold private data and use it to their own advantage.

In fact, even without a facebook account they'll know about as much about you unless you've blocked their domain/ips on all your devices because those like buttons are everywhere.

Why do you feel the need to justify yourself about not having a fb account? Simply blackhole and ignore them, then get on with your life and if people ask you why not 'because I don't trust them' should be more than good enough, no need to go into paranoid fantasies about what they could do.

If facebook wants EU style data protection / privacy laws in the US then they should definitely try to sell your private data to insurance companies. I'm pretty sure that would sway even the most pro-business anti-consumer legislative body.

For you and I, it's enough to say "I don't trust them". For the normal users of Facebook, people like my classmates, friends, and family members, they have no way of knowing what I mean when I say I don't trust Facebook. They cannot imagine what you and I know to be possible, if not highly improbable. The first question they ask after me saying I don't trust them is why? I've had to explain some variant of this many many times lately and so I've written it up as something I can send them.

And yeah, I'm worried about google, my bank, my phone operator(no smartphone though), and my ISPs. Just because all of these other companies do it doesn't mean it's alright for them to do. I hate that there are hundreds of files out there that have data along the lines of "Zack Maril, Male, 21". I'd like to find ways to prevent companies from collecting all of that information about me. (Using DuckDuckGo and cash only would probably be a great start.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com