Oculus nooooooooooooo!

Volunteering your own personal information is one thing, but volunteering another's is a whole different kettle of fish. Facebook has asked about my friend's; jobs, home towns, and universities. Oh, and where they've been, they always want me to bloody tag people in photos.

That was kind of the point I was trying to make when I said Facebook is greedier than the NSA. The NSA has the means to basically see everything and they use it. However, they are only interested in specific information and they don't sell the information like Facebook. Facebook takes your personal information and the information of your friends and family and collects it. And they are willing to sell if they can only find a buyer.

And like BulletMagnet said: It doesn't matter if you try to control their access to your private information if a friend, family member or colleague puts it on his profile. Zuckerberg has learned to use peer pressure and insensibility of many internet users to close even the last gaps in his network. Somebody will do the work for him just to get a couple of likes. *sigh*

I feel the NSA is actually interested into any kind of information they can possibly get, their greed is without limits.
I don't really use facebook and the like, but somehow I rather have google and facebook know about my private stuff than the NSA. Why? Google and Facebook are companies out to make money by legal means in the end, that won't disrupt our society as a whole. They don't endanger democracy.
The NSA I feel is out to build up power to control the world so that some upcoming mad US politician may use it to establish whatever worldorder he/she thinks is best.

You feel that.

Do you have any evidence of it?

I feel that you need to start using the quote function.

It is hard to get evidence about a system that employs secret judges that make secret laws that allow them to break very basic rights.

I mean seriously they create new laws in secret that allow them to break the officially known laws. How bad is that? How is a constitutional state supposed to work if the government is allowed to make secret laws that invalidate known ones?

You're starting to sound like you've made a certain type of hat out of of all the tin in those cola cans.

Imagine if the secret judges didn't exist, and that the secret laws didn't exist.

You'd have a hard time getting evidence proving people are being irrational and paranoid.

Colin has a point though, the NSA is endangering democracy in the US. What if one of the next presidents is more like Nixon than Obama and demands all information the NSA has about some of his opponents. I have a feeling that the NSA will have a hard time saying no. Watergate 2 might become really nasty.

The NSA needs more oversight imo. There have to be clear rules what information they are allowed to collect and what they are allowed to do with it. The old rules might have been inconvenient but after the Patriot Act? Ask yourself: What can happen now if you get another president like Nixon. How much power could he command and what damage could he do?

Corporate lobbyists are endangering democracy, not the NSA.

I think we are way past the endangering part on that front. Examples here in Germany:
BMW influencing a decision in the EU regarding environmental laws for a 0.6 million euro 'donation' to the CDU, chancellor Angela Merkel's party.
The Russian Gazprom hiring ex-chancellor Gerhard Schröder for 2 mio a year as 'advisor' for 'services rendered'. Minister for Economics and Labour Wolfgang Clement got a similar job with Gazprom. If you want to know why Germany depends so much on Russian gas, look no further.

Lobbyists 'donating' to political parties, politicians becoming lobbyist when their term ends... It's quite a mess. Hard to prove even the most blatant cases though.

If you care about your private data keep it offline and encrypted. Facebook isn't any better of worse than any other large corporation and obviously there is no reason to trust any of them. There is no way any internet service care about your private data safety because there is too much vulnerabilities around.

If a large, central repository of data is built up, even if it's owned by google or facebook and technically private, it's going to be available to the NSA to some extent inevitably, whether by backroom deals, outright subpeonas, or government black-hats.

Anyway, as regards to Oculus, the announcement that Michael Abrash is joining them does set my mind at ease a bit.

So, if websites like this are allowed to what they want within their own sphere of operations . . . why can't Facebook? As they're in the same category

So don't give it to them. LinkedIn asks me to endorse my connections all the time. I don't necessarily do it.

Someone should check the privacy settings on Facebook, lest he be working on information that is severely out of date.

Does anyone have any hard evidence as to what Facebook does?

No, I didn't think so either.

I don't even get why people are defending the NSA just so that they can justify positioning Facebook as "the bad guys".

What exactly are you trying to say? Facebook can.

Then I misread where you were coming from, sir! Sorry about that

I happen to respect people's privacy. The question is, do my friends respect my privacy? The answer, is usually no-they-don't. It's not a malicious action on their part - they often don't realise what they're doing.

In any case, Facebook should be doing a better job to not enable them. Have you been tagged at a location? Sorry, you can't be untagged. The best you can ask for is for that tag to only appear on the timeline of the person tagging you. Been tagged in a picture? It's your name is attached to your ugly face in that picture until you untag yourself.

I'm not worried about my friends seeing information about me - I'm worried about people I don't know.

If people take photos of me in the first place, maybe that's what I should be objecting to? I'm me. If there's a photo of me on Facebook, it's a photo of me. Why should I be afraid of it being tagged?

What prevents you from asking your friends this? I have plenty of friends that I'd only need to ask once for them to not do something. And sometimes it happens regardless, because drunken photos are often amusing

There is nothing harmful to me, or of me, on Facebook. That is because I know where I am, I know what photos are taken of me, and I know the locations I travel to. They are no secret, and I have no need of hiding myself from those events.

Of course, this is anecdotal. But you're also making (negative) assumptions on the behalf of your friends.

Wait.. Are we talking about Oculus still?

Politics and Free speech derailing me thread.

If I posted a picture of another forum member on here, I'd get a pretty swift ban. Privacy is important. Invading another's privacy is a big deal. Facebook only needs to make some simple changes to privacy, and everyone would benefit. Yet, they refuse to do so, which is why I am quite concerned over what Facebook might do to the OR.