Why We Disagree with The New York Times • Hacker News Board

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#71

Post by dominotw » Mon, Jun 04, 2018, 5:24 PM UTC

Liquix wrote: post #62

dominotw wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Signed agreements do not prevent your information from being used in other ways. Why is this, though? How is it different from any other legal agreements?

I think the argument is that saying "I promise not to murder someone" does not in any way prevent said party turning around and murdering someone - signing a contract does not prevent these companies from violating the terms of the contract.

> signing a contract does not prevent these companies from violating the terms of the contract.

So whats the point of any legal agreement then?

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#72

Post by pas » Mon, Jun 04, 2018, 5:24 PM UTC

_red wrote: post #57

jacobsheehy wrote: post #2

It reads like a long defensive argument, "how else did you expect us to make huge sums of money"? It is exactly as tone-deaf and legalese as you would expect. There is no new information here; Facebook says legal contracts actually protect your data so it can't go anywhere, "just trust us", etc. > These partners signed agreements that prevented people’s Facebook information from being used for any other purpose than…

>Signed agreements do not prevent your information from being used in other ways. That's insane, literally. The real insanity is with the users. FB did the most obvious thing. The user-base somehow magically thought they were providing all those free services because they were nice guys. It was obvious to anyone since the beginning that FB was a clearinghouse for private data trading. How else could the model remotel…

You target audiences (segments), and FB gets ad revenue.

The problem is that via apps you get the user info directly. And their friends' info too. That's how Tinder can show how many mutual friends you and the profile you're looking at have. That sounds nice, but as the data left FB's servers, there's no way that users can control what happens with it.

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#73

Post by bluesign » Mon, Jun 04, 2018, 5:25 PM UTC

NYT says: ‘Some device makers could retrieve personal information even from users’ friends who believed they had barred any sharing, The New York Times found.’

FB says: ‘Contrary to claims by the New York Times, friends’ information, like photos, was only accessible on devices when people made a decision to share their information with those friends.’

This is the only disagreement as I can see.

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#74

Post by dominotw » Mon, Jun 04, 2018, 5:25 PM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #61

dominotw wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Signed agreements do not prevent your information from being used in other ways. Why is this, though? How is it different from any other legal agreements?

> How is it different from any other legal agreements? Suppose I tell you a secret. You promise only to share it with others who will keep it a secret. You share my secret with Bob. Bob promises he won't share my secret. Bob shares my secret. You broke your promise. You tried not to break it. But break it you did.

> You broke your promise.

Then you face the legal consequences for doing so. Thats what prevents people from breaking them in first place. Unless you are arguing that all legal contracts are useless because they can be broken.

I am not asking about the logistics of leaking. Yes ofcourse its physically possible, I am asking why the consequences of breaking a contract don't matter in this specific case.

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#75

Post by captainmuon » Mon, Jun 04, 2018, 5:26 PM UTC

Incredible, they are using the current controversy to represent their locking down of the API in a good light. Facebook didn't restrict their API because they were privacy-conscious. They restricted it so you could not build experiences they did not want:

- You cannot sync your address book contacts with facebook in order to get profile pictures (you used to be able to do this)

- You cannot write an alternative Facebook client (with a better timeline, no ads, ...)

- You cannot write a complete bridge to another social network (e.g. implement Federation)

- You cannot build a P2P (serverless) application over Facebook. E.g. a chat, or something to send a file to a friend on Facebook, or to initiate a TeamViewer-like session.

All of these are either explicity forbidden by policy, or have been closed by specific changed to their API.

To be honest, I don't care too much that people were able to scrape data I put up voluntarily. The German Facebook clone was called StudiVZ - Student's Directory. This sounds a lot like a telephone book, and that was the mindset and expectation I had when signing up to Facebook. Create and curate a profile for friends and friends-of-friends to see, and I didn't care much if others saw anything, because it was irrelevant to them. I mostly cared about meeting people - being found, and finding other people. In this light, I'm more concerned about data freedom than data protection. While the latter is important of course, it's unfortunate that the former is always forgotten.

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#76

Post by JorgeGT » Mon, Jun 04, 2018, 5:28 PM UTC

patja wrote: post #33

jacobsheehy wrote: post #2

It reads like a long defensive argument, "how else did you expect us to make huge sums of money"? It is exactly as tone-deaf and legalese as you would expect. There is no new information here; Facebook says legal contracts actually protect your data so it can't go anywhere, "just trust us", etc. > These partners signed agreements that prevented people’s Facebook information from being used for any other purpose than…

Similar to how they "prevented" apps from abusing their API through policy, while simultaneously doing nothing with their construction of the API to prevent apps from breaking the policy. Apps are prohibited from filling in content that (by policy) must come only from the user, but oh we're going to give you all the tools and capabilities required to march right on ahead and do what we agreed you wouldn't do. Then pr…

Regulations forbid us from letting you access the filing cabinet but I can tell you, all of us will be out having a beer between 6 and 8 PM. Oh, and the key is under the flowerpot. Wink wink.

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#77

Post by md224 » Mon, Jun 04, 2018, 5:28 PM UTC

jakelazaroff wrote: post #59

esrauch wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely it is only giving blackberry the information if you type in your login credentials on a blackberry right? I don't see how the situation is actually different now: if you run the official Facebook app on your Galaxh phone then Samsung could scrape and exfiltrate the data anytime it wants. It is Samsung's fault if they do it not Facebook's.

According to the New York Times article [1] the third parties were able to obtain information about you if a friend signs in on their phone, no consent from you required: > Facebook’s view that the device makers are not outsiders lets the partners go even further, The Times found: They can obtain data about a user’s Facebook friends, even those who have denied Facebook permission to share information with any third p…

Not siding with FB here, but their response appears to address this:

> Contrary to claims by the New York Times, friends’ information, like photos, was only accessible on devices when people made a decision to share their information with those friends.

Maybe the confusion is that FB isn't treating these integrations as "third parties" since they're supposed to be pseudo-official FB apps?

Edit: Thinking about it further, this is the crux of the matter, isn't it? Whether or not an FB-approved "mobile experience" counts as an official FB app or a third-party app?

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#78

Post by ameister14 » Mon, Jun 04, 2018, 5:28 PM UTC

jakelazaroff wrote: post #59

esrauch wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely it is only giving blackberry the information if you type in your login credentials on a blackberry right? I don't see how the situation is actually different now: if you run the official Facebook app on your Galaxh phone then Samsung could scrape and exfiltrate the data anytime it wants. It is Samsung's fault if they do it not Facebook's.

According to the New York Times article [1] the third parties were able to obtain information about you if a friend signs in on their phone, no consent from you required: > Facebook’s view that the device makers are not outsiders lets the partners go even further, The Times found: They can obtain data about a user’s Facebook friends, even those who have denied Facebook permission to share information with any third p…

Of course they can, though. Are you surprised that to see data on your phone (such as images/text your friends share with you and nobody else), your phone needs to be able to pull that data from the Facebook database? How else is it supposed to work?

If your phone saved it or your provider saved the data in a server somewhere without your permission and used it for other purposes, that's a pretty big deal. As it is, this should only be a shock if you have no idea how the modern internet works.

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#79

Post by miracle2k » Mon, Jun 04, 2018, 5:29 PM UTC

jakelazaroff wrote: post #59

esrauch wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely it is only giving blackberry the information if you type in your login credentials on a blackberry right? I don't see how the situation is actually different now: if you run the official Facebook app on your Galaxh phone then Samsung could scrape and exfiltrate the data anytime it wants. It is Samsung's fault if they do it not Facebook's.

According to the New York Times article [1] the third parties were able to obtain information about you if a friend signs in on their phone, no consent from you required: > Facebook’s view that the device makers are not outsiders lets the partners go even further, The Times found: They can obtain data about a user’s Facebook friends, even those who have denied Facebook permission to share information with any third p…

I log into the Facebook app on my Blackberry. I can see my friend's data in the same way I could as if I used the Facebook website.

The only difference is that the app on the phone has been coded by Blackberry, and the JavaScript code in my browser has been coded by Facebook, except of course for the banner part that my ISP injected, or all the JavaScript code that third parties injected, and who are thus functionally equivalent to the code written by Blackberry.

In this scenario, no third party had access to anyones data, right?

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#80

Post by whitexn--g28h » Mon, Jun 04, 2018, 5:30 PM UTC

jakelazaroff wrote: post #59

esrauch wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely it is only giving blackberry the information if you type in your login credentials on a blackberry right? I don't see how the situation is actually different now: if you run the official Facebook app on your Galaxh phone then Samsung could scrape and exfiltrate the data anytime it wants. It is Samsung's fault if they do it not Facebook's.

According to the New York Times article [1] the third parties were able to obtain information about you if a friend signs in on their phone, no consent from you required: > Facebook’s view that the device makers are not outsiders lets the partners go even further, The Times found: They can obtain data about a user’s Facebook friends, even those who have denied Facebook permission to share information with any third p…

How is this different from your friends putting your contact information into a cloud synced contact list? You shared your information with your friends, it's not Facebook who decided how your friends use that information.