The only difference is their size and capability to retaliate as compared to any other App developer.
Here's a thought experiement: If Facebook were malware, could you get rid of it?
Malware is any software intentionally designed to cause damage to a computer, server, client, or computer network. A wide variety of malware types exist, including computer viruses, worms, Trojan horses, ransomware, spyware, adware, rogue software, wiper and scareware.
As for me, I would use an alternative platform in a heartbeat, but all the privacy focused ones so far have not gained any traction.
Clearly most people aren't aware of that (nor are they happy with it) given that some people even have the impression that Facebook is literally listening to conversations.
"Facebook invades privacy" is still a minority opinion among their user base (whether we like it or not).
Apple has been aiming to become that product, because I've said before that Apple is primarily a privacy company with a bunch of entertainment features. It also means that competing with Apple isn't about design, it's also mainly about providing privacy. Their whole recipe is the complementary packaging of the two orthogonal concepts of entertainment and privacy.
I should start the next Apple.
Now, I noticed a weird behaviour. I am not sure if its a 'bug' due to jailbreak, or if it shows how apps can access location.
The setup is as follows: location services are completely deactivated system-wide. a spoof location is set.
This means, I am not able in any way to access/share my location, neither the real nor the spoofed one.
However, when someone shares a location with me, upon displaying it on a map, instead of the location shared the spoofed one will be displayed along the correct address of the shared location.
ok, i dont know how iOS manages location services. still it is not nice at all to see that somehow an app can access a location, even if its spoofed and by error.
regarding the article: you can tell your phone not to give fb any location data. but why would you take a picture with location data and upload it to facebook? its so obvious and straight-forward that the user simply undermines his own privacy.
It wasn't 6+ months later that I realized audio was also embedded in live photos. I just never noticed because my phone is always on silent mode.
The realization that I was sending audio clips to friends and family along with photos for months and month was... unnerving.
It's a problem when tech becomes so complex that the average (or in my case, even the above average) tech user can't keep up.
Photo geolocation metadata has legitimate uses, the problem isn't that the metadata is there per-se but that it's being used for nefarious purposes without the user's knowledge nor consent.
You could argue that most people don't know the location data is there. But at the same time, if you're doing something you want to keep secret, you probably shouldn't be uploading pictures of it to Facebook anyway.
If you don't have an issue with Facebook then disregard and continue using their services. If you do have a problem then try being the change you want to see. Tend your garden. You cannot control other people but you can control yourself.
See Beeper (bridges to various chat apps based on Matrix.org): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25848278
Legally, I’m not sure how you can have it both ways, aside from either FB offering a paid tier (you pay cash instead of providing your data), or we shut FB down entirely.
What exactly do you believe is the solution?
Personally, I think social media is more harm than good. I don’t want to ban or control social media companies (my local officials aren’t even capable of keeping drugs and homeless addicts off school grounds, let alone dictating internet regulation). My personal choice is to not use it.
Family and friends adapted, most without prompting.
I'd say try it but be prepared for an ego check if nobody follows haha
my proposal is more radical. rally to ban FB in that country. incentivize local companies to come up with alternative solutions.
zuck and his comrades have no business poking their noses into foreigners medical data anyway. it would also avoid less taxes being lost on facebooks Double Irish tax evasion. treat them like the cancer they are. don't celebrate FB engineers and call them out for the useful idiots they are.
Can't change my profile picture in the Messenger app though, so would need to reactivate if I felt the urgent need to.
I sure hope so. The EXIF data has to be part of the backups, it's important data.
The issue is that you are telling Facebook to not use your location data for marketing, then they are finding out your location via another method and then using it for marketing (based on a loophole in their privacy agreement).
(Non ad location business: hazard profile based on where you hang out. Frequency of pub visits may impact your life insurance rates)
It’s a matter of expectations: You’re handing your data over to Apple for them to back it up; You’re sending photos via Facebook to share it with friends, and location data isn’t shown anywhere.
The false equivalencies in this thread are almost overwhelming.
That’s why I back up mine to a NAS in my house and have that send encrypted backups off-site.
That's surprising. Facebook has a global reach and can run on damn near anything with a screen. I'm surprised iOS makes up such disproportionate part of its revenue.
The problem is that Facebook's business model is to sell out their userbase to the highest bidder, and the bids are significantly higher for iOS users who are considered good marks for ads compared to some generic feature-phone users.
Like mentioned in the article, there a lot of EXIF strips in Appstore too but I’m not sure if a regular user would take the road of take photo > go to exif stripper > delete exif on photo > save the photo > go to facebook > upload to facebook
I think the better option is:
(1) Make it obvious when location data is being included with a photograph, and exclude it by default - especially if the app doesn't already have Precise Location access.
(2) Apps that manage your entire photo library and all its EXIF data (think Amazon Photos / Google Photos, or an app to bulk import photos from a DSLR camera or something) should have to apply to Apple to get that specific entitlement- and social media apps should not qualify. But in this case, they shouldn't need Precise Location access to get access to all the EXIF data.
Personally, I use a Shortcut to be able to share photos without metadata. It works very well. It's the one included with iVerify, but there are free ones in the Shortcuts library.
Facebook would like to access your photos:
Select Photos
All Photos
Strip location and other metadataThen again, I don't use facebook and I do strip exif if I want to upload a photo somewhere I don't want to share my location. (and I can do this with termux and the same tool I'd use this on my PC, just run exiftool -all= foo.jpg)
I get that it is not a sensible solution for the average user. But the problem is not exif-tags. It is facebook and the current ad ecosystem.
On android a file-picker that could optionally remove exif-data when a file is chosen seems like an easy workaround for the time being.
Apple should update the photo permissions to allow enabling or disabling access to metadata as well.
Settings.app —> Privacy —> Location services —> Camera
and turning off the “precise location” option for the Camera app that way.
It would be ideal if there were an “EXIF data” toggle in the Camera section that could allow sharing pictures with apps but with all metadata removed.
I'm not shilling for them but just wondering whether some of these results are a direct consequence of the nature of the systems rather than nefarious design
A quick look at their privacy policy [1] brings up:
> Forbes may also process certain user information on the basis of the following legitimate interests, provided that such interests are not overridden by your privacy rights and interests: delivering and continuing to develop and improve the Site, learning from your behavior on the Site (e.g., analyzing traffic) to better serve you and other Site users, helping us modify or enhance the Site and its content, receiving insight as to what users do (and don’t) like about our Site or aspects thereof, and providing a stable, consistent, and secure user experience in connection with the Site.
I understood this as 'unless your privacy rights and interests prohibit us, we'll process your data' (TINLA). Still, would be nice to know how do they check for an individual's privacy rights.
edit: grammar
I am fortunate to have been able to delete Facebook and Instagram from my phone but being in Europe I have to use WhatsApp.
I have contacts in UK, Scotland, Germany, Norway, Pakistan, India, South Africa and probably a few more. They all have installed Telegram by now.
Of course I think we can do better than Telegram but at least I am not contributing to forcing everyone to give all their metadata to Facebook.
But sure, let's continue to victim shame and blame here.
When my grandmother passed due to COVID, my family called and texted each other and offered support in plenty of ways outside of Facebook, despite most of them being heavy users.
Everyone’s situation is going to be different, but it may be be as impactful as you think to drop Facebook. It’s addictive to read about people’s updates all day but it may not actually add much to your life and you may find the connections you have with people instead more meaningful as I have.
I'll admit I use messenger because some people will try to contact me there, and it's necessary to be able to respond quickly if you're using Marketplace, but the main app? No way.
Two problems:
* there's a lot of misinformation around the GDPR even in the tech community
* some of this misinformation is most likely distributed intentionally, either to derail the GDPR itself or to continue profiting off nefarious things (marketing, etc) while pretending to comply and getting business via that (the majority of "GDPR compliance solutions" are absolutely not compliant, and yet companies pay for them)
* some GDPR criticism is clearly in bad faith by vested interests who currently make a lot of money from breaching it (including on this community)
* the regulators have been absolutely incompetent or unwilling to enforce it.
Interesting nugget: the author repeats the lies that apple doesn't collect/store/index your data.
I think the scepticism of facebook is a good thing, however I really wish it would be applied equally to every big company. Especially when they so clearly abuse privacy like Apple and Google.
The article states that FB all but confirmed that it is used for advertising purposes.
> the author repeats the lies that apple doesn't collect/store/index your data.
Where's the proof/evidence of this? Apps/OS have been found to leak/send some 'personal' data to Apple servers, but they say they don't track outside of apps (so app store ads use data from your app store usage etc), for them to do so without admitting it would be a huge commercial risk for very little gain (advertising revenue is still a small % of their total revenue).
This isn't about leaks, its about actual design. The itracker system scans your local area for tags, and reports back their IDs and your location. This was rolled out without consent.
By default apple collects "significant locations", which is then accessible to the itracker system ostensibly to warn you about tracking devices.
We accept this because apple are "trusted".
What if Apple are only trusted because they understand how to PR their way out of a bad narrative?
By default all your photos are sent to icloud. They are indexed and processed to give you faces, locations and other (useful) metadata tools.
In one of the OS upgrades, OSX uploaded all my passwords saved in my laptop keychain to icloud, without consent or warning. Not only that it shared them with my phone. My phone didn't at the time have a strong password set.
Just imagine the sheer breathless indignity if facebook, tiktok, or similar tried just one of these actions. However apple(and google) has impunity to do all.
That's my point, if we do care about privacy, then we need to apply the same level of criticism to _all_ companies.
Also: "I suggested to them that this data is used for advertising purposes, and that this is “regardless of the privacy settings selected by the user within the Facebook/Instagram app on their phones.” Facebook told me it was fine to proceed with those assumptions."
FB stance seems to be that the user has the option to strip EXIF data before uploading to FB. On the same token, can't strip your IP, guess that means a proxy.
Which is pretty poor. I'd be interesting to see what twitter, tiktok and snap do with similar data.
Although people seem pretty chilled with other companies doing it. We already know google indexes by location. That's how they do the real time busyness graphs.
I always wonder why the bias is always against facebook and apple. As if people don't realize that all the privacy smoke and mirrors was just about being able to compete with the Ad Industry. Apple Ads now does the same, in a non-blockable manner. I mean, it clearly was about business tactics all along.
I did not saw this in the article... Can you elaborate on this like copy/pasting the line(s) from the article please?
6th paragraph. However, I‘m not sure whether Apple or Facebook is „the data giants“.
The difference between Apple and Facebook is that Facebook's entire business model is built on abusing the privacy of it's users.
but, apart from cambridge analytica, where actual data was leaked, what privacy abuses are unique to facebook?
Its not like they drove around harvesting your wifi to geolocate you, or deliberately hid breaches to protect it's "good name", or sells your location data to any and everyone who asks is it?
All big companies have done shitty things, but why do we let them off? shouldn't we hold them to account as well?