Remember, you can do pretty much whatever you want just as long as you don't screw over rich people.
Probably wouldn't be seeing this headline if it weren't the investors that were upset.
Facebook Sued by Investors Over Voter-Profile Harvesting
91–100 of 172 posts
Re: Facebook Sued by Investors Over Voter-Profile Harvesting
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
The data & privacy abuse by the Obama campaign was in fact dramatically worse. As an opinion piece at TheHill.com noted today: > The former Obama director of integration and media analytics stated that, during the 2012 campaign, Facebook allowed the Obama team to “suck out the whole social graph”; Facebook “was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn’t stop us once they realized that…
The Trump case complicates "dramatically worse," since the issue is that the data was sold to third parties who ultimately affected the election with it.
the issue is that the data was sold to third parties
Afaik, there has been no allegation that Facebook sold this data. Rather, someone created an innocuous looking quiz app that then used its access tokens to gather data on people through the Facebook Graph API. The app was called "thisisyourdigitallife".
who ultimately affected the election with it.
I've seen zero evidence that any of the psychobabble being touted by CA had any effect on the election (and I've been scouring the internet for such proof). As much as it may pain Democrats to hear, it's possible that Hillary just lost because she was unpalatable to a large percentage of voters, and not because of Russian conspiracies/Facebook/CA. She had more than her share of baggage.
Re: Facebook Sued by Investors Over Voter-Profile Harvesting
#93"...defendants made false or misleading statements and failed to disclose that Facebook violated its own data privacy policies by allowing third parties access to personal data of millions of Facebook users without their consent..." The "without their consent" part is BS, as is this lawsuit. When you use Facebook platform apps, you have to consent to the disclosure of your information to the developer, and have to ag…
> The "without their consent" part is BS, as is this lawsuit. When you use Facebook platform apps, you have to consent to the disclosure of your information to the developer, and have to agree to allow whatever special permissions the developer is asking for. As for friend data that apps may have access to, when you sign up for and use Facebook, you agree to the terms and conditions, which allow this behavior.
As far as I am aware, across the whole of Europe, pretty much none of those TOS click-through things hold up as informed contractual consent. They aren't really worth the pixels they are written on in many jurisdictions.
Re: Facebook Sued by Investors Over Voter-Profile Harvesting
#94"...defendants made false or misleading statements and failed to disclose that Facebook violated its own data privacy policies by allowing third parties access to personal data of millions of Facebook users without their consent..." The "without their consent" part is BS, as is this lawsuit. When you use Facebook platform apps, you have to consent to the disclosure of your information to the developer, and have to ag…
Disagree - your argument makes no legal point. This suit is by institutional investors who have access to the best lawyers in the country. They chose to sue fully aware of the TOC, they obviously know more
Re: Facebook Sued by Investors Over Voter-Profile Harvesting
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean terms of service are not that hard to read. Facebook's TOS is only 4k words long. It is not particularly dense or full of legalese. I have written source code comments a tenth that length for a single function. That is not many words to describe the plethora of implications of using their service. Go ahead and have a glance at it. What would you remove from it that wouldn't cause a significant gap? Some exampl…
Great. So far so good. Where was the part where I agreed they could harvest my profile information because a friend filled out a quiz/questionnaire/etc.?
From https://www.facebook.com/terms.php, item 2.3
When you use an application, the application may ask for your permission to access your content and information as well as content and information that others have shared with you. We require applications to respect your privacy, and your agreement with that application will control how the application can use, store, and transfer that content and information. (To learn more about Platform, including how you can control what information other people may share with applications, read our Data Policy and Platform Page.)
You gave access to your friends, who then authorised access to the application.
Re: Facebook Sued by Investors Over Voter-Profile Harvesting
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
That consent is contained in the TOS that you and all of your friends agreed to when you signed up for Facebook. Further, the access to friend data has always been more limited than you imply here, and more recently, it’s become so limited that using apps for data collection about friends is almost a pointless endeavor.
When I click a button that says I agree to share my data with a third party app, I am also clicking it on behalf of all of my friends. Where in the TOS does it say that?
I'm not sure what the HN rules around reposting your own comment are, but:
From https://www.facebook.com/terms.php, item 2.3
When you use an application, the application may ask for your permission to access your content and information as well as content and information that others have shared with you. We require applications to respect your privacy, and your agreement with that application will control how the application can use, store, and transfer that content and information. (To learn more about Platform, including how you can control what information other people may share with applications, read our Data Policy and Platform Page.)
Re: Facebook Sued by Investors Over Voter-Profile Harvesting
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean terms of service are not that hard to read. Facebook's TOS is only 4k words long. It is not particularly dense or full of legalese. I have written source code comments a tenth that length for a single function. That is not many words to describe the plethora of implications of using their service. Go ahead and have a glance at it. What would you remove from it that wouldn't cause a significant gap? Some exampl…
Great. So far so good. Where was the part where I agreed they could harvest my profile information because a friend filled out a quiz/questionnaire/etc.?
There is a setting to globally disable and enable all apps. If you disable it, no apps can see you, even if your friends use the app. Facebook actually has tons of settings - discoverability is a big problem
Re: Facebook Sued by Investors Over Voter-Profile Harvesting
#98"...defendants made false or misleading statements and failed to disclose that Facebook violated its own data privacy policies by allowing third parties access to personal data of millions of Facebook users without their consent..." The "without their consent" part is BS, as is this lawsuit. When you use Facebook platform apps, you have to consent to the disclosure of your information to the developer, and have to ag…
Disagree - your argument makes no legal point. This suit is by institutional investors who have access to the best lawyers in the country. They chose to sue fully aware of the TOC, they obviously know more
they obviously know more
Or they're just greedy and looking for a quick settlement, like all other class action securities attorneys do when the sue over large stock price drops. These types of suits are filed daily, many of them without merit.
For a fascinating look at Bill Lerach, the lawyer who perfected this tactic, check out [1]. He squeezed so much money out of public companies and caused so many problems with these often ridiculous lawsuits, that Congress passed a bill limiting them that became known as the "Get Lerach Act". He eventually went to federal prison for paying kickbacks to plaintiffs.
Re: Facebook Sued by Investors Over Voter-Profile Harvesting
#99"...defendants made false or misleading statements and failed to disclose that Facebook violated its own data privacy policies by allowing third parties access to personal data of millions of Facebook users without their consent..." The "without their consent" part is BS, as is this lawsuit. When you use Facebook platform apps, you have to consent to the disclosure of your information to the developer, and have to ag…
The modern approach to consent in these things arguably immoral, and indisputably awful. Most adults simply don't have the ability to understand the dense legalese that these contracts are written in, so they don't. Asking people to take an hour or two to properly read and digest it just to sign up for a website is ridiculous, and expecting them to actually do so is like something out of a Terry Gilliam movie.
The provision that allows this is ~460 words into the TOS, and is written in pretty easy to understand english. At some point you need to hold yourself accountable for agreeing to this stuff.
Re: Facebook Sued by Investors Over Voter-Profile Harvesting
#100"...defendants made false or misleading statements and failed to disclose that Facebook violated its own data privacy policies by allowing third parties access to personal data of millions of Facebook users without their consent..." The "without their consent" part is BS, as is this lawsuit. When you use Facebook platform apps, you have to consent to the disclosure of your information to the developer, and have to ag…
> agree to allow whatever special permissions the developer is asking for
You can't just write up an arbitrary contract and assume it will hold up in a court of law. For example, if I tried to rent out a unit by signing a lease that allowed the landlord to turn my water off if I posted a negative review about them, their lease would probably be found in violation of the corresponding state's landlord-tenant laws.
Precedents are established all the time. In the case of Facebook, this is something that common law would not have addressed prior to the early 2000s. Never before have we had such an efficient data-mining machine in the hands of anyone. New technologies warrant new laws.
Edit: One example of such a landlord, by the way, is Anne Kihagi who neglected many such tenants. I'm not sure if she did so through a faulty lease, however. It's late... https://www.modernluxury.com/san-francisco/story/home-invade...