Facebook Doesn’t Tell Users Everything It Really Knows About Them • Hacker News Board

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

#261

Post by fnl » Sat, Dec 31, 2016, 1:57 PM UTC

closeparen wrote: post #84

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's easy to forget on HN, but there is far from universal buy-in for the notion that having or collecting data on people is unethical. Some may even consider it noble to optimize and perfect the world and its institutions (including commerce, via efficient advertising) using large-scale personal data. The impulse to make something better by applying a database engine that you might feel for business processes, can j…

About twenty years ago we probably surpassed Orwell's 1984. Until ten years ago, the secret services of the world's governments would have done just about anything to get this kind of personal data. Five years ago, Facebook & co (twenti in Spain, vkontake in Russia, etc.) started to convince people to hand that info over for free. Today people are saying that somehow improves their lives, or that they have "nothing to hide". What do you think will happen when, in a few decades in the future, your personal, detailed history ends up in the hands of a government that is rattled by debt, ever increasing poverty and unemployment, and political instability, in a world much like in the 1930s? Not that that scenario must happen, but it can, given today's outlook, and history tends to repeat itself...

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

#262

Post by tripzilch » Sat, Dec 31, 2016, 2:02 PM UTC

kayoone wrote: post #163

closeparen wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easy to forget on HN, but there is far from universal buy-in for the notion that having or collecting data on people is unethical. Some may even consider it noble to optimize and perfect the world and its institutions (including commerce, via efficient advertising) using large-scale personal data. The impulse to make something better by applying a database engine that you might feel for business processes, can j…

It's not even just unethical, it's also illegal in many places. Facebook (and Google and many others) are constantly violating European privacy laws and hide behind the Irish government who protects them against the rest of the EU. As an example, in Germany, data privacy is a basic human right and in theory things like the FB Like Button or Google Analytics just collecting data in the background without a user knowin…

> in Germany, data privacy is a basic human right

This! Seriously, there's moral relativism and there's squabbling whether a human right "would be nice to have". They/we don't call it a human right lightly. It's to shine a spotlight on something very important that people otherwise don't realise.

> This is not even touching on the fact that all the data these US companies mine of European citizens is also accessible by the NSA

Well in a way, it does. Total surveillance by governments that openly admit you have zero rights in their eyes (as do their citizens, by the way, many times, even on HN ...) is one of the many terrible implications of the existence of these databases.

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

#263

Post by tripzilch » Sat, Dec 31, 2016, 2:12 PM UTC

closeparen wrote: post #252

xg15 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why that? The data collection you're talking about is relatively constrained and transparent - all those institutions have a well-defined range of data they are allowed to collect, using well-known procedures. On the other hand, the data private organisations collect is not restricted - neither what data is collected, nor how or from who. If voter registration started to ask for skin color, there would be immediate p…

Why does the subject knowing about it make it any less useful for genocidal purposes? You pretty much need a state ID or drivers license, which lists your skin color. Political contributions are a matter of public record for anticurruption purposes. Vital records offices are more than sufficient for tracing ancestry. Welfare offices know who is poor and medically needy. Telecoms and the post office knew who you commu…

Skin colour, religious and sexual preferences ... One can only hope the next dictator shares your lack of imagination.

Also it's a bit of a bizarre argument that tech companies are doing data collection on such a massively intrusive scale, we should really look at the government databases first because they're already more than enough to screw us over with? It's not even a "but they're doing it more!" ...

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

#264

Post by fnl » Sat, Dec 31, 2016, 2:37 PM UTC

closeparen wrote: post #252

xg15 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why that? The data collection you're talking about is relatively constrained and transparent - all those institutions have a well-defined range of data they are allowed to collect, using well-known procedures. On the other hand, the data private organisations collect is not restricted - neither what data is collected, nor how or from who. If voter registration started to ask for skin color, there would be immediate p…

Why does the subject knowing about it make it any less useful for genocidal purposes? You pretty much need a state ID or drivers license, which lists your skin color. Political contributions are a matter of public record for anticurruption purposes. Vital records offices are more than sufficient for tracing ancestry. Welfare offices know who is poor and medically needy. Telecoms and the post office knew who you commu…

Different, though: Now its all in one place, stored forever, and in much more detail: your cell phone leaks your location continuously and in real-time, your photos and videos provide detail we are only just learning to harvest, your formerly secret or at least hard to track written communication is now trivial to record and analyze, and with the coming of IoT all this is just getting a bit more minuscule. Future governments seeking for unwanted persons will have an unprecedented dataset to profile whomever they might not agree with.

Again, this worst case scenario may not happen, but the fact that it can, even if only with a small chance, makes this massive data collection totally irresponsible.

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

#265

Post by tripzilch » Sat, Dec 31, 2016, 4:57 PM UTC

kalleboo wrote: post #258

SomeStupidPoint wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem I have with it is that Facebook decides what "improve" means -- it tries to groom me like cattle rather than ask me how I want to experience it or who I want to be "optimized" in to being. And that's okay, so far as they're open about it. But I don't think they are, especially the sophistication of their psychology research (and experimentation).

I appreciate that, but most people don't know how they want to experience it. E.g. people will say they want to see everything in their feed, but if they do get everything, they complain about how much crap there is

The assumption being that this is not how people want to experience it?

If there's so much crap, maybe I want to be able to complain about it.

People might act on the tsunami of crap in manners that may not be profitable for Facebook.

The solution to undesirable, stupid, homeless, uneducated, etc etc isn't to hide it from your vision.

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

#266

Post by quadrangle » Sat, Dec 31, 2016, 7:06 PM UTC

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…

Well, I didn't mean to imply that regulation was actually a feasible answer (it needs to be enforceable, non-captured, effective… hard to do). Maybe it's hopeless. I was just suggesting that races-to-the-bottom can only be solved with regulation or other systematic measures, not asking each player to refuse to participate. If you're right that regulation won't work, then you're probably also right that it's hopeless.

There are some mitigating factors though, like if we push for software freedom and get rid of legal support for DRM… that at least will allow some level of control by technology users.

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

#267

Post by firmgently » Sat, Dec 31, 2016, 7:43 PM UTC

bigB wrote: post #126

harry8 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mafia defense? Really?

Why not, you are using their "free" services, and if you would care to read every word of the user agreements then it lays out exactly what they information they "collect". What they "collect" and what they "know" are two different things, using data analysis they can speculate many other aspects of a user with a pretty high degree of accuracy. They should not have to disclose this, the user has given them the data a…

If you want your client/user/customer to be aware of something you put it on your front page or packaging in plain language and a large, legible font. T&Cs/TOS is where you obfuscate information that you're legally obliged to 'inform' people of, but you really wish you didn't have to and you hope they'll never see it. Nobody reads the T&Cs of every product they use. I know this, you know this, everyone knows this. To suggest otherwise is either naive or disingenuous. It may be commonplace but it's really not ok and we shouldn't accept it. To defend companies doing this is enabling and shameful IMO.

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

#268

Post by groovy2shoes » Sun, Jan 01, 2017, 1:47 AM UTC

rhizome wrote: post #231

lithos wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US doesn't have the privacy parts is WWII in memory. Where govt workers had to scramble to destroy what data they could before it was seized, where fire fighters let document storage burn as long as possible because it had census data, where others where forced to go through govt. Data to sentence neighbors to death, and similar hero/horror stories. I feel that the IT world is irresponsible in its collection of d…

>(What's the proper word for old data/information before computers)? Files.

Yep. I also remember hearing "records" in addition to "files" back in "the day". The reason, of course, these terms have come into computing is by analogy with their "old-world" counterparts.

That said, I wouldn't consider it wrong, per se, to call it data or information these days. Strictly-speaking, old files and records do constitute data, whether they happen to be digitized or not.

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

#269

Post by clydethefrog » Sun, Jan 01, 2017, 10:37 AM UTC

drunken-serval wrote: post #230

lithos wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US doesn't have the privacy parts is WWII in memory. Where govt workers had to scramble to destroy what data they could before it was seized, where fire fighters let document storage burn as long as possible because it had census data, where others where forced to go through govt. Data to sentence neighbors to death, and similar hero/horror stories. I feel that the IT world is irresponsible in its collection of d…

> I feel that the IT world is irresponsible in its collection of data, and doesn't treat it as the liability it is. A lot of that is due to a lack of training. There's two major ways new people come into programming. 1. Go to college, get a computer science or engineering degree. 2. Self taught. Neither of those prepares you to deal with the ethics of information storage. I happened to have an entire course on the to…

What literature did the course provide? I would like to teach myself more too. The lack of any so far in my programme is making me really pessimistic.

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

#270

Post by scalio » Sun, Jan 01, 2017, 10:36 PM UTC

morgante wrote: post #254

scalio wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of fear is rightly grounded in history: it's clear that this much power in very few hands turns to shit at some point. Facebook may well be humanity's biggest concentration of power (knowledge being power). How do you keep an advantage when the other side knows >> than you could ever know? There's also the disparity in availability of AI, since large applications need powerful and thus expensive hardwar…

To be clear, I don't think Facebook is flawless. All the issues you bring up are definitely true. I just think it's unfair to assume that these issues automatically make Facebook evil and that there's no good they do.

They certainly could do good, theoretically. Problem is their business model, because manipulating people doesn't fall under "doing good". As long as they make profit by selling people, they're the opposite of good because their activity goes against peoples' interest.