61–70 of 120 posts
In light of this news, the fact that Zuckerberg General Hospital exists is in some ways completely irrelevant/cosmetic, but is simultaneously kind of hideous.
I mean, I’m no FB fan at all, but why? Assuming it’s named that because he made a donation and he’s not using his leverage at the hospital inappropriately, isn’t it only fair to give him some credit when his surveillance money is used for good? Similar to Bill Gates.
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Not if you use salt.
Even if you salt the hashes. The problem is that the number of inputs is limited and it's trivial to enumerate over the input values. Let's take a contrived example: We have the data of a small, entirely made-up island where only two families live, so we have two surnames. Let's name them Foo and Bar. Now, they have an entirely funny tradition, they all get first names based on the order in which they were born (1).…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not if you use salt.
Even if you salt the hashes. The problem is that the number of inputs is limited and it's trivial to enumerate over the input values. Let's take a contrived example: We have the data of a small, entirely made-up island where only two families live, so we have two surnames. Let's name them Foo and Bar. Now, they have an entirely funny tradition, they all get first names based on the order in which they were born (1).…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, I’m no FB fan at all, but why? Assuming it’s named that because he made a donation and he’s not using his leverage at the hospital inappropriately, isn’t it only fair to give him some credit when his surveillance money is used for good? Similar to Bill Gates.
Mild poetic irony is all they likely meant.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, all I see is that insurance companies will be the ones with the most to gain (economically) from this information, and thus the ones that will pay the most for it.
Insurance companies already have tons of relevant medical data on their clients, there's no reason why whatever FB can provide them is going to be miraculously more telling than actual medical data such as their current and past diagnoses and medical conditions.
FB seems to have (rightly) realised that this is one of those 'just because we can, doesn't mean we should' cases, especially given the current situation. It's a bit of a non-story, and if I squint I can see the possible academic value in it, but given how battered FB's reputation is right now it's definitely not the time to try something like this. I am sure that the privacy issues could be overcome with a properly…
HIPAA laws (which protect the privacy of patient health information) have some real teeth. If Facebook was not scared off by them, their partners -- the hospitals -- may well have been.
The pile on continues... (1) This is probably a project by a small "research" group at Facebook. The goal of that group is probably to publish papers in a Psych journal or something like that about how they were able to correlate anonymized medical data with Facebook feed updates. Tech companies have these research groups for prestige, they are not central to the company mission. (2) According to the article, the pro…
It sounds to me like the researcher wanted to use this data to identify at-risk groups and get them preventive care. I don't mean "identify" as in, de-anonymize them, but to use data to figure who may need help (or advertised to -- same difference really). This actually sounds like a good idea if that's the purpose. It's not any different than retailers identifying cohorts they can sell to. It also sounds very simila…
Why are we still giving this company the benefit of the doubt after years of blatant abuse?
Advertising corporations shouldn't be anywhere near my medical records, period.
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I dislike/disagree with facebook more than most folks, but even I can smell a dead horse being beaten.
For years privacy-minded people have complained about the lack of recognition of privacy issues among the masses. Suddenly, story after story about aspects of Facebook's anti-privacy practices are being read by the public. This will lead to more stories about other data mining entities as well. The more this keeps up, the more concrete privacy issues will be in the minds of many. And yet, HN is full of dismissals. I'…
They want the stories to stop because they fear the general public may finally be gaining awareness of the abuse they're being subjected to.
The pile on continues... (1) This is probably a project by a small "research" group at Facebook. The goal of that group is probably to publish papers in a Psych journal or something like that about how they were able to correlate anonymized medical data with Facebook feed updates. Tech companies have these research groups for prestige, they are not central to the company mission. (2) According to the article, the pro…
Facebook has been screwing with people's privacy for years, so it's only fair that they are now criticised for years on end. This has got to be a new Facebook apology meme: the pile-on. Until Facebook and privacy is regulated in the US, like GDPR does it for the EU, the pile-on should continue. Must continue, no matter how uncomfortable it is for the pro-Facebook, pro-ads or pro-spyware people.
Yes there's some responsibility due them as well, but perhaps we can remain civil to our silent peers?