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Facebook Doesn’t Tell Users Everything It Really Knows About Them

propublica.org

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Re: Facebook Doesn’t Tell Users Everything It Really Knows About Them

#201

Post by wz1000 »

zippoxer wrote: post #165
allemagne wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NSA recruiters came to a class I had in college. I imagine Facebook employees would have the same sort of party line drilled into them. Yes the NSA takes privacy very seriously. The NSA spies on everyone else but doesn't spy on Americans, period. Oh, well yeah of course we collect data from Americans but if we find out we are looking at an American's data we're supposed to throw it away immediately. Throw in a harmle…

I never got why HN are angry at NSA since they spy on Americans. Spying on me (non-American) is okay, but spying on an American is wrong? I feel just as violated as any American by the thought of NSA spying me.

It's the same with drone strikes. If you look at the recent controversies about the drone program in the US, it's all about how Obama authorized drone strikes on an American. Illegally assassinating non Americans without any form of trial or due process is perfectly fine.

Re: Facebook Doesn’t Tell Users Everything It Really Knows About Them

#203

Post by eriknstr »

Taek wrote: post #156
quadrangle wrote: post #118

I know this is too late to get noticed much, but here's the truth: This is a race-to-the-bottom. Everyone in this whole area has to compete with whoever is the scummiest exploiter unless they really go out of their way to sell their service with privacy and ethics as the top feature. So, some ethical niche services can exist, but meanwhile, everyone else is screwed, and network effects make any niche thing stay prett…

I agree that it's a race to the bottom but not that regulation is a way out. There are too many services employing too many engineers, and furthermore governments benefit from this massive surveillance. They pay for the results, and the direction in government today is towards less privacy, not more. And if you do win the regulation battle, you only win it for the current generation of tech. There will be more, and e…

>I agree that it's a race to the bottom but not that regulation is a way out. There are too many services employing too many engineers, and furthermore governments benefit from this massive surveillance. They pay for the results, and the direction in government today is towards less privacy, not more.

In Norway we have an independent administrative body of the government called Datatilsynet, known in English as The Norwegian Data Protection Authority. Wikipedia has a very short article about it in English [1] and a longer article in Norwegian [2]. For a translation of the Norwegian article, see [3].

Notably, the King and the Ministry may not instruct or reverse Datatilsynet's exercise of authority in the individual case according to law.

So while some parts of a government might want to maximize data collection and surveillance, it is still possible to have other bodies of the government work to protect the privacy of its citizens.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_Data_Protection_Auth...

[2]: https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datatilsynet_(Norge)

[3]: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...

Re: Facebook Doesn’t Tell Users Everything It Really Knows About Them

#204

Post by cbr »

pmlnr wrote: post #191
thr0waway1239 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SoftGooFace: We can easily double your current salary. Engineer: Oh SoftGooFace: You don't have to worry about employment ever after Engineer: Oh Soft: We are so powerful, we can dump unwanted OS upgrades on people Goo: We are so powerful, people are terrified of linking to other sites Face: We are so powerful, even heads of state better watch out before criticizing us Engineer: Uh.. SoftGooFace: Every time someone m…

> open source everything Sure. Like they open sourced their Blu-Ray cold storage system. Oh, wait, if they do that, people will realize they should be sued for using the word "delete", since you can't remove data from Blu-Ray.

The standard way to do this is to store the data encrypted, and store the key in something modifiable. Then when there's a delete you scramble the key.

Re: Facebook Doesn’t Tell Users Everything It Really Knows About Them

#205

Post by username223 »

esert wrote: post #93
hueving wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't offer any services that would benefit from it.

They have ads: https://developer.apple.com/app-store/search-ads/

Search advertising doesn't require massive data collection, just bidding on search terms. Anyways, I bet anything Apple makes on app store ads is a rounding error compared to their hardware business. They probably don't care that much, and certainly have no need to go into the surveillance business.

Re: Facebook Doesn’t Tell Users Everything It Really Knows About Them

#206

Post by username223 »

chriswwweb wrote: post #174

It's funny that a newspaper criticizes Facebook's data mining practices ... but when I opened the article on their website, my privacy badger addon told me that 16 scripts had been blocked (facebook!, twitter, google analytics, chartbeat, outbrain, pardot, ...). Then I read through the article and half way down they throw me a huge banner in the way telling me to like their page on Facebook :/ So basically they preac…

This could also be seen as a newspaper operating as it should: one group is paid to report news, another is paid to sell ads, and they don't talk to each other. Things are more complicated in real life, more so now that the news people are under pressure to "generate viral content," but having creepy trackers next to an article about creepy trackers isn't necessarily hypocrisy.

Re: Facebook Doesn’t Tell Users Everything It Really Knows About Them

#207

Post by wheelerwj »

hueving wrote: post #157
wheelerwj wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

payment is relative. to the rest ofnthe world, all of the SV engineers looks grossly over paid.

> to the rest ofnthe world, all of the SV engineers looks grossly over paid. Only to people who don't understand economics. I know the salaries in NYC are high as well, but I understand the cost of living that drives that.

no, even to people who understand economics.

the only reason the cost of living is so high in SF is because of grossly over paid employees who drive up the cost of living. its a private little island of inflation.

Re: Facebook Doesn’t Tell Users Everything It Really Knows About Them

#208

Post by optionalparens »

MarkMc wrote: post #138
ForrestN wrote: post #39

There must be many HNers who work at Facebook. Anyone willing to make a throwaway account and tell us how it feels from the inside for Facebook to be one the wrong side of so many ethical issues? It just seems like in so many dimensions they've been caught saying wrong things or appearing to outright lie, and I'm curious how developers who work for them think about aiding a company that seems to be so compromised at…

Not a Facebook employee, but I don't see any particular ethical problem with the company. There's nothing in the law or Facebook's terms of use that obligates the company to release data they buy from third-party sources.

I'm not trying to agree or disagree with you here (for the record, I despise Facebook and anyone who works there), rather I want to point out that ethics often has no correlation with law. The difficulty in making ethical determinations is precisely that there is often no well-defined written criteria like a law or terms of use that dictate what are the ethical boundaries or what might be ethically or morally reprehensible.

Re: Facebook Doesn’t Tell Users Everything It Really Knows About Them

#209

Post by rasz_pl »

ForrestN wrote: post #39

There must be many HNers who work at Facebook. Anyone willing to make a throwaway account and tell us how it feels from the inside for Facebook to be one the wrong side of so many ethical issues? It just seems like in so many dimensions they've been caught saying wrong things or appearing to outright lie, and I'm curious how developers who work for them think about aiding a company that seems to be so compromised at…

It probably feels pretty good from inside your very own Tesla.

Re: Facebook Doesn’t Tell Users Everything It Really Knows About Them

#210

Post by bogomipz »

kuschku wrote: post #171
vixen99 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps someone in the EU bears this in mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust The 'Final Solution' was facilitated by knowing who everyone was and where they could be found. The technology at that time happened to be the Hollerith Punched Card system.

Well, the go-to example is usually the Netherlands (they had a central registry of all Jews, so the Nazis invaded, and managed to eradicate almost all in mere weeks), but yes. And the StaSi, with constant surveillance of everyone in East Germany, also is still in collective memory, and another reason why no one wants that much surveillance (although acceptance for surveillance went up since the Berlin attacks, quite…

I went to the Stasi Museum recently. And I remember thinking if you traded the physical surveillance(a man in a van) for the now near ubiquitous security cameras, both the US and the UK are on par with the surveillance state that was the former East Germany. Albeit a much more technologically advanced one. It's a sad irony.

What is the evidence that acceptance of being surveilled went up since the attacks? Opinion polls? Newly proposed legislation? Germany seems to be the bastion of privacy advocation these days so I am curious to hear. I hope that Germany resists letting politicians exploit a heightened emotional state such what exists while the country is grieving a terrible tragedy.

I had never heard this before about the Netherlands and the registry. Do you know why they would have had such a registry?

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