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Statement by FTC Regarding Reported Concerns about Facebook Privacy Practices

ftc.gov

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Re: Statement by FTC Regarding Reported Concerns about Facebook Privacy Practices

#111

Post by herpderp3dtwerp »

lumberjack wrote: post #68

>Foremost among these tools is enforcement action against companies that fail to honor their privacy promises This is the crux of the issue. The problem is that when Facebook asks for "location information", the consequences of this are not being conveyed to the user. The user might think, "ah they want my location for the weather recommendations and event suggestions in my neighbourhood". They do not realise how som…

You can get all of this information from a phone number too.

https://www.twilio.com/marketplace/add-ons/nextcaller-advanc...

Give it a try with your phone number. It'll provide your address (current and former), income bracket, relatives, siblings, children, etc, etc.

Guess what Facebook asks you to provide when initially setting up!?

Re: Statement by FTC Regarding Reported Concerns about Facebook Privacy Practices

#112

Post by mrtksn »

purple-again wrote: post #106
eggpy wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was totally ready to call you out and that the rebranding of IE to Edge resulted in no change in adoption and Microsoft wins by default but apparently I am totally incorrect. Chrome is _by far_ dominating the browser game[0]. And while I'd rather FF take that spot, dethroning Microsoft makes my nerd heart pretty happy. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#/m...

Wow I honestly had no idea. I would of bet you $100 on the spot that Microsoft had more than 50% marketshare of browser traffic and considered you a sucker for taking the bet. I had no idea Chrome had dominated so much. I wonder what Firefox did wrong that it didn't become Chrome? It was the cool browser to use years before I ever heard of Chrome.

Maybe it was Google's push for the most part but Firefox made a reputation or being cluttered memory hogg and when Chrome came along it was so fast and fresh. Firefox used to lose it's smoothness when a tab misbehaves and didn't take advantage of the multi-core processors that were getting popular but Chrome was butter smooth even if a website is not responding(due to Flash Player mostly) because everything runs in a separate process and if a website died only that tab died.

It was no-brainer to switch to Chrome.

Also, Google was this cool company that was giving away revolutionary products. Don't do evil was their motto.

Re: Statement by FTC Regarding Reported Concerns about Facebook Privacy Practices

#113

Post by thu0nt345tnu »

mtgx wrote: post #79
lumberjack wrote: post #68

>Foremost among these tools is enforcement action against companies that fail to honor their privacy promises This is the crux of the issue. The problem is that when Facebook asks for "location information", the consequences of this are not being conveyed to the user. The user might think, "ah they want my location for the weather recommendations and event suggestions in my neighbourhood". They do not realise how som…

Indeed. Collecting a "type of data" tells you almost nothing about what the company collecting it could do or is going to do with that data. I think regulation around this idea may be most effective. Companies should have limits on what they can do with the data by default. If they want to use it for more, then they should not only offer a much greater degree of transparency but they should have to abide by much high…

I don't believe that telling the user what use will be made of their data will be in any way effective. Many companies are very honest and up front about it. The problem is that the information is just too technical for a user to understand, so they ignore. They have no choice because there's no way for them to understand it anyway.

Even if all companies were required to and did comply with a law like that and fully disclosed the information, the collected data would just be laundered through a third party in some way so that the terms of service were technically correct, but they could still get away with business as usual.

I think these companies just need to be barred from using data in this way period. It's the only way to ensure users are protected in my opinion.

Re: Statement by FTC Regarding Reported Concerns about Facebook Privacy Practices

#114

Post by politician »

I'm really amazed that all of this is coming to light less than 2 months before the GDPR comes into effect. I would've thought that companies, especially social media companies, would be trying to keep their heads down and avoid drawing attention from the EU on Day 1.

Everything that Facebook is saying to its American audience, it's also saying to the European GDPR regulators.

They need to walk a very fine line here and right now I don't think they're doing a particularly good job of it.

Re: Statement by FTC Regarding Reported Concerns about Facebook Privacy Practices

#115

Post by kemitche »

herpderp3dtwerp wrote: post #111
lumberjack wrote: post #68

>Foremost among these tools is enforcement action against companies that fail to honor their privacy promises This is the crux of the issue. The problem is that when Facebook asks for "location information", the consequences of this are not being conveyed to the user. The user might think, "ah they want my location for the weather recommendations and event suggestions in my neighbourhood". They do not realise how som…

You can get all of this information from a phone number too. https://www.twilio.com/marketplace/add-ons/nextcaller-advanc... Give it a try with your phone number. It'll provide your address (current and former), income bracket, relatives, siblings, children, etc, etc. Guess what Facebook asks you to provide when initially setting up!?

You can't get someone's bank from that. You can likely figure out someone's bank if you monitor their location over time, though.

Re: Statement by FTC Regarding Reported Concerns about Facebook Privacy Practices

#116

Post by shamino »

mrtksn wrote: post #41
kbenson wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure Digg had enough money lying around to just buy the next "cool" thing that comes along, as Facebook has done a few times now.

I added IE to my example to illustrate that having all the money in the world may not save you when your brand becomes toxic. Some may say that FB users don't care but with IE it also was just geeks and devs, but it turned into a crusade and now everyone "knows" that the first thing you do after you have a fresh PC is to install Chrome.

IE may be bad, but IE is not a stock symbol. MSFT is, and I wouldn't have mind buy MSFT when IE was going down.

:)

Re: Statement by FTC Regarding Reported Concerns about Facebook Privacy Practices

#117

Post by vuln »

habosa wrote: post #98
bogomipz wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on exactly how "big four banks" built a regulatory moat that no one can breach?

The regulatory costs of running a bank are much higher now than before the financial crisis. This means that the chance of an upstart challenging the big players has actually gone down, even though some of the regulation was meant to address concerns of "too big to fail".

Which is the Trump administration is trying to change that to give smaller regional banks a fighting chance. It's weird tat people are against this.

Re: Statement by FTC Regarding Reported Concerns about Facebook Privacy Practices

#119

Post by fogzen »

How were any of you damaged by Facebook ads, exactly? Why the outrage now and not before, when Obama (and everyone else) used targeted advertising?

This whole outrage over privacy is disingenuous. It’s painfully obvious the outrage is about Donald Trump being elected president, not personal information used to target ads.

Re: Statement by FTC Regarding Reported Concerns about Facebook Privacy Practices

#120

Post by steve_b »

r00fus wrote: post #85
lumberjack wrote: post #68

>Foremost among these tools is enforcement action against companies that fail to honor their privacy promises This is the crux of the issue. The problem is that when Facebook asks for "location information", the consequences of this are not being conveyed to the user. The user might think, "ah they want my location for the weather recommendations and event suggestions in my neighbourhood". They do not realise how som…

And who knows if the analysis that is derivable from this private data leads to a bunch of false-positives (that are conveniently not known by the person affected)? You could be "doing nothing wrong" and still get screwed by right people thinking the wrong things about your data. 1984 or Brazil - it doesn't matter they're both dystopias that revolve around totalitarian constructs - neither of them work without this k…

There's a really good Econtalk podcast called Weapons of Math Destruction about this: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2016/10/cathy_oneil_on_1.ht...
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