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WhatsApp co-founder tells everyone to delete Facebook

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Re: WhatsApp co-founder tells everyone to delete Facebook

#621

Post by gglitch »

hycaria wrote: post #460
simonh wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was talking to my daughter about that yesterday. Suppose Facebook knows your interests, taste in music, where you live, what good you like, etc. A political campaign could use that information to tell you that their local candidate shares your interests, lived in the same town, loves the same music, supports the same charity or whatever overlaps with your profile, while knowingly avoiding telling you about things y…

I don't vote, I don't care. Couldn't care less about politics to be quite honest. They have a very marginal influence on my life, aspirations and happiness.

If that's true, that's a pretty handy description of what many US leftists call "privilege." There are many marginalized people, including in developed western nations, for whom the politics you're able to ignore can have decisive impact on their day to day lives. Many of these people, like many people in general, will not have the knowledge of internet technology and policy they need to protect themselves.

Re: WhatsApp co-founder tells everyone to delete Facebook

#622

Post by yuhong »

apotheothesomai wrote: post #63
iliketosleep wrote: post #31

It's quite ironic that this is the man who sold WhatsApp and its enormous userbase to facebook, creating a total lock in to the facebook ecosystem for many who do not even use facebook. He would have known what kind of a company facebook is, so I don't understand the contradiction between selling Whatsapp to them and now caring about these issues. Anyway, I am still glad he's getting behind the #deletefacebook moveme…

Jan's commitment to privacy motivated WhatsApp. Jan and Acton always have believed in it strongly. That said, if your company has 50 people, and FB offers nearly $20B. How exactly do you tell those people that you refused an acquisition that huge, because you personally feel that FB is bad. Could you deprive an engineer who has worked his ass off for 4 years >$100M? Anyway, I was contracting for WhatsApp, when the ac…

I wrote a draft of an essay: http://yuhongbao.blogspot.ca/2018/03/google-doubleclick-essa... I hasn't even mentioned Urchin/Google Analytics and Mozilla yet.

Re: WhatsApp co-founder tells everyone to delete Facebook

#623

Post by gglitch »

hycaria wrote: post #402
ramphastidae wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. I’ve been explaining this stuff to friends for years. Even the most intelligent and rational dismiss it as paranoia or say, “I don’t care, I have nothing to hide anyway.”

I don't put that much data out, but I don't mind being profiled. I like being suggested music that I'm susceptible to like based on other people. I think it's fine if one can infer out of my lifestyle that I would be interested in x or warn for risks of y. What is wrong with it ? I'm probably no statistical anomaly, I don't mind being part of some artificial cluster somewhere, helping having a more accurate portrayal…

You're saying you don't mind being profiled and don't see the harm in it, but in several places downthread you describe in detail how little you use the platform, how poorly it understands you, and how little exposure you get to it. If these things are true, you're not a good example of how harmless their profiling is for other people.

Re: WhatsApp co-founder tells everyone to delete Facebook

#624

Post by noetic_techy »

fzeroracer wrote: post #539
noetic_techy wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its purely Trump hatred driving this. Because Obama doing this in 2012 = Genius. Trump doing this in 2016 = Scandal. I'm a libertarian and yes I threw my vote away on Gary Johnson, but looking at the media landscape, there truly is a backlash against conservatives going on in social media, and this is just part of that. Donald Trump won because fake news... no wait, it was Russia and their abysmal social media spendi…

What Obama did is not nearly the same as what Trump did [1]. Also, it's important to keep in mind that this entire argument about Obama is one diversion perpetuated by Cambridge Analytica. They brought up this idea and it has been bouncing around the more surreptitious parts of the internet as a tactic to avoid criticism. I wonder why a place like CA would attempt to change the conversation? [1] https://washingtonmon…

They leave out a critical fact, which you can find buried in The Hill article they deride:

" “Consciously or otherwise,” The Guardian states, “the individual volunteer will be injecting all the information they store publicly on their Facebook page — home location, date of birth, interests and, crucially, network of friends — directly into the central Obama database.” Facebook had no problem with such activity then. They do now. "

Consciously or otherwise...

It was the same exact tactic, maybe only slightly less deceptive than CA's methods.

Re: WhatsApp co-founder tells everyone to delete Facebook

#625

Post by wybiral »

mike10010100 wrote: post #617
wybiral wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's more that all of these things are gaining traction and people are trying to relate it to Trump. There's been a growing discussion about data collection and shady advertising practices for a long time. It's not about Trump. And this isn't the first time I've seen distrust raised towards Facebook or Google about this stuff. The Russian propaganda was mostly divisive messages surrounding things like race /…

> (people tried to accuse Obama of all kinds of stuff, and don't even get started on what people were accusing the Clinton campaign of). It shouldn't distract from the fact that it's scandalous and sketchy and we should keep an eye on these issues. Accusations are one thing. We have actual documented evidence here, and that's what so startling. In addition, I'd argue that if Trump wasn't such an incompetent, bumbling…

I don't think you got what I was saying.

All of these things are alarming, yes. But not because Trump is involved. These issues should be investigated regardless of who was doing it.

And I was trying to convey to the parent post that these issues of data use and disingenuous campaign practices would have come up, Trump or not, because it's happening and we don't like it as a society. But since Trump is the one, right now, people will point the finger at him like he's to blame for it all. That's why I mentioned Obama (because people did the same to him).

It looks, to me, like Trump sought help from shady people in multiple cases. And that's worth noting but it's irrelevant to the fact that those people were doing shady things in the first place.

> We have actual documented evidence here, and that's what so startling.

No. Sadly we only have a situation where an app was collecting data using Facebook and a video where two individuals were pitching their product by saying things to try and win a customer.

We know that the Trump campaign hired them, but we don't know that the Trump campaign knew about their data practices any more than their other customers knew. They had many other customers before Trump.

PS: I'm not a Republican and am not supporting Donald Trump. But trying to spin this as real evidence is stooping to their level of misinformation. We don't know that the Trump campaign knew about this. And we don't know that the recent videos weren't just CA lying to sell their product. But yes we absolutely need to investigate both of those possibilities.

Re: WhatsApp co-founder tells everyone to delete Facebook

#626

Post by aylmao »

dspillett wrote: post #599
aylmao wrote: post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually agree with you, this could be handled better by them. I'm personally a little confused by the details and timings though; where did you read about them profiting after they knew about the issue?

I'm working under the impression that they were aware of the specific "breach" some months ago, and only terminated their dealings with CA once the matter became public (so cutting off the revenue stream was done CA as a reaction to bad PR, not because of any moral rightness or a reaction to any policy or contract breach).

Oh, I was under the impression that business relation was with some university researcher and finished a while ago. The researcher didn't delete the data, and instead brought it to CA (Facebook didn't deal with CA directly). Facebook found out some time ago but did nothing more than tell them to delete it and trust they would, without really informing anyone or pushing further.

Re: WhatsApp co-founder tells everyone to delete Facebook

#627

Post by noetic_techy »

matchbok wrote: post #516
noetic_techy wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its purely Trump hatred driving this. Because Obama doing this in 2012 = Genius. Trump doing this in 2016 = Scandal. I'm a libertarian and yes I threw my vote away on Gary Johnson, but looking at the media landscape, there truly is a backlash against conservatives going on in social media, and this is just part of that. Donald Trump won because fake news... no wait, it was Russia and their abysmal social media spendi…

What Obama did was very, very different. The fact that you don't know this (or ignored it) tells a lot about how biased you are. And yes, there should be backlash against conservatives. They just elected a Nazi in Illinois.

Is it? I'm sure I will get chided for bias quoting a hill article by Ben Shapiro, but as a Libertarian you really need to read both sides perspective to get the true story here. It highlights how the tactic was almost EXACTLY the same: Access facebooks data to build a database of possible supporters and target political messages to them. Obama's operation was only slightly less deceptive about it than CA and their scummy personality quiz chain mail.

My point is not the tactic though, my point is that the ONLY reason this has suddenly gone critical is because Trump is associated with it. It was ok then, its suddenly not now.

http://thehill.com/opinion/technology/379245-whats-genius-fo...

The key takeaway:

---

" “Consciously or otherwise,” The Guardian states, “the individual volunteer will be injecting all the information they store publicly on their Facebook page — home location, date of birth, interests and, crucially, network of friends — directly into the central Obama database.” Facebook had no problem with such activity then. They do now. There’s a reason for that. 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 was what we were doing.” She added, “They came to [the] office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side.”

Not so with Trump. As soon as Facebook realized that Cambridge Analytica had pursued a similar strategy, they suspended the firm. "

---

Consciously or otherwise ...

Another HN user linked to the opposing opinion:

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2018/03/21/no-obama-didnt-empl...

I agree with this article also, Obama's team was slightly more above board with the original source of the data. After that it looks pretty similar. Remember that they chided Romney for NOT doing this and being behind the curve.

A question I'm asking myself: Would this have still been a scandal if CA was less scummy in their modus operandi?

Re: WhatsApp co-founder tells everyone to delete Facebook

#628

Post by mike10010100 »

wybiral wrote: post #625
mike10010100 wrote: post #617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (people tried to accuse Obama of all kinds of stuff, and don't even get started on what people were accusing the Clinton campaign of). It shouldn't distract from the fact that it's scandalous and sketchy and we should keep an eye on these issues. Accusations are one thing. We have actual documented evidence here, and that's what so startling. In addition, I'd argue that if Trump wasn't such an incompetent, bumbling…

I don't think you got what I was saying. All of these things are alarming, yes. But not because Trump is involved. These issues should be investigated regardless of who was doing it. And I was trying to convey to the parent post that these issues of data use and disingenuous campaign practices would have come up, Trump or not, because it's happening and we don't like it as a society. But since Trump is the one, right…

> And I was trying to convey to the parent post that these issues of data use and disingenuous campaign practices would have come up, Trump or not, because it's happening and we don't like it as a society.

Right, but then you said Obama was doing the same thing. He was not. Nor was Clinton. So the fact of the matter is that it may have come up, but there's been literally no evidence to suggest it's happened in the past by any of the winning Democratic campaigns.

That's the false equivalence I'm talking about. You're shifting blame away from the Republican party, the Trump campaign, and placing it solely on Facebook and unscrupulous data collection parties, when the issue should mostly be on the fact that a political campaign not only engaged said parties but won using them.

> No. Sadly we only have a situation where an app was collecting data using Facebook and a video where two individuals were pitching their product by saying things to try and win a customer.

And the words/documents provided by the CA whistleblower. That's immensely important.

> but we don't know that the Trump campaign knew about their data practices any more than their other customers knew.

Steve Bannon knew. Unless you're now claiming that he, as VP of CA, didn't know what his own company was doing.

> We don't know that the Trump campaign knew about this. And we don't know that the recent videos weren't just CA lying to sell their product.

That's because you're removing broader context that shows that we should probably err on the side of "they probably knew about all this" rather than "there's no way they could have known".

The fact is, CA was testing phrases used by the Trump campaign literally years before they approached Trump. The Mercers pumped money into the Trump campaign at a critical time (June 2016), and forced all campaign processes to go through CA. This is all documented. In August of that year, Bannon left CA (which was already running Trump's campaign) and joined the Trump campaign directly.

You're trying to pretend like there's more ambiguity than there actually is.

EDIT: The latter half of this article goes in depth on how the Mercer's money shifted from Ted Cruz to Trump: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/19/us/politics/robert-mercer...

Re: WhatsApp co-founder tells everyone to delete Facebook

#629

Post by cocktailpeanuts »

sah2ed wrote: post #423
cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #286

I find it very hypocritical of all these people who already have vested their shares in Facebook coming out and criticizing the company. As someone else mentioned on this thread, this is the guy who contributed to the concentration of all things social into Facebook by selling Whatsapp. I'm pretty sure most people are not fond of Facebook basically monopolizing people's private data and monetizing, but you don't get…

I wouldn't call it hypocrisy, more like having to deal with the unintended consequences of your action. He and others that have come out to publicly criticize Facebook knew what they were building, they just didn't see how powerful Facebook would eventually become in programming people en masse. The way the last election turned out was the wake up call. Sean Parker himself admits as much in an interview with Axios: "…

I think what Sean Parker said was sensible. I'm talking about other people who cross the line.

If these people were such a saint enough to come out and say "Delete Facebook", they had years of opportunity to do so. It's not like Facebook's user exploitation is something new. In fact this breach of user privacy has been the general theme of Facebook from the beginning, even years and years before Facebook acquired Whatsapp.

The appropriate reaction should be them sharing their opinion but in an apologetic sentiment (since they clearly contributed to it AND profited from it) instead of suddenly pretending to be a saint on the other side now that their shares have all vested (and in this case he's working on a competing product, which adds another layer of distaste in my mouth since he's basically leveraging this social justice theme to get more users to use his signal app)

Re: WhatsApp co-founder tells everyone to delete Facebook

#630

Post by wybiral »

mike10010100 wrote: post #628
wybiral wrote: post #625

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you got what I was saying. All of these things are alarming, yes. But not because Trump is involved. These issues should be investigated regardless of who was doing it. And I was trying to convey to the parent post that these issues of data use and disingenuous campaign practices would have come up, Trump or not, because it's happening and we don't like it as a society. But since Trump is the one, right…

> And I was trying to convey to the parent post that these issues of data use and disingenuous campaign practices would have come up, Trump or not, because it's happening and we don't like it as a society. Right, but then you said Obama was doing the same thing. He was not. Nor was Clinton. So the fact of the matter is that it may have come up, but there's been literally no evidence to suggest it's happened in the pa…

> Right, but then you said Obama was doing the same thing.

No. I didn't say anything like that. I literally said "people tried to accuse Obama of all kinds of stuff" and my point was to the parent post who said "Its purely Trump hatred driving this".

You missed the point because you don't like that I'm not blaming this entirely on Trump.

I want an investigation into all of this. And other sketchy behavior surrounding the Trump campaign.

But I was stating that I don't think the parent post was correct in saying that this is all about Trump.

> You're trying to pretend like there's more ambiguity than there actually is.

You're trying to pretend like there's more certainty than there actually is and that this is somehow all Trump's fault.

I think that's dangerous because the Trump team keeps claiming that there's a witch hunt going on so when all new scandals are pinned to him it actually helps them as far as optics go. We need to investigate this all and get to the bottom of it and I hope Trump is exposed for the scam artist that he is in the process.

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