[dead]
Why We Disagree with The New York Times
271–280 of 325 posts
Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times
#272lol where are these people back then when Facebook released the APIs? I bet even if they were asked to give consent, they would not be able to foresee what's happening today.
Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times
#273I feel the response is similar to Apple's antenna-gate. Using competitors along to prove their point. Could have communicated better. Good that they took steps couple of months ago to close their legacy APIs. That's the only key takeaway from the post.
Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
This is not an accurate way to view the situation.
Here's the situation. The user has purchased a device (such as a smart phone) from a device manufacturer (such as Apple). The device runs an operating system (iOS) and a whole boatload of software, including telecommunications equipment necessary to operate cellular radios, the higher level OS, then user-installed applications and such.
If you don't trust the device manufacturer, then that's the ball game. If you assume that the device manufacturer is untrustworthy, then you should assume that it can steal the user's data just as easily from a web browser (when the user visits facebook.com) as it can from a native application.
When the user decides to sign into Facebook (or any website or application) from their device - the manufacturer-supplied device - the user is trusting the manufacturer with their data. Whether the application is delivered through a web browser, or is a so-called 'native' app installed through an app store, doesn't substantially change the trust relationship between Facebook and the manufacturer. If you believe the manufacturer is doing nefarious things, then you should assume the manufacturer will install a spyware web browser that siphons data out of every web page that you visit. Partnering with the device manufacturer to allow them to distribute a Facebook-branded mobile app does not substantially grant them more trust than they would have already.
Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times
#275Facebook’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…
Exactly, this seems to be coming from people who don't fully understand or appreciate the history or social/technical/economic environment from which it came about. Then they are retroactively applying our relatively recently evolved demands for fine grained control of data.
This type of thing in journalism really concerns me with the recent moral panic against 'fake news' and the attempts to create systems which define it. When what is 'true' or factual or not is so often subtle and easily spun/twisted. Which is ironic in this context because Facebook and NYTimes are both leading players championing these efforts.
Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times
#276Earlier 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. How else could the model remotely work? This is just hindsight talking. It was hardly obvious from the beginning because it was hardly obvious how big the market for granular private data was going to be. Facebook, in the beginning, was functionally just a stripped down personal page with a status update feature analog…
I for one should have realized what it was more or less immediately, but as a young kid in college, didn't. I don't claim that it was particularly hard to see at that point as it was well into the mid 2000s, but I wasn't particularly tech savvy or worldly yet.
By the time I deleted my facebook, no one even saw my goodbye post on their "feed." It was a different internet than the one on which I naively signed up. I, and a host of others, enabled that new internet. I have much less interest in this one.
Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times
#277Facebook’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…
My email client has full access to the contents of my email but the author of said client has none. Although my client has credentials these are stored locally and like my email never communicated to the creator of my client.
If the device makers applications merely fetched data on behalf of users and displayed it on their machine it would be no more of a problem than my email client.
In the first place it looks the apis provided access to data the users had opted not to share in the second place the times article seems to state that partners partook of that data themselves rather than merely acting as a client example
"Facebook acknowledged that some partners did store users’ data — including friends’ data — on their own servers. A Facebook official said that regardless of where the data was kept, it was governed by strict agreements between the companies."
Before deciding if facebook's response was reasonable did you even bother reading the times article?
Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times
#278Earlier 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.
All sensible choices last only till antagnositc action occurs.
In the case of legal documents -
1) the base scenario itself is terrible - attempts to make credit card terms easier to read have resulted in a huge increase in the amount of text required to read it.
2) leaving the base case aside - the moment a company or individual decides that they can get away with preying on customers, sensible options no longer work- no normal person is going to beat the legal team.
Your position is a theoretically sound position but it does not survive contact with very common real world scenarios.
Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times
#279Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times
#280Earlier 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. How else could the model remotely work? This is just hindsight talking. It was hardly obvious from the beginning because it was hardly obvious how big the market for granular private data was going to be. Facebook, in the beginning, was functionally just a stripped down personal page with a status update feature analog…
Dude that’s BS.
The day FB was announced was the day I said “this is a bad idea.”
I and many others on HN have NEVER made a FB account, and my life seems to generally have been better for it.
But it was obvious then, and it is obvious now.
Matter of fact it frankly looks even worse today, since there really seems to be no solution, and the granularity of tools and regulation is too coarse to deal with this scenario.
The only real option I’ve seen seems to be to drop off the internet.