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Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook hearing was a sham

theguardian.com

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Re: Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook hearing was a sham

#161

Post by jschwartzi »

Zarel wrote: post #154
jschwartzi wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that the world you're arguing for is one where I get all my friends to sign a contract before I give them my personal details. Nobody wants that, not even in exchange for whatever Facebook provides. It's a perverse expectation rooted in some kind of idea that all human exchange must be regulated by some contract. And thieves are indeed liable for returning money.

But what's the real answer? Imagine my friend writes down my phone number in his iPhone's contacts list, and then installs an app – let's say some random game. The game asks for permission to access contact info, which my friend grants because he's careless. The game steals contact info and does various nefarious things with it. In this analogy, Facebook is Apple, and Cambridge Analytica's app is the phone game. I do…

Or make it illegal to harvest this type of information without express consent from the first party. Meaning that in order for the game to gather the contact info it must ask everyone in your contacts list if it's okay.

It doesn't stop your friends from oversharing but it creates a contract between you and the party requesting your information so there's now some legal recourse for how they use your data. And if the law creates liability for app distributors to ensure apps follow the law then Google and Apple are now on the hook for allowing violations.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook hearing was a sham

#162

Post by manjushri »

5555624 wrote: post #10
lwansbrough wrote: post #7

I 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…

When you signed up for Facebook, was there a screen that said, "Facebook will take all the information you provide, regardless of format or intent, and monetize it as much as possible, as well as share it with government agencies"? You knew this going in. Many people know this and don't have Facebook account. A lot of people did not know this and are just finding out -- that's where the "outrage" comes out. (A fourth…

>Very few people ever read "Terms & Conditions" and that's a problem.

People don't read them because they can't read them.

>read: look at and comprehend the meaning of (written or printed matter) by mentally interpreting the characters or symbols of which it is composed.

Terms & Conditions are deliberately obfuscated by lawyers and encrypted in legalese. Decrypting these documents into plain english for the average users would go a long ways to breaking the Pavlovian conditioning of checking a Terms and Conditions checkbox for "free" apps.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook hearing was a sham

#163

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

kaitnieks wrote: post #38

Maybe 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.

Yeah, that's pretty much the entire purpose of Senate and Congressional hearings and always has been. When those groups want to get something done they do it behind closed doors.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook hearing was a sham

#164

Post by AnthonyMouse »

jacquesm wrote: post #113
spacehome wrote: post #5

I 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…

Facebook never was part of 'the free internet', in fact it is a force strongly against the free internet.

> Facebook never was part of 'the free internet', in fact it is a force strongly against the free internet.

That's the point.

Imagine the result of all this is a piece of legislation that doesn't hamper Facebook in any significant way but imposes large fixed compliance costs on tech companies.

Facebook is huge, they pay the costs without even noticing. People who want to dethrone Facebook, or replace it with some decentralized alternative that actually protects privacy, are killed in the cradle by the new fixed overhead.

Facebook gets what they want and the Senators get to look like they've done something, meanwhile nobody pay attention to the fact that the same Senators are about to get a load of campaign money from Facebook.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook hearing was a sham

#165

Post by davvolun »

spacehome wrote: post #5

I 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…

Measures to protect users' data and privacy will not strictly kill a "free" internet -- there are lots of reasonable caveats such as number of active users, total revenue, number of employees that would allow a small business to compete.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook hearing was a sham

#166

Post by Zarel »

jschwartzi wrote: post #161
Zarel wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what's the real answer? Imagine my friend writes down my phone number in his iPhone's contacts list, and then installs an app – let's say some random game. The game asks for permission to access contact info, which my friend grants because he's careless. The game steals contact info and does various nefarious things with it. In this analogy, Facebook is Apple, and Cambridge Analytica's app is the phone game. I do…

Or make it illegal to harvest this type of information without express consent from the first party. Meaning that in order for the game to gather the contact info it must ask everyone in your contacts list if it's okay. It doesn't stop your friends from oversharing but it creates a contract between you and the party requesting your information so there's now some legal recourse for how they use your data. And if the…

So then would it be impossible for me to write down your phone number in my phone, without my phone's contact list app asking you for permission first? That seems kind of excessive.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook hearing was a sham

#167

Post by manjushri »

mmd45 wrote: post #141
manjushri wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm having a hard time understanding why any of what is known is at all a surprise to someone who understands tech. The vast majority of FB users don't understand tech, and that's the root problem. These hearings aren't for technical minded people. If they were, there would be technical minded people asking the questions.

But still, what type of "discovery" is being hoped for?

Showing how billions of people's psychological profiles can be algorithmically weaponized against them would be highly informative I would think. That way the average user would understand the types of things they are "consenting" to when they write a blank check for their personal information.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook hearing was a sham

#168

Post by zippy786 »

Q. Can the users completely delete their data ?

Zuckerberg: Yes, there are two options. First to deactivate because students and want to suspend and come back because they want to study for exam. Second option is users can totally delete all their data.

Where is the second option anyone from Facebook ? There is only an option to delete the account after you DIE, not an option to delete it when you are alive.

So many lies.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook hearing was a sham

#169

Post by oneplusone »

zippy786 wrote: post #168

Q. Can the users completely delete their data ? Zuckerberg: Yes, there are two options. First to deactivate because students and want to suspend and come back because they want to study for exam. Second option is users can totally delete all their data. Where is the second option anyone from Facebook ? There is only an option to delete the account after you DIE, not an option to delete it when you are alive. So many…

Easy to google: https://www.facebook.com/help/delete_account

Re: Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook hearing was a sham

#170

Post by specialist »

DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #160
spacehome wrote: post #5

I 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…

it was a sham because asking hard questions would require them to admit FB being an important asset for US own intelligence operations. If they drill too deep they'd need to face very uncomfortable questions about other platforms too, e.g Palantir (Thiel was right there lurking ;)). Facebook is the Internet in many countries (making them less resilient and even more prone to meddling than the US). And so looking at i…

Everything about everybody, living or dead, is known in near real-time.

We got a demo of Seisent, since bought by LexisNexus, mid-2000s. Our use case was to uniquely identify patients to improve record matching across heterogeneous databases.

Back then, Seisent was just based on publicly available data. It spanned all of North America, The Caribbean, and a good portion of Central and South. In those regions, every single person has been unqiuely identified. Easy to do thru process of elimination with that much data.

When shown my own data set, everything about me was right there. Everywhere I've ever lived, worked. My entire legal trail, like mortgages, marriage. Seisent even inferred my ex-wife's affair (FOAF).

Seisent sold their tech (big graph database, query language, some gear) to the NSA. Who was able to add non-public data. Like phone records, electronic transactions, etc.

That was 10+ years ago. Now I imagine they're slurping data up globally.

Siesent, Palantir, Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, etc effectively know everything about everybody.

I assume foreign efforts are doing the same.

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