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Facebook was in talks with hospitals about a proposal to share data

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Re: Facebook was in talks with hospitals about a proposal to share data

#101

Post by fricat1ve »

apotheothesomai wrote: post #23
craftyguy wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

>the idea of being in an "elite", informed group is more important than the actual issues.

Do you mean to say it's voyeurism, i.e. the draw of being "informed"? Sitting in the eye of the panopticon?

I think people just have a tendency to focus on the positive things that might be gained from data mining. There's just a lot of naivete about how compromised an ad-supported business ultimately is.

Re: Facebook was in talks with hospitals about a proposal to share data

#102

Post by clickme_zsh »

Facebook might have collected a lot of Data in India especially in Southern states where they advertised blood donations camp and asked people to volunteer.

They might have a lot of data on people by now as many of my ex-classmates joined for blood donation drives.

People don't care about privacy anyways(At least where I live until some one explains them the implications of it. :/ I cant prove that they collected the volunteers data though as I didn't take part in it.

Re: Facebook was in talks with hospitals about a proposal to share data

#103

Post by twanvl »

d33 wrote: post #63
Xylakant wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).…

Doesn't it only apply if the salt is known or constant? If I passed you hash(x) + aes(random_salt), would this attack work?

If you don't store the salt, then you might as well generate random numbers.

Re: Facebook was in talks with hospitals about a proposal to share data

#105

Post by ShabbosGoy »

leesalminen wrote: post #96
LinuxBender wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ones I know are proud of the fact they can pull in thousands of data sources. They will show off what they can do using big data, AI and other bingo terms with your data.

Scary stuff. Glad I never drank the FB Kool-Aid. Don’t think I’d even consider a job offer from them.

It’s easy to say that when you are financially secure and comfortable.

Re: Facebook was in talks with hospitals about a proposal to share data

#106

Post by lmilcin »

chillingeffect wrote: post #81
lmilcin wrote: post #40

I hope that by now everybody understands that we are the product, not the customers.

This is generally very true, especially for facebook, but there are cases of pure altruism and fraternity, such as open and free software. Some people really do want the world to be a better place and dedicate small or large amounts of their life's work to improving it for the others. Some free things are actually wholesome. So we have to learn how to discriminate between whether something free is actually good for u…

Fully agree. But a large for profit company with investors has an obligation to turn profit. There can't be really true altruism within those rules unless what appears as altruism supports for profi goal of the company becuse they for some reason are aligned with your goals. If you are not paying it then its interests are not likely aligned with yours. I don't want to say for profit companies can't do good, because they do. You just have to be constantly vigilant that your goals and the company goals stay aligned.

Re: Facebook was in talks with hospitals about a proposal to share data

#107

Post by flokie »

marcell wrote: post #6

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 seems like some are forgetting the near 6000 word 'manifesto' where this was all outlined by Mark.

"In times like these, the most important thing we at Facebook can do is develop the social infrastructure... "

"For the past decade, Facebook has focused on connecting friends and families. With that foundation, our next focus will be developing the social infrastructure for community -- for supporting us, for keeping us safe, for informing us, for civic engagement,"

" I have long expected more organizations and startups to build health and safety tools using technology, and I have been surprised by how little of what must be built has even been attempted. There is a real opportunity to build global safety infrastructure, and I have directed Facebook to invest more and more resources into serving this need."

This is barely a year old. Did he not lay out a vision where FB powered our civic, social & community services?

link: https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/building-glob...

Re: Facebook was in talks with hospitals about a proposal to share data

#108

Post by 794CD01 »

ShabbosGoy wrote: post #105
leesalminen wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scary stuff. Glad I never drank the FB Kool-Aid. Don’t think I’d even consider a job offer from them.

It’s easy to say that when you are financially secure and comfortable.

What kind of person is facebook interested in hiring who can't become financially secure and comfortable working elsewhere?

Re: Facebook was in talks with hospitals about a proposal to share data

#109

Post by mapster »

marcell wrote: post #6

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…

How did the public get wind of it if it was an internal research project?

Re: Facebook was in talks with hospitals about a proposal to share data

#110

Post by feelin_googley »

Heres an interesting "letter to Mark Zuckerberg" from a professor of health informatics who has worked with the NHS for the last 34 years.1

It discusses the issue of "the creepy line" and how to manage it in terms of getting informed consent to use electronic patient records.

He suggests NHS has "25 years of data on 50 million people" but because consent is required they cannot extract much meaningful information from it.

He tells that in an effort to "get around" this problem, the government proposed the concept of "implied consent".

A former shipyard worker in one of the authors workshops evaluated this concept plainly as thus: "Clearly some London-based bollocks. Nobody implies my consent."

1 https://www.digitalhealth.net/2018/04/joes-view-dear-mr-zuck...

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