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Why We Disagree with The New York Times

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Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#181

Post by adrianmonk »

zaroth wrote: post #50

Facebook’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…

> There once was a day when we demanded our social media platforms to provide these “open access” APIs

And we still demand them for other types of apps.

If I have a Mac or iPhone, I can connect the Apple-supplied Mail app to Gmail with IMAP or POP or whatever it uses. If I have Windows with Outlook, I can connect it to whatever mail server too. And this software gets access to all the content of my emails, which is private data.

Likewise, on a smartphone, I can install a third-party app to access Hacker News or Reddit. Because both of them have an open API. (In fact, for a long time there wasn't an official Reddit mobile app, and they encouraged you to go third party.)

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#182

Post by esrauch »

vorpalhex wrote: post #81
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.

If Samsung secretly runs a keylogger on all their phones and then steals your data that way, that's a Samsung problem and you should be angry. That is not what happened here. Facebook officially blessed other platforms, allowed them to say you were signing into Facebook, and then allowed those platforms to have access not only to your data, but your friends exhaustive data. Facebook was aware of this, explicitly allo…

Facebook officially sends arbitrary friends data through the Android/Samung APIs in the normal course of operating the official FB app. It likely also locally caches a lot of data in a format and on-device storage that Samsung could arbitrarily access. The only thing stopping Samsung from stealing all of your friends data is legal and social, not technical.

Is there any evidence that the API was actually used to arbitrarily request and exfiltrate other users profiles? If not, this is strictly only "Facebook allowed other developers to write Facebook apps": there is no way that could possible work without offering an API with this level off access to the app.

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#183

Post by coding123 »

blueprint wrote: post #35

> It’s hard to remember now but back then there were no app stores. Bunch of nonsense. Of course there were.

Yep - I recall that the first iOS version that pre-integrated FB I recall specifically writing an email to a friend of mine that worked at Apple to blast Apple for including it - when there was a perfectly viable option for them to use the app-store. They didn't reply to that email, but we remained friends. That was about 8 years ago.

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#184

Post by duxup »

>These partners signed agreements that prevented people’s Facebook information from being used for any other purpose than to recreate Facebook-like experiences.

Two people you don't know made a deal about how to use your information without telling you. There is no reason to think they are going to keep that deal, no reason to think anyone is actually checking up on your information, and no reason to think either of them cares... and no way to know if anyone actually keeps the deal... and probabbly no recourse even if you did know someone broke the deal.

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#185

Post by JackCh »

dominotw wrote: post #110
derefr wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Punishment after-the-fact to statistically disincentivize behaviours we want to disincentivize. It doesn’t prevent the thing from happening ever, it just makes it so that when it does, inevitably, happen, the system pushes back against the offender. This makes rational actors less likely to do things they could be sued for. But 1. not all actors in a market are rational; and 2. sometimes it’s rational to be “evil” if…

> Facebook gave an assurance that our data would never cross paths with a bad actor. Don't downvote for asking me this, asking in good faith. Where did they give that assurance?

The root contention here is over the word "prevent". You questioned this:

> "Signed agreements do not prevent your information from being used in other ways."

But I guess you now understand why contracts do not prevent it.

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#186

Post by methodover »

criley2 wrote: post #155

Crazy 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 p…

> - How on earth does Facebook justify giving direct API access to information that users have, in every setting possible, marked as private?

The user logs into Facebook on the device. This log-in action the part of the user is effectively permission to share data with the device.

> - How on earth does Facebook justify offering deep API access on users who have literally disabled API access to their data?

When the user logs into Facebook on the device, they are giving permission for their data to be transferred via an API to that device.

I do not understand your outrage.

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#187

Post by Bartweiss »

chiefalchemist wrote: post #68
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Their PR problems aren't rooted in SV Silicon Valley is the last place I'm consistently hearing full-throated defenses of Facebook. It makes sense to keep one's base in order.

That might be sure. But it's still not their bigger / biggest PR problem.

If not SV, then where?

I could buy "Congress" or "the European Parliament", but outside of those answers I don't see it. Average users don't appear to be rejecting Facebook to a meaningful degree, no matter how much news outlets beat the privacy drum. But the Valley is small enough that FB could get stuck paying extra for engineers or even losing domain experts.

More broadly speaking: consumer boycotts don't work (directly), but supplier boycotts sometimes do. That includes labor.

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#188

Post by lovich »

vasilipupkin wrote: post #163
acjohnson55 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 disagree completely, honestly. If you are signing up for a service like Facebook and they are asking you to click a bunch of boxes, it's not unrealistic to expect you to a) either understand what you are clicking on or b) just refuse to click on it what is unrealistic is to expect society to babysit you every single time a moderately complex choice is presented to you.

If you were to actually sit and read those agreements for everything you use, more than half of all productive time for humanity would be reading licensing agreements. You can refuse to click on these things,but these companies continue to try to insert themselves into more and more of society until we get to the point that you can either chose to spend all day confirming companies aren't taking advantage of you, or checking out of society.

This is a tragedy of the commons that government regulation has been the best solution for so far

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#189

Post by gist »

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…

> how else did you expect us to make huge sums of money

Your tone is as if to imply that nobody but the company benefits from making 'huge sums of money'. There are employees, vendors (selling goods and services), stockholders (retirees?), governments (taxes) and so on. Why the idea that earning money is somehow not the purpose of a company? It is at the core.

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#190

Post by zzzeek »

smallnamespace wrote: post #178
zzzeek wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

unethical science does not deserve to be wrapped in its journalistic language in an effort to detach it from the harm it caused, it deserves to be called out for what it actually is, in this case intentional psychological manipulation of people's moods without their knowledge or consent. One does not grasp the true harm caused by unethical experiments by reading only the documented (published or non-published) scient…

How do you distinguish between unethical science and A/B testing, or even just 'We changed our product, then didn't like the results, and changed it back?'

I would assume a core tenet of ethics and deciding if something is unethical is if it has the potential to harm people. Inducing depression to indiscriminate masses is pretty high on the list. It's not valid to compare the emotional impact of Facebook on millions of its addicted users to something like the color of a box of laundry detergent.
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