Automatic Facebook couple pages: Nauseating sign of desperation A week after Facebook introduced the nauseating idea of automatic couple pages, it has been rolled out to users across the globe, inducing reactions such as: "creepy and intrusive", "retch-inducing" and "smug". Facebook's new couple page, credit Facebook Here is your relationship Facebook users who have listed themselves …
Yep, me and the missus are on there.
After I'd stopped throwing up, I began to wonder what Facebook are doing about the security side of things. Me and 'er indoors have separate settings to control who can see what, so can anyone see this page? Highest common denominator of settings? Something else entirely that I can't find the options for?
I'm seriously thinking about killing my Facebook account now, but I'm afraid that if I stop liking the "Physicists 4 Angular Momentum" page, the world may stop turning...
Absolutely. I have the same attitude as you do there. As I've posted elsewhere, my approach to Facebook is that I post nothing on there that I wouldn't sign on the countertop of a police station in front of an officer.
What I might post in El Reg comments threads, on the other hand...
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Getting off of facebook...
Remember, when you go for the kill of your account and start to remove the posts you've made, plan on doing it over a few weeks. Just quitting facebook doesn't get your information out and just abandoning it could see it used for anything. Give it time and go down your wall and pull off all your posts, then as you empty that queue, their servers will dig down and start to pull up older posts. Eventually, you'll get to posts you've made on *other* people's pages - and THAT is the stuff that keeps you perpetually in their system.
Get all of that deleted so when you log in you will have NO posts on your wall/timeline page.
At that point, start to 'unfriend' people. Do this dead last, as if you do it first, you'll not be able to delete posts you've made on their pages and you'll be stuck in facebook's system.
You know that you've done it correctly, if when you login after a month or so, FB is showing you random names of people that you do not know.
Took me six weeks to get all my data OFF of facebook.
Good luck.
I can't wait for the inevitable lawsuit that will arise when Facebook automatically makes a Couples Page for a closeted gay couple. Even better will the blow back when Facebook automatically makes a Couples Page for a closeted gay couple who live in a repressive country, like Iran, where being gay gets you the death penalty.
My my, what has Zuckerberg wrought?
Me and my wife scaled back our Facebook presence - we now basically just use the messenger part of it to contact friends who no longer bother with email/phones.
I'm tempted to mark ourselves as married and see how Facebook copes with a couple with no mutual photos, likes, comments or wall postings!
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"Every time there is a Facebook story, there is someone saying that they don't have an account (either never had or deleted theirs).
What exactly are you adding to this?"
I wasn't personally involved in the Peterloo massacre either, but I may have opinions about it.
(Hint, people have opinions about things, that's what the comments system is for, you bellend)
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Except that the sentiment at issue is mostly ""I've never been in a massacre, because they seem like a bit of a bad idea".
I suspect you probably also have thoughts about things that you've never done too- unless you're one of those rare mountaineering tantric breakdancing orchestral astronauts?
(If you are, links to videos, stat)
I can see you guys wouldn't like the feature, because
a)you can count your friends on one hand
b)neither you or your equally nerdy few friends are in relationships
Still, let's mature and say a feature we don't like is stupid, and anyone who doesn't agree with you is also stupid. Doesn't make you look like the dumb-ass in this situation. Nope, not one bit.
> Still, let's mature and say a feature we don't like is stupid, and anyone who doesn't agree with you is also stupid. Doesn't make you look like the dumb-ass in this situation. Nope, not one bit.
You could always read what people actually say. They are calling it nauseating and creepy. In fact, the only place the word "stupid" occurs in the comments is in your comment.
There's theoretically nothing wrong with it, but to do it without asking me, without giving me any control over the content, without allowing me to see what the privacy controls are set to, allowing me to change them or allowing me to delete it is completely unconscionable.
This would be better served by something created on the fly when you want to look at it that could also be turned into a page if you want, not something like this.
So......
April and Bob are in a relationship, Facebook the ever friendly stalker creates a page for them. April splits up with Bob and starts doing the horizontal boogie with Charles. One thing leads to another - BLAMMO! - April is now seeing Charles....
Does April/Bob page get deleted?
Or are we left with hundreds of pages of April's conquests, successfully and fauthfully?
Beer, because they must've been on some good stuff when they came up with this one!
Nope...
What happens is that the ex finds out shes with someone else, gets his prize uzi out (lovingly converted with a .45 ACP receiver & micro uzi bolt set), goes to her place of work/favourite bar and conducts a scientific test on how many women and children you can cut in half in the space of two 30 round magazines.
The police turn up and shoot him. Facebook gets off scot free & the girl spends the rest of her life learning about the results of 5 .45 hits to the abdomen and their effect on the internal organs...
And everyone lives happily ever after, except the dead ones...
If thats aimed at me then you should be aware... There was a boy of 17 stabbed to death in my town and both facebook and twatter are implicated in the arrangements for his ' ceasing to be a problem'. Thats not to mention the three women shot by exes, or in one case batty parents, various teens raped & murdered, and the odd stalking case related to facebook - and thats just off the top of my head. Still think I am odd for loathing the zuckwit and the IPO he rode in on?
"Still think I am odd for loathing the zuckwit and the IPO he rode in on?"
Don't blame the tool for what the idiot who used it did with it. Violent retards will always find a way to cause trouble. You think those people wouldn't have used a phone if facebook or twitter didn't exist? If people are worried about their security then they shouldn't post personal information on a public forum. End of.
What is it you fail to get? No Zuckwit = no Facebook. No Facebook = couple not violently murdered for unfriending murderers daughter on Facebook. No Facebook incitement to murder = no murder.
Its called a chain of causality by the cops.
Now, if I go and tell someone falsely that someone else is a pedo and that someone else ends up on the wrong side of a katana, the police will charge me so quick my feet won't touch. All well and good. Facebook outs teens as gay, putting them at risk of their lives and enables murder and other crimes, and all that happens is people whinge over crappy share prices. Both situations there is culpability, the individual ends up starring in a Diane Fossey documentary, the corporate CEO walks away with millions. Can someone explain to me, like I'm 5 years old, how that's in any way 'right'?
facebook doesn't do any of these things. "People" do these things, liek the old saying, guns don't kill people, people kill people.
Sure facebook may make it easier, but it doesn't do it.
You telling someone that x is a peado is no different to you typing on facebook or twitter that x is a peado, it's still on you, not the medium you choose to communicate it.
I think my 5 year old could undestand that, can you?
But guns do make it a bloody sight easier to kill in the heat of passion, and also make it less dangerous for the killer as they can shoot their victim from afar, instead of having to get up close and personal.
Guns make it much easier to kill. They reduce the obstacles that would otherwise get in the way of an angry scrote and his intended victim. Those obstacles get in your way, slowing you down and giving you more opportunities to reflect and withdraw. That's the problem. Gun control isn't about banning guns entirely (although there really is no excuse for carrying one on your person at all times. Seriously: you do not live in the Wild West any more.)
Technology – and guns are also technology – is all about making things easier to do. Guns are a labour-saving device, like a washing machine. To pretend that guns are utterly harmless and should be made freely available is the height of idiocy. (And, of course, it's unlikely the authors of the US Constitution's Second Amendment had modern weaponry in mind when drafting it. The word "arms" also covered lances, knives and pitchforks. The word used is "arms", not "firearms".
A good revolver would set you back $17 – around $300 in today's money – which is outside the range of most of the population at the time, for whom $1-3 / day was considered a decent wage. A Winchester rifle was $40 – $700 in today's money; the equivalent of buying an iPad. Even ammunition cost 50 cents, which is a substantial chunk of a day's pay for the poorer workers.
It's clear that, in the context of the time when that Second Amendment was signed into law, firearms were unlikely to have been foremost in the legislators' minds. It was an age of cavalries, cannons and lancers. The hoi polloi were not expected to have guns in their handbags.
"What is it you fail to get? No Zuckwit = no Facebook. No Facebook = couple not violently murdered for unfriending murderers daughter on Facebook. No Facebook incitement to murder = no murder."
Oh grow up FFS. If you want to do down that line of reasoning then you might as well call for every means of communication to be shut down.
"Oh noooess! Someone upset someone else by text message and caused a fight - quick , lets ban SMS!"
"Oh noooesss , someone ordered a hit by phone - quick , lets ban phones! Graham-Bell was like totally eeevil dude!"
Do you realise what a complete moron you sound?
"What is it you fail to get? No Zuckwit = no Facebook. No Facebook = couple not violently murdered for unfriending murderers daughter on Facebook. No Facebook incitement to murder = no murder."
No Zuckerberg = someone else comes up with the same thing under a different name.
No facebook = crazy stalker stalks people using some other means.
It seems more than a little like looking for someone to blame when someone goes crazy and kills a bunch of people. What was the last thing the killer drank? X Cola? Ban X cola now! What, he was wearing clothes when he did it? Ban clothes!
In other words, just because X might lead to Y, and Y might lead to Z, doesn't mean X leads to Z. I think you may need to go back to school and study 'causality 101' again.
"Facebook outs teens as gay, putting them at risk of their lives and enables murder and other crimes"
If you're living around people whose lives are endangered if their homosexuality is revealed, you have problems a fuck of a lot more systemic than Facebook, like basic failure of civilised society. I think you're flailing around for someone or something easy and simple to blame, rather than addressing the main issue.
@jemma:
> Facebook outs teens as gay, putting them at risk of their lives and enables murder and other crimes,
Not a fan of facebook, but teen in your example did themselves place that information on public forum. If they didn't want to be outed, surely they would keep that information to theyselves, hmm?
I hate Facebook as much as most people but I have to say that they are not responsible here.
No Facebook != couple not violently murdered for unfriending murderers daughter on Facebook
No Facebook = couple violently murdered for ignoring murderers daughter at party/insulting her new dress/splashing mud on her shoes/doing almost any trivial thing that upset her enough for her clearly unstable father to take dispropertionate retribution
If a company makes hammer intended for hammering in nails and someone uses one to bash someones brains in it is not the companies fault. You can't say that the murder would never have happened in a world without hammers, because the murderer would have found something else.
Also people managed to plot and incite murders, riots and all kinds of mayhem long before Facebook and Twitter. I imagine that if you took social media sites away the people who do these things through facebook twitter would be doing the same thing with email, or text messages, or notes passed round and quite converstaions in the pub
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meh all this is true, but could you really blame zuckerburg for putting the platform there? I think its more a downfall of the human race that they resort to childish bitching and bullying over a computer. Granted, if it wasnt in place online then less beef would happen, BUT you have to have the idiot mindset in the first place to go on FB and post death threats, cock pictures etc.
Its kinda like a digital jeremy kyle at some points, but without ya boy Jezza to moderate.
"both facebook and twatter are implicated in the arrangements for his ' ceasing to be a problem'"
now are you trying to say that he would still be alive if twatter(sic) and facebook had not been around? Well in that case you can also lay blame on the maker of the knife and the shop that sold it, and while you are at it lay blame on creation and evolution as responsible for the construction and layout of the human body that designed it in such a way that it is susceptible to catastrophic failure due to puncture wounds with sharp implements...
you can blame nobody but the person who used the weapon responsible for the death of another person, no matter what the surrounding facts are !!,
"If you have enjoyed shagging this person, why not try shagging other people enjoyed by them?"
I got it from Agnes
She got it from Jim
We all agree it must have been Louise who gave it to him
She got it from Harry who got it from Marie
And everybody knows that Marie...
Got it from me
Giles got it from Daphne
She got it from Joan
Who picked it up in County Cork a-kissin' the Blarney Stone
Pierre gave it to Sheila who must have brought it there
He got it from Francois and Jacques...
Haha, Lucky Pierre
Max got it from Edith who gets it every spring
She got it from her Daddy who just gives her everything
She then gave it to Daniel whose spaniel has it now
Our dentist even got it...
And we're still wondering how
Ah, but I got it from Agnes
Or maybe it was Sue
Or Millie or Billie or Gillie or Willie - it doesn't matter who
It might have been at the club or at the pub, or in the loo
And if you will be my friend then I might...
(Mind you, I said "might")...
Give it to you
(Tom Lehrer)
To turn off seeing data which is already available, and simply presented in a different format? Who cares. If you don't want that data on FB, don't tell them about your relationship. But sine the entire point of a social network is to build connections, you've probably missed the point and shouldn't use the service.
If you don't use the service, then your commentary on what FB should or shouldn't do is fairly pointless. It'd be like someone who can't drive talking about what's wrong with the new Ferrari.
You almost had a point, right up until the bit where real-life businesses started becoming more and more integrated with Facebook(tm). After that point it starts getting progressively harder to NOT have anything to do with Facebook.
I was all set to sign up for the Spotify service when it became clear that it was turning out to be a really good streaming music service ... the door slammed shut on that idea with it turns out you HAVE to have a Facebook account to join Spotify. Even more irritating, Last.FM - which I do have an account on, switched to using Spotify as its streaming play-on-demand service , so I'm double screwed.
Maybe I'm just being belligerant, but I have started to disassociating myself with companies I deal with who of late have started insisting that I 'Like' them on Facebook. Personally I prefer to live my life without Web 2 "social media" - there exist plenty of ways to communicate and share stuff without Web 2.0 that aren't necessarily any worse, and in fact offer you greater individual freedom.
While I respect that fact that a lot of younger people get a lot out of it (I fondly remember the days of bulletin boarding over dial-up modem where people used to 'hang out' in a primitive on-line way!!) I'm getting annoyed with being co-erced into signing up for reasons other than my own needs.
Mormons don't have multiple spouses, certainly not legally. That was rather a long time ago.
Romney certainly only has one wife; to suggest otherwise is simply ignorant AND stupid because polygamy is illegal in the USA and nobody would get to run for president without their party running very thorough background checks due to the uproar if something like this was found.
So they're mashing up public data where people have actively chosen to set up a link between accounts? What a horribly creepy thing to do...
And as for the couples page - are people really scared that this is a privacy issue? The URL www.facebook.com/us sort of gives the game away that it's going to be specific to each user, with no (intentional) way of seeing those of others.
Don't get me wrong. Facebook do lots of potentially creepy stuff, but it must be a slow news day if this is the privacy scare of the moment...
Oh, I'm not. I won't let Facebook make any assumptions about me, because I wouldn't touch them with yours. But assume makes an ass out of u and me. And I think anyone would and should have the right to determine how and when others see their interactions with someone else. It's the online equivalent of someone patrolling the park entrance and supergluing together the hands of anyone who enters the gates as a "couple".
Not only that, but it's a change to an established thing, as the person somewhere here who had "married" someone else for some other reason to do with finding a way around Facebook's interface.
Except there isn't anything there other than what you and your partner put on there. So it's not like there is any information on that page that isn't already on your (or your partners) FB page. The only possible issue is privacy leaks if you have different settings on things (or different "friends" on FB), but as long as that's taken care of sensibly there really isn't much to be upset about.
It might be a bit twee and I'm not really sure there is much of a point to it, but there's also little reason to get bothered about it.
Bingo... content aggregation at its best... this is what facebook is for, you sign up, you sell your personal data to them in return for webhosting... they then market your details in various ways...
This can only help couples on FB, just think... you have broken up with your beloved, your in tears, close to the edge, this saves the task of putting up a gut wrenching attention grabbing status... you just change your marital status and everyone is instantly emailed...
Christ, ive seen an upside!! just friend all the fit girls you can find, when you get the automated breakup email, dive in for some rebound sex!!
That's what I was asking myself too. It's not like typing the /us will allow me to see other couple's pages. Silly, yes; stalker-enabling? Hardly. But then...
But then I tried something else, which I do not know whether it was available before this. I went to a married friend's page. I've never met his wife, and she's not a "friend" on FB either. The word married in "Married to ..." was a link. When I clicked on it, it created a page showing the relationship. A URL of the form www.facebook.com/user_name1?and=user_name2
Of course then I tried to replace user2 with my user tag or whatever it's called. Voi là, a page showing my FB relationship to my friend. It's the same as clicking on the "see friendship" link on a friend's page. So, it's not couple specific, and nothing new I assume. Just a new, teenage-ish URL, to do something that was already possible. Or did I miss something.
Can't wait to see Google+ respond to this with "Google Relationship Analytics" - number of partners, amount of sexual intercourse with each one, average length of relationship, country of origin... All laid out in cute pie and line graphs.
(Although the "Audience Retention" graph might be somewhat depressing for some...)
Remember when google was one of many competing search engines, but the only one with a clean no-hassle start page that did what it said on the tin and nothing else? Remember how they did quite well out of that? Now does anyone remember altavista? AOL? Thought so. Facebook, your days are numbered.
Acceleration to fb' "end of days" would come if 3/4 of users posted in thei pages, "ll, 60% of things i post to fb are false, misleading, and confusing to verify. From DAY ONE!"But, i suspect that fb would filter those words out before sponsors and downstream buyers see our posts aggregated for them...
AltaVista died off because (a) Google came along and gave better results (b) there is pretty much no reason to remain loyal to a search engine, you've invested nothing in it.
To get people away from Facebook requires something much better to come along to justify giving up all the invested time in FB to rebuild it all on a different social network. The luke warm response to Google+ (is it still going?) should be pretty good evidence of that. And every single day that passes with people uploading more stuff to FB, it becomes less and less likely they'll see value in moving away from it.
Most browsers make a privacy / incognito mode that is useful for surfing pr0n. Using that should shake off the tracking cookies that are building a profile of your "interests".
Remember: targeted advertising crosses websites thanks to modern ad networks.
Nice theory, but I can pretty much guarantee I'm not getting served "meet singles" ads because of pr0n habits. I know all about remarketing since its something I have to do for a living. FB are serving me irrelevant crap because they stopped paying lip service to targeting and user control a while ago when it turned out they needed the money quick smart. I also get shitloads of betting ads and I've never stepped inside a bookies or used an online gambling site in my life.
The bastards are already wise to that one.
If you turn off tracking, the ruddy ad networks serve a continuous diet of singles sites, russian/asian babes chatrooms, gambling and everything else from their seedier range.
I think it's a deliberate attempt to get you to cough up your data.....
You haven't met one of my ex's then. Most people take labradors for a 'walk' not something that shares most of the same letters...
Its amazing how that image sticks in the mind even years later. I think the technical term is a woofgasm.
I'll (not) have what shes having...
I can't begin to describe how happy am I that I have never created a FB account. I was happy before, discouraging people from FB, but this is a great way to make it clear that it's going exactly where I thought it would.
In other words, Facebook is the spawn of satan stealing your thoughts, blahblah.
Aside from the "/us" link, which only you can go to for obvious reasons, all this does is takes two people and presents the common parts of their timelines. Look at the URL and you see the other person; change it to someone else and it gives the events you have in common with them. After clicking on the link on here and seeing stuff in common with my partner, I tried it with my son and an acquaintance. It's nothing to do with relationship data, and the page is generated on the fly, so it's not like someone's comment on pages of past relationships continuing to lurk as self sustaining entities. So, like, chill.
Yep, pretty much my conclusions in another comment.
I also tried generating pages (with the www.facebook.com/user1?and=user2 kind of link) of "relationships" between friends of mine who are not themselves "friended" on FB. It generates a mostly blank page. The most specific thing that appeared was "Living in city, state", since they live in the same city. So yes, generated on the fly, and visible by anyone, it seems.
Looked at mine. Me and and the wife apparently have a page, but the one post is her posting a link to a geeky t-shirt with the phrase "hint" and a lot of photos of my father's chickens and ducks doing silly things which we were both tagged in (I don't untag these since I prefer to pollute the facial recognition database) beside one solitary photo of our wedding day
So I would be a bit annoyed at it except that it's been implemented so badly that it's neither here nor there
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I used to work with a woman called Tracey. At one point in conversation she let it be known that, if she had been born a boy, her parents would have called her Wayne. This led to my asking the following question:
"That's interesting. Your parents, did they own a MkIII Cortina by any chance?"
"Why yes! How on earth did you know th.........."
I was already running by the time the penny dropped.
However we have different online lives to each other, we have a few common family members on the FB friends list but that's where it ends. I have my FB page to showcase some of my photography, she has her genalogy and TV show stuff and never the twain and all that. We have nothing to hide from each other but she wouldn't like me poking my nose into her business and conversations, vice-versa.
This is a creepy thing for those sickening couples who've only been together for 2 weeks and sit all smugly on trains to work giving off that "We wuv each ovver wery wery wery muchy!" vibe! When you've been together and married for 25 years like me and my Missus that's when you know that person inside and out and you also know how to respect each other's limits and boundaries.
Not quite sure what all the vitriol is about with this. It's just a search filter. Ooo. Now, if I could only search for any of the other stuff in my timeline...
My biggest complaint about Facebook is that it's so impossible to search _your own data_. How can you find posts you made four years ago? Even the friend search thing is the crappest search imaginable. That's its most cynical aspect, I find; they are using your data six ways 'til Sunday but they don't seem to want _you_ to be able to use it.
If you're on FB...
All this really is.. is just the "friendship" page for you and your partner. You'll find you have "friendship" pages between you and ALL your friends. If you ever saw a "see friendship" link, that's what it is. This just happens to be the one between you and your partner, is all. I don't see the issue.
That is where my millions of friends hang out, that are just waiting for me to contact them.....
Oh Friends, Glorious Friends - millions of people I have never met till then,
And when I log into Face Bum - there they are not.....
"Oh do you remember me? We used to sit at a desk together when we were 7 years old - nearly 50 years ago?"
"Ohhhhhhhhhh yeah I remember you, I lent you 5c back then and I want it back."
Ummmm sorry wrong school.
Arrrggghh the millions of FRIENDS.... on Face Bum
So the daily Face Bum email goes....
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