Blummin facebook

[Pegasus]

Hi All,

For those of you who use facebook and have been kind enough to 'like' the UKC facebook page - some help please...

For a few days now I have been unable to share posts I place on facebook to other groups - CHECC for example or 'Cavers of Facebook'    No idea why and almost impossible to get an answer from FB.

Love it or loathe it, fact is sharing threads from UKC onto FB helps promote the forum.

If you see a post on the UKC FB page and would share it, especially to CHECC/Cavers of Facebook/other if relevant, I'd be grateful, thank you 

Pegasus

 

[mudman]

Let me share to the UK Caving and Speleological Community group here

 

[martinb]

Hi All,

For those of you who use facebook and have been kind enough to 'like' the UKC facebook page - some help please...

For a few days now I have been unable to share posts I place on facebook to other groups - CHECC for example or 'Cavers of Facebook'    No idea why and almost impossible to get an answer from FB.

Love it or loathe it, fact is sharing threads from UKC onto FB helps promote the forum.

If you see a post on the UKC FB page and would share it, especially to CHECC/Cavers of Facebook/other if relevant, I'd be grateful, thank you 

Pegasus

Its not just your page, its been happening a lot with other 'commercial' pages as well, as we -sometimes - cannot share our rental property on occasions. Probably something to do with FB's new, improved software update.

 

[GarDouth]

Jane, what exactly is the issue? When you say you can't share do you mean there is no option to do it or that when you try it fails? Is there an error message?

Facebook constantly tighten up privacy as it's the topic of the moment. Couple of things to look at...

If you are sharing a post from your own personal feed you need to make sure the privacy settings are correct. Edit the post and check at the bottom (next to the save button) what it says. If it says something like "friends only" then you won't be able to share it to a public page. You need to change it to "public" then you will get the share button. By default a new post is usually "friends only" by default. You can also set this in a similar way when you post it in the first place.

If you're sharing a link on a public page (UKC's Facebook page for example) you can use the debugger tool to preview what it will look like first: https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug. If it has not been shared on FB before you will get a button that says "scrape again". Click it to get the most up to date details then when you share it, FB already has the details of the page ready.

Hope that helps.

 

[Caver Keith]

I've just tried to share a post from my Caver Keith Facebook page to a Facebook group that I am a member of.
Usually when I start typing in the name of the group, e.g. Cavers of Facebook, Facebook auto-completes the name. It doesn't now, and even when the name of the group is typed in fully the Post button stays inactive.
Is this what you are experiencing, Pegasus?
It does appear to be a glitch at the moment. I'm sure that the nice programmers at Facebook will have it up and running again shortly.

 

[ZombieCake]

Are people still really daft (OK stupid) enough to still use Facebook?  Don't you know it's just a data harvesting site (along with What's App, Instagram, etc.) that just looks at your texts, emails, contacts, and so on and takes them and sells them.

 

[2xw]

Are people still really daft (OK stupid) enough to still use Facebook?  Don't you know it's just a data harvesting site (along with What's App, Instagram, etc.) that just looks at your texts, emails, contacts, and so on and takes them and sells them.

Yeah duh, that's what they're for. Noone can escape that kind of data sharing though. Look how much personal information you yourself have put on this site. Easy enough to build an advertising profile

 

[mikem]

It's how they pay for the site, rather than charging you...

Lots of people have been having trouble uploading pictures to share recently, so may be a more general bandwidth problem.

 

[Pegasus]

Jane, what exactly is the issue? When you say you can't share do you mean there is no option to do it or that when you try it fails? Is there an error message?  No option

Facebook constantly tighten up privacy as it's the topic of the moment. Couple of things to look at...

If you are sharing a post from your own personal feed you need to make sure the privacy settings are correct. Edit the post and check at the bottom (next to the save button) what it says. If it says something like "friends only" then you won't be able to share it to a public page. You need to change it to "public" then you will get the share button. By default a new post is usually "friends only" by default. You can also set this in a similar way when you post it in the first place.  Not sharing from personal feed

If you're sharing a link on a public page (UKC's Facebook page for example) you can use the debugger tool to preview what it will look like first: https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug. If it has not been shared on FB before you will get a button that says "scrape again". Click it to get the most up to date details then when you share it, FB already has the details of the page ready.  Will look at this, thank you, I looked, mumbo jumbo 

Hope that helps.  Not really, but thanks anyway 

 

[Pegasus]

I've just tried to share a post from my Caver Keith Facebook page to a Facebook group that I am a member of.
Usually when I start typing in the name of the group, e.g. Cavers of Facebook, Facebook auto-completes the name. It doesn't now, and even when the name of the group is typed in fully the Post button stays inactive.
Is this what you are experiencing, Pegasus?
It does appear to be a glitch at the moment. I'm sure that the nice programmers at Facebook will have it up and running again shortly.

Yes, that's the problem - blummin facebook

 

[Pegasus]

Are people still really daft (OK stupid) enough to still use Facebook?  Don't you know it's just a data harvesting site (along with What's App, Instagram, etc.) that just looks at your texts, emails, contacts, and so on and takes them and sells them.

How often have I said it...

Facebook, owned by Billionaires, run for profit, mess with your data, don't give a jot about caves, cavers or caving blah blah.  UKC owned by cavers for cavers, not run for profit (any 'profit' put back into caving) and doesn't mess with your data.  The irony when I hear some cavers dissing the forum whilst merrily posting on FB, a social media platform where all sorts of horrid things take place.  Do I want to be spending my time running a UKC FB page?  No, however if you can't beat them.....

Haven't said it for a while - thank you to each and every one of you who use the forum, especially to those who post, like and contribute 

 

[GarDouth]

I don't particularly want to defend Facebook and it's billionaire fat cat owners but despite it's (many) downsides it is still a useful tool used by millions of people including many thousands of cavers. If you haven't seen Facebook for a while or draw your opinions of it from other media, it has change a LOT in recent years and if used properly and sensibly it works well.

Selling data? Yeah probably but they can only sell what you give them and personally I don't think it's anything like as corrupt as the press would have you believe.

For business and PR its by far the best FREE (that's FREE) advertising tool. I use it a huge amount for CNCC, Hidden Earth and York Caving Club and the amount of positive attention it gets for these organisations can not be dismissed. It has been a very important tool in getting good, positive information about conservation and access out to cavers who don't use UKC. It's impact on peoples opinions of CNCC over the last few years has been massive.

UKC is also a social media platform and does fantastic work. I would always say use UKC first but they both have a place and indeed one can compliment the other. The UKC Facebook Page has almost 3000 followers which is a lot more than use the forum.

If you don't want to use Facebook that's your choice but a LOT of people do and it has a huge caving community with some really interesting stuff to see from all over the world. It's pretty easy to avoid the bad stuff.

 

[GarDouth]

Are people still really daft (OK stupid) enough to still use Facebook?  Don't you know it's just a data harvesting site (along with What's App, Instagram, etc.) that just looks at your texts, emails, contacts, and so on and takes them and sells them.

Hmm. I'm interested to see your evidence for this. Do you think Microsoft, Google or Apple are any better? I'm willing to bet you use at lease one of these services.

 

[ZombieCake]

Selling data? Yeah probably but they can only sell what you give them

Nope, it gathers data from non-users as well.  https://www.recode.net/2018/4/20/17254312/facebook-shadow-profiles-data-collection-non-users-mark-zuckerberg

I was at a Identity Management conference recently and one of the speakers posed an interesting conundrum: If you have Whats App on your phone and company information there's a good chance you may be in breach of GDPR.  The contacts are probably OK with having their info on your phone but are unlikely to have given consent for Whats App (Facebook owned company) to take that data and sell it, which they probably have, if things aren't locked down.  That's why all those companies' apps want access to contacts, texts, etc. so they can merrily trawl through your various devices.
While these companies may have some use and are a necessary evil it is best have both eyes open as to what they actually do.  And yes they probably are all at it to varying degrees of deviousness, and some will even sell you home surveillance devices with microphones to monitor you further!

 

[2xw]

WhatsApp is encrypted, they can't and don't sell your data. In fact, selling any of your data would be an offense, so that theory is obviously a conspiracy.

WhatsApp obviously wants access to your contacts and texts because...  You use it to send texts to your contacts so the app couldn't function without it.

It also wouldn't make good business sense to sell your data, because then they lose control of it. What they do sell is the ability for advertisers to target specific demographics.

 

[ZombieCake]

Since when did some of these organisations bother with minor things like complying with legislation?

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/04/26/facebook_sued_again/

Quote from article:
'...Zuck's bunch admitted siphoning contacts books from 1.5 million people's email accounts without permission, snaring potentially hundreds of millions of netizens' contact details as a result. Folks signing up to use the social network were asked to hand over their email account passwords so the site could verify automatically that the accounts were valid, during which it also hoovered up all the contacts' details it could from those inboxes.'

 

[2xw]

I'll bear that in mind in case I go to Ireland, Canada, or the US soon.

What I think you're missing here is that email addresses and contact details aren't really private information. People can see them in the same way they can buy the address of your house to market to.

You don't seem to be so worried about the genuinely private data about you which is collected and sold whenever you own a phone, or have a bank account, or buy any type of insurance.

I'd be far more worried about our own government given they want to create a database full of everybodies sexual proclivities in a few months.

 

[ZombieCake]

I give up!

 

[2xw]

Well, it's just a little like being stood in the middle of the motorway and worrying about being hit by a horse

 

[Badlad]

Does anyone else see the irony in the acceptance that these huge companies regularly harvest and use our data for profit whilst the poor old BCA lives in fear of sending its own harmless newsletter out to its own members for no real reason other than to offer a more useful service.