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Zuckerberg Takes Steps to Calm Facebook Employees

nytimes.com

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Re: Zuckerberg Takes Steps to Calm Facebook Employees

#261

Post by sjg007 »

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…

Upton Sinclair comes to mind: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

Re: Zuckerberg Takes Steps to Calm Facebook Employees

#262

Post by heurist »

fatbird wrote: post #212
renaudg wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, it's quite the opposite in fact : their business model relies on jealously guarding private user information to remain the only entity in the world who can sell highly-targeted ads

How do you sell highly targeted ads without revealing your data? How did the Obama campaign download the entire U.S. social graph in 2012, and brag about doing so, with Facebook’s approval? How did Cambridge Analytica do a comparable thing in 2016? Facebook doesn’t sound that jealous to me.

They abstract most of it away. Marketers can set specific targeting criteria and can get a high level estimate of how an ad will perform. Beyond that it's tracking impressions, clicks, split testing, etc.

The app API was different until 2013(?). App developers only needed a single user's permission to access all of that user's friends' information. Both Obama and Cambridge Analytica came out of that period. Now, users can only authorize the release of their own information.

Re: Zuckerberg Takes Steps to Calm Facebook Employees

#263

Post by chrischen »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #93
chrischen wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't Zuckerberg have full control of the board?

> Doesn't Zuckerberg have full control of the board? Zuckerberg has voting control of Facebook, in part due to some financial engineering in 2016 [1]. He does not control the Board. Board members have a fiduciary "duty of care," i.e. "the duty to pay attention and to try to make good decision" [2]. This duty is to the company as a whole, not just its majority vote-holder [3][4]. (That said "American courts simply do…

What does that mean? He can't control the opinion of the board members but he can control the decisions of the board as whole?

Re: Zuckerberg Takes Steps to Calm Facebook Employees

#264

Post by jk2323 »

fenk85 wrote: post #257
jk2323 wrote: post #231

Honestly, I am not very worried about rouge data analytic companies or Russian trolls on facebook. I am worried that questionable semi-private German entity can block me (e.g. 30 days ban) on facebook at will. I am an US citizen and don't live in Germany. This is outrageous.

Whatabout a semi-private German entity?

Take this as a start (I know, Breitbart)

http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015/09/17/german-govt-hires...

I just read about "FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection Regarding Reported Concerns about Facebook Privacy Practices". Since I am an American citizen and was blocked for 30 days on facebook by this dubious organisation, I may actually drop the FTC an email and ask about their opinion on this.

Re: Zuckerberg Takes Steps to Calm Facebook Employees

#265

Post by softawre »

wdr1 wrote: post #167
m52go wrote: 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.

> 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 Oba…

> We would ask permission

They asked each user for permission to look at their social graph, in an app designed for this task (Obama election).

Re: Zuckerberg Takes Steps to Calm Facebook Employees

#266

Post by softawre »

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.

> already owns or is on their way to purchasing a home

This is insane. I get why some people want to live in the bay area, but I'll take my 4k square feet home in the great neighboorhood with the award winning schools for 300k.

Re: Zuckerberg Takes Steps to Calm Facebook Employees

#268

Post by eurticket »

mehrdadn wrote: post #2

I feel like someone should also give Zuckerberg the memo that it's only a matter of time before an insider also goes rogue and abuses data access (edit: or otherwise; see below). Facebook fundamentally seems to trust itself way too much, and it worries me that it thinks the only threats are external entities... to me, this is another silently ticking time bomb. EDIT: And don't forget that going rogue is just one scen…

I would imagine we would hear a lot less information about an internal issue regarding a Facebook employee than an external one as well.

Re: Zuckerberg Takes Steps to Calm Facebook Employees

#269

Post by heavenlyblue »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #98
harryh wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd think so, but most companies have pretty strict internal controls for this sort of thing. Access is also carefully logged so a leaker is pretty much guaranteed to get caught at which point they'd immediately lose their job and likely face criminal prosecution. With so much to lose and so little to gain internal leaks of this sort are extremely rare.

> With so much to lose and so little to gain internal leaks of this sort are extremely rare I recently downloaded my Facebook archive [1]. If it were legal, I would certainly pay thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars for certain peoples' archives. I can think of several practical contexts in which an unethical actor would find it profitable to pay a Facebook employee a million dollars for someone's Facebook a…

I could find several unethical contexts where the same actor is paid a million dollars to kill the same person and the legal framework we live in does nothing to stop this.

Well, apart from post-factum incarceration.

Re: Zuckerberg Takes Steps to Calm Facebook Employees

#270

Post by kerng »

mehrdadn wrote: post #224
kerng wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Google security manager told me at a conference when chatting about this in 2016. They were thinking of staffing a breach team, but did not have one then.

I thought Project Zero tries to find vulnerabilities in Google stuff too?

Project Zero is different compared to performing end to end breaches. A breach team might use 0-days of Project Zero to actually compromise Google's internal assets to see if their defenders can detect an adversary. FB has such a team and they gave public presentations (one was at RuxCon 2016) how they compromise for instance their domain controllers and stuff.
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