Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why We Disagree with The New York Times

newsroom.fb.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 325 posts

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#311

Post by naravara »

intended wrote: post #309
naravara wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The day FB was announced was the day I said “this is a bad idea.” The "day FB was announced" it was exclusive to Harvard students and was just a cleaner version of MySpace and Friendster. It's unlikely you would have had strong opinions about Facebook, in particular, that you didn't also extend to those two, as well as AOL and sites like Digg.

To ding me for using the term announced is to find issue in semantics. My position is the same - I had the chance to be part of FB at some of the earliest stages and thought it was a bad idea as did many others. And people clearly saw and pointed out the issues with privacy back then. I had few issues with Aol, but it was still a simple service play - and had/has little at all in common with Facebook. DIGG was never…

>To ding me for using the term announced is to find issue in semantics.

Not pure semantics. It is important to focus on what you're actually talking about when you say "the beginning." Facebook has evolved over time, both in its service as well as its business model. So when you talk about "the beginning" it's important to know the beginning of what?

>DIGG was never at the same scale or range - and from what I know it never depended on your real life profile as I recall.

Nothing was ever at the same scale or range as Facebook. If they were, they'd have been as much of a threat as Facebook is now. That's kind of the point. A lot of the LiveJournal, Xanga, MySpace, etc. stuff from back then was all groping towards a functioning business model and it was Facebook's news feed that actually created one.

But even in the early stages the News Feed wasn't really about extracting data, just about creating a UI paradigm that made it easy to shove native advertising in your face. What really made the big data analytics game take off was when SEO and viral marketing started getting big, which wasn't really on Facebook's radar in the early days.

Advertising is different from Ad Tech. Ad Tech is about more than just Facebook's collection. People couldn't really have predicted the extent to which the media industry (new and old) was going to go whole hog into Facebook's platform. It has been their complicity that elevates Facebook's data collection from being "Wow The Facebook is nosy and annoying" to "Wow Facebook is a threat to the public sphere."

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#312

Post by vasilipupkin »

intended wrote: post #308
vasilipupkin wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The Soviet Union didn’t live in the modern era - and the country which is comparable today is China - and they’re doing very well. I’ve heard many credible claims that the Chinese state will fail, but it hasn’t till date. So that point may need to be re-thought.

Doing what very well? You are making too handwavy of a statement. they are regulating some things they care about very heavily and others not at all. And very well is all relative. China is a poor country still, comparing it to US is not reasonable at this stage

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#313

Post by rhizome »

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…

There is plenty of gray area in human protections law.

Of course, which is why the conversation continues. If it was settled at the beginning without nuance, it would be defined in black and white.

I'm not sure how your reply relates, though, since I was merely imploring GP to demonstrate any awareness of the state of research rather than jumping in with a lazy question-comment.

Elsewhere this is expressed by the slogan, "I'm 12 years old and what is this?"

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#314

Post by JackCh »

dominotw wrote: post #243
JackCh wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The root contention here is over the word "prevent". You questioned this: > "Signed agreements do not prevent your information from being used in other ways." But I guess you now understand why contracts do not prevent it.

I was not asking why an agreement is not able to physically get between the person and his computer and tie his hands from data being used in other ways. Why would i possibly ask such a question :D I was asking why consequences of breach of agreement is not a strong enough deterrent in this case .

The contention of the comment to which you originally responded was with the use of the word "prevent." If they had used a word like "disincentives" there wouldn't be an issue. I thought that was clear from that comment.

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#315

Post by arcbyte »

rando444 wrote: post #295
arcbyte wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

How do you think Motoblur worked?

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#316

Post by arcbyte »

mlb_hn wrote: post #215
arcbyte wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'm not sure it's meaningless. It seems to me that there is a distinction between [device manufacturer X is building their own copy of Facebook's graph by acquiring friend data] vs [device manufacturer X allows a user to login to Facebook and access friend data on their device without having to use the web browser].

Nobody was doing either of those things. Theres a whole plethora of innovation and social network competition and integration that happened in the 2000s. Google Friendfeed.

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#317

Post by prepend »

pmontra wrote: post #285
prepend wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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.

And it didn’t happen with FB’s API. Your friends could see their private data. You could see yours. The apps were not able to show your private data to friends and vice versa without breaking their contract with FB.

It would be like being concerned because both you friends both use Chrome to access your individual, private bank accounts. Google accesses your private information, with your permission, to display data on your screen. It’s only bad if they misuse that data.

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#318

Post by intended »

naravara wrote: post #311
intended wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To ding me for using the term announced is to find issue in semantics. My position is the same - I had the chance to be part of FB at some of the earliest stages and thought it was a bad idea as did many others. And people clearly saw and pointed out the issues with privacy back then. I had few issues with Aol, but it was still a simple service play - and had/has little at all in common with Facebook. DIGG was never…

>To ding me for using the term announced is to find issue in semantics. Not pure semantics. It is important to focus on what you're actually talking about when you say "the beginning." Facebook has evolved over time, both in its service as well as its business model. So when you talk about "the beginning" it's important to know the beginning of what? >DIGG was never at the same scale or range - and from what I know i…

It’s irrelevant whether they had a functional business model or not - the issues with this system were known. And Facebook isn’t the only threat in the world.

It was obviously privacy invasive and the harm type any of those systems could do was obvious. They didn’t have a business model when they started out - but that’s only because they had the runway to ignore it. Otherwise there was an obvious way they were going to make money and that was Ads. Powered by data harvested about you.

I mean that’s the whole point of the site? What else is it going to do?

This is facebooks business model - it’s also the business model for many other sites. And yes those other sites are also a problem.

Hey, I’m not stating an opinion, I’m stating a fact.

I don’t have a Facebook account and always viewed it as a threat to privacy. I’m not the only one.

All that’s happening now is one of many adversarial uses of this information is being made known to people who Don’t visit slashdot and hacker news.

Facebook was going to use your personal information to make money for itself. It was going to be harmful to you.

This has happened.

The business model for other parts of the web is the same. Those parts are going to cause similar issues but at smaller scales.

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#319

Post by Trundle »

gaius wrote: post #269
wybiral wrote: post #233

Earlier 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…

You do that because its not an either/or decision, and the bidding nature of digital advertising means the lower effectiveness will be reflected in what you're paying. You can be paying a premium for people searching to buy gardening gloves, a little bit for people reading gardening stuff, and then a pittance for people that may be related to gardening in some fashion.

You're extrapolating based on your own actions rather than measuring the result. The results say that if you show gardening gloves to enough people at random, you'll eventually get some sales. Everything else is just narrowing down "random" a little bit.

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#320

Post by acct1771 »

wybiral wrote: post #303
acct1771 wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it does add value. Brand awareness/clout. A reminder that you need or want that thing.

You can do that kind of advertising without collecting this much data and creating psychological profiles on every user (think: Coca-Cola). And even if I like something seeing it repeatedly online just annoys me more than it inspires me to buy their stuff. I think they'd get more bang for their buck by having social media personalities that align with their target market push their product (think: Nike). If people ar…

Agreed.
Post reply on HN