Not exactly an employee benefit!
Robert Scheer has just written a book called “They Know Everything About You”, which I am planning to read this summer. Scheer was a regular columnist for the LA Times, for years. He spoke truth to power when the Bush administration was gearing up for war on Iraq. Sadly, the Times and its parent company, the Chicago Tribune, dropped him from the contributors (as well as the “Boondocks” comic strip).
The current flame-war on the topic of Facebook has two camps. One camp is trying to articulate what they know about Facebook and is concerned; the second camp heaps derision on the first group by equating the first group’s views with fringe conspiracies (9/11, moon-landing, tin-foil-hat, Obama-invades-Texas).
Killian, tholub, Pinoclean: I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt; you can’t actually believe that guilt-by-association can be contrived so sloppily. I wonder, however, if you underestimate the intellect of the people reading the forums. Pshaw, pshaw!
Regarding the fact that all three of you employed the same rhetorical device: conspiratorial, or merely banal?
Actually, I thought you were joking and I was playing along.
If you’re serious, I will point out that conspiracy theorists create airtight loops of circular logic which are unassailable by any rhetorical means. All that’s left to do is deride them.
I will say that I agree that the amount of surveillance the US does of its own citizens is odious. I can’t wait for Dianne Feinstein (co-sponsor of the PATRIOT Act) to retire so California can get an actual progressive senator. But it’s somewhere on the continuum between silly and ridiculous to think that the US’s surveillance programs should have anything to do with whether we talk about unicycle stuff on a public forum indexed by Google, or on a Facebook group. And closer to the ridiculous end.
The US surveillance programs have ‘anything to do’ with EVERYTHING online. That’s sort of the point of bulk data collection. They have a direct plug into the back of Facebook servers to collect all that data, whether it’s about child abuse or unicycles. Just because they’re not necessarily looking at it, doesn’t mean it’s not collected and indexed.
This isn’t nutjob conspiracy theory, this is fact. But even if you took away the US (And other) government surveillance, Facebook is still a hell of a privacy-violating service, specially the Messenger app with its ability to turn on your camera/track all your screen touches (Amongst other things). The thing is though, this site is most probably indexed by the governments too (not directly, but through things such as Google, and all of our ISP’s as well as many other vectors that might get caught up in the dragnet), so it’s more of a question of Facebook creepiness than government creepiness I think, as both places allow for government creepiness! 
This thread is getting close to the Goldwin point… But unicyclists are more clever than that and I’m sure we’ll avoid it.
Entirely right, here is the proof about the fake moon landing:
And you think that’s more true than for the Google servers?
So what?
You really need to stop repeating blather.
Any app you install can request access to your camera. That’s true for the email app you use, for text messaging, for FaceTime, for any app at all. When you are prompted to allow it, you can allow it or not. If you don’t allow it, you can’t take pictures or video with your camera. That’s a personal choice and it has nothing to do with the vendor, who is just providing an app which does what most of its users want it to do.
What a story! Even more ridiculous than the actual story is the harassment from your boss.
Well, they’re welcome to monitor my unicycle blog posts. It is a public forum anyway - all the past posts are stored here for ever! Maybe we’ll get more unicyclists in the government!
Of course not! I would never pretend for a second that Google are any better than Facebook for this sort of thing. But this thread is about Facebook, not G+
And I’m not sure how I’m repeating blather either. Just giving my reasons for trying to steer clear of Facebook apps on my phone.
Indeed it is a personal choice - but most people don’t know the Messenger app (as well as others, probably) do what they do (And how would they?), and is why I’ve spent half my life pushing for non-proprietary alternatives for things like this. Free code = apps you can trust.
There is no ‘blather’ in this. Facebook Messenger is well-known for what I’ve mentioned. Yes, there are others that are just as bad, or worse! Hell, Android itself is a massive surveillance platform (though some of it is open source and so there have been forks/spins of it built on purely free software). This isn’t about tinfoil hattery or crazy conspiracies, it’s about not wanting my data dragnetted in such an easy way for the sake of small amounts of convenience.
But again, as you said, you’re allowed to use Facebook, I’m not stopping you, because that’d be stupid as I use it myself on my desktop. After blocking as much of their trackers, JS and other such of course 
There’s nothing special about the Facebook Messenger app. It has exactly the same permissions as the Google app, your Mail app, Whatsapp, Snapchat, GroupMe, or whatever other tool you use for communication. If you had an open-source app that had access to the camera it would have the exact same permissions.
Maybe you don’t do chatting on your phone, which is fine, but it’s silly to call out the Facebook app for doing exactly what it’s supposed to do. Of course it can monitor whether you’re tapping the phone; how else would it work?
Any app that has permission to use the camera can turn the camera on. That’s the nature of having permission. Is there any evidence that Facebook turns on the camera at any time other than when you’ve asked to take a picture or video? No.
And open source is a solution for exactly nothing here; if the Facebook app were open-source it would still have the permission to use the camera if you gave it permission to use the camera.
Speaking of “exactly nothing”, that’s how much additional privacy protection the posts on unicyclist.com have compared to posts on Facebook.
It’s just completely silly to bring up in this context.
How much time do you guys have??
APPARENTLY TOO MUCH:D
Go ride it off now;)
If this was facebook I would be liking Tholub’s posts.
I am sure goverment’s keep more data than they need to. It doesnt really faze me, I don’t have anything to be worried about (not that they are ever likely to get around to reading my facebook data). I also don’t care about any info facebook keeps. Their no.1 priority is to try and place more appropriate advertisements on my feed. So far they are doing a terrible job. I don’t believe just because they have permission to turn on my camera they are following me around with my camera all day.
If facebook implemented a forum system on groups I would be the happiest in the world.
This forum is the reason why I get ~200 spam email a day. Actually no. It was the Unicycling Mailing List, the email-based discussion group we had BEFORE Gilby created this wonderful place. Those messages were just emails, so my email address was found in the footer of every message I sent, from around 1993 until I moved over to the Unicyclist.com Forums. No harm, no foul, right? Until all those old posts got “archived” to the WWW, where they can now all be found, with my email address on every post.
I still use the same email address. For years I told people I was fighting the spammers, and I would never give up. Only recently I realized that, with all those copies of my email address online in old mailing list posts, the spam will probably never go away. It will keep getting found and harvested by 'bots. So at some point I’m going to change my faithful old email address; the one I’ve been using since 1995. I’ll let you know when that happens (but not by spelling it out for you).
Back to the topic:
What? Facebook has a Unicycle Chat? 
On the bright side, this means unicycling is getting more popular.
Can you image just one forum for all the bikers in the world?
Do they really need an extra forum? I mean, they already have an extra wheel, right?
One of the Snowden documents did mention a specific NSA program used for activating video cameras remotely on people’s portable electronic devices. I would expect Facebook to be thoroughly complicit in this form of spying, though I doubt they are unique in this sense.
It is not just that we are being watched, though, it is who is doing the watching. The surveillance conducted by the capitalist state should not be seen as mere observation. NSA director Michael Hayden put it very bluntly: “We kill people based on metadata.”
30 years ago today, the police dropped a bomb on a house in Philadelphia inhabited by a back-to-nature organization that was predominantly black. 11 people were killed by the explosion and/or the ensuing fire, including five children. The only adult survivor was sent to prison, and a policeman who pulled a boy from the flames was later terrorized by his fellow cops. He quit the police force and now cleans offices for a living…
Actually there’s quite a bit of evidence that it turns the camera on when in use, something about wanting to see where you look at your screen. Not just the Snowden docs - lots of researchers have looked into this. It’s all about advertising, yes, but it’s still a bit weird I think
The reason open source would fix this is, yes the camera permission would be there, but you’d be able to check over the source (or at the very least, get someone trustworthy to do so) to make sure it only uses the camera when you want it to (eg. taking a photo). Sorry, but I’m not willing to take Facebook’s word for it, and the same goes for all the other services you listed
You’re right though that Facebook posts and this forum aren’t private, because obviously anyone can read them. It’s more about the app itself (and others like it, which as you correctly say can be just as bad, if not worse - but this thread is about Facebook not all the others) and its slightly creepy connotations.
I have a bunch of things I want to change and/or upgrade on this site, however, it always seems like I can dedicate some time a couple months from now, and then when a couple months pass, it seems like a couple months away again. Yes, this site is old (created in 2001 and last really updated in 2008) and it needs a good update, but it’s unrealistic for me commit to a timeframe. And I am not sure it would bring those facebook users back.
The facebook related updates I want to have happen include adding a Facebook login, posting new threads to the unicyclist.com facebook page that people can subscribe to, and possibily importing the unicycle chat posts to this site (if there is no legal barrier).
For example: conspiracy theorists are paranoid by nature, therefore they will seek out any information which confirms their paranoid thoughts.
I think the term “conspiracy theorist” was invented by reactionaries, and it is applied freely to skeptics and those finding inconsistencies the details of “official” stories.
While, as some on the forum have argued, the privacy of the general public is decreasing, it seems that the elites of the world, to an unprecedented degree, are able to conduct business in the secrecy of their private jets, boardrooms, golf-courses and yachts. The public is necessarily shut out of these meetings, and that explains the highly speculative nature of conspiracy theories. In other words, speculation fills an information vacuum. To make the conspiracy theories go away, make our government and industry operate in a more transparent fashion. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
Wow, did this thread get hijacked or what! 
Personally I’ve become annoyed lately by “Friends” who seem to think Facebook is a blog where you document your intimate life story in such detail that posts are many paragraphs long and often uncomfortable to read. In this sense I think Twitter got it right by limiting tweets to 180 characters. Having said that I rarely tweet. Also, anything you put online is forever, period. Many should expect to explain their foul language posts in their next job interview. 
I prefer Facebook for a big picture, broad, unsorted view of the world. This forum allows a focused discussion on more specific topics, plus I can search for answers to my questions. Hence I use both.
Yes, the UX in this forum could use an update but it is simple, serviceable and meets the vast majority of user requirements as is. I applaud Gilby’s work here and as a developer understand the “I’ll get to it next month” environment. If an update attracts more people then great, but you can’t force them.