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

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#201

Post by kolpa » Mon, Jun 04, 2018, 7:42 PM UTC

adrianmonk wrote: post #176

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. Breach of contract opens you up to civil liability. Having this agreement creates disincentives that wouldn't otherwise exist. "Prevent" doesn't mean to make something physically impossible or remove the ability to choose. Police can prevent drunken driving by announcing they will have DUI checkpoints on New Year's Eve. It doesn't make…

Who is liable to whom when user A use a free service B based on an ambiguous agreement, and that service makes an ambiguous agreement with another service C, and C does something that is arguable a violation of one of those agreements?

How much restitution am I entitled to for an ambiguous violation of an amorphous concept like privacy? And how much is Facebook entitled to from a partner who (might have) violated that agreement, causing non-measurable harm to me?

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#202

Post by nradov » Mon, Jun 04, 2018, 7:42 PM UTC

zzzeek wrote: post #177

braindongle wrote: post #149

Earlier 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. 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 ser…

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…

Please don't Godwin HN discussions. A minor change in social media functionality is in no way comparable to experiments which caused actual physical harm.

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#203

Post by kolpa » Mon, Jun 04, 2018, 7:45 PM UTC

RodgerTheGreat wrote: post #142

fakescience wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When does any company get consent for changing its product or advertising and measuring the response?

I never gave my consent to McDonald's for putting up a billboard or changing their menu or their recipe.

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#204

Post by methodover » Mon, Jun 04, 2018, 7:48 PM UTC

djhworld wrote: post #10

> All these partnerships were built on a common interest — the desire for people to be able to use Facebook whatever their device or operating system. Facebooks best interest, not 'common interest'

No, the user's interest. Users were logging into these devices, presumably. They wanted to access their Facebook account on them, Facebook and the device manufacturer figured out how to do it. It sounds like everything is working as intended, there.

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#205

Post by cosmie » Mon, Jun 04, 2018, 7:52 PM UTC

plurgid wrote: post #144

untog wrote: post #105

Earlier 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…

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 use…

While I completely agree with your comment, it also omits something that just serves to underscore your point that consumers make assumptions about how things (economically) work.

> They're going to think "I paid my cell phone bill, therefore I am paying for facebook" ... the question never even arises.

Your example switches from "I pay that enables access to " and you don't even have to go that far.

The guide channel is not tracking her viewing habits, but her cable box certainly is. The industry term is Addressable Media[1], and if she has any modern cable box from any major provider then she's being tracked and targeted for targeted ads just as highly as Facebook would be, despite her paying her cable company for the privilege of watching it. And while it's not customizing the programming itself that she watches, it is customizing the ads she's seeing. It's effectively the same as Facebook, where the she's using whatever is on offer and being subtly influenced by highly targeted excerpts being interspersed into it.

Ever experience weird glitches for commercials that start and end almost immediately, or randomly lack sound or any number of weird quirks that would make you think "man, someone just spent a lot of money for a messed up commercial spot, how did that get passed QA/QC?!"... chances are that was just a hiccup for you specifically as your cable box dynamically inserted an ad, and not hardcoded as part of the wider broadcast.

Cell phones are the same. Even though you're paying the cell company for network access, they're also double dipping by selling targeted audience capabilities based on their data of you based on ads that are seen while using their network.

[1] https://martechtoday.com/addressable-tv-state-cross-device-a...

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#206

Post by mkane848 » Mon, Jun 04, 2018, 7:54 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…

Oh no, the people at large don't understand the complicated interactions between law and technology, those fucking idiots, how dare they

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#207

Post by criley2 » Mon, Jun 04, 2018, 7:58 PM UTC

cjhopman wrote: post #175

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…

You do realize that facebook will share user's private information with any random web browser that the user enters her credentials in, right? Is that "ridiculous"?

If a friend of one of my friends, who I am not connected with, can acces my private data despite my settings being clearly limited, with API access disabled, "friends of my friends" settings disabled, as was reported is possible, then yes that is ridiculous.

However your reply completely fails to grasp the problem, like so many others. It's not the fact that I type in a user/password and get my data, it's that, I type in my user/password and Facebook authorizes access to as many as 10,000 to 100,000 other accounts data, based on proximity to my account.

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#208

Post by criley2 » Mon, Jun 04, 2018, 8:00 PM UTC

methodover wrote: post #186

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 us…

>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.

As well as the data of 10,000 to 100,000 connected users as both friends and friends of friends have data pulled without any checks by the third party.

"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."

When the user selects to have their data limited to friends only, and not friends of friends, then additionally disables API access to their data explicitly, no, they are not "giving permission for their data to be transferred via API".

They are quite explicitly doing the opposite.

My outrage, stated multiple times and oddly invisible to the users here, is that my user/password doesn't authorize the third party to access 10,000 to 100,000 other users private data, and those users personal settings should override any third party data hose utility.

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#209

Post by laken » Mon, Jun 04, 2018, 8:01 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.

On Windows Phone 7, Facebook integrated with the Contacts app, so your Facebook friends would be added to your contacts, and their images would be added to their contacts if they didn't have one set. That's probably what it is, as that would then sync with your Outlook account for those contacts

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#210

Post by zzzeek » Mon, Jun 04, 2018, 8:06 PM UTC

nradov wrote: post #202

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…

Please don't Godwin HN discussions. A minor change in social media functionality is in no way comparable to experiments which caused actual physical harm.

I did not compare Facebook's experiments to those of Nazis. I used Nazi experimentation as a canonical example of unethical science.

Since it is likely unavoidable that referring to Nazis will lead to accusations of Godwining, I have edited my above post to hopefully make this distinction extremely clear.