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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

#261

Post by sonnyblarney »

Liquix wrote: post #62
dominotw wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Signed agreements do not prevent your information from being used in other ways. Why is this, though? How is it different from any other legal agreements?

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.

There is no comparison between such a "I promise not to murder contract" and a contractual agreement between two companies regarding data integrity.

Companies share sensitive information all the time, this is not a new thing, contracts are real things, breach of contracts is a big deal, consequences can be huge.

Both FB and most of the entities with whom they would have shared data are huge, and there'd be way to much risk in not being smart with the data.

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#262

Post by bastawhiz »

kmonsen wrote: post #130
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…

Device manufacturers can also of course trivially bypass any way facebook tries to hide this data from them as well if they really want to. They control the OS and it's implementation, nothing can be hidden if they really badly want to get it.

Your phone manufacturer can also theoretically just watch your phone's display output over VNC if they had that kind of control over your device. If you believe your device's manufacturer is deliberately working to actively steal data from third party apps on your phone, perhaps you should consider a different phone.

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#264

Post by snowwrestler »

cjhopman wrote: post #245
snowwrestler wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand why my iPhone needs access to my Facebook friends' info, in order to display it to me. I don't understand why Apple Inc. needs access and permission to download and store my friends' data on Apple Inc. servers . That is what the NY Times reported, and Facebook has not directly denied it here. Edit to be clear: I'm just using Apple as an example company.

Do you know about the Amazon Silk web browser? If you log in to facebook in that browser, Amazon may download and store your friends' data on Amazon's servers. And that's even without any agreement with facebook. I can think of a handful of Facebook-like experiences that would require an OS/device provider to store data on their servers, especially considering the constraints imposed on some devices (particularly old…

I run websites that get traffic from Amazon Silk browsers. I've never signed a data sharing agreement with Amazon. There's more going on in this story than a simple browsing proxy.

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#265

Post by brewdad »

untog wrote: post #174
vasilipupkin wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But surely all the evidence suggests that it is unrealistic, given that reality shows us over and over that people don't read these boxes before checking? Do you read the entirety of every twenty page EULA before using a new app?

Not to mention the services that alter their TOS and "notify" you by updating a web page. No email, no summary of changes, just a quiet update to a 20 page document that you automatically agree to by continuing to log in.

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#266

Post by throwaway2048 »

zzzeek wrote: post #210
nradov wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Don't feel bad about it, people parroting any mention of nazis as "godwining" (and almost always trying to use it as "you lose the arguement!!!", which wasnt even godwin's observation) are terribly short sighted.

If you refuse to even discuss the nazis and what they did, especially in directly applicable cases like this, how the hell can we ever hope to not repeat their mistakes.

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#267

Post by phs318u »

braindongle wrote: post #149
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…

> 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…

> late-Slashdot style trolling

Off topic but that ^^^ is exactly why, after 20 years, I finally gave up on Slashdot and then stumbled across HN and couldn't be happier. I have, in recent times, gone back for a visit just to see what it's like and... realised my decision to leave Slashdot was made probably 10 years later than it should have been.

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#268

Post by neltnerb »

untog wrote: post #105
_red wrote: post #57

Earlier 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…

I suppose that's true. Before Facebook I basically just talked to people over AIM and email lists. I remember setting my status on AIM so people would know how things were going. Initially creating a Facebook account did feel like just filling out your user profile in your AIM account so your friends can find information about you.

Perhaps someone was also mining the AIM data, but that would never have occurred to me to do. I doubt the tools to analyze and monetize it existed yet in any case. I'm not even sure the tools existed to monetize a social network when Facebook started.

It's a kind of weird conceptual leap to be honest, when compared to thinking about just selling ad space or perhaps targeting it based on people's interests.

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#269

Post by gaius »

wybiral wrote: post #233
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…

Most of the people I've talked to seemed to think that ads were how money was made from services like that. Promoted content that's constantly in their face trying to blend into normal content. In fact, so much so that it's been hard to get people to realize that the recent issues haven't been related to ads at all. Facebook itself stills seems to be trying to blur the lines between data collection and advertisement.…

ads (if I'm reading about gardening then show me an ad for potting soil or gloves)

That’s what genuinely baffles me. If I were a manager of a gardening company and I wanted to do targeted advertising I would just buy space in gardening themed publications. The idea of showing people my ads while they’re on other websites and not in a gardening mood anyway makes literally no sense. All this tracking and profiling ads zero value for the ad buyers, so why are they paying for it?

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