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

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#91

Post by miracle2k » Mon, Jun 04, 2018, 5:37 PM UTC

detaro wrote: post #39

miracle2k wrote: post #36

The New York Times should be ashamed of itself. Facebook let companies like Apple integrate with their platform. To do so, these companies sent the same sequence of bytes from your mobile phone to the Facebook server, as the Facebook app does, or as any person can do. I can write my own Facebook app today, and there is nothing that Facebook can do about it, except sue me. THAT IS A GOOD THING. LITERALLY FIVE MINUTES…

The NYT article says that Facebook told them that some partners stored that data on their servers. I note that this Facebook rebuttal does not refute that point in regard to the device partners. (Which could be a possible confusion or misleading quote in the NYT article, conflating all partners with the device integration partners, so I'd like it to be clarified somehow)

Sure. I still think that is fair enough, in particular since there are actual contracts involved here.

However, as you say, it is not clear at all. If that is the problem, the New York Times should write an article about that, not 5000 words of all kinds of insinuations, with the goal, it would seem, to generate the maximum amount of confusion, least amount of education, and thus the most amount of outrage.

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#92

Post by d4l3k » Mon, Jun 04, 2018, 5:38 PM UTC

tr33house wrote: post #53

davidw wrote: post #6

The fact that you can't read messages (without switching to 'desktop mode') on their mobile web app is such horse shit. Yuck.

imposing `messenger` on all of us because they know none of us would use it if we had a choice

I just graduated college and pretty much all of my friends and everyone I knew there used Messenger as default for text communication. There's plenty of other alternatives, but that's what people seem to prefer. It's a pretty decent app and in my opinion way better than the old built in FB messaging.

I'd prefer to use Signal and my family uses it to communicate but it's definitely not as nice as Messenger.

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#93

Post by jessaustin » Mon, Jun 04, 2018, 5:38 PM UTC

frockington wrote: post #13

TAForObvReasons wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... and thus begins a new series of regulations designed to pierce the plausible deniability of "terms of service". People complain about GDPR and other regulations, but they are created to close loopholes that were abused by companies like Facebook.

There's probably nothing FB wants more than to be regulated into a monopoly

So long as we don't have to log onto to FB to file our taxes or something, how much harm can the regulator really inflict on the general public? Assume it ends up being a regulator that's really talented at harming the general public, like FCC...

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#94

Post by Slartie » Mon, Jun 04, 2018, 5:38 PM UTC

dominotw wrote: post #74

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Contracts are not "useless", but they are also not "preventing" someone from doing something just because they impose a penalty. If you want to see proof: visit a court!

Contracts motivate you to adhere to some previously-agreed-upon behavior, and the degree to which they motivate you depends on how much the penalty actually penalizes you. In the case of large corporations, seemingly big penalties are often actually negligible in comparison, with the resulting motivation to adhere to the contract being negligible as well. That is one important reason why it is deliberately misleading to use the word "preventing" in the context in which Facebook uses it here. The other one is simply that it's factually wrong, even regardless of the size of the penalty.

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#95

Post by JumpCrisscross » Mon, Jun 04, 2018, 5:39 PM UTC

dominotw wrote: post #74

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> I am asking why the consequences of breaking a contract don't matter in this specific case

Technically speaking, no contract was broken. When users signed up for Facebook, they clicked a button pursuant to which Facebook indemnified itself from everything under the sun. (It is unclear how enforceable those terms are. EULAs, for example, aren't very enforceable in the U.S. [1].)

Facebook did agree not to do these things with the FTC. (It also made some noises to the Congress, but I don't believe those were under oath.) And there are a lot of things it may have done which are illegal. But enforcing the law and consent decrees requires prosecutors to prosecute. We're waiting for that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-user_license_agreement#Enf...

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#96

Post by btilly » Mon, Jun 04, 2018, 5:41 PM UTC

esrauch wrote: post #43

vorpalhex wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing wrong with offering a public API. There's everything wrong with offering a secret, non-public API where you give a third party I didn't consent to full access to all of my data. See how that's a bit different? One of them is offering public information (say, stock quotes), publicly. One of them is offering private information (my sexual orientation and date of birth) to tons of third parties I didn't…

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.

No, it is giving Blackberry the information if any friend of mine offers THEIR login credentials.

I friended my cousin because she is my cousin. I didn't think about what kind of device she uses. I certainly didn't intend for her to hand my personal information over to a company that I don't know.

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#97

Post by md224 » Mon, Jun 04, 2018, 5:41 PM UTC

Correct me if I'm wrong, but my impression is that this all comes down to one basic question:

Does a Facebook-approved "mobile experience" count as an official FB app or a third-party app? It seems to me that the FB post is trying to frame it as the former, and everyone who's upset is trying to frame it as the latter.

Is that what this entire disagreement is about? Because if it is, maybe it would help if we just focused on that question.

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#98

Post by mathinpens » Mon, Jun 04, 2018, 5:41 PM UTC

writing this was a mistake. this is clearly a deceptive pr spin fluff that is entirely non-responsive to the specific concerns raised in the new york times article.

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#99

Post by jbeckham » Mon, Jun 04, 2018, 5:43 PM UTC

detaro wrote: post #86

jbeckham wrote: post #82

I had a Windows phone that used these API's. When Windows Phone 7 came out, Facebook didn't create the Facebook App for that OS, Microsoft did. It looked like what you expected Facebook to have built and it worked like the Facebook App that other platforms had. The whole purpose of the API agreement with Microsoft was to guarantee that the Facebook App they wrote would still work years down the road. Microsoft did no…

The NYT article says that Facebook told them that some partners stored that data on their servers. Do you have a good citation that this does not refer to these device integrations, given you so strongly claim it doesn't? (It's very well possible that it's a misleading quote by the NYT, or a misunderstanding, but I don't see a clear answer in any of what we know) That's from my perspective the critical point here.

No I do not. I do know that the Windows Phone version communicated directly with Facebook due to network traces I had done back then. It did not use an intermediary. I could see some devices using an intermediary, especially for under powered and "dumb" phones where they may have made a simplified web app that would be usable on their platforms where as the actual Facebook web app would not have been. Think flip phones that had Facebook integration.

I don't know if that happened or not, but the way this article reads is very misleading and several of the vendors that they listed did not actually have access to the data.

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#100

Post by asciimo » Mon, Jun 04, 2018, 5:43 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…

Obvious to some. When consumers receive a valuable service or product for free, with no obvious strings attached, they consume it. I don't think most people would preoccupy themselves with the provider or manufacturer's business model. You are savvy, and that's good. But others deserve consideration and protection.