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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

#251

Post by blipbloop »

obelix_ wrote: post #167
RodgerTheGreat wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Staging an experiment of this nature without informed consent of the participants is unethical, irrespective of whether the technique proved to be effective.

"It's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission" is a very popular mantra among the boy wonders of Silicon Valley.

Was the mantra of Grace Hopper, who I wouldn't necessarily describe as a 'Boy Wonder', however she used it in the context of 'borrowing' equipment and machine time from bits of the navy and academia.

She was being dry witted about tatting stuff, not recommending human testing.

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#252

Post by bobdole1234 »

_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…

Facebook doesn't sell data, they ads.

Those ads are targetable by categories determined from private data, but Facebook doesn't give anyone else the data, that's literally why people would purchase ads through their exchange and not through another exchange.

Google has the same model, they don't sell your data, they use your data to match you with advertisers through a fairly opaque interface that lets advertisers reach the categories of people they want to reach, without revealing the data to allowed them to put someone in that category.

Kind of like how your Mom will set you up on a blind date based on what she knows about what both parties want, but doesn't disclose all your information because she doesn't want anyone to be upset with her.

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#253

Post by musage »

albertgoeswoof wrote: post #135
JorgeGT wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regulations forbid us from letting you access the filing cabinet but I can tell you, all of us will be out having a beer between 6 and 8 PM. Oh, and the key is under the flowerpot. Wink wink.

But that analogy is letting someone access the filing cabinet, and not taking reasonable precautions not to. Which would be a direct violation. Which may or may not be the case here.

The claim is that it is the case here, as in

> "prevented" apps from abusing their API through policy, while simultaneously doing nothing with their construction of the API to prevent apps from breaking the policy

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#254

Post by hueving »

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.

It's not a 'Godwin' when it's literally the reason for IRBs and modern scientific human research ethics.

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#255

Post by drb91 »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #59
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.

According to the New York Times article [1] the third parties were able to obtain information about you if a friend signs in on their phone, no consent from you required: > Facebook’s view that the device makers are not outsiders lets the partners go even further, The Times found: They can obtain data about a user’s Facebook friends, even those who have denied Facebook permission to share information with any third p…

The quoted behavior appears to essentially be the behavior of browsing your friend’s profile. Does the website itself also violate trust by allowing this behavior? Should Obama or Cambridge Analytica simply have violated the ToS to get users passwords to scrape facebook.com?

I don’t really care; if you install the facebook app you deserve whatever it does.

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#256

Post by romwell »

bluesign wrote: post #73

NYT says: ‘Some device makers could retrieve personal information even from users’ friends who believed they had barred any sharing, The New York Times found.’ FB says: ‘Contrary to claims by the New York Times, friends’ information, like photos, was only accessible on devices when people made a decision to share their information with those friends.’ This is the only disagreement as I can see.

Well, this is a huge difference.

If FB is correct here, then the whole thing is a non-issue. Some API giving access to the data otherwise available through a web browser is a good thing.

On the other hand, if an API provides access to information that isn't accessible through a web browser (and doesn't show in the official FB app), then it's reasonable to loudly complain.

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#257

Post by drb91 »

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…

> Police can prevent drunken driving by announcing they will have DUI checkpoints on New Year's Eve.

Well, it’s only prevention if it succeeds.... otherwise it’s just a failed attempt.

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#258

Post by killjoywashere »

rhizome wrote: post #235
smallnamespace wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?'

There is at least a dense 50 years of research and writing on the topic of scientific ethics, it's a bit naive to pop into a thread and ask, "so what's the deeeeaaaal with human experimentation?"

There is plenty of gray area in human protections law. Source: I'm a researcher who spent most of last week dealing with lawyers in multiple time zones on exactly how to write a bit of protocol in order to preserve the grey area (so as to avoid setting unnecessary precedent), while honoring the more stringent interpretation (to avoid even the appearance of skating onto thin ice).

Four years ago, having talked to some of the same lawyers about the same topic, none of us had any thought that it was a grey area. An a priori interpretation of the law was pretty clear: a more liberal position was (and is) perfectly legal. But the most anxious minds tend to prevail in these matters.

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#259

Post by jack9 »

StanislavPetrov wrote: post #211
braindongle wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. If you Google for primary literature related to Tuskegee, you will find, front-and-center, publications describing the ethical disaster that it was. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2609060/ https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/3372911/brandt_r... One does indeed grasp the horror. And, where did the Nazis publish, again? We certainly need people to responsibly interpret peer-reviewed li…

>If you Google for primary literature related to Tuskegee, you will find, front-and-center, publications describing the ethical disaster that it was. Your citations were published ~50 years after the Tuskegee exeripments. A proper analogy would be to compare your citations to the ethical condemntations of Facebook made 50 years from now. >And, where did the Nazis publish, again? The Nazis published in all of the fron…

> A proper analogy would be to compare your citations to the ethical condemntations of Facebook made 50 years from now.

When the findings are published has no bearing on the ethics of the experiments. Ironically, the half century lead time does not impinge on the impact, as much as the chronology strengthens the impact.

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#260

Post by sonnyblarney »

kolpa wrote: post #201
adrianmonk wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 tha…

I worked at an F50 corp that built a special FB app for our platform. I worked on the project itself.

This is getting a little conspiratorial: contracts are very real, and though I didn't see ours and was not privy to any special user data we might have received, we are very careful about that kind of stuff and liability is a huge, huge deal.

A contract stipulating that data has to be protected in a certain manner is a reasonable protection, depending on the sensitivity of the data.

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