This image from Reddit purports to be Mark’s notes from the meeting: https://i.redd.it/egi0jlf096r01.jpg . Some interesting stuff in there if true.
Mark Zuckerberg testifies before Congress
421–430 of 487 posts
Re: Mark Zuckerberg testifies before Congress
#422When you ask general questions you get "We did not do anything illegal, we did something wrong though; but, people do not read Terms Of Use/Privacy, and they do not read manuals"
When you ask very specific questions you get "I need to get back to you on that", right?
There is clearly a conflict of interest there. In a public hearing the CEO of his own company is basically forced into giving up their trade secrets on how and why his company even got so successful in the business of ad targeting.
The question is: In his place, what would you do? Tell everything and potentially break your own company, your system, life achievement, whatever? Or be careful and vague to save it? I'm not trying to defend his position, but rather to understand it. In any case, he maneuvered himself and his company in a situation where it'll be impossible to keep secrets anymore. Nothing will ever be the same, and he is responsible for it, because it was his idea and his intention behind enabling his company to connect people by selling ads.
Re: Mark Zuckerberg testifies before Congress
#423Am I missing something? Take the Senator who spoke about monopolies. An oil monopoly is bad because we all need to get to work and trains need to run. Microsoft monopoly, arguable but I can see how it can be bad. All companies end up using Microsoft and this affects everyone, hospitals, schools ... Facebook is optional, we won't starve, hospitals won't close, aeroplanes will continue if we delete Facebook. Is this an…
Not participating in facebook puts you on a social disadvantage (during an interview for a job, the question of a lack of facebook account came up and the interviewer noted negatively that they weren't able to confirm my CV that way, I didn't take that job)
Facebook as a monopoly is bad in the same way that Microsoft as a monopoly was/is bad because while you can still work on your computer using Linux, you'll have a hard time opening Word documents from the latest MS Office release that contain non-trivial formatting.
You can probably still use the document but you are disadvantaged.
It's a quasi-monopoly. They don't operate a resource necessary for survival, Microsoft never did either, but not participating in their quasi-monopoly puts you at a disadvantage.
Re: Mark Zuckerberg testifies before Congress
#424Earlier quoted context omitted.
Facebook doesn't delete all cookies (for instance, there's an `sb` cookie still set) in their logout response. They may choose not to do anything with the cookies that remain, but the technical answer to the question is yes. And even if they currently did delete all cookies, there's nothing from preventing them from introducing cookies that do remain. Zuck knows this is generally feasible - he's a talented software e…
This is all supposed to be politically scary and demonstrative of the fact that very few people actually knows what is going on. Which all the more scary to me because these are the people who are supposed to understand what's going on so they can have proper oversight. This entire issue reminds me of the time the supreme court tried to wrap their brains around the (finger quotes) "the cloud". What's really sad is th…
I'm deriving a perverse kind of pleasure from all this. Maciej Ceglowski has a fantastic talk called Haunted By Data, where he compares data to radioactive waste: we collect a lot of it, and ultimately don't know how to handle it safely and responsibly.
He ends the talk with a warning that unless the tech sector is careful, they will have their own Three Mile Island, and will forever afterwards be regulated into the ground. Facebook and Google are almost begging for it. May we see them become a shadow of their powerful selves in not too distant a future.
Re: Mark Zuckerberg testifies before Congress
#425When you ask general questions you get "We did not do anything illegal, we did something wrong though; but, people do not read Terms Of Use/Privacy, and they do not read manuals" When you ask very specific questions you get "I need to get back to you on that", right? There is clearly a conflict of interest there. In a public hearing the CEO of his own company is basically forced into giving up their trade secrets on…
It's a crass kind of life achievement if all of his life has lead up to adtech. I refuse to believe that there is no middle ground between what facebook is doing and what the average user would like to see them doing.
Re: Mark Zuckerberg testifies before Congress
#426Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cookies? I would assume Facebook is using the latest tracking techniques like canvas fingerprinting and other ways to identify users uniquely on the web.
I though canvas fingerprinting can't track individual users, but only segments based on the underlying graphics substrate?
Even if they can't track single users solely based on canvas fingerprinting, it gives them a big additional piece of information, to narrow down specific users.
Re: Mark Zuckerberg testifies before Congress
#427Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They may choose not to do anything with the cookies that remain, but the technical answer to the question is yes. I think you could say the same thing about IP addresses. A website might log the IP addresses of people who visit them, or they might not, but quite a lot of tracking is feasible. The problem with focusing on feasibility there, is that you end up with an answer like "yes, just like every other website i…
While a website may be able to track you via IP address within itself, it can't track you across websites like FB can since their code gets injected to a lot of websites (which they do use to track you when you're signed in - my guess would be the same holds for when you're logged out).
They need the website to add their code in order to track you. The website could just send the IPs as easily.
Re: Mark Zuckerberg testifies before Congress
#428When you ask general questions you get "We did not do anything illegal, we did something wrong though; but, people do not read Terms Of Use/Privacy, and they do not read manuals" When you ask very specific questions you get "I need to get back to you on that", right? There is clearly a conflict of interest there. In a public hearing the CEO of his own company is basically forced into giving up their trade secrets on…
It's a crass kind of life achievement if all of his life has lead up to adtech. I refuse to believe that there is no middle ground between what facebook is doing and what the average user would like to see them doing.
Well that's an interesting juxtaposition. His life achievement would then be "he connected people all over the world" but what he essentially did "was selling ads and he was good at it".
There's always a middle ground. You give up a bit of privacy and benefit from some product "free of charge". See? The questions are how much is "a bit", who decides what is in it and who decides who gets what? To agree on middle ground there need to be ground rules/terms. So, the problem is that Facebook alone is deciding upon which rules users get to use their services.
Re: Mark Zuckerberg testifies before Congress
#429Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Many trans people consider the transgendered offensive You are creating insanity everywhere you go with this line. Anyone who takes offense at such a trifle can only be out to pick a fight. And if someone is egging for a fight, shall we engage rather than wilt away? And isn't THAT the landmine you're stepping on here? Are you picking a fight? If so, where do you get off?
When someone says, "Hey, I prefer X for myself", I generally make an token effort to acknowledge and accommodate that preference because it seems like the sort of thing a decent human being does.
Right, but no one actually said to great_kraken, "I'd prefer it if you to say 'transgender' to 'transgendered'."
You just went full speech police because you felt so empowered. And what I'm telling you is that your dismissive attempt to shutdown discourse in the way you did is toxic.
Re: Mark Zuckerberg testifies before Congress
#430This image from Reddit purports to be Mark’s notes from the meeting: https://i.redd.it/egi0jlf096r01.jpg . Some interesting stuff in there if true.
“Don’t say we already do what GDPR requires”
“Lots of stories about apps misusing Apple Data. Never heard of Apple notifying anyone”