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The amount of effort that goes in to making it 'safer' for people to use ridiculously abusive services like this is ridiculous.

This is the tech world's equivalent of a "how to take a punch" class for victims of domestic violence.



That would make sense if the abuse was between individual actors. Domestic violence victims can, in theory, defend themselves with weapons and legal means. This is (to really stretch the analogy) more "how to hide from drones" for targets of a giant, state-tolerated PMC.


Sorry, but no.

People know that (facebook|their partner) is abusing them (privacy-wise|physically) and they choose to continue the relationship.

That's it. No one chooses a relationship with a drone, and to date Facebook haven't found a way to force people to create accounts and continue to use them, at gun-point.



> People know that (facebook|their partner) is abusing them (privacy-wise|physically) and they choose to continue the relationship.

Really bad comparison there.


Well, I don't mean to compare those two very different situations, but that does happen with victims of domestic violence. Many times they choose to remain in the relationship, and out of fear and desperation, they hope things will change, and they rationalize that whatever is happening is partially their fault or not that serious. And many times that ends with the death of a domestic violence victim.


You're hopelessly naive if you think that doesn't happen all the time with domestic violence. It's the rule, not the exception.


That's my point. Domestic violence shouldn't be equaled with Facebook's abuses. Causes, consequences, objectives and methods of entrapment are too much different.

I have experienced domestic violence first-hand and I cringed when I read the word "choose" when describing the situation.


I chose to stop the relationship. It probably still has all my information in a shadow account, and might be collecting SMS messages I exchange with people who maintain FB accounts. Facebook doesn't have to force people to do anything -- are you going to cut off contact with everyone you suspect might possibly have an account, to prevent them from creating a shadow account on you?


The topic is about a browser extension to block them tracking first party activity. That does literally nothing to solve the scenario you described.

It's also no coincidence that their SMS harvesting shenanigans are only possible on Android, the poster child for "fuck privacy I want free shit from a giant creepy company".

Sure, on some level there should be laws about privacy. But this is fucking America we're talking about - it's practically the third world when it comes to the state of basic protections for citizens.


Facebook tracks people who are not users. That has been a reason for lawsuits. I have taken measures to block Facebook trackers in many sites I visit.

So yes, Facebook (among other agents, like Google) is forcing me to follow a course of action that protects my family and myself from intensive data collection, and that many times breaks my browsing and interferes with my work. Forcing HTTPS, blocking cookies, revoking certificates, etc. and then reverting some special cases or creating exceptions on the fly for specific sites I cannot go without is kind of maddening.

Stalking isn't a relationship, but it does force victims to take action.


If you don't want to run arbitrary 3rd party code on your system, don't run arbitrary 3rd party code on your system.


Great! Everyone chose to run 3rd party code because the services provided by that code bring them value and they have no feasible alternative.

Does that suddenly make it okay to completely ignore ethics?


Well, yeah, because the law does jackshit to protect people.




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