Mark Zuckerberg Refuses to Admit How Facebook Works • Hacker News Board

Re: Mark Zuckerberg Refuses to Admit How Facebook Works

#101

Post by TekMol » Thu, Apr 12, 2018, 4:06 PM UTC

thaladred wrote: post #85

TekMol wrote: post #24

Is lying in front of congress a crime? If I was a senator, I would have asked these two questions: When I look at a product in an onlineshop like Amazon, afterwards I see adverts for this product on Facebook. How does this work? When I visit a physical store, afterwards I see adverts for this store on Facebook. Even on my desktop computer. Even though I don't have any facebook apps on my phone. How does this work? If…

1. Since Amazon uses Facebook for advertising, they can feed their data to both Google and Facebook ads. It's easy to do with cookies. 2. If you don't have Facebook app on your phone or if you did not open your Facebook app when you are in store, you won't see ads for that store. Unless you have a loyalty program with the store or the store decides to target advertise you based on your payment info, etc. In any case,…

1: How is that easy? If I had a cookie on Amazons domain, how would that enable Amazon to show me personalized ads on FB? I don't keep cookies though. So the targeting must use other types of user identification.

2: I don't have a FB app nor do I use FB on my phone. But I see ads related to the places I went to. So the flow of information must be via other channels. One part is probably Google (I use Android).

Re: Mark Zuckerberg Refuses to Admit How Facebook Works

#102

Post by bogomipz » Thu, Apr 12, 2018, 4:11 PM UTC

common_ wrote: post #7

Here's how Zuckerberg's testimony works: 1. When he says he doesn't know, he actually knows. 2. When he says he knows, and that the answer is "more AI," he doesn't actually know.

You forgot:

3) Run down the 4 minute clock each representative had to ask questions by talking as much as possible so as to avoid a meaningful exchange.

Representative Marsha Blackburn was the only one that actually called him out on this BS:

BLACKBURN: And where does privacy rank as a corporate value for Facebook?

ZUCKERBERG: Congresswoman, giving people control of their information and how they want to set their privacy is foundational to the whole service. It's not just a — kind of an add-on feature, something we have to...

BLACKBURN: Okay.

ZUCKERBERG: ... comply with.

BLACKBURN: Well...

ZUCKERBERG: The reality is, if you have a photo — if you just think about this in your day-to-day life...

BLACKBURN: No, I can't let you filibuster right now.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/04/11...

Re: Mark Zuckerberg Refuses to Admit How Facebook Works

#103

Post by perpetualpatzer » Thu, Apr 12, 2018, 4:28 PM UTC

fwdpropaganda wrote: post #75

inlined wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what's worse is that privacy controls explicitly don't control ad targeting. Years ago I had a long term relationship end. We hid our relationship status and only ended the status a year later. Immediately after changing a status marked "only me" in privacy settings I got bombarded with dating ads. I complained that this was a huge privacy violation and they said "we didn't share your relationship status with the…

> "we didn't share your relationship status with them. We matched you to them because of the relationship status" Which I'm sure is acurate, that's how advertising targeting normally works. Some years ago I read an essay about how the words we have limit the kind of phenomena we think about. I think the example at the time was about piracy and "stealing". Before computers existed it was impossible to make exact copie…

> "Before computers existed it was impossible to make exact copies of something at zero cost. Therefore, stealing was morally wrong because if you take one of something, the person you took it from will have one less of that something."

I know this wasn't your main point, but I think it's worth rethinking the basis of your (or possibly, just this essay's) view on copyright.

A "copyright" is so named because it is precisely the right to prevent other people from making copies. When it originated (in the 1700s), its goal was to prevent the copying of books, even though copying--then and now--did not deprive the owner of their own access to the work.

What has changed is not the invention of a new fundamental concept (making a thing like another thing), but the ease with which this can be done by the unscrupulous. If you really liked a poem in 1720, wanted to be able to read it, but didn't want to buy a copy, you could get it by copying it word-for-word from someone else's version. The effect on the author was no different from copying a friend's MP3 file. The only difference is it feels like "a smaller act," so it can't be "a big deal."

Re: Mark Zuckerberg Refuses to Admit How Facebook Works

#104

Post by xaedes » Thu, Apr 12, 2018, 4:33 PM UTC

kerng wrote: post #78

Even Zuckerberg doesn't seem to know, he appears to have lost control of what's going on. Unfortunately, the hearing didn't dive into details to better demonstrate that he can't tell why somebody sees what they see, and who uses the data (inside and outside of Facebook). Also, the whole collecting data "for security purposes" is pretty unbelievable. Does that mean they share information with governments around the wo…

Well.. He did look uneasy when asked about Palantir.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg Refuses to Admit How Facebook Works

#105

Post by JoshMnem » Thu, Apr 12, 2018, 4:35 PM UTC

sfifs wrote: post #68

mfoy_ wrote: post #12

I think the biggest thing is the HUGE disconnect with what people think Facebook is doing, and what Facebook is actually doing. I think the whole point of this is to raise awareness about of the scope of Facebook's data collection-- It's unfathomably enormous. If more average people had a better understanding of what Facebook was tracking, they'd be outraged. Zuckerberg's goal in this was to keep the wool pulled over…

Actually "average people" in my experience very likely wildly over estimate how much information Facebook has about them. The default assumption I've seen non-technical people make is "they know everything". They understand at an intuitive level that when a company provides services for free and is worth so much, it probably uses a lot of their data. When these "average people" are business managers, this leads them…

Most consumers don't know what data Facebook has or what can be done with it. They do often have a helpless, fatalistic response though: "The Internet already has all of my data, so there's nothing I can do." They don't realize that the statement is false.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg Refuses to Admit How Facebook Works

#106

Post by fwdpropaganda » Thu, Apr 12, 2018, 4:49 PM UTC

perpetualpatzer wrote: post #103

fwdpropaganda wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "we didn't share your relationship status with them. We matched you to them because of the relationship status" Which I'm sure is acurate, that's how advertising targeting normally works. Some years ago I read an essay about how the words we have limit the kind of phenomena we think about. I think the example at the time was about piracy and "stealing". Before computers existed it was impossible to make exact copie…

> "Before computers existed it was impossible to make exact copies of something at zero cost. Therefore, stealing was morally wrong because if you take one of something, the person you took it from will have one less of that something." I know this wasn't your main point, but I think it's worth rethinking the basis of your (or possibly, just this essay's) view on copyright. A "copyright" is so named because it is pre…

Ok, so it's not that we went from non-zero cost to zero cost, but instead that cost of copy is a continuum and the lower we went the more prevalent it became.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg Refuses to Admit How Facebook Works

#107

Post by 908087 » Thu, Apr 12, 2018, 4:52 PM UTC

gsich wrote: post #60

ynniv wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incognito mode makes cookie avoidance easy, even for average users.

Or using another browser. And yes your average user is able to do that.

Average users are able to do a lot of simple things to afford themselves basic protection from some of these practices. The problem is that the vast majority of them don't know what those things are and don't know that they should be doing them.

Even among the few who do take steps, the majority misunderstand what they're even achieving, in a "I use incognito mode so the NSA can't track me" kind of way.

The even bigger problem, is that they shouldn't have to do anything to begin with, because these practices shouldn't be allowed in the first place. Governmental and societal complacency has allowed massive corporations to turn the internet into a largely adversarial entity for users. Use of the internet has become just easy enough to allow unsophisticated users to become a danger to themselves due to lack of understanding of what the simplified high level actions they take are actually doing underneath it all.

Much of the time, these people are running apps which they don't understand to be connecting to the internet at all. The average grandparent isn't going to understand that the "free" solitaire game they installed is slurping down their contact list and call/SMS history.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg Refuses to Admit How Facebook Works

#108

Post by dingaling » Thu, Apr 12, 2018, 4:58 PM UTC

cryptoz wrote: post #54

fixermark wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does such a practice differ morally from consumer credit reporting agencies?

You sign up for those when you get a credit card. You don't sign up for Facebook, they just start tracking you. You don't even have to go online for it to happen. They'll do it from your friend's profiles. It's quite different.

> You sign up for those when you get a credit card

That is incorrect. Credit agencies create shadow profiles too, they call them 'thin files'. I have had to code around those situations.

Like Facebook they suck-up every scrap of data they can get from their sources. They absolutely do not throw away any of it just because you don't have a credit card ( else they'd omit half of Europe ).

Re: Mark Zuckerberg Refuses to Admit How Facebook Works

#109

Post by bobwaycott » Thu, Apr 12, 2018, 4:59 PM UTC

bogomipz wrote: post #90

mfoy_ wrote: post #12

I think the biggest thing is the HUGE disconnect with what people think Facebook is doing, and what Facebook is actually doing. I think the whole point of this is to raise awareness about of the scope of Facebook's data collection-- It's unfathomably enormous. If more average people had a better understanding of what Facebook was tracking, they'd be outraged. Zuckerberg's goal in this was to keep the wool pulled over…

>"hat's why he kept conflating post-visibility settings with privacy / tracking settings." Indeed and if Congress had bothered to bring in some subject matter experts they would have been able to him out on these disingenuous answers and deceitful statements. I'm sure Zuckerberg believes he may have won here but I think he lost in the court of public opinion. I think his testimony did him a lot of damage as it shows…

> I'm sure Zuckerberg believes he may have won here but I think he lost in the court of public opinion. I think his testimony did him a lot of damage as it shows just how disingenuous and dishonest he really is.

I highly doubt this. If the court of public opinion is an average of general public sentiment, my hunch is the probability a vast majority of the public paid any attention at all—and understood enough to see through the cleverly scripted and misleading answers—is far closer to 0 than 1.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg Refuses to Admit How Facebook Works

#110

Post by bobwaycott » Thu, Apr 12, 2018, 5:03 PM UTC

mindslight wrote: post #80

fixermark wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does such a practice differ morally from consumer credit reporting agencies?

It doesn't really - we need to get to a point where all of these surveillance companies are out of business. Using data about a user with their consent seems perfectly fine. The fiction where this consent can be granted in perpetuity is not.

> Using data about a user with their consent seems perfectly fine. The fiction where this consent can be granted in perpetuity is not.

Not only that, but I think there is considerable trouble in interpreting consent when users cannot demonstrate or articulate a thorough understanding of exactly what such consent and data usage entails.