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Facebook's tentacles reach further than people think

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Facebook's tentacles reach further than people think

#91

Post by contingencies »

Bakary wrote: post #88
gub09 wrote: post #65

I read the Share Lab metadata report, based on an examination of the metadata in the headers of the emails exchanged between Hacking Team members. The level of detail this provides on the network and on the individual members of the team is extraordinary. Now in the case of Facebook, imagine that times 100, then add AI to slice and dice the data better than a team of the world's top 1000 data scientists working on th…

Not just current politicians, but also future high-status men and women.

And people still wonder why China banned it...

Re: Facebook's tentacles reach further than people think

#93

Post by thr0waway1239 »

baddox wrote: post #70
ghughes wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing will change until the law cracks down on this. The people who work on these systems are smart enough to comprehend the wider consequences, but they do it anyway because money. Without significant external pressure, there will always be a long line of engineers willing to dial their cognitive dissonance up to 11 and build software that is clearly unethical in exchange for a fat paycheck.

Could you pretend I either disagree or have yet to form an opinion, and explain why this is "clearly unethical"?

Unethical: lacking moral principles.

Moral: of, relating to, or concerned with the principles or rules of right conduct or the distinction between right and wrong

I think it is "clearly wrong" that Facebook creates shadow profiles, because it is violating the freedom of people who have not signed up for their service, in the same way that it is clearly wrong for me to take away your favorite pet for ritualistic sacrifice against your wishes, even if "everyone" in the community agrees that it has been a consistently effective method for pleasing the Gods.

Of course, you know these analogies are tenuous, and you will eventually go into very precise definitions of words (or worse, you will actually start taking my pet sacrifice analogy and dissecting it). Perhaps you could tell us about something you think is clearly unethical, and we will try and draw the connection for you.

Re: Facebook's tentacles reach further than people think

#94

Post by qyv »

ghughes wrote: post #22
jacquesm wrote: post #4

The bigger problem for me is how facebook tracks and identifies even people who do not have a facebook account. They simply infer such a person exists from photograps, contacts and other one sided activity and can start to track that person, tie all this information together and then target them with ads even though they never signed up for Facebook. Such shadow profiles are a much larger problem to me than people wh…

Nothing will change until the law cracks down on this. The people who work on these systems are smart enough to comprehend the wider consequences, but they do it anyway because money. Without significant external pressure, there will always be a long line of engineers willing to dial their cognitive dissonance up to 11 and build software that is clearly unethical in exchange for a fat paycheck.

I think it is more likely that the market corrects this well before the law. How much longer can the status-quo of online advertising remain intact? Do these targeted ad's really work? There is a ton of time and talent being poured into hyper-advanced targeted advertising systems, how long can this be sustained?

Re: Facebook's tentacles reach further than people think

#95

Post by _dztf »

type0 wrote: post #6
jacquesm wrote: post #4

The bigger problem for me is how facebook tracks and identifies even people who do not have a facebook account. They simply infer such a person exists from photograps, contacts and other one sided activity and can start to track that person, tie all this information together and then target them with ads even though they never signed up for Facebook. Such shadow profiles are a much larger problem to me than people wh…

Mentioned shadow profiles and some other of their shady practices to an acquaintance recently, he uses fb and wanted to stay in touch using it. He chose not to listen to my critique of fb calling me a "tinfoil hat" (whatever that even means).

Tinfoil Hat = paranoid, as in people who believe govt is sending mind control waves, and wear tinfoil hats so as to block them.

Re: Facebook's tentacles reach further than people think

#96

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

aikinai wrote: post #67
GuiA wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP desired to keep his Google associated email and non Google associated phone number separate, and behaved as such. That's a very reasonable thing to want and do. But Google used OP's friend's phone, bought from them, to surreptitiously acquire the connection between his email address and phone number. That was against OP's desire, and his friend never explicitly agreed to provide that information. I fully understan…

I think everyone is misunderstanding the complaint. Google does not link phone numbers to accounts based on being added to he same contact. The poster is just complaining that it shows the photo from his Google profile (attached the the email his friend already knows) and shows that when he calls from his phone number (that his friend also already knows and added to the same contact).

How do we know Google doesn't do such linking? Perhaps not in a user-visible way, but Google certainly have the data.

Re: Facebook's tentacles reach further than people think

#98

Post by adamnemecek »

Mosi1 wrote: post #81
makecheck wrote: post #72

In computer security, every time machines become fast enough to breach the limits of an algorithm we invent something new so that “hard” problems remain “hard” and therefore encryption is still secure. There has been no corresponding increase in the difficulty of invading privacy. 30 years ago, even though you probably “could” observe somebody for a long time and eventually connect some dots about them, it would not…

How many times has your privacy been invaded?

Send me your credit card info, I promise not to abuse it.

Re: Facebook's tentacles reach further than people think

#99

Post by lohengramm »

tuna-piano wrote: post #79

Facebook's dominance is even more pronounced in parts of the developing world. I've met people in Asia (Myanmar and Nepal) who have just accessed the internet for the first time in the past 12-24 months (through their Android smartphones). But they don't know the true internet - they only know the internet through the Facebook app. They use it like we use Google and web browsers. To them, Facebook is the internet. Th…

In Brazil this is very common. The whole internet is reduced to a combination of WhatsApp, Facebook and YouTube.

Re: Facebook's tentacles reach further than people think

#100

Post by NabenHarb »

makecheck wrote: post #72

In computer security, every time machines become fast enough to breach the limits of an algorithm we invent something new so that “hard” problems remain “hard” and therefore encryption is still secure. There has been no corresponding increase in the difficulty of invading privacy. 30 years ago, even though you probably “could” observe somebody for a long time and eventually connect some dots about them, it would not…

You have essentially described differential privacy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_privacy).

The main issue is that there is no reason for companies like Facebook to fully adopt it, since it doesn't benefit them and there is no outside pressure forcing them to do so.

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