Another needlessly strident and self-righteous article from The Guardian, that says one useful thing (the hearing is too short), followed by paragraphs of "and they are allowing this Zuck guy to SPEAK at a HEARING can you BELIEVE this? iamoutragediamoutraged." There are so many important points to cover on this topic for a mass readership to whom most of this is new (as in: a new threat they often don't quite yet und…
I would not call this an "article from The Guardian"
Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook hearing was a sham
51–60 of 263 posts
Re: Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook hearing was a sham
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Since when are businesses not users of the internet?
We obviously mean freedom for individual users lacking the resources of big organisations to defend themselves and protect their own rights. Come on this isn't a game of semantics.
Edit: I can only speculate as to why people don't like this, but in case it makes a difference it's intended only as historical background for people who missed the start of the experiment.
Re: Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook hearing was a sham
#53I was struck that on the surface it looked quite adversarial. Senators were trying to ask fairly pointed questions (despite any technical ignorance). But underneath the surface, the two parties here have fairly well aligned goals -- less freedom on the Internet. The senators want to show that they're doing something, and Facebook welcomes regulation in order to suffocate would-be competitors with it. I'm sure they're…
The regulations should be non-technology specific. Simply it should provide rules about customer/user data. Even if I use pigeons. (But not RFC 1149.)
Re: Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook hearing was a sham
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those two things are positively correlated
Not necessarily. The ultimate aim of each business is to crush the competition and become a monopoly. If they succeed, and we do have some de facto monopolies now, they can do whatever they want and users/customers have little or no choice. Regulations limiting the power of companies are designed do counteract that.
They can't do whatever they want. So long as the Internet is free from overbearing government restrictions and the ISPs aren't segmenting it (locking users into restricted sandboxes), you can go wherever you want without using Google search, or shopping at Amazon, or using Windows, or using Chrome, or using Facebook, or shopping on eBay, or paying with PayPal.
The only real limiting premise as it pertains to the Internet, are the ISPs and the backbones.
So long as you can get on a free Internet, engineers can perpetually build their own new products at will, crafting new tech universes that didn't exist before. They have been doing that non-stop in every category for the last two plus decades since the Web took off.
Don't like Chrome because it managed to acquire 99% of the market? Fine, spin up your own clone and put it out there. Or use Firefox or Edge a dozen other lesser used competitors.
Don't like Go or C# or Java? Fine, use one of 37 other languages.
Don't like Google search? Fine, use Bing or DuckDuckGo or a dozen other less well known search engines. Build a new one maybe, nobody is stopping you, maybe it's time for a new search paradigm.
Don't like AWS? Fine, use Hetzner, or Digital Ocean, or a dedicated box provider, or Vultr, or Linode or Google Cloud, or Azure, or build your own new competitor.
There are vastly more options today, in essentially every way, than there were in 1995 or 2005.
The free Internet has worked extraordinarily well. It has never stopped producing alternatives, and alternatives have never stopped existing. The only thing that can crush it is government regulation, specifically if they fuck that up.
Re: Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook hearing was a sham
#55I believe writers from the Guardian would sooner hand over control of the United States to the EU rather than try to understand why the US does things differently; but I think this question bears repeating: ethically, what has Facebook done wrong? Understanding the full context of this hearing is vital to your opinion on the matter. I'm nobody with an outsider's perspective, but to me Facebook has made very few error…
I consented to sharing my data with the 3rd party, which
was essentially a license for that party to own that data.
Imagine you're not a facebook user. When Facebook sucks up your name and phone number and e-mail address out of your buddy's phonebook, along with all the messages and calls between you, have you consented?What about when you get a 'shadow profile' based on tracking buttons and pixels on other websites. Have you consented?
How about if you've brought from example-retailer.com in the past and they upload your full contact and mailing details to Facebook to make an ad campaign that targets (or skips) existing customers?
When you don't participate in anything like quizzes on FB Platform, but your grandma does so FB hands your details over to the quiz company anyway as part of Grandma's list of friends, have you consented?
What about when you deliberately haven't given certain data to Facebook, and they buy it from a advertising data broker instead?
IMHO people who think consent is the only issue here don't fully understand the problems.
Re: Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook hearing was a sham
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
They should have had subject matter experts asking the questions. Instead there were people had no idea what they were talking about, wasting time on shout-outs to their sons/nephews or whomever (I was only able to follow it for a minute). The CEO needed to be under oath so that lying would carry consequences, and they needed someone who could cut through the BS of how some of the answers were worded. We need more pr…
The best part was someone asked if Facebook tracks you even if you've logged out of their website. Holy shit, moment of truth for Zuck, I thought. Nope, he deflected by saying he'll get his team to get back to the senator, and then he spewed jargon ("I know websites use cookies [bla bla] for security"). Oh, he knew the answer, but he couldn't say it in front of all the cameras watching. And of-effing-course he knows…
Decentraleyes:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/decentraleyes...
Don't touch my tabs! :
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dont-touch-my...
Re: Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook hearing was a sham
#57Maybe I'm too cynical about politics, but it appears to me that the point of these hearings is not to solve or investigate anything, it's to generate soundbites that voters or potential future voters would like. It's not even that important what the reply is, as long as the politician asks the hard question and demonstrates his concern, and if it makes the news & press, that's victory for them.
What I find particularly annoying in this kind of hearing is the condescending tone of the politicians. They are eager to put the blame on someone else when they are ultimately the ones who vote the laws.
Re: Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook hearing was a sham
#58Re: Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook hearing was a sham
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
+1. Zuckerberg should have pointed out exactly who voted for the renewal of the FISA surveillance program in Jan. "Look, if an American citizen is angry enough and chooses to never share any more data with Facebook, s/he has that right and the ability. With the NSA/CIA/FBI/TSA/Homeland Security/traffic cameras/license plate readers/stingrays, there is no opt-out. Period."
In theory yes. It would be entertaining. The reality is, he'd be screwed. Nor can we discount FB isn't a favored front of sorts for various "data collection agencies." p.s. I find it (sadly) funny how so many are upset with ZM and FB, but are completely unaware about Snowden, Obama's expansion of the Patriot Act, etc. FB is the obvious scapegoat. It currently has to play the role, even if it hates doing so. But for h…