from Hacker News

Why I don't have a Facebook account

by zackzackzack on 12/29/12, 2:42 AM with 19 comments

  • by jacquesm on 12/29/12, 4:20 AM

    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'.

  • by g2e on 12/29/12, 4:33 AM

    This is absurd. First of all, at least from personal experience, women DO NOT post status updates about their menstrual cycle. People don't want to paint themselves on Facebook as annoying, immature children.

    Second of all, why am I the only person here that trusts Zuckerberg and the goal he plans to accomplish with Facebook?

    Let them data mine my account! Learn everything you want to know about me and the interactions I have with my friends! So what? What difference does that make to my life?

    And lastly, I really doubt FB is having or going to have money problems anytime soon. If they do they'll probably just 1-up advertising.

  • by mingpan on 12/29/12, 4:50 AM

    The other potential concern is that stuff of this sort could get accidentally learned. Suppose there were some sensitive fact about some subset of the population, and suppose it happened to correlate with response to some advertisement. If FB were trying to optimize for better ad targeting and response, they could happen to learn this trait, perhaps without even a human operator realizing it.

    Again, these are all relatively unlikely hypotheticals, but it is admittedly unnerving that the potential could exist.

  • by aneth4 on 12/29/12, 5:38 AM

    Does anyone care if Facebook knows when their menstrual cycle is? Or has a prediction on when you are going to die? Or predicts when I'm going to get a cold?

    I don't care.

    If you are this paranoid, you should stop using credit cards, phones, and emails, as all that data is similarly being mined and sold or capable of such.

    I do think we should have strong disclosure and privacy laws - I don't know detail but I believe the EU does a better job of this than the US. We should be entitled to know what data is gathered about us and what is sold, and much of that should require consent.

  • by troyinjapan on 12/29/12, 4:51 AM

    If you're really betting $100, you'd be losing a lot of money on everything you posted. I'll bet $100 the blog post was a total fail.

  • by chrisringrose on 12/29/12, 10:47 PM

    My predictions:

    - Facebook will make enough money from advertising

    - They will make tons of money from all kinds of sources

    - They will be here, and strong, in 10 years

    - You will reactivate your account, eventually

  • by Fuzzwah on 12/29/12, 11:02 AM

    You can have an FB account and just be smart about the information you put on it.

    You know, just like everything else on the internet.

    Also; https://disconnect.me

  • by borplk on 12/29/12, 4:26 AM

    Why is that tweet repeated 20 times across the whole article?

  • by bayan09 on 12/29/12, 4:21 AM

    Damn.

  • by milkman on 12/29/12, 5:00 AM

    This is a brilliant, hard hitting post Zack. And pretty obvious when you think about it. Of course Facebook is going to sell user data to the highest bidder. They already do to a lesser extent with their PPC advertising.

    Readers: dismiss these warnings at your own peril.

    EDIT: Looks like the crybabies and Facebook stockholders are flagging this. You must have hit a sensitive nerve Zack. Good job.