Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Facebook Sued by Investors Over Voter-Profile Harvesting

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 172 posts

Re: Facebook Sued by Investors Over Voter-Profile Harvesting

#121

Post by Xylakant »

downandout wrote: post #117
Xylakant wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole point is that you cannot meaningfully consent to give out information about your friend since they’d have to consent to that. Even acknowledging they exist and are your friends is already information. To make matters worse, the v1 API would happily hand out information about your friends, such as their likes without _their_ consent. Not your privacy is breached - theirs is. And there’s no way user A can mea…

It was yours to share because it was shared with you.

That's just not how it works. Apps could for example request access to all messages. Let's make that a physical world example: I write you a letter that contains private details. Are you free to share this letter with third parties? The established legal precedent is clearly "no, not at all." Another example: I allow you to peek into my diary. I shared my private thoughts with you. Are you now allowed to go out and trumpet those out in the world? No, not by any standard. So the default assumption is that things shared privately are private, not public. There are cases where a higher good allows to breach that assumption, but "financial gain" has never been accepted as a higher good in such cases.

Failing to honor that assumption is facebooks fault here.

Re: Facebook Sued by Investors Over Voter-Profile Harvesting

#122

Post by rtpg »

throwaway84742 wrote: post #112
rtpg wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is more of an aside, but given that Clinton lost by so little, _very many things_ caused her to lose. Because of such a small margin, for almost any X: "X had little effect" and "X caused Clinton to lose" can be simultaneously true. If you lose by only one vote, then every vote caused you to lose. (Of course if you're running a campaign, going after things that are bigger issues is more useful, but when we're ta…

She did lose by quite a bit, though. 74 electoral votes out of 538. And that’s after rigging the primaries and spending twice as much as Trump did. Not even 1.2 billion could make this albatross fly.

It sounds like a lot, but it ends up not being much. It was, of course, 40k votes over 3 states. But most Presidential elections the winner carries more than 320 electoral votes. Bush 2 had pretty slim margins, of course. Before that, you need to go back to Carter to get 297 electoral votes.

It's not the tightest margin, but it's among the lowest margin of victories in the electoral college. Not that it matters, because you either win or lose. And we all know the rules of the game before we start playing

Re: Facebook Sued by Investors Over Voter-Profile Harvesting

#123

Post by rmc »

downandout wrote: post #24

"...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…

> 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.

So it depends on what you mean by consent, and whether you want to specify "informed consent". Lots of EU data protection law talks about "informed consent". If you asked 1,000 facebook users what they had consented to, they probably would not think that they had consented to that. One can make a case that the long legalese with a checkbox at the end isn't (informed) consent.

Re: Facebook Sued by Investors Over Voter-Profile Harvesting

#124

Post by downandout »

Xylakant wrote: post #121
downandout wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was yours to share because it was shared with you.

That's just not how it works. Apps could for example request access to all messages. Let's make that a physical world example: I write you a letter that contains private details. Are you free to share this letter with third parties? The established legal precedent is clearly "no, not at all." Another example: I allow you to peek into my diary. I shared my private thoughts with you. Are you now allowed to go out and t…

That's just not how it works

Actually, that is how it works. Unless there is an NDA in place between you and I, I can share anything you choose to share with me, especially in the context of a social network where we both agreed to and are bound by the same TOS where we authorized exactly this kind of sharing.

Re: Facebook Sued by Investors Over Voter-Profile Harvesting

#125

Post by manuelflara »

IshKebab wrote: post #116
kaeawc wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a developer of an app that makes use of Facebook friend permissions and have seen the various API changes they have made since 2014. Applications using Facebook Graph 2.+ (which is the only option since Spring 2015 or so) who access friend data may only access data of friends who have also given consent to your app. So if A and C log into a Facebook app, and A is friends with B and C, the app can only be aware t…

They haven't got around that, it's just that this data "breach" happened before 2015 when the old API was removed.

Is this correct? Because all this time I was wondering about this scandal: apparently, this all started because someone had some app or website which got downloaded by a few hundred thousand FB users (who gave access to their info), and somehow they turned that into data of 50M users. And I also am well aware the current FB API doesn't allow you to get info about your friends if only you give permissions to an app. That this "breach" happened some time ago, when API permissions were different, would make a lot of sense to me.

Re: Facebook Sued by Investors Over Voter-Profile Harvesting

#126

Post by dqv »

rmc wrote: post #123
downandout wrote: post #24

"...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…

> 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. So it depends on what you mean by consent, and whether you want to…

>If you asked 1,000 facebook users what they had consented to, they probably would not think that they had consented to that.

SomeFacebookApp is requesting permission to do the following:

Access my basic information: Includes my name, profile picture, gender, networks, user ID, list of friends, and any other information I've shared with everyone.

Access my contact information: Current Address and Mobile Phone Number

I can't imagine how much more explicit this could be. I don't think the argument that it's behind legalese would hold. And it seems pretty informative about what information is going to be taken.

Re: Facebook Sued by Investors Over Voter-Profile Harvesting

#127

Post by dozzie »

dqv wrote: post #126
rmc wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. So it depends on what you mean by consent, and whether you want to…

>If you asked 1,000 facebook users what they had consented to, they probably would not think that they had consented to that. SomeFacebookApp is requesting permission to do the following: Access my basic information: Includes my name, profile picture, gender, networks, user ID, list of friends, and any other information I've shared with everyone. Access my contact information: Current Address and Mobile Phone Number…

> I can't imagine how much more explicit this could be.

Ah yes, and what exactly are they doing with this information? I can't imagine how much less explicit this could be.

Re: Facebook Sued by Investors Over Voter-Profile Harvesting

#128

Post by pjc50 »

downandout wrote: post #117
Xylakant wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole point is that you cannot meaningfully consent to give out information about your friend since they’d have to consent to that. Even acknowledging they exist and are your friends is already information. To make matters worse, the v1 API would happily hand out information about your friends, such as their likes without _their_ consent. Not your privacy is breached - theirs is. And there’s no way user A can mea…

It was yours to share because it was shared with you.

Not in GDPR land.

Re: Facebook Sued by Investors Over Voter-Profile Harvesting

#129

Post by pmlnr »

dqv wrote: post #126
rmc wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. So it depends on what you mean by consent, and whether you want to…

>If you asked 1,000 facebook users what they had consented to, they probably would not think that they had consented to that. SomeFacebookApp is requesting permission to do the following: Access my basic information: Includes my name, profile picture, gender, networks, user ID, list of friends, and any other information I've shared with everyone. Access my contact information: Current Address and Mobile Phone Number…

That 'list of friends' meant 'oh, and all of these for all of your friends as well, and by accepting this, you tell us they know about this and they accepted it as well' - in which case, your friends, of course, are not even aware of this.

Re: Facebook Sued by Investors Over Voter-Profile Harvesting

#130

Post by makomk »

oldcynic wrote: post #36
downandout wrote: post #24

"...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…

Correct me where I'm wrong but did it not used to be the case that facebook apps could access almost as much info about your friends as they could about you? So where is the consent? Fred gives consent to run a personality quiz and its associated data gathering - Fred's 180 friends didn't.

This is, of course, true but it's not clear why investors should have any grounds to sue over it. This wasn't actually a PR problem for Facebook until relatively recently - for instance, the 2012 Obama campaign harvested data about the Facebook friends of people who volunteered access to their accounts, those friends obviously didn't consent, and this mostly just lead to glowing articles about how clever this was and how commercial companies could copy it.

What it took for this to be a problem for Facebook was Trump running for and winning the presidency, the press needing someone to blame other than themselves, and them being willing to bury minor details like the campaign probably not actually using the data in question in any form. That doesn't seem like something which could reasonably be predicted in advance.

Post reply on HN