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Mark Zuckerberg testifies before Congress

theguardian.com

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Re: Mark Zuckerberg testifies before Congress

#431

Post by croon »

dschuetz wrote: post #428
exergy wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 grou…

There's no business incentive to scale down your ad sales even if you charged your users for the service.

I agree with you that there needs to be ground rules/terms, but in the form of regulation.

If Google chose a middle ground, they'd give away the Pixel phones for free, or at least heavily subsidized. But they don't have to, so they don't.

If no one stops you, sell on both ends.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg testifies before Congress

#432

Post by belorn »

Blahah wrote: post #358
bithive123 wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point people are trying to make is that properly practiced law can't be circumvented by these kinds of arguments. If there was a requirement to do something with the data and it was not done then you failed, technical jargon and implementation details are irrelevant.

I really do not think this is accurate. I have been in a courtroom when a file was described as 'deleted' and then an expert witness 'recovered' the 'deleted' file, which was entered as evidence. Delete is a technical word that has a specfiic meaning. Unlike most language, technical terms are (to some degree) clearly defined and should not change over time or with common usage. Whether people misinterpret the word ar…

Recovering a deleted file is identical to the concept of recovering a shredded document. Its more about intent and purpose rather than result. A shredded document is intended to be destroyed, but its obvious that it can be recovered if you got all the pieces. If you however put the paper in the basement and simply pretend to have destroyed it then I can see how a court would object.

Let think of an example where a government employee has a requirement to destroy documents and computer records as part of normal operations. Would marking the document as "destroyed" and then put in the basement be acceptable? Similarly, would marking the computer record in a database as "inaccessible" be enough? I personally doubt that the court would accept either method.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg testifies before Congress

#433

Post by johnchristopher »

dschuetz wrote: post #422

When 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…

Trade secret ? What would that be ? Is there a secret sauce to Facebook's success beyond the early mass adoption and dedication to adtech/attentioneconomy from the beginning ?

Re: Mark Zuckerberg testifies before Congress

#434

Post by ersh »

johnchristopher wrote: post #433
dschuetz wrote: post #422

When 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…

Trade secret ? What would that be ? Is there a secret sauce to Facebook's success beyond the early mass adoption and dedication to adtech/attentioneconomy from the beginning ?

Well if they do something they want to conceal they call that a 'trade secret' :)

Re: Mark Zuckerberg testifies before Congress

#435

Post by ibejoeb »

ibejoeb wrote: post #299
dljsjr wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's illegal for foreign nationals to make direct or indirect contributions to US politics. So the line that has to be drawn is one connecting that law to the CA scandal and its alleged use to drive the strategies of the Trump campaign during the 2016 election. I don't know for sure if Facebook can be seen as being complicit in breaking US election law. I think their issues are completely domestic as it stands right…

It's all fascinating. How do we reconcile a facebook bot account that may be, at best, loosely tied to Russia, according to some speculators with a foreign national and intelligence officer, Richard Steele, compiling a op report on the Republican presidential candidate?

Ahh, the phantom downvotes. Would you like to address my point? Why is it okay that a foreign national campaigns for one candidate and another foreign national campaigns for another?

Re: Mark Zuckerberg testifies before Congress

#436

Post by dschuetz »

johnchristopher wrote: post #433
dschuetz wrote: post #422

When 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…

Trade secret ? What would that be ? Is there a secret sauce to Facebook's success beyond the early mass adoption and dedication to adtech/attentioneconomy from the beginning ?

I believe so, yes. Why else would they be so successful? Any other attempt to replace Facebook (or even copy it) as a social network had failed or remained insignificant. Why? I think, because they cannot agree on how to finance their services on large scales. Facebook has vast monetary resources and they know to manage them.

I imagine the story of Facebook as this. In the beginning Facebook was just another campus project gone wild. But then there was an idea to grow beyond the campus, somehow. The question arose: where do we get the money? Answer: Well, we do online ads. Later: How do we grow world-wide? We need even more money, we need to bring in and convince investors, that we have a vast network of ads and that's basically a dead-sure cash cow. So, Facebook mutated from an innocent campus project into a cash cow, just because that's the way it goes. But, it doesn't mean that it's right. So, the question is: What does Facebook do to keep ahead of its competition (Apple, Google, ... as Zuck said)? It's a trade secret, right?

Re: Mark Zuckerberg testifies before Congress

#437

Post by jacquesm »

dschuetz wrote: post #428
exergy wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 grou…

> a bit

It all revolves around what you define as 'a bit' and as long as there is a billion more to be earned by stretching that definition it will be stretched.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg testifies before Congress

#438

Post by setr »

kevindqc wrote: post #173
dusing wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zuck had himself just said that people living in silicon valley are overwhelmingly left leaning. So when he says they have 20k back home policing content it would makes sense to assume those 20k people are included in the group Zuck summarizes as overwhelmingly left leaning. Worth asking about.

Are people doing the policing in Silicon Valley though? Why pay that much for people if someone remote/outsourced can do it for much cheaper?

The people laying down the policies, managing the remote workers output, checking potentially controversial policing, etc are presumably at some point in the chain landing in SV.

Presumably, the decisions aren't being left solely to the discretion of the grunts.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg testifies before Congress

#439

Post by xg15 »

cygx wrote: post #416
noobermin wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is the point. People need to stop seeing "better than a coin flip" as "knowing you better than your lover".

It's a reference to a study where they had an algorithm fed with a certain number of facebook likes compete against personal acquaintances (including spouses) in predictig personality traits. The algorithm won: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/01/07/1418680112

The parent's argument assumes though that this kind of accuracy is achieved regularly and consistently today, which is way different than the report of one study.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg testifies before Congress

#440

Post by suprfnk »

dschuetz wrote: post #436
johnchristopher wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trade secret ? What would that be ? Is there a secret sauce to Facebook's success beyond the early mass adoption and dedication to adtech/attentioneconomy from the beginning ?

I believe so, yes. Why else would they be so successful? Any other attempt to replace Facebook (or even copy it) as a social network had failed or remained insignificant. Why? I think, because they cannot agree on how to finance their services on large scales. Facebook has vast monetary resources and they know to manage them. I imagine the story of Facebook as this. In the beginning Facebook was just another campus p…

> Why else would they be so successful? Any other attempt to replace Facebook (or even copy it) as a social network had failed or remained insignificant.

Would this not be adequately explained by the first movers advantage (or maybe not the very first, but very early), coupled with the network effect?

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