Zuckerberg Takes Steps to Calm Facebook Employees • Hacker News Board

Re: Zuckerberg Takes Steps to Calm Facebook Employees

#151

Post by bamboozled » Mon, Mar 26, 2018, 2:53 AM UTC

ramphastidae wrote: post #86

tbrock wrote: post #40

I respect Facebook and their engineering chops as much as the next person, they are truly world class programmers, but how the holy hell is everyone daydreaming that they don’t work for an advertising company? You sell and use people’s data to get money: this is the business plan. Full stop. Connecting people can definitely be lucrative and useful in other ways but facebooks particular implementation is impression ba…

Because they’re paid well. Very well. Everyone I know that works at FB for 2+ years is making 300-500k (including stock) and already owns or is on their way to purchasing a home. That makes it a lot easier to ignore the reality of FB. Meanwhile chumps like me that consider the ethics of their employer will be renting forever. I honestly don’t blame them.

Agreed, a lot of cognitive dissonance happening on campus.

Re: Zuckerberg Takes Steps to Calm Facebook Employees

#152

Post by seattle_spring » Mon, Mar 26, 2018, 2:53 AM UTC

anonytrary wrote: post #146

tbrock wrote: post #40

I respect Facebook and their engineering chops as much as the next person, they are truly world class programmers, but how the holy hell is everyone daydreaming that they don’t work for an advertising company? You sell and use people’s data to get money: this is the business plan. Full stop. Connecting people can definitely be lucrative and useful in other ways but facebooks particular implementation is impression ba…

Sheryl Sandberg is under the impression that Facebook, quote, "does not sell your data": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1CTHFEcoJc She is either wrong, or lying, or has her own ideas of what "selling your data" means.

They don't sell your data. Your actions and data are used to put you into categories, and advertisers pay to show their ads to people associated with those categories. No one is given direct access to your data. This strategy is not unique to Facebook-- it's how Google, Yahoo, and other major advertising-based tech companies work.

Re: Zuckerberg Takes Steps to Calm Facebook Employees

#153

Post by bamboozled » Mon, Mar 26, 2018, 2:55 AM UTC

sp527 wrote: post #41

madez wrote: post #10

Facebook is an enabler for individuals to successfully undermine our democratic mechanisms. It shouldn't feel nice to work for a company that has to explain itself in front of the government. The employees of Facebook should be aware of what monster they are building.

No they’re not. They’re in denial. I used to work there as an intern, so I get a front row seat to how a lot of employees are reacting. The word I would use is: indignation. I’ve seen this us-against-them mentality play out elsewhere in various toxic cult-like organizational cultures. The NSA was a great public example of just how manifestly horrifying things can get with tens to hundreds of decent people willfully p…

I've seen the same behaviour, excellent comment and thanks for sharing. It would be great to see a documentary on these companies and their relationships with the companies they work for.

Re: Zuckerberg Takes Steps to Calm Facebook Employees

#154

Post by sulam » Mon, Mar 26, 2018, 2:56 AM UTC

aianus wrote: post #147

sulam wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HITRUST CSF is a framework for auditably proving HIPPA compliance. It prescribes controls such as encrypting data at rest. If you have a business relationship with a company which provides you PHI without explicit user consent you must have an agreement (a BAA) with the third party which puts them under the same requirements (backed up with third party audits). Everything you’re describing sounds like it’s either inc…

Surprise: regulating and legislating doesn’t actually make bad behaviour go away. I too have had the experience of interning at a medical software company where security and patient privacy were a joke.

That sucks, but you might consider next time talking to people and seeing if they are working to improve things and, if not, being a whistleblower.

Re: Zuckerberg Takes Steps to Calm Facebook Employees

#155

Post by anonytrary » Mon, Mar 26, 2018, 3:00 AM UTC

seattle_spring wrote: post #152

anonytrary wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sheryl Sandberg is under the impression that Facebook, quote, "does not sell your data": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1CTHFEcoJc She is either wrong, or lying, or has her own ideas of what "selling your data" means.

They don't sell your data. Your actions and data are used to put you into categories, and advertisers pay to show their ads to people associated with those categories. No one is given direct access to your data. This strategy is not unique to Facebook-- it's how Google, Yahoo, and other major advertising-based tech companies work.

At the end of the day, your data goes into a black box, gets jumbled around and then sold. To suggest this is different than "selling your data" is pedantic and misleading. For Sheryl to deny this "selling of data" reveals her concern with words and reception over real actions and effects.

Re: Zuckerberg Takes Steps to Calm Facebook Employees

#156

Post by colejohnson66 » Mon, Mar 26, 2018, 3:00 AM UTC

joshjdr wrote: post #125

How fast can I kill all my karma by pointing out that the 3 of the top 4 articles on HN are some realization that Facebook does not give an ef about anybody's privacy?

On ArsTechnica, you just need to bring up Obama’s use of FB’s social graph

Re: Zuckerberg Takes Steps to Calm Facebook Employees

#157

Post by dawhizkid » Mon, Mar 26, 2018, 3:05 AM UTC

tuna-piano wrote: post #62

Can someone explain to me why the Cambridge Analytica story is making people so much angrier than the later revelation that Facebook was scraping call+text info? That seems to be the larger problem to me. Somewhere at Facebook there is a team of people who wrote software to scrape, store and analyze the personal call+text data that users didn't explicitly mean to give to Facebook. The data that Cambridge Analytica at…

The CA story is the first tangible example of the societal consequences of exploiting social data for something other than selling you cat litter.

Re: Zuckerberg Takes Steps to Calm Facebook Employees

#158

Post by TAForObvReasons » Mon, Mar 26, 2018, 3:05 AM UTC

m52go wrote: post #143

tuna-piano wrote: post #62

Can someone explain to me why the Cambridge Analytica story is making people so much angrier than the later revelation that Facebook was scraping call+text info? That seems to be the larger problem to me. Somewhere at Facebook there is a team of people who wrote software to scrape, store and analyze the personal call+text data that users didn't explicitly mean to give to Facebook. The data that Cambridge Analytica at…

> Isn't the Cambridge Analytics headline really just, "Group doesn't follow website's terms of service from five years ago". I think the the headline people are seeing is more like "Group doesn't follow website's terms of service from five years ago, and ends up helping Donald Trump win presidency." A big part of the reason this has become so big a story is political.

"A foreign entity that was not registered as foreign agents collaborated with a multinational corporation to influence the presidential election" is why people are outraged. But it's likely that none of this would have been investigated had Clinton won the election

Re: Zuckerberg Takes Steps to Calm Facebook Employees

#159

Post by fatbird » Mon, Mar 26, 2018, 3:07 AM UTC

m52go wrote: post #143

tuna-piano wrote: post #62

Can someone explain to me why the Cambridge Analytica story is making people so much angrier than the later revelation that Facebook was scraping call+text info? That seems to be the larger problem to me. Somewhere at Facebook there is a team of people who wrote software to scrape, store and analyze the personal call+text data that users didn't explicitly mean to give to Facebook. The data that Cambridge Analytica at…

> Isn't the Cambridge Analytics headline really just, "Group doesn't follow website's terms of service from five years ago". I think the the headline people are seeing is more like "Group doesn't follow website's terms of service from five years ago, and ends up helping Donald Trump win presidency." A big part of the reason this has become so big a story is political.

Cambridge Analytica’s actions had real world political consequences, so yes it’s political for that reason. But another angle of the CA portion of the story is that they were ratfucking in a very effective way—such as publishing fake news about BLM activists were organizing violent rallies, then broadcasting that to likely Trump voters. In some cases they even organized BLM events with incitement to commit violence, then pushed true stories about the events that suited their narrative.

In other words, CA demonstrated a tremendous vulnerability in our political dialogue to pure propaganda and dirty tricks that social media, in its algorithmic purity, was supposed to make less likely, not more. Some of the fallout of this affair will be a tremendous distrust that any provider of social media is an honest broker of what others use their services for. If my news feed is tainted by a group like CA manipulating it at the algorithm level, what hope can I have that anything I’m receiving over the Internet isn’t compromised? Maybe the stories are fake; maybe they’re true but the balance of stories is altered; maybe the facts are true-ish but slanted or selective. These are all legitimate concerns in the normal marketplace of ideas, but now we find the marketplace of ideas is deliberately compromised by malicious entities.

Re: Zuckerberg Takes Steps to Calm Facebook Employees

#160

Post by srj » Mon, Mar 26, 2018, 3:07 AM UTC

kerng wrote: post #109

debatem1 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has a gaggle of security teams, almost all of which occasionally red team and some of which exclusively do. I'm not sure who told you otherwise but they were certainly mistaken. Source: I TL'd a security team there several years ago.

Thanks for pointing this out. I heard it from a security manager at Google at a conference in 2016. Good to hear that they do breach simulations now, besides regular pen testing and stuff.

I'm not sure if there was miscommunication or what, but Google has had teams that do this for a while now. I typically hear them referred to as orange teams.