There is no way I will go down that route. That's defeat and it simply will not happen with me being an enabler. If that means I'll miss out on the occasional party then so be it.

How is that defeat? I have no desire to waste my precious time in an unwinnable arms race. My freedom of action and self-expression are my primary operational need, and I don't want to spend my life creeping around trying to conceal every fact about myself that might be employed as an attack vector. That's not liberty.

Don't you get it? It's not just about you. It's about all around you.

When you're using Facebook, you are doing 2 things: first, you reveal the personal information of everyone around you (bit by bit, each time you reveal your personal information). Second, you strengthen the network effect that incite, sometimes even force people to cave in, use Facebook themselves, and thus reveal their private information.

You don't know it, but using Facebook is not just a personal choice. It's a political choice.

Who are these people around me whose information I'm revealing, pray tell?

You don't know it, but using Facebook is not just a personal choice. It's a political choice.

I do know that, I don't know why you would think otherwise. Whether you understand my political motives is another question, though it's clear you don't agree with them.

I assumed your self-centred argument (your freedom, your needs…) stemmed from an oversight. I assumed you didn't know, or consider, the effect you have on others by using Facebook (specifically, giving up information about them, and strengthening the network effects that sometimes force people to use Facebook even if they don't want to).

But now you're telling me you're aware of these issues… I don't want to assume, but you sure look like an egotistical bastard at this point. Or a cynic. I'm not sure which is worse.

> But now you're telling me you're aware of these issues… I don't want to assume, but you sure look like an egotistical bastard at this point. Or a cynic. I'm not sure which is worse.

That seems a bit extreme... The effect on others is pretty minimal, what is so bad about using Facebook just because you like it, despite the small side effects on others? So your saying that anyone who uses Facebook after hearing about shadow accounts is a 'egotistical bastard'?

Depends on the expected magnitude of the effect. If small enough, you're still good. There are also ways to mitigate those effects, such as lurking only, never tag anything, use the "like" wisely…

It's not just about shadow accounts, by the way. There are more direct effects. For instance I was once forced to set up an account for logistic reasons (they used Facebook extensively, if not exclusively). Worse, when I tell them I didn't got some news (because I didn't check that account very often, and I turned off the very annoying notifications), they say "but I sent the mail" (they only used Facebook). I have since "deleted" my account, good riddance.

So, the effect on me was direct and significant. Depending on how you use Facebook, you can have a similar effect. The worst you can do is set up events and invitations on Facebook only, forcing your friends to either use Facebook, or drift apart.

You are now officially part of the problem.

But I'm under no obligation to limit my own utility so as to maximize the pool of people who are not on FB so that your digital footprint is proportionately more shallow, Jacques.

Suppose, in any case, that I persuaded my valued social circle (perhaps 10 intimates, 40 casual friends, 150 acquaintances) to move off FB to some other platform. This is unlikely as I'm not the only or most important reason reason they're on FB, but anyway: what would be different? OK, there would be less commercial exploitation of our information, but that doesn't seem like your primary concern. The NSA would, doubtless, still be vacuuming up our conversations just as the NSA vacuums up all the discussions we have here, and can easily cross reference our HN handles with our more detailed and specific identities on other platforms. I could posit a secure platform where everything was encrypted and all interpersonal communications metadata on said platform was cryptographically obscured, but then we'd have 200 going to the same site every day, presumably to communicate with each other in secret. That in itself would be of interest to intelligence gatherers, and how difficult would it be to social engineer oneself into a group of 200 people? Not very, and once inside one has most of the access one needs already because otherwise where is the utility?

I can't help feeling that you're arguing for a very highly highly elaborated version of security through obscurity. I prefer the security of knowing that if anything happens to me it will upset enough people to have negative ramifications for my antagonist. I find the conceit that we can have a situation where private actors enjoy all the benefits of instantaneous and frictionless communication but government actors are enjoined from participating even at the user level by virtue of the political authority they wield neither theoretically nor practically sensible.

> OK, there would be less commercial exploitation of our information, but that doesn't seem like your primary concern.

I wouldn't be so sure. Ads make money for a reason. I'm not sure I want giant corporations to play tricks with my mind so I by their products.

> we'd have 200 going to the same site every day, presumably to communicate with each other in secret.

If all communications were end-to-end encrypted, it wouldn't even look suspicious.

> how difficult would it be to social engineer oneself into a group of 200 people? Not very, and once inside one has most of the access one needs already because otherwise where is the utility?

Consider the costs and the scale. Unencrypted conversations can be archived and indexed at negligible cost. This is what enables mass surveillance. Social engineering however requires that an agent spends time on it. This is expensive, and thus only enables targeted surveillance.

I don't use Facebook either, and I've suffered for it, but I find your analysis here both overly simplistic and hampered by an obsolete framework.

With a billion daily active users, the problem is well beyond the individual human scale. Facebook lives, in its own right. If those users were cells, Facebook would be an organism of quite respectable size. There's only one action I can see, on the part of the individual, that poses a credible risk to the health of the whole.

Find a way to give Facebook cancer, and we can talk about individual actions affecting the problem as a whole. Until then, I don't see what it helps to throw around ultimata, especially ones like yours which in the past have embodied a significant threat of politically motivated violence - not, to be sure, something of which I accuse you, but connotations do matter, and those in particular are not conducive to worthwhile discussion in any way I can see.

I agree with this. Google and FB are semi conscious artificial intelligences. I further doubt that the chief executives or technologists at either firm enjoy direct conversation with said entities - they can communicate with them, but only in the crude reflexive manner of a doctor hitting your knee with a hammer.

I don't think they are conscious, i.e. self-aware, at even a minimal level; it's a human conceit to imagine that such awareness is other than orthogonal to intelligence. And even as intelligence goes, I should have to think theirs, whatever there is of it, is akin to that of an ant colony, rather than anything more like we'd recognize as resembling our own selves - and even that is really something of a philosophical point.

In any case, I'm less interested in parsing details of precisely which speculative definitions of artificial intelligence Facebook taken as a whole might satisfy, than taking the view (if perhaps only for the sake of this argument) that it does certainly satisfy at least some definitions of life based on its behavior, in particular its evident tropisms toward growth and self-preservation, for which no particular intelligence is even necessary - kudzu need not be intelligent to be a pestilential and highly effective thief of the resources required for a proper ecology to thrive.

Unless you remember every conversation you've ever had on one of their services word for word, they also know more about you than you do.