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…
> Facebook has acted on this and intentionally made hundreds of thousands of people fall into a depression, just to see if they could, and then they bragged about it. That's interesting. Do you have a link to source?
Why We Disagree with The New York Times
141–150 of 325 posts
Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Facebook has acted on this and intentionally made hundreds of thousands of people fall into a depression, just to see if they could, and then they bragged about it. That's interesting. Do you have a link to source?
Likely referring to this article [1]. However, the claim that they made "hundreds of thousands of people fall into a depression" is pretty exaggerated - FB demonstrated it could influence the mood of users via changes to the algorithm, but the overall effect size was small (Cohen's d = 0.001). I am very critical of FB and this type of research, but don't know if anyone became depressed over the experiment. It's possi…
Staging an experiment of this nature without informed consent of the participants is unethical, irrespective of whether the technique proved to be effective.
Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
The agreement is between FB and the next party. If FB is suitably embarrassed, they can go after the next party.
That doesn't help the users much, though.
Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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…
> It was obvious to anyone since the beginning that FB was a clearinghouse for private data trading. I tire of this argument that users should obviously know they are trading their personal information in return for access to a service. They don't know this. It's obvious in a conversation with any (even lightly) tech-illiterate person that nothing about how the modern internet economy works is obvious. Think back to…
add to this also the target audience.
FB may have started out as an invite only thing for technically savvy(ish) college kids, but those days were completely over the minute they got their app so tightly integrated with iOS and Android. So ... circa 2010 maybe?
FBs target audience now is literally the same as or even wider than television. We don't expect granny to understand the economics of her cable box.
She's used to paying the cable bill, seeing a few ads and feeling free to use whatever is on offer. Because she paid for it.
For instance the guide channel is not "free" from her perspective, and she has no expectation that she should need to be suspicious that for insance, the guide channel is tracking her viewing habits and customizing the programming on offer so as to massively sway public opinion and elections.
Average US consumers are used to this model, whether or not the fine print spells out something else. They're going to think "I paid my cell phone bill, therefore I am paying for facebook" ... the question never even arises.
Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times
#145It 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…
>It was obvious to anyone since the beginning that FB was a clearinghouse for private data trading. How else could the model remotely work?
This is just hindsight talking. It was hardly obvious from the beginning because it was hardly obvious how big the market for granular private data was going to be.
Facebook, in the beginning, was functionally just a stripped down personal page with a status update feature analogous to AIM. It didn't really ask for any information that you wouldn't have gleaned from a 10 minute conversation with a person and almost everything it got about you had to be volunteered (e.g. favorite music, movies, etc.)
The News Feed didn't get introduced until a few years in and it prompted massive outcry from Facebook users for how invasive it seemed, but even then most people assumed the problem was going to be that it violated some implicit social consensus where people should have to go looking for information about you, not have it sent to them in an notification blast. In other words: "stalking should be hard."
The ad-supported business model at the time didn't rely so heavily on micro-targeting by "revealed preferences," it was assumed they would target based on the declared preferences that you gave them (e.g. favorite movies, music, etc.) The idea that Facebook (or even data analytics as a field) would eventually become sophisticated enough to devour the news media in general and tailor you a bespoke reality based on your implied tendencies and personal weaknesses to manipulate you was, at best, fodder for some speculative cyberpunk fiction in the early days. In fact, Facebook didn't really even make forays into being a news clearinghouse/media aggregator until the mid 2000s when "going viral" became the hot trend in media, which is what ultimately led to the media world putting themselves over a barrel to social media companies by myopically chasing traffic in lieu of building an audience.
Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
That might be sure. But it's still not their bigger / biggest PR problem.
> * it's still not their bigger / biggest PR problem* It's the only one that could matter to them. Congress flopped when Zuckerberg testified. They are clearly no present threat. And we haven't seen a wave of action from states' attorneys general. We have no evidence users are decamping. And by extension, the advertisers are staying. The only weak point is in (a) recruitment and (b) political support from the tech co…
> We have no evidence users are decamping.
Last I saw (on HN) was teens usage is down.
As for Congress...do you trust them not to loop around again?
The fact that FB believes SV is all they have to focus on is what created this mess in the first place, yes? Nuff said.
Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times
#147Earlier 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.
It seems like we're seeing how scalable the mantra of "ask for forgiveness, not permission" really is. Not Facebook scale, apparently.
Been fine so far.
Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times
#148I unexpectedly agree with FB here. If NYT are correct then we can kiss goodbye to APIs that are used by any services that are not explicitly written and signed by the service provider. In the extreme that means you won't be able to log in to facebook on the web, only via a facebook app, because there's no guarantee that a 3rd party web browser isn't stealing data. That goes for any and every service dealing with pers…
> In the extreme that means you won't be able to log in to facebook on the web, only via a facebook app
Taking that even further, if you really want to avoid the need to trust anyone, you'd need to run an operating system created by Facebook running on hardware created by Facebook. Otherwise, the OS and hardware vendors of course have access to your personal data. I guess it's all a spectrum, and certain hardware/software vendors you just need to trust (or at least assign blame to them, not Facebook, if they maliciously steal your data).
Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times
#149It 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…
> Facebook has acted on this and intentionally made hundreds of thousands of people fall into a depression, just to see if they could, and then they bragged about it.
No, they did not. They adjusted the proportion of positive emotional expressions and negative emotional expressions in users' news feeds in order to test for an association between that proportion and emotional expressions in users' posts. There are serious problems with what they did, but "intentionally made hundreds of thousands of people fall into a depression" is late-Slashdot style trolling.
Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're not naive at all. When it's not in your business interest to manipulate reality, you manipulate perception.
I think it's a more complex picture. I did my own deep dive after years of reflecting on this: Inside the Bubble at Facebook "Management will laud what employees do, show them selective facts that justify their views, and hire/promote those who behave similarly to them. Employees in isolated teams with training in a single function may not realize the broad, unintended effects of their company's work. They'll assume…
Bookmarked for future reference. It's super important to remember that every company's behaviors reflect their incentive structure, not their mission statement.