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Facebook Gave Device Makers Deep Access to Data on Users and Friends

nytimes.com

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Re: Facebook Gave Device Makers Deep Access to Data on Users and Friends

#151

Post by makomk »

sigmar wrote: post #111
makomk wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not giving manufacturers access to data in exchange for being integrated/pre-installed on the device; they're giving those manufacturers' apps access to data because they need that access in order to be able to present that data to the users who are accessing Facebook through those apps. It's not a quid pro quo, it's something that's fundamentally necessary for the apps in question to actually allow users to…

That might have been true in certain cases, but the article makes it clear there were other situations: >Facebook acknowledged that some partners did store users’ data — including friends’ data — on their own servers. A Facebook official said that regardless of where the data was kept, it was governed by strict agreements between the companies. Furthermore, why would they be putting an end to all these "partnerships"…

If you read the NYT article, there's one pretty obvious reason why they can get away with ending the partnerships now: almost everyone has smartphones that can just run the official Facebook app. It probably also helps to understand that on a few of the older platforms, almost everything went through the manufacturer's servers, including email and sometimes even web browsing.

While I guess technically they could've use the normal API and only got the same information as Farmville or any random quiz could, this would have the result that - depending on what phones your friends used - you wouldn't be able to share information with all your friends without also sharing it with Farmville, Cambridge Analytica, and all the other shady Facebook platform apps that weren't held to the same privacy standards. That doesn't seem like a win to me, particularly since getting someone to click "yes" on a permissions dialog is a lot easier than creating a widely-used hardware platform and convincing them to use it.

(Of course, given just how many intrusive permissions it demands, getting everyone on the official Facebook app arguably isn't a great leap forward for privacy either.)

Re: Facebook Gave Device Makers Deep Access to Data on Users and Friends

#152

Post by [deleted] »

cyberpunk0 wrote: post #150
zaroth wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is like saying that Chrome, Edge or Firefox are “third parties”. Embedding user agent functionality into the OS is not the same as third party access. Talk to me when a device manufacturer is caught exfiltrating this user data off the phone and then aim your pitchforks at them .

Google, Firefox, and Edge are not Facebook so yes they are third party.

[deleted]

Re: Facebook Gave Device Makers Deep Access to Data on Users and Friends

#153

Post by zaroth »

cyberpunk0 wrote: post #150
zaroth wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is like saying that Chrome, Edge or Firefox are “third parties”. Embedding user agent functionality into the OS is not the same as third party access. Talk to me when a device manufacturer is caught exfiltrating this user data off the phone and then aim your pitchforks at them .

Google, Firefox, and Edge are not Facebook so yes they are third party.

That’s not what the term means. User agents which render Facebook UI components are not “third parties” to my Facebook data anymore than my monitor manufacturer is a third party to my Facebook data while I am viewing the pixels in the screen.

Re: Facebook Gave Device Makers Deep Access to Data on Users and Friends

#154

Post by _jal »

greglindahl wrote: post #63
TAForObvReasons wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This disregard for ethics has allowed Facebook to “grow at all costs." There's a great phrase for this: "move fast and break things". When you believe it is ok to break small rules and norms, it becomes easier to break larger norms and ethics and rules. This philosophy took SV by storm, but at its core it's always been about disregarding things like laws and ethics, and now we are seeing the world that created.

You might think that that's a great phrase for it, but many other people don't interpret "move fast and break things" to mean what you think it means. I'm all for criticizing things that have gone wrong, but you're using an overly-broad brush.

> but you're using an overly-broad brush

No, not really.

If you notice people working - say, construction - in a particular way, and they're trading safety for speed, and if you weren't concerned with worker-safety, you might consider that tradeoff their business. If you also found that it led them to build buildings that overlapped other people's properties, you might note that the tradeoffs they choose might also lead to that problem.

Especially if you notice that other construction firms are making the same sorts of tradeoffs and also having the same problems.

I'm not saying that firms who "move fast and break things" are inevitably also unethical, shitty companies. Everyone sacrifices QA depth for release at some point. But there's nothing wrong with pointing out many high-profile companies who trumpet their pride of it are, in fact, unethical, shitty companies.

Re: Facebook Gave Device Makers Deep Access to Data on Users and Friends

#155

Post by makomk »

pritambaral wrote: post #106
Iv wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that "bad behavior" is a concept in flux. Facebook never hid what their business model was: sell your personal data to third parties. Only a few privacy activists were concerned. Others reactions went from "meh" to "it's actually smart!" (Remember when Obama's campaign was praised for its innovative approach profiling voters?). It took Cambridge Analytica for people to realize that they did not want th…

> Remember when Obama's campaign was praised for its innovative approach profiling voters? Didn't Obama's campaign obtain users' consent before reading data?

Obama's campaign obtained users' consent before reading their friends' data. They did not, however, obtain the consent of those friends in any way, and at least for the 2012 campaign it was those friends who they were trying to convince to vote for Obama.

Re: Facebook Gave Device Makers Deep Access to Data on Users and Friends

#156

Post by zaroth »

This appears to be an API to integrate Facebook chrome and functionality into a mobile OS UI;

> “An Apple spokesman said the company relied on private access to Facebook data for features that enabled users to post photos to the social network without opening the Facebook app, among other things. Apple said its phones no longer had such access to Facebook as of last September.

...

> Usher Lieberman, a BlackBerry spokesman, said in a statement that the company used Facebook data only to give its own customers access to their Facebook networks and messages. Mr. Lieberman said that the company “did not collect or mine the Facebook data of our customers,” adding that “BlackBerry has always been in the business of protecting, not monetizing, customer data.”

> Microsoft entered a partnership with Facebook in 2008 that allowed Microsoft-powered devices to do things like add contacts and friends and receive notifications, according to a spokesman. He added that the data was stored locally on the phone and was not synced to Microsoft’s servers.”

The story recounts how the BlackBerry Facebook view could... not surprisingly in any way... render your Facebook friends’ information which you are supposed to be able to access.

But the NYT apparently thinks this is nefarious in some way.

> “The Hub also requested — and received — data that Facebook’s policy appears to prohibit. Since 2015, Facebook has said that apps can request only the names of friends using the same app. But the BlackBerry app had access to all of the reporter’s Facebook friends and, for most of them, returned information such as user ID, birthday, work and education history and whether they were currently online.

> The BlackBerry device was also able to retrieve identifying information for nearly 295,000 Facebook users. Most of them were second-degree Facebook friends of the reporter, or friends of friends.”

...How the hell else do you suppose the UI was rendering your Facebook Feed?! Maybe they thought BlackBerry used magic unicorns to render the Facebook UI components on their Hub view.

If only there was a term to describe when media sites write a non-story to stir up fake controversy by smearing a popular target...

Re: Facebook Gave Device Makers Deep Access to Data on Users and Friends

#157

Post by JumpCrisscross »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #117

This and the discussion here is obnoxiously bad. Facebook gave some device makers special APIs to access authorized data. This is literally no different than a web API or scraping facebook HTML, just more streamlined. What you guys seem to be objecting to is that non-facebook code was able to interact with authorized user data. But that is a necessary feature of displaying data of any kind (unless facebook owns the e…

Hackers proclaiming "but it wasn't technically a breach" or "the API worked as intended" is 2018's edition of Great Recession bankers' "the counterparty should have known it was our business to screw them" or "it isn't our job to diligence the mortgages". There is discomfort associated with any paradigm shift. Particularly when our livelihoods are entangled in them. A good way to stick oneself on the wrong side is to brand change as derangement.

Re: Facebook Gave Device Makers Deep Access to Data on Users and Friends

#158

Post by [deleted] »

zaroth wrote: post #147
Latteland wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you are wrong, this is a pretty egregious mistake. They defined device makers as service providers, and then allowed them to do things that even third parties weren't allowed. Yet they claimed they shut that stuff off to third parties (so they lied by omission). "No, we don't allow third parties anymore to do that kind of stuff" (but there's this large group that can do it, but we aren't calling them third partie…

This is like saying that Chrome, Edge or Firefox are “third parties”. Embedding user agent functionality into the OS is not the same as third party access. Talk to me when a device manufacturer is caught exfiltrating this user data off the phone and then aim your pitchforks at them .

[deleted]

Re: Facebook Gave Device Makers Deep Access to Data on Users and Friends

#159

Post by staplers »

goblin89 wrote: post #128
arthurofbabylon wrote: post #47

Most notable pieces I took from the article: 1) Facebook does not see third parties (such as BlackBerry) as “third parties.” 2) Facebook told Congress that it disabled third party access to user data, but in actuality did not. My own strong interjection: Facebook’s competitive advantage is its disregard for ethics. Somehow, Zuckerberg has been able to convince a lot of smart people to do unethical things and build un…

> Facebook’s competitive advantage is its disregard for ethics. This appears to be a quality that occurs in some business owners. I know more than a single entrepreneur with similar disregard for things like data retention and PII. Their reluctance to address these issues when advised, I assume, would persist until they get burned. Taking a step back, at the root it appears simply that some people are better at focus…

  similar to reprimanding someone on the spectrum for not saying hello
Why hold anyone in the upper class accountable for their actions when we can just claim they all suffer from mental disorders and make excuses for them?
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