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

Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

facebook.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 583 posts

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#111

Post by busterarm »

nabla9 wrote: post #84
gwicks56 wrote: post #54

1000 word statement. Number of times the word "advertising" was mentioned: 0 Facebook continues to pretend it's business model is unicorns and kittens, not selling user data for money.

It was standard crisis management PR sermon. "learn from this experience", "doesn't change what happened in the past. ", "responsibility", "going forward", "together". You find this same boilerplate from athletes who beat their wife, do drugs, or kill people.

...and go on to continue to beat their wife, do drugs...

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#112

Post by aylmao »

mehrdadn wrote: post #23
minimaxir wrote: post #4

On the FB developer side: > Second, we will restrict developers' data access even further to prevent other kinds of abuse. For example, we will remove developers' access to your data if you haven't used their app in 3 months. Won't this behavior break a ton of apps?

>> Second, we will restrict developers' data access even further to prevent other kinds of abuse. For example, we will remove developers' access to your data if you haven't used their app in 3 months. The problem was data that was secretly kept , right? How would removing access change anything? Or am I misunderstanding what happened?

My guess is this might help prevent long term tracking-updating? He does mention this:

> we immediately banned Kogan's app from our platform.

So my guess is the app still existed, and could probably keep querying data to keep user profiles updated. What you like, do, who you interact with; it all changes with time, so the data's value is slowly lost as it diverges from reality.

Moreover, there might be apps I gave access to back in the day when I didn't know better that could potentially still access my information. Even if the actors aren't malicious now, this could probably to prevent Chrome-extension like situations. Apparently legit extensions have been bought in the past by malicious actors with the purpose of exploiting their broad install-base and permissions [1]. I could see something similar happening with Facebook apps.

[1]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/01/malwa...

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#113

Post by JumpCrisscross »

dustingetz wrote: post #81
propman wrote: post #39

The trusting developers not to sell any data but putting zero safeguards in place to prevent this and extremely punitive repercussions despite being repeatedly told by the public, media, and even high level employees tells me Facebook can't plead ignorance to this and they not only knew this was happening, but they probably intended for it to happen. They knew it was illegal but put all the incentives for companies n…

> They knew it was illegal but put all the incentives for companies not to follow the rules. Offtopic but i cant help it. You get what you measure. Which is why economies that only measure profit optimize for nothing but profit. When a nationstate says "It's illegal to do X" but has mandatory accounting practices that do not measure X but only measure profit, we should not be surprised that companies like Facebook do…

> When a nationstate says "It's illegal to do X" but has mandatory accounting practices that do not measure X but only measure profit

We don't need accountants to measure legality. That's what we have law enforcement and courts for. Investors care about profits; behaving illegally should hurt profits. Deputising a multi-billion dollar company's thousands of shareholders as its moral police is an absurd proposal.

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#115

Post by asah »

bobthepanda wrote: post #86
prostoalex wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of safeguards would you introduce? At the very start of Facebook platform the API would anonymize the user's email address, the app would get an app-specific hash, e.g. abcdefg-app123456@facebook.net It was a working email address with Facebook handling the forwarding. This proved futile as the very first thing that apps then did was to ask users for their real email address.

Then make "no requests for users email" part of the terms of using the API?

Which they flagrantly violated...

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#116

Post by toss1 »

I_am_tiberius wrote: post #52

The main problem is that users can't control their data. FB should: - Allow its users to delete their accounts as if they never existed - Show users which person and or service has accessed their data (also FB internally) - Use backend permission management instead of frontend permission management

How about additionally, 1) providing an "Advanced Feed" providing each user a log of every data field exfiltrated, date/time/who/IP addr,/ etc.

2) requiring every single advert and it's targeting parameters, that runs on the system to be made available in a fully searchable advert pool for anyone to search. This would allow people to see what is being targeted, journalists to figure out what targeting is happening (much of the Cambridge Analytica nonsense happened under the radar for a long time), and regulators to uncover scams.

Mere transparency. they could probably figure out a way that this will make them more money if they actually looked at it (e.g., support an ecosystem of people studying the data and figuring out what works better, to better utilize the platform).

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#118

Post by SirLJ »

plusbryan wrote: post #94

"I started Facebook, and at the end of the day I'm responsible for what happens on our platform." Regardless of my feelings about how this was handled, I appreciate the level of leadership accountability demonstrated in this statement. I wish that more founders, CEOs, and politicians facing difficult circumstances would adopt this perspective. Even if you didn't personally code/negotiate/write it - you made manageria…

is he resigning or something? how "responsible" he actually is?

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#119

Post by gordon_freeman »

propman wrote: post #39

The trusting developers not to sell any data but putting zero safeguards in place to prevent this and extremely punitive repercussions despite being repeatedly told by the public, media, and even high level employees tells me Facebook can't plead ignorance to this and they not only knew this was happening, but they probably intended for it to happen. They knew it was illegal but put all the incentives for companies n…

So FB opened up their platform to 3rd party Devs in 2007 and this CA incident happened in 2013. FB changed their policy of not allowing broad data access to these Devs in 2014. So my question is: Why they admit that they'd audit the pre-2014 apps now when NYT and Guardian/Observer broke the news? And what policy is in place now that makes sure that these 3rd party Devs won't sell whatever info they do collect as per post-2014 policy? I am not satisfied with what Mark said just now. We need more answers.

Re: Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation

#120

Post by vermontdevil »

bowmessage wrote: post #2

"... we immediately banned Kogan's app from our platform, and demanded that Kogan and Cambridge Analytica formally certify that they had deleted all improperly acquired data. They provided these certifications." How is it at all possible to certify that data has been deleted and no copies were taken..?

Even if CA deleted their data, what about all the other data that has been taken out as per this [1]?

All our data associated with FB unique id is out there. My understanding this has stopped in 2015 but for sure?

Hopefully the data that is out there becomes less relevant over time.

[1] https://medium.com/@jamesallworth/what-the-f-was-facebook-th...

Post reply on HN