Imagine if this same thing happened with Microsoft and imagike people’s reactions.
Why We Disagree with The New York Times
281–290 of 325 posts
Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
Medical trials are also just A/B testing. waves hands
true, but most of them have opt in. . .. Like people know they are in the test even if they don't know if they are the control or not.
That was my point, apparently that was not obvious at all. That is what I meant by the "hand waving" part. Being apologetic about FB just because what they did was some kind of A/B testing does not redeem them at all.
Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> I run websites that get traffic from Amazon Silk browsers. I've never signed a data sharing agreement with Amazon.
Of course not. Because the fact that a user agent like this has widespread access to the data that the user has access to is expected. The OS itself also has at least that same level of access (as it has control over the behavior of the user agent). We just all seem to assume that we can trust those entities to not misuse the data (in some cases the particular software we run may have privacy policies that cover how they use that data that we necessarily give them access to).
> There's more going on in this story than a simple browsing proxy.
There's nothing in the report that indicates that. In fact, most "simple browsing prox[ies]" have no data sharing agreement limiting how they use the information from your browsing, in the cases in this story they were all limited to "signed agreements that prevented people’s Facebook information from being used for any other purpose than to recreate Facebook-like experiences." and even further "our partnership and engineering teams approved the Facebook experiences these companies built". In addition, it sounds like in most of these instances, no data was even accessed or stored off the device (i.e. they had much less access than a proxy).
Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times
#284I'm no huge Facebook fan - hardly use it these days, but... These apps are just alternative Facebook clients. Don't we _want_ a system where you can use different clients to access your own data? If the problem is not trusting the client, well, that'll be a problem for any such system, even some utopian fully open, distributed and federated social network - until you build an open source client yourself.
It seems that FB gave to those clients an API to access more data than the user allowed. The Blackberry used by the Times got data about the friends of the journalist even if those friends didn't consent to that.
One thing is allowing the official FB client to see those data (FB has those data anyway), another thing is to let third parties see them and possibly store them on their servers and not only on our devices.
This is different from email and email clients. First, the expectations are different: if I send you an email I expect that you can forward it to your friends or anybody else unless I explicitly ask you not to. Second, local clients don't send mail to their authors, same for address books. Third, we know that Google and others can see most of our mails anyway, because most people use only webmail and messages are stored on the servers of those companies.
Finally, FB didn't tell us about this API and what it can do. It's this secrecy that's hurting them IMHO. Sure, I concede that they couldn't foresee the current climate around their company when they made the choice not to advertise it, or we wouldn't be in this situation now. But we're here also because of chain of bad choices from their side.
My suggestion for a social network of the future is to have a single API, used also by the official client. The servers must not trust any client, which is the usual thing we do in web development, and give all them the same level of access. It's up to the user to decide if they want to use the official client or one of any third party.
Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times
#285Crazy 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 offering deep API access on users who have literally disabled API access to their data?” Here how it seems really non-crazy to me as a programmer. Let’s say I make phone with a Linux OS. I want to make an app to let users check Facebook on my weird OS. I ask Facebook, they say no. I then build an app to call their API and let users do stuff. All my app does is call the API and show…
Private means that I (the user of my own FB client) can see my private data. That's obvious. What must not happen is that I can also see data that my friends, or their friends, marked as private. This doesn't happen in the official FB client and must not happen with any API.
Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If you sign in to facebook in Opera mini, opera will store your facebook data on their servers. How much does that upset you?
Sounds like closed source software to me.
Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Because it does add value.
Brand awareness/clout. A reminder that you need or want that thing.
Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times
#288Earlier 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…
On a similar to theme to the ever present facebook button, I wonder how much tracking Google is able to do through Google fonts, an absolute ton of sites use Google's CDN to deliver fonts to your browser.
Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times
#289A lot of people are missing the point, debating whether this was reasonable or not.
Mark got away with telling Congress ~"we don't share with third parties" and now they're saying Blackberry's not a third party.
If it's all okay, why didn't Mark come clean? and tell his Congressmen? He had a chance to explain this arguably-harmless behavior, but he chose to sidestep it. Why? Did he not understand the question?
It's fine that this data-sharing is maybe reasonable. It's not fine that Mark withheld this from Senators. This is exactly what they were asking about, and given the chance to explain, he chooses silence. He gets to avoid the public debate while the techies argue amongst themselves.
Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times
#290I don't have high expectations for a company that says they take privacy seriously while constantly invading it and playing dumb.