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Facebook pauses app reviews, disables new user authorizations

developers.facebook.com

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Re: Facebook pauses app reviews, disables new user authorizations

#121

Post by IAmEveryone »

downandout wrote: post #107
misiti3780 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is what I thought also but how did CA get this friend data?

They got it by using the same technique that Obama did in 2008 and 2012. They got one of your friends to authorize their app, and then they were allowed to access most of the data about your friends that you could access. The only difference between CA and Obama is that Obama’s app was given special permission to blow through data collection limits enforced on all other apps, such that even though less than 1 million…

There are, obviously similarities. Yet there are, I believe, also two major differences:

(a) This was 8 and 4 years earlier. A lot changed in that timeframe. While, yes, there were always concerns about privacy, the string of data leaks, and the increasingly obvious power of statistical methods for targeting, have had a strong effect on the general public's attitude towards the practice.

(b) The Obama campaign did not break their contract with Facebook. Facebook did apparently turn of their API limits, either because of sympathy or because that's just what they did for big clients back then (FarmVille got the same privilege). But in the end, it appears that nobody broke any rules back then.

Now this probably won't convince everybody. So let me say this: even if the reaction now is hypocritical, it seems everyone agrees that the current outrage is justified. If so, it would be foolish not take action now just because "your team" got caught while the other got away. After all, the chances of each party being advantaged by such practices going forward seem to be exactly equal.

(Not to mention the vastly larger universe of threats not involving the two US parties)

Re: Facebook pauses app reviews, disables new user authorizations

#122

Post by downandout »

IAmEveryone wrote: post #117
downandout wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can’t “essentially do the same thing” in the way you mention though. You are bringing up a second issue, that is also not allowed. You cannot, for example, use specific GPS coordinates to target a house or even a group of houses. Anything less specific than that and the effect gets watered down significantly, and the platform simply doesn’t allow anything close to that kind of “extremely specific” location target…

The idea is this: given the complete graph and add some external data, you can identify those users you should advertise to, i. e. jane@test.com. BUT: what is still possible, and what Cambridge Analytica was actually building, is slightly different: with a statistical sample of maybe a few ten thousand complete profiles, you can build a statistical model that targets your advertisement not to a user, but a set of cri…

Agreed that it’s scary if someone actually manages to get it working. CA did not, nor did Obama who was given access to far more data. But the issue is the false narrative being sold by these news stories. If you ask an average person right now what happened based upon these news stories, they’ll tell you that Trump hired someone to hack their Facebook data and then used it to target Facebook ads to them, and that this was so effective that he was able to steal the election from Hillary. That’s what I take issue with - it’s a provably false narrative.

Re: Facebook pauses app reviews, disables new user authorizations

#123

Post by mistermann »

734786710934 wrote: post #50
niij wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>He hasn't. He has pledged to donate 99% of his wealth to a private, for-profit organization that he owns. I initially thought you were being overly critical here. It looks like you're right, the "Initiative" he created is an LLC and not a non-profit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chan_Zuckerberg_Initiative#Com...

If you read higher up in that wiki it lists all of the money the initiative has given away so far. I'm not sure why people think that the LLC doesn't give away money.

That's called influence, changing people's minds with relatively small amounts of money. And it works.

Re: Facebook pauses app reviews, disables new user authorizations

#124

Post by jnbiche »

mistermann wrote: post #119
jnbiche wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm fairly sure there are multiple downvote bots operating on HN. Frequently, certain comments to topics considered by some as "political" on HN will get an immediate 2 or 3 downvotes in the first 30 seconds, and then over the course of the next 2 or 3 hours, be upvoted back up to black. Although it's possible that there's some confounding happening here, such as the handful of people who hit refresh on HN hundreds o…

I get downvoted on agreeable comments on 4 day old conversations....there's definitely bots or something going on.

A downvote on a 4-day-old comment is unlikely to be a bot, since it's likely that no one will even see it. If you're seeing agreeable comments being downvoted after several days, it's probably just a grouchy misanthrope or two catching up on HN on their day off.

Re: Facebook pauses app reviews, disables new user authorizations

#125

Post by downandout »

IAmEveryone wrote: post #121
downandout wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They got it by using the same technique that Obama did in 2008 and 2012. They got one of your friends to authorize their app, and then they were allowed to access most of the data about your friends that you could access. The only difference between CA and Obama is that Obama’s app was given special permission to blow through data collection limits enforced on all other apps, such that even though less than 1 million…

There are, obviously similarities. Yet there are, I believe, also two major differences: (a) This was 8 and 4 years earlier. A lot changed in that timeframe. While, yes, there were always concerns about privacy, the string of data leaks, and the increasingly obvious power of statistical methods for targeting, have had a strong effect on the general public's attitude towards the practice. (b) The Obama campaign did no…

The Obama campaign did not break their contract with Facebook.

While I generally agree with the rest of your comment, Obama did in fact break their contract with Facebook. The developer TOS said that any data obtained through the API was to be used exclusively for the purpose of the operation of your app. Unfortunately, by all accounts, they used this data for purposes outside the app, such as campaign strategy and voter targeting. Further, this was back when targeting Facebook ads by ID was allowed. So they likely did far scarier things than either Trump or Hillary were able to accomplish. We don’t know, because the media was OK with his win, and as a result, nobody investigated the specifics.

Re: Facebook pauses app reviews, disables new user authorizations

#126

Post by mistermann »

IAmEveryone wrote: post #117
downandout wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can’t “essentially do the same thing” in the way you mention though. You are bringing up a second issue, that is also not allowed. You cannot, for example, use specific GPS coordinates to target a house or even a group of houses. Anything less specific than that and the effect gets watered down significantly, and the platform simply doesn’t allow anything close to that kind of “extremely specific” location target…

The idea is this: given the complete graph and add some external data, you can identify those users you should advertise to, i. e. jane@test.com. BUT: what is still possible, and what Cambridge Analytica was actually building, is slightly different: with a statistical sample of maybe a few ten thousand complete profiles, you can build a statistical model that targets your advertisement not to a user, but a set of cri…

> you can build a statistical model that targets your advertisement not to a user, but a set of criteria: "Males between the ages of 35 and 40 living in a mid-sized town in Texas who liked curling and Star Wars Episode I, but has never traveled to Australia". This is still perfectly possible.

Prediction: It won't be after the government is done with a new set of regulations, at least for election purposes. I continue to believe this is about the ability to wield political influence, not privacy. The privacy issues have been well known for years, and there's very little evidence of public concern over the privacy, other than newspaper article after newspaper article claiming there is, each one "coincidentally" making reference to Donald Trump, as if he was somehow personally responsible for this debacle, and almost no stories on the Obama campaign who did largely the same thing on a much grander scale.

If someone knows of any convincing independent public polls, with published questions (with the right questions, you can get whatever "answer" you want to produce) that shows that there are in fact widespread public privacy concerns, I'd love to read them. Until then, I'm going to continue to believe this is about the power to influence the public in the political sphere, and predict that the Facebook platform is going to be stripped of that power.

Re: Facebook pauses app reviews, disables new user authorizations

#127

Post by ryanwaggoner »

majestik wrote: post #105
headsoup wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're comparing Apples to oranges (I'm sorry) Apple doesn't have a social network. They also don't rely on advertising and 3rd party data brokering. It's easy for Apple to be the 'good guys' here when they have physical products as their profit generators. FOSS would have worked better in the Facebook case too as people and developers would know/discover a) where their data is and b) what risks it faces

“Apple doesn't have a social network.” What about iMessage?

That's a social network in the same way the Pony Express was.

Re: Facebook pauses app reviews, disables new user authorizations

#128

Post by ryanwaggoner »

jnbiche wrote: post #124
mistermann wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get downvoted on agreeable comments on 4 day old conversations....there's definitely bots or something going on.

A downvote on a 4-day-old comment is unlikely to be a bot, since it's likely that no one will even see it. If you're seeing agreeable comments being downvoted after several days, it's probably just a grouchy misanthrope or two catching up on HN on their day off.

it's probably just a grouchy misanthrope or two catching up on HN on their day off.

I do this :)

Re: Facebook pauses app reviews, disables new user authorizations

#129

Post by intrasight »

aylmao wrote: post #93
IBM wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple got this right from the beginning despite years of criticism about the "walled garden". They took arrows for years: all the "open always wins" from the FOSS types, all the press coverage of some app developer crying about App Store rejections or onerous rules. They didn't get it wrong because they know who butters their bread: customers. Developers are rightly prioritized last. Fun to give this Paul Graham essa…

> Apple got this right from the beginning despite years of criticism about the "walled garden". Being a walled garden is independent of privacy. The calendar app on macOS Calendar app allows me to share my calendars in an open format (ICAL) and interoperates with other calendar apps through that specification. It respects my privacy by not sharing anything I don't ask it to without being "walled". Signal is open and…

> FOSS and privacy are tangential matters

I totally agree (because it's true of course). But do recognize that it's in Apple's interest to conflate the two. To make it even more interesting, add "secure" to the list of matters.

Re: Facebook pauses app reviews, disables new user authorizations

#130

Post by ryanwaggoner »

madrox wrote: post #56

This is a bit out of left field, but since the height of Farmville I've argued that Facebook should offer cloud services. I know these days everyone wants you to build on their cloud and it's a bit oversaturated, but a very easy way for Facebook to make data available to developers while maintaining security is to run the code that operates on that data on their servers. Seems like such a no-brainer I'm surprised the…

Ben Thompson from Stratechery has convinced me that Facebook wanted to be a platform, but changed their mind. They realized that making the world's most valuable consumer dataset available to developers (and competitors) was dumb, as was letting those companies all pollute the core FB experience (like Farmville), and they would make far more money in the long run by letting advertisers target with that data.

This lines up with my experience. I did a ton of (painful) Facebook platform development from 2007-2009 or so, but I haven't followed it as closely since. My sense back then was that there was this huge build-up of activity around the FB platform; they were creating all these new APIs and ways for developers to build super social experiences and deeply integrate with the core FB experience, there were huge companies like Zynga that were entirely dependent on Facebook and also were responsible for tons of FB revenue, etc. And then it all seemed to fizzle? It doesn't seem like there's really hardly any activity any more in terms of deep integration with Facebook as a platform, other than FB login. I never see anything on my news feed any more from weird apps, or get invites to take some dumb quiz, or whatever. I mean, I'm sure that stuff is there somewhere, but not anything like it was. That could be wrong though!

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