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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

#191

Post by wvenable »

throwaway413 wrote: post #124

Damn social logins. The biggest one is Spotify. They require you to make a whole new account instead of just unlinking your FB one, and then all of your playlists etc are gone. I’m going to set aside a day to migrate all of my services, but it’s going to be a pain. Worth it.

I made the smart choice a long time ago to never use one of those social logins. It actually kept me off of Stackoverflow for a long time. I'm not even particularly socially minded or privacy conscious -- I just don't think one coordinated login is a good idea.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook hearing was a sham

#192

Post by newscracker »

cdolan wrote: post #50
nerdponx wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stop using Ghostery and switch to uBlock Origin.

Why

IIRC, Ghostery is a company that used to work with advertisers in the past (when it was owned by a company called Evidon). It also collects data from its users.

uBlock Origin is a low footprint (compared to other ad/tracker blockers) extension primarily maintained by one person who refuses to even take donations for it. Scroll down to the "About" section on the GitHub page [1] and see this Wiki page on donations [2], which at this point in time states:

> Why don't you accept donations?

> I don't want the administrative workload coming with donations. I don't want the project to become in need of funding in any way: no dedicated home page + no forum = no cost = no need for funding. I want to be free to move onto something else if ever I get tired working on these projects (no donations = no expectations).

> Have a thought for the maintainers of the various lists. These lists are everything. This can't be emphasized enough.

Also see uBlock Origin's manifesto. [3]

For me, using uBlock Origin along with Privacy Badger [4] from EFF is a good combination.

[1]: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock

[2]: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Why-don't-you-accept-...

[3]: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/blob/master/MANIFESTO.md

[4]: https://www.eff.org/privacybadger

Re: Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook hearing was a sham

#193

Post by AnthonyMouse »

simias wrote: post #127
aesh2Xa1 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The concept of regulatory or legislative capture actually a mainstream one; hardly deserves the conspiracy label. Further, the author's claim is well supported by ongoing legislative efforts as well as those efforts of the administrative agencies. There's a legitimate and level-headed reason to have concern. I'd call it skepticism or pessism at worst.

I'm not saying that regulatory capture doesn't happen, I'm saying that it doesn't necessarily happen every time a new piece of regulation is introduced. Saying that any hypothetical regulation introduced after this Facebook fiasco (and all the other data breaches of late) will benefit Facebook and hurt competitors is not exactly what I would call level-headed skepticism. Doesn't mean that we shouldn't be very careful…

> Saying that any hypothetical regulation introduced after this Facebook fiasco (and all the other data breaches of late) will benefit Facebook and hurt competitors is not exactly what I would call level-headed skepticism.

Can you name a piece of US federal legislation regulating a major industry passed in the last, say, 30 years, where this was not the case?

Re: Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook hearing was a sham

#194

Post by chiefalchemist »

mistermann wrote: post #188
mmd45 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What type of discovery would you like to make? It seems to me that whatever fb has they control and do with as they please and have the money for lobbyists and lawyers to corporate-splain their actions away and pay the occasional fine (cost of doing business). I'm having a hard time understanding why any of what is known is at all a surprise to someone who understands tech.

If a qualified person was asking the questions, the public would then know the reality of the situation, as well as get a decent look into how honest Mr. Zuckerberg is. I suspect what we watched was fairly well scripted theater, right down to the humiliating booster seat as well as the talking points cheat sheet that he "accidentally" let a reporter get a picture of. This wasn't about discovery, truth, or justice, it…

"This wasn't about discovery, truth, or justice, it is about shaping public opinion."

Agreed. And the irony completely stomps on the absurdity meter.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook hearing was a sham

#195

Post by chiefalchemist »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #88
listenallyall wrote: post #26

Earlier 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."

I would be shocked if the government was not a major customer of FB.

Per (the book) Dragnet Nation, there is plenty of data being sold. And yes, not all buyers are the private sector.

If you think of what we do know, the unknowns are likely 10x as freightening.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook hearing was a sham

#197

Post by chiefalchemist »

return1 wrote: post #116
chiefalchemist wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> But for how long? usually hype cycles last a few months, until the next outrage takes over to keep people busy.

I should have been more clear: How long before FB pushes back? And what might that look like? Is Congress capable of regulating something like FB? They can't solve immigration / DACA.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook hearing was a sham

#198

Post by fullshark »

austenallred wrote: post #71
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.

Note how many of the senators who voted to expand surveillance programs and the NSA became suddenly very concerned for privacy. They just wanted to try and dunk on him and get in a sound bite.

And the guardian is pissed that the dunks weren't fierce enough I guess. I'm not sure what they expected, I thought it was like every congressional hearing ever.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook hearing was a sham

#199

Post by blobwalker »

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #86
loup-vaillant wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a flip side to this: in part thanks to this lack of regulation, anything outside the popular protocols tend to be blocked in an increasing number of network. I can see this becoming so bad that the only way to communicate freely would be to tunnel our stuff through TLS on port 443. (That is, doing what looks like HTTPS.)

That's true. Fortunately, if everything else fails, we should always be able to connect on 443 via stunnel for example, no matter what protocol we use. That's the price to pay for the net getting more complex and more abused.

Unfortunately, that's not true. Corporate networks got rid of plain old proxies that just passed anything SSL on 443 many years ago. In order to meet regulatory requirements to record employee communications, pretty much every US company of any decent size uses a proxy (blue coat, zscaler, palo alto, etc.) that executes MiTM attacks on all SSL traffic. If it's something other than HTTP over SSL, or if it's to a blocked hostname, it won't go through.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook hearing was a sham

#200

Post by jacquesm »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #164
jacquesm wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dec…

> some decentralized alternative that actually protects privacy, are killed in the cradle by the new fixed overhead

I don't follow you, how would a decentralized (and presumably non commercial) alternative be affected by this?

Besides the fact that legislation is typically a local affair Facebook would have an advantage versus another commercial player, and whoever wrote the law would most likely focus on those aspects that would have an impact on such players as well.

So for a non-commercial, decentralized and/or federated alternative this would be a huge boon, rather than that it would be killed in the cradle.

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