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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

#291

Post by specialist »

killjoywashere wrote: post #258
rhizome wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I enthusiastically support requiring Facebook to have an IRB greenlight any user impacting changes they want to make.

That's a terrific idea.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_review_board

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#292

Post by makomk »

michaelmrose wrote: post #277
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…

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…

The APIs provided access to data that had been shared with the person who was logged into the device, but not with random Facebook apps like Farmville. The New York Times' argument is essentially that the flag which stopped Cambridge Analytica and Zynga getting access to your data should also have stopped your actual friends from viewing it except through installing Facebook's official app.

It's hard to see any way in which making users choose between sharing their info with every dodgy quiz their friends use and forcing their friends to install the Facebook app and let it get its tendrils into their devices in order to interact with them would've been good for privacy, but this is exactly what the NYT is insisting Facebook should've done.

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#293

Post by specialist »

CaptainZapp wrote: post #115
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…

Exactly that. I consider myself relatively tech savvy, but when - thanks to the GDPR - that hive of scum and tracking that underpins the modern internet was revealed I was really shocked. Clicking one of those "manage your cookies" links is a truly enlightening experience. How should Average Q User even begin to grasp the implications of this fucking datasucking hydra? I was glad having "deleted" my Facebook account…

As a fellow geek, of course I was aware of the potential abuse.

Being party to conversations with C-level sociopaths is what really brings it home.

One example: One employer railed at the injustice (loss of profit) of not being able to share the millions of patient's medical records we'd accumulated with Big Pharma's marketing machine. This employer spent considerable effort trying to figure out how to work around the law (eg plausibly deniable anonymization).

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#294

Post by sideshowb »

kolpa wrote: post #203
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.

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.

This is a very good point in its own right (though not a point for or against fb doing this per se). Not sure why it appears in grey.

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#295

Post by rando444 »

arcbyte wrote: post #126
mlb_hn wrote: post #64

Facebook's making the distinction between allowing a device to offer Facebook-like services (which require Facebook functionality) and third-party apps that suck up all your friend data. On the one hand, Facebook's got a point, that if you want to be able to use Facebook on a device without going through the Facebook app or the website the device needs to be able to authenticate onto some sort of API. On the other ha…

The fact that "data made it to device maker servers" is a stupid, meaningless point. Of course it hit their servers. And it should hit their servers. It's idiots who don't know what they're writing about causing hysteria among idiot's who don't know what they're reading in order to sell advertising dollars. And the whole time they're pointing at facebook as the corrupt ones.

I can see no reasonable need for device manufacturers to have your facebook data (and that of your friends) stored on their servers.

Care to elaborate on why this data should be allowed to leave the phone? (and be allowed to be collected regardless of user's privacy settings)

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#296

Post by rando444 »

romwell wrote: post #256
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.

NYT said relationship status, religion, political leaning and upcoming events, among other data were shared.

FB saying "we didn't share photos" is trying to say "well, we didn't give away everything"

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#297

Post by Sacho »

arh68 wrote: post #289

A 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 f…

It seems like Mark would always have to answer 'yes' to that question, since accessing Facebook via the web means you share your data with Google(Chrome), Mozilla(Firefox), Microsoft(IE), etc..

(Also any OS/kernel manufacturers who get access to your data through your usage of the OS or TCP/IP stack).

Facebook is sharing your data with Blackberry in the same manner.

I don't even see a consent difference, since you need to explicitly consent to sharing your data by entering your Facebook user/password into the Blackberry UI app. Similar to how you write your user and password into Chrome, thus "sharing your data" with Google. It also doesn't seem like there's any evidence that the UI apps were intended to secretly collect and store data(Was "The Hub" an unknown feature?)

I don't believe the evidence presented here invalidates Mark's answer. His answer would have been meaningless if he had taken the definition of "third party" put forward in the NYT.

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#298

Post by [deleted] »

gengkev wrote: post #161
spankalee wrote: post #60

I'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.

I think the problem is Facebook's lack of transparency here. As a user, suppose I have some information that I've marked as "not available to third-party apps". Then I might be surprised to find out that Blackberry's servers have access to that data via a secret API, even if it is to implement a "Facebook experience".

[deleted]

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#299

Post by basseq »

Eridrus wrote: post #159
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…

> 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…

> Mint (still) asks users for their banking passwords.

In defense of Mint, most banks are severely behind the curve when it comes to authentication, and there would be no way to provide that service otherwise.

Where the financial institution has a better API, Mint happily supports it. (Interactive Brokers, IIRC, is an example of this.)

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#300

Post by vasilipupkin »

intended wrote: post #278
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.

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 wor…

you have to evaluate this position in the context of comparing it to the alternatives. Do you propose government regulating every moderately complex activity because people can't understand it? First of all, people are smarter than you give them credit for and secondly, Soviet Union tried this. It just doesn't work.
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