I wouldn't be worried about BlackBerry, it's Samsung. I will never use their phones again with their fingers over every part of the Android pie.
Why We Disagree with The New York Times
151–160 of 325 posts
Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times
#152It 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.
Yes but just two sentences later in the post...
> And our partnership and engineering teams approved the Facebook experiences these companies built.
They're saying they inspected these apps. You jumped to "literally insane" so fast there.
Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Sure, but do we just absolve people of all individual responsibility to think even a little bit and make educated choices? I think there is more evidence that people just don't really care about this issue. After all of this came out, FB use didn't really go down.
> After all of this came out, FB use didn't really go down.
It's both too early and hard to say that for sure. I would suspect it's had an impact on FB's long term trend line, especially with younger people.
Anecdotally, much of my social network has significantly decreased their Facebook use if status updates are anything to go by. They may be on the site as much as before, but they're not really engaging with it as actively as they used to.
Granted, that could just be a normal fall-off since the 2016 Presidential Election season was a "special" time. But I've noticed even with my cousins abroad they've mostly transitioned fully to WhatsApp. Sure, that is also a Facebook joint, but it sends a real signal to Facebook as to what the market values in a social media platform, and it seems it's not the Facebook model.
Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Sounds like nuclear weapons research in Tennessee during World War 2: only inform employees enough so that they can carry on the work without jeopardizing the mission (building nukes vs building a platform which owns people's information).
Telling people "just enough" was more of a security thing than a psychology thing.
X vs the Manhattan project isn't really a good test for the ethic of working on X.
You don't need to work hard to motivate people to start creating the atomic bomb when the Nazis are doing the same thing and a good chunk of your team fled the Nazis.
You don't need to work hard to motivate people to keep working on an atomic bomb when the alternative is a few million people being killed in the invasion of a bunch of islands that the inhabitants have pledged to defend to the death and thus far made good on their promise.
The Manhattan project is much less morally ambiguous than recent tech scandals (the words "recent" and "scandal" relative to the general population, people who follow tech have seen this stuff coming a mile away) because the cost of inaction in 1945 was so much higher than today. It's not like anyone was working hard to make Facebook IPO happen because they thought it would slightly reduce the chances of their relatives dying half way around the world.
Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times
#155Crazy that everyone in here is defending Facebook.
- How on earth does Facebook justify giving direct API access to information that users have, in every setting possible, marked as private?
- How on earth does Facebook justify offering deep API access on users who have literally disabled API access to their data?
It's ridiculous, and it's more ridiculous that users here are conflating "basic API access with a sane permissions system to give you control" with "deep API access with no privacy controls whatsoever that openly defy existing privacy controls".
It's not acceptable, and frankly, this is EXACTLY why government regulation of data online isn't a possibility, it's an inevitability. Because when the penalty for ignoring the user's selection of "DO NOT MAKE MY DATA AVAILABLE OVER THE API" and "DO NOT MAKE MY DATA AVAILABLE TO FRIENDS OF MY FRIENDS" etc is now billions of dollars in damages and potentially criminal charges for executives, magically, these violations will stop occuring.
Until then, everything in this document is either a lie or sufficiently legalese'd that it's worthless, just like the lies that they told to Congress, just like Zuckerberg's lies to E.U. as well.
I cannot wait until it is a crime to share private user data against their will. We live in a wild west and the past 10-15 years are proving just how much sheer damage we have caused in society by not criminalizing disrespect of digital privacy.
Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times
#156> These partners signed agreements that prevented people’s Facebook information from being used for any other purpose than to recreate Facebook-like experiences.
hahahaha lolololol
Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, but do we just absolve people of all individual responsibility to think even a little bit and make educated choices? I think there is more evidence that people just don't really care about this issue. After all of this came out, FB use didn't really go down.
I think it's absurdly unrealistic to expect people to do in-depth due diligence on all of the services they use. Modern society requires us to trust innumerable service providers and their dependencies to enable so much of the convenience we take for granted. What little knowledge we do have about abuse comes from the accountability of these companies to regulators like the FTC and FCC. Realistically, I think we have…
I think another thing that bothers me about this mindset is that we have started viewing "consumer" action as the only valid response, which is really convenient for some people for the reasons you mention.
But in a society where citizens are represented by elected officials, regulations are "citizen" action. Regulations should not be viewed as any less legitimate than consumer action, they are just enacted through a proxy mechanism, aka elected officials.
This whole bifurcation of regulation vs consumer boycott, and the subsequent push to delegitimize regulation seems pretty artificial, and more importantly, a huge benefit to people looking to avoid any sort of boundaries on their actions.
Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times
#158It 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. Yes but just two sentences later in the post... > And our partnership and engineering teams approved the Facebook experiences these companies built. They're saying they inspected these apps. You jumped to "literally insane" so fast there.
Nope, you know that once the data leaves your server it is out of your control. These companies could have fooled fb representatives quite easily if they wanted.
Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times
#159Facebook’s response seems perfectly reasonable to me. - Obviously in order to integrate FB functionality into a Mobile OS UI requires an API to render the data being displayed. - If your phone has a home screen widget which shows friend data, obviously that friend data came from a Facebook API call. - If you type your Facebook username and password into a settings dialog in order to enable that home screen widget to…
> When you enter your username and password in order to view your Facebook feed — that’s called a “user agent” and that’s something appreciably different than a third party quiz app sucking in friend feed data.
I think we're trying to make this different in hindsight, but APIs for this sort of thing are the replacement for "please give my app your Facebook password". I hope everyone remembers how Facebook used to ask users for their GMail password and how Mint (still) asks users for their banking passwords.
And if what you are doing is "giving an app access to my account", then letting them see everything you see is a pretty natural API.
I think over time we have realised that users want more fine-grained permissions so they don't have to make such difficult decisions of whether they "trust" an app, but I know that as a developer and user I get pretty annoyed when other software cannot interact with an app for me because the API is too limiting.
Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, but do we just absolve people of all individual responsibility to think even a little bit and make educated choices? I think there is more evidence that people just don't really care about this issue. After all of this came out, FB use didn't really go down.
> After all of this came out, FB use didn't really go down. It's both too early and hard to say that for sure. I would suspect it's had an impact on FB's long term trend line, especially with younger people. Anecdotally, much of my social network has significantly decreased their Facebook use if status updates are anything to go by. They may be on the site as much as before, but they're not really engaging with it as…
> But I've noticed even with my cousins abroad they've mostly transitioned fully to WhatsApp.
I've managed to get my friends and family over to other channel so we are now almost 100% Facebook free except for a few log in with Facebook and the occasional Instagram (also declining I think).
(Disclaimer: I trust WhatsApps crypto since a number of cryptographers have audited it but I still do not want them to have my metadata. I mean, seriously: the crypto can be unbreakable but why do we think Facebook bought WhatsApp and made it free?)