Facebook Retracted Zuckerberg's Messages From Recipients' Inboxes (techcrunch.com) 106
An anonymous reader shares a report: You can't remove Facebook messages from the inboxes of people you sent them to, but Facebook did that for Mark Zuckerberg and other executives. Three sources confirm to TechCrunch that old Facebook messages they received from Zuckerberg have disappeared from their Facebook inboxes, while their own replies to him conspiculously remain. An email receipt of a Facebook message from 2010 reviewed by TechCrunch proves Zuckerberg sent people messages that no longer appear in their Facebook chat logs or in the files available from Facebook's Download Your Information tool. Casey Newton, a reporter at The Verge, tweeted, "Deleting Mark's messages while leaving the recipients' intact highlights Facebook's actual views on privacy better than any statement it makes on the subject ever will"
Update: Facebook has just announced that it will give all users an option to unsend messages.
Update: Facebook has just announced that it will give all users an option to unsend messages.
Their servers, their service (Score:4, Interesting)
I also have my own servers, and I can also delete whatever I want from them. So what?
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"I also have my own servers, and I can also delete whatever I want from them."
Exactly! You're an asshole, they're assholes, no difference.
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Re:Their servers, their service (Score:5, Informative)
Keep your bits on your own machines, kids!
As for Facebook and Mr. Zuckerberg: Have you no shame? This sort of move looks terrible. Perhaps you have no brain.
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Does it, though? People using Facebook are already doing so because they don't care about their data. Other people already know they shouldn't give their data to Facebook. I think that stuff like this has zero impact on Facebook.
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your Primary assumption is wrong.
"People using Facebook are already doing so because they don't care about their data."
The majority of people do not actually understand the implications of sharing their data so freely with facebook. They start off initially with way too much trust in Corporations as they have been taught to by the politicians. The main difference is that activities like this is where trust is lost which is bad for facebook. While the average technical person may understand the implications
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Perhaps "looks bad" is not the best way to put it, more like "reveals too much, and what is revealed is very unflattering and contradicts how they generally present themselves and/or are perceived by most"... or something.
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Keep your bits on your own machines, kids!
The rule in Health class was, "If it's wet and it's not yours, don't touch it."
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Re:Their servers, their service (Score:4, Insightful)
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Keep your bits on your own machines, kids!
Except your backups!
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I like how people talk sense and then try to pretend they said something radical or paranoid. You didn't. Yes, shunning the cloud and circling the wagon at home is what people should be doing. It's not unreasonable, it's appropriate and it's even practical (though various interests try to portray it as not practical). And (though I realize I'm posting on Slashdot) it's fun!
It's just unusual. Getting vaccinations also used to be unusual. Taking a cab home from the bar instead of driving drunk was also unusua
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Why would anybody be surprised?
Human decency keeps a lot of people from otherwise "doing what they want", and the fact that its absence still surprises some people, that people still expect it, is -- in its own way -- one of the most encouraging things one can hear. Yes, putting down the beast that Facebook is will require widespread realization that Facebook lacks human decency (or even corporate decency), but don't dismiss the hopers and dreamers altogether... the world they want is the only one worth fighting for.
Stop using Facebook (Score:5, Insightful)
If Facebook's policies piss you off so much, stop using it (I stopped in 2011). It's not like you have a subscription you paid for the year and now have to use up to get your money's worth or something. Just log off. Delete your account. Say no.
You can live without Facebook. It's not necessary. If they change their ways, you can always go back. Nothing will get Facebook to change the way they operate like losing millions of users really quickly. If users just bitch about, but keep using it, nothing substantial will change. If people start leaving in droves, then they will change things.
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don't worry, they can put together quite a nice profile of you from all of your friends and family that still use it.
It is a fallacy to say that just because they have data on you already that you might as well just give them more data by using their service. The more you use them, the more they violate your privacy. It's about risk mitigation. If you care about privacy, don't use them.
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Who says anything about using the service? If you don't have an account, their shadow profile data on you is marked as "public". Open an account, and you can set all that profile data from public to private.
That's all I use facebook for. Ot
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Privacy is an illusion.
Its what we tell ourselves to protect us from what other people might think about us. With enough effort, anyone can gather just about any information about you that they want. Hire a PI and have them follow you around for long enough, and they will tell you things about yourself that in some cases you are unaware of.
Once you realize that privacy is an illusion, then you'll be much happier about your life. Playing pretend is a child's game.
Likewise, most people don't care about much o
Re:Stop using Facebook (Score:5, Insightful)
Privacy is an illusion.
Its what we tell ourselves to protect us from what other people might think about us. With enough effort, anyone can gather just about any information about you that they want. Hire a PI and have them follow you around for long enough, and they will tell you things about yourself that in some cases you are unaware of.
Once you realize that privacy is an illusion, then you'll be much happier about your life. Playing pretend is a child's game.
Likewise, most people don't care about much of what you do behind closed doors. Sure there are exceptions, but I can tell you that most ./ers don't give a shit about what's growing in my back yard.
I'm afraid you've drunk the Zuckerbeg Kool-Aid.
Yes, absolute privacy is an illusion. Unless of course you are willing to live as a hermit completely isolated from society. People, of course, at least intuitively, know this. Relative privacy on the other hand, is not an illusion at all - it's a real thing. It's about what we decide to tell or reveal about ourselves to different classes of people. This is a fundamental pillar of social relations. Some things, I tell to no one (although it's conceivable that people could find out about them if they really tried). Some things, I will tell my wife, but not my co-workers...some to my friends, but not my wife...and so on. Of course, those different sets of people could talk to each other and destroy my perception of relative privacy. Which is where we get to another thing: trust.
The whole uproar about privacy in the modern era and its impact by modern technologies is really about two things. The first is exposure. With these new technologies, the vast majority of people have no idea how exposed they are to the world when they are using certain services, and very few of those service providers communicate that in a clear way. It's hard to intuitively understand, because what is done to your data is very opaque to you as a user. The average person will make the connection between using a free service (Free-to-air TV channels, Gmail, Facebook) and being shown ads while they use it: OK, they will say, by serving up advertising they make money since I don't pay them directly. However, the average person will not make the connection between the ads and data gathering (now they might of course after all the news on it, but at the beginning of such services years ago, they would not have). If I read a book (a paper copy), and do not talk about it, no one knows I read it. If I buy a newspaper, nobody knows if I've read the sports section or the cooking section. If I read an article on my phone, tons of apps might be tracking me and seeing what I've read. If I talk to a friend in a cafe, I know that besides my friend, what I said was perhaps overhead by a few people around me. If I chat to that friend over Facebook, Facebook knows the entire content of that conversation...and who know who else as well.
People need to know about this, because if they don't, they will be unwittingly exposed. This can go from the party-pooping (I'm buying a surprise gift for my wife, we share computers, then before her birthday Google and Facebook ads spam her for the exact thing I bought - no longer a surprise) to the life-destroying (I have a fight with my wife, think of divorce, google it up but then forget about it - then at maybe a very bad time, she realizes I was doing this via some Google Ad or whatever, and things get worse). That doesn't mean we should limit people's exposure at all times. It means people have a right to know what exposes them - so that they can choose what and when to expose to whom - to protect their relative privacy.
The second issue is trust. If I say something to a friend, I have some expectations about whether he will share this information, and with whom: I have a certain level of trust in him regarding the protection of my (relative) privacy. With Facebook and the like, the level of trust you
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A nice profile? It's going to be a substantially fuzzier profile than what they get if you directly feed them (and even personally curate!) information.
Also, if you're not using it, then friends and family have less incentive to endure it.
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don't worry, they can put together quite a nice profile of you from all of your friends and family that still use it.
I don't have any friends or family, you insensitive clod!
Re: Stop using Facebook (Score:2, Insightful)
my hero for quitting FB so long ago. the smartest people never used it in the first place (or my space or friendster for that matter).
it's such a privacy nightmare I don't understand how anyone would choose to.
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I stopped in 2011
stop talking and ravage me
tell me about how you dont have a tv too
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If Facebook's policies piss you off so much, stop using it (I stopped in 2011).
And yet here you are on Slashdot? Ok.. I believe you..
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Tell it to employers who want a FB account, or disqualify you from being hired, as you are a "fossil."
Tell that to organizations that do all their group stuff on FB, because it is free, easy to manage, and works well.
If you really have to be on FB, for the reasons you mention above, you can always create a very basic profile. Name and picture. Nothing else there. Nothing that anyone couldn't get just by Googling you. That's what I would do if I needed to have FB to get hired (I mean, first I would try to avoid having to work for an employer who requires me to have a *personal* Facebook profile prior to being hired...because that employer is likely and idiot. I understand of course that some people have no choice).
Tell that to people who want a one stop "watering hole" for socialization.
Not ex
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Like you, I stopped using Facebook.
The feeling that I got doing that was VERY similar to when I stopped smoking.
To put the finest point on it: It was the feeling of withdrawal from an addiction.
An addiction with both physical and psychological components.
It was then that I knew two things:
1. People aren't going to quit without a very compelling self-interest reason that overrides an addictive attachment.
2. The future will look back on us allowing children to have social media accounts as an incredibly horri
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Like you, I stopped using Facebook.
The feeling that I got doing that was VERY similar to when I stopped smoking. To put the finest point on it: It was the feeling of withdrawal from an addiction. An addiction with both physical and psychological components.
It was then that I knew two things:
1. People aren't going to quit without a very compelling self-interest reason that overrides an addictive attachment.
2. The future will look back on us allowing children to have social media accounts as an incredibly horrible evil that we were at first too ignorant and then too lazy, to do anything about.
If I could moderate this discussion, I'd mod you up. I totally agree.
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If Facebook's policies piss you off so much, stop using it (I stopped in 2011). It's not like you have a subscription you paid for the year and now have to use up to get your money's worth or something. Just log off. Delete your account. Say no.
You can live without Facebook. It's not necessary. If they change their ways, you can always go back. Nothing will get Facebook to change the way they operate like losing millions of users really quickly. If users just bitch about, but keep using it, nothing substantial will change. If people start leaving in droves, then they will change things.
If only it were that easy. Network effect.
It's almost like saying "just give up your phone, don't use phone calls". After all, you can live without a phone.
Yeah, you can do that ... sort of. Tell everyone "no more phone calls for me."
And you can get all your friends, family, and associates to use some other communications channel just for you. In a dream world.
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If only it were that easy. Network effect.
It is that easy. I've done it long ago. As have many other people.
It's almost like saying "just give up your phone, don't use phone calls". After all, you can live without a phone.
Yeah, almost like that...except that it isn't really. You can't really compare it to a phone back in the pre-internet days (you could compare it to a phone in current times...now it is conceivable to live without a phone entirely, as long as you have internet access and people can reach you through other means). Phones used to be the only method for real-time long-distance voice communication...also, the simplest way for most people. Facebook
It's good to be the King (Score:1)
That is all.
Time to Update the Quote (Score:3)
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it, but thy request to Mr. Zuckerberg can obliterate it from history if he wills it.
As usual (Score:2)
It's good to be the King.
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It's just a glitch in the Matrix (Score:2)
Re: Who is behind this (Score:4)
Facebook is Cancer (Score:1)
And Zuckerberg and Sandberg (the latter of whom is on a nationwide media dissembling tour) are lying sacks of shit.
Facebook 2020 == MySpace 2010 (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Facebook 2020 == MySpace 2010 (Score:4, Interesting)
I wish you were correct, but my real guess is that Facebook will continue until something just as intrusive, or more, replaces it in popular fashion.
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I think that you grossly are overestimating intelligence of the general public. Have you seen who they elected as their president in the US?
This is why I take backups of my inbox (Score:1)
I always backup my company in/out boxes. That way if there's ever a problem I have the messages. If I worked at Facebook I'd probably get millions in bribe money.
Because they can? (Score:1)
"These included limiting the retention period for Mark’s messages in Messenger."
Are they still Mark's messages if he sent them to somebody's inbox?
If Mark writes a snail mail and mails it to Baker,
then it is called Mark's letter but is owned by Baker.
Mark can't disappear it because he no longer owns it.
Why should E-mail and retention policies be any different?
The answer is because they can.
Might be a tactical error if you are trying to show the world that you are not getting too powerfu
Don't add an unsend option (Score:5, Insightful)
Facebook should just admit that the execs of the company have that and more powers and the
ability to exercise more actions than mere mortals when it comes to messaging tools and access
to data on the website, because clearly they do.
Unfortunately they don't yet have control of users' e-mail accounts, so they can't yet delete receipts or E-mail based proofs,
although they might in the future tweak the feature that sends messages to E-mail accounts to prevent it from being used to
prove a message was sent.
just announced that it will give all users an option to unsend messages.
That's bullshit. Once you send a message and someone's read it;
what to do with the copy of the message within their Inbox should be their decision.
I could think of dozens of different scenarios where I would want to keep a message against the sender's
desires, such as evidence of wrongdoing, OR evidence to protect me (E.g. Proof they directed me to do X), and they should have no say in that.
Re: Don't add an unsend option (Score:2)
Good policy (Score:2)
We do something nasty.
You complain.
We let you do the same nasty things to others.
You are happy.
We win.
You've lost.
Too bad (Score:2)
You can delete a message or recall an email, but you can't ever get rid of the account and all the data they have on you and will continue to collect, aggregate, and market.
How convenient, apropos Congress testimony (Score:1)
How convenient, considering Zuckerberg's upcoming testimony before Congress, I don't suppose he had anything to hide, nor was he worried about contradicting anything he said on line that might enter the public record? Of course not.
Surely he's as honest and trustworthy as everyone in Congress. Right?!
It is merely a coincidence that he debuted this new message deletion feature at this particular time. Obviously.
Wiped them like with a cloth, he did: “No witness, no crime.”
It is surprising that there is any outrage. (Score:3)
Farmers maintain a minimum Quality of Life for animals so that they can be managed. This is generally kept at the commercially minimal level so the animals don't die, and produce the optimal quantity and quality of product.
Facebook is no different.
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Okay. Next option wanted. (Score:2)
Update: Facebook has just announced that it will give all users an option to unsend messages.
An option to unsend all the data they've collected from us through third-parties, especially people w/o Facebook accounts (you know, the ones with "shadow profiles") ...
"all users an option to unsend" (Score:2)
"all users an option to unsend"
And pedophiles and cyberbullies the world over are now cheering...