Ask HN: Invited by Facebook for privacy roundtable. What questions should I ask?

1. How can one find out about their shadow profiles that have been created by FB?

2. How can they delete the data associated with the above?

3. Info on how they group personal data from WhatsApp, FB and Instagram

4. Who do they share such data with?

5. Who within FB is responsible for privacy policies, etc.?

I would ask a more generic question.

What's the right level of control users should have over their data?

Then as a follow up I would ask what's keeping Facebook from implementing those controls.

Unless this was already covered in an acceptable way after the Cambridge Analytica f*ckup (I haven't followed what actions Facebook took afterwards to address the issue), I would also ask about what are they doing about policing bad actors, companies trawling or leaking users' private information or abusing it. How are they going to better prevent that in the future. Once it's outside of Facebook they've already lost control of the situation.

1. Do your apps upload metadata and/or thumbnails from photos to which they’re permissions to access, but which aren’t explicitly selected by the user for posting/uploading?

2. Do your apps “skim” the contents of device clipboards and send this info off device without user intent to do so?

And one open-ended question to try to gauge how open they’re being about the whole process:

3. What information do you collect that would surprise or upset privacy-conscious individuals?

Well, The big one would be nice: Facebook makes her money from harvesting and selling privacy sensitive data, or at least that is the perception shared by nation states, the EU and the wider audience. For any claim Facebook makes about respecting privacy to have at least face validity she need to show how she is going to make money without violating her users privacy. So how is Facebook going to make money if they need to respect users privacy?

Somewhat more constructive: Facebook seems to have an unhealthy appetite to collect _all_ user data including privacy sensitive information. But lets be fair: She is definitely not the only company on the quest for the Big Data insights, that seem to always be at least one data point away. Does Facebook have information on which data points they really need to make a commercial viable user profile? What data points are privacy sensitive? Is Facebook looking into alternatives for those privacy sensitive data points? If not: can Facebook enumerate those and ask their users for explicit consent to collect those points and ask for explicit consent in the future for any new data points?

Good luck this afternoon. I hope you get some insights.

> 1. How can one find out about their shadow profiles that have been created by FB?

I feel like this is a misguided notion. Facebook doesn't need to create "shadow profiles" for anybody to achieve the same effect: they can just pull together the data on-demand (e.g. say when you create an account, they could scan others' contact lists for a match for your name), without aggregating them together into a 'profile' beforehand. Unless you really intend to ignore that possibility (which I doubt, given the effect would be exactly the same), you probably want to approach it differently than talking about 'shadow profiles'.