<story><title>You Might Have an Invisible Facebook Account Even if You Never Signed Up</title><url>http://www.groovypost.com/news/facebook-shadow-accounts-non-users/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>novum</author><text>Is this it? This is our brave new world of pervasive data gathering, social network analysis, and the dying gasp of any shred of privacy? This is the future we&amp;#x27;ve built for ourselves?&lt;p&gt;I haven&amp;#x27;t had a facebook account for 3 years. I&amp;#x27;m certain FB has a shadow profile for me today and there&amp;#x27;s nothing I can do about it. My friends don&amp;#x27;t understand (or don&amp;#x27;t care about) the implications of everything they do online being tracked, in minute detail, and stored indefinitely.&lt;p&gt;Real-time indefinite mass surveillance is a fact and yet failed to galvanize the public into action. What can I do other than allow the cynicism to take hold and become a recluse?&lt;p&gt;I earn my livelihood from technology. I want to believe technology has great potential for medicine, exploration, and improving the human condition. The cognitive dissonance has to give somewhere.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hyperplane</author><text>You think &lt;i&gt;your&lt;/i&gt; cognitive dissonance is bad? You&amp;#x27;re heaps ahead of where the people that &amp;quot;don&amp;#x27;t care&amp;quot; are. I try to evangelize privacy to friends and family all the time, and 60-80% of the time I am written off or ignored.&lt;p&gt;Most people don&amp;#x27;t seem to want to accept the fact that something terrible may ever happen to them, and will gladly drown out the pain of dealing with a potential future threat to prolong happiness in the short-term. How&amp;#x27;s that for dealing with cognitive dissonance? After all, the easiest way to remove the dissonance is to render the counterargument false without resorting to reason that might shake your emotional foundations.&lt;p&gt;As for your own cognitive dissonance: I don&amp;#x27;t believe that you are death, destroyer of worlds, by default just because you have the ability to build technology, no more so than a man with the capacity to develop firearms is by default a murderer. Improve the human condition, engineer systems toward that goal, and just pay more attention to the question of &amp;quot;what would somebody evil possibly use this product for?&amp;quot; and try to mitigate against the evil bits.&lt;p&gt;If you are terrified of ever having unintentionally built a weapon, then it is best not to be an engineer at all, as nearly every tool can be weaponized in the right environment with some degree of effectiveness by someone that means harm.</text></comment>
<story><title>You Might Have an Invisible Facebook Account Even if You Never Signed Up</title><url>http://www.groovypost.com/news/facebook-shadow-accounts-non-users/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>novum</author><text>Is this it? This is our brave new world of pervasive data gathering, social network analysis, and the dying gasp of any shred of privacy? This is the future we&amp;#x27;ve built for ourselves?&lt;p&gt;I haven&amp;#x27;t had a facebook account for 3 years. I&amp;#x27;m certain FB has a shadow profile for me today and there&amp;#x27;s nothing I can do about it. My friends don&amp;#x27;t understand (or don&amp;#x27;t care about) the implications of everything they do online being tracked, in minute detail, and stored indefinitely.&lt;p&gt;Real-time indefinite mass surveillance is a fact and yet failed to galvanize the public into action. What can I do other than allow the cynicism to take hold and become a recluse?&lt;p&gt;I earn my livelihood from technology. I want to believe technology has great potential for medicine, exploration, and improving the human condition. The cognitive dissonance has to give somewhere.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pasiaj</author><text>If &amp;#x27;has your contact info in a database&amp;#x27; amounts to a &amp;quot;Shadow Profile&amp;quot;, there are quite many shadow profiles of you laying around. It probably has relations to all the people on Facebook who have your contact info added, but overall this is much ado about nothing.</text></comment>