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Zuckerberg Takes Steps to Calm Facebook Employees

nytimes.com

161–170 of 274 posts

Re: Zuckerberg Takes Steps to Calm Facebook Employees

#161
post #41
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 think it also kinda helps that most of the engineers are probably not "rich kids"; they're probably mostly from middle class backgrounds. They've never seen that kind of wealth before, never seen that insane level of benefits. Its much easier to think of someone (or some org) as benign, to give them a second chance, when they treat you personally so well. Its kinda what immigrants feel when they do well in the US as well.

Re: Zuckerberg Takes Steps to Calm Facebook Employees

#162
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

If Clinton had won, the propaganda and dirty tricks would have failed, and so would have seemed much lower priority.

Re: Zuckerberg Takes Steps to Calm Facebook Employees

#163
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By giving access to your data, you are saying it's ok to take that data and pander to your psyche in some fashion. You may not see direct advertising in your browser, but it leads back to how strategists decide to engage your physical community. And even if you block ads, your friends may not. Friends will influence you through your feed, based on the ads they see, based on your data.

Yeah but my data - I'm middle aged, read HN, speculate a bit in crypto etc - is not anything I'm worried about people knowing. I can understand if people want to keep stuff secret but I don't have much of that and what I do I don't post on the internet in any form. I've never really thought of facebook as much more private than HN - ie not private.

It’s not that your data might be revealed, it’s that the data of you, your friends, and 50 million other voters might give someone an effective lever over a national election. Regardless of how you feel about Trump or Clinton, that should give you some pause.

Re: Zuckerberg Takes Steps to Calm Facebook Employees

#164

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?

It's been almost a week of this. Actually wondering when we'll get back to interesting tech

Re: Zuckerberg Takes Steps to Calm Facebook Employees

#165
post #154
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You might as well connect that whistle to an aircompressor if my experience is anything to go by. Very few companies have their house in order, and healthcare is definitely not an exception to this.

Re: Zuckerberg Takes Steps to Calm Facebook Employees

#166
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.

You can only sell your soul once, the second time there is nothing left.

Re: Zuckerberg Takes Steps to Calm Facebook Employees

#167
post #143

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.

> 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."

Exactly.

The Obama campaign already acknowledge they did the same thing, but on a bigger scale.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/facebooks-ru...

"In 2011, Carol Davidsen, director of data integration and media analytics for Obama for America, built a database of every American voter using the same Facebook developer tool used by Cambridge, known as the social graph API. Any time people used Facebook’s log-in button to sign on to the campaign’s website, the Obama data scientists were able to access their profile as well as their friends’ information. That allowed them to chart the closeness of people’s relationships and make estimates about which people would be most likely to influence other people in their network to vote.

“We ingested the entire U.S. social graph,” Davidsen said in an interview. “We would ask permission to basically scrape your profile, and also scrape your friends, basically anything that was available to scrape. We scraped it all.”"

Re: Zuckerberg Takes Steps to Calm Facebook Employees

#168
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It was true at Google. Yes, because Google is not your average company. It takes security extremely seriously... in fact it's about as awful of an example as you can give for a blanket statement you made about "most companies".

I'm not sure if Google even has an internal red team that performs breaches, last time I talked with someone there at a conference they didn't (that was 2016). So I am not sure Google has metrics on how easy it is to gain access by an adversary.

I worked in 2014-2015 at Google on one of the (many) teams that did exactly that.

Re: Zuckerberg Takes Steps to Calm Facebook Employees

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who watches the watchers? #1 - There's always a back door. I did some medical records stuff for a while. I looked myself up, just to confirm for myself how trivial it was to do. Yup, there I was. Which is why I insist that all data at rest is encrypted. (I have yet to win this argument.) #2 - Our "portal" product had access logs for auditing. Plus permissions, consent trees, delegation. The usual features. Alas. We a…

As an ex-employee, I feel much more confident in Facebook's processes than the company you're describing. Facebook would have no problem terminating people who do what you're describing.

As an ex-employee could you please also confirm whether or not the average employee is able to access user data, and what kinds of permissions (if any) this requires?

Re: Zuckerberg Takes Steps to Calm Facebook Employees

#170
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

> 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?

Was it CA doing the manipulating, or was it Facebook?

It's Facebook that runs Facebook...CA was merely taking advantage of Facebook to the fullest extent it could.

I'm not saying what CA did was right, but your comment seems to suggest Facebook was somehow helplessly complicit in executing CA's malicious plan.

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