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Facebook's seized files published by MPs

bbc.co.uk

231–240 of 507 posts

Re: Facebook's seized files published by MPs

#231
I worked at Facebook for 5 years on Workplace and Internal Tools. I am typically very critical of the company nowadays, but even so find the discussion here difficult to digest.

People are complex. They are more complex than an action, or even a group of actions. To take a person and alias them into being "good" or "bad" based on an action or a series of actions is to explicitly dehumanize them for the sake of making the world simpler. It is a poor model, and in a Dale-Carnegie-way it leads to poor outcomes, as you close the dialog with that person that allows you to change opinions and outcomes. It is the same with groups or companies: some parts of groups do good from some vantage point, some do bad.

I found myself inspired by a lot of what Facebook did. I loved working inside Infrastructure there, I was amazed by what people were innovating on every day. Projects like charitable causes have raised a lot for charity. I've seen the Are you Safe feature reduce so much stress during disasters. I keep meaningful dialogs going with friends I don't get to see often on FB and Instagram. It makes me really happy to see my friends thriving.

One of Napoleon's great gifts was in compartmentalizing pieces of his life. His tumultuous and frankly soul-crushing personal life (which affected him deeply) with Josephine never got in the way of his military victories. I wonder if that's a good model, up-to-a-point for people and groups. With people, by compartmentalizing some unsavory perspective someone has, you have the ability to change it later on through discussion.

... in groups: if everyone good leaves organizations because they're "bad," well, those organizations will just be filled with the worst of us soon enough.

Re: Facebook's seized files published by MPs

#232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WRT doing business in the UK. You need to understand that this is a highly unusual situation. Part of the UK Parliamentary system is that there are "Select Committees"on MPs, whose job is to review and hold to account the performance of government bodies and departments. They may also review areas of national interest within their remit, and invite witnesses to give evidence to them. For example, there have been sign…

I can understand it's highly unusual. I don't have an absolute fear or no fear of doing business in the UK, it just ups my "riskometer" I mentioned. Surely it is clear that a vindictive government raiding a visitor and publishing confidential business documents should give one pause about the government's ideals? And I think we can make judgements about how decisions are reached instead of assuming that the exact ste…

> vindictive government raiding

What? OP literally just described how skipping a request for info is comparable to skipping a court summons in the US. If you skip a court summons 4 times, the government comes after you. How is this situation different?

> publishing

This certainly does raise questions.

> government's ideals

Investigating companies who might be implicit in crimes? (Gov is investigatng fake news, most of which is shared via facebook. Fb /probably/ didn't commit any crime, but they are closely involved and failing to cooperate raises red flags. Fake news isn't a crime, but there were questions of brexit advertising funds, election funds, etc.

Re: Facebook's seized files published by MPs

#233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We're changing instances of whitelist and blacklist to "allowlist" and "blocklist" similar to the conversion of master and slave to "primary" and "replica". Are you going to change the whole dictionary as well? blackout? blackhole? dark energy? dark matter? dark side of the moon? and what not? Might as well deem the whole english language offensive since its the language of slavers? Maybe you should focus on real p…

Changing these takes next to zero effort. "Blacklist" and "whitelist" are more confusing to new engineers than "allowlist" and "blocklist", since the latter terms speak for themselves. Language changes over time. These are just words. I don't understand why we have to hold onto them like they're our precious children. If we can be more inclusive with the labels we choose, that's a good thing.

> If we can be more inclusive with the labels we choose, that's a good thing.

You are claiming these words are "not inclusive" at first place, which is purely a matter of ideology, not semantics. Words have different meaning in different contexts. If you can't understand that, off course you will find everything "offensive".

Starting with the word "inclusive" itself which basically is newspeak at that point. You are right, language changes over time, and it's being manipulated by people like you to steer controversy and division, to deem this or that racist, sexist because you willfully ignore context for pure political goals. There is nothing confusing about "blacklist" or "whitelist". anybody can look up these words in a dictionary, if your "engineers" are incapable of doing that, maybe you should hire better ones. "allowlist" on the other hand is a useless neologism only driven by the need to effectively control the language to force your ideology on others, under threat of being deemed "not inclusive".

This is a political stunt, nothing more, you are asserting control over others, in the name of "inclusiveness" which is rather exclusive as a matter of fact...

Re: Facebook's seized files published by MPs

#234
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's plenty of similar cases in IT. Some people find Master/Slave offensive - though I personally believe this is a 'looking for problems'-kind of thing.

Yeah, we'd have to go through all sorts of books and documents on mechanics and electronics to whiteout (Doh! doing it again!!!) reference to those terms.

whiteout is an interesting one though, I personally would have written blackout

Re: Facebook's seized files published by MPs

#235
post #28

Thx for link. Everytime i read the word ‘whitelist’, i think, havn’t they caught up with the times, thats racist, whitelist. Why does white suggest good?

Historically (eg in different religions and such), light was associated with good and dark with bad/evil. You have yin and yang, light and dark, day and night, positive and negatice. It has no racial connotations.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-and-white_dualism

Re: Facebook's seized files published by MPs

#236
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which has not actually caused anyone harm. This is not a statement you can just throw out there. For example https://www.wired.com/story/how-facebooks-rise-fueled-chaos-...

Again. Hyperbole. We’re adults here. Who are you trying to convince with that crap? No, Facebook is a website. They aren’t involved in genocide. They aren’t why Trump is president.

By that logic, any website that hosts cp isn't involved. Any website where you can buy slaves isn't complicit.

Re: Facebook's seized files published by MPs

#237
post #51
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A world in which companies are not allowed to selectively withhold proprietary data from some competitors, and form partnerships with others, is a world that suboptimally promotes innovation and economic growth.

I'm not advocating for anything here, but isn't hurting innovation and economic growth exactly what FB is doing by snuffing out promising products based on analytics?

I think when you choose to sell your products on Amazon, or host your videos on YouTube or use FB login for your app, you're necessarily taking a risk by depending on a third-party for your success. It's possible to create your own login system or host your own videos or own your own e-commerce site and there are even a whole host of valid competitors for all these services too.

Re: Facebook's seized files published by MPs

#238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sharing or not sharing data with another app is likewise not an unusual decision. FB is not a public utility - they can not work with other apps for any reason, or no reason at all. And this is a particularly ironic thing to point out, considering that the main thrust is complaining that they _did_ share data with other apps. So it's bad if they do share data, but also bad if they don't? To me, this would be Facebo…

> Let's remember this is not Facebook's data, this is their users' data. No, it's not - short of a change in law it is Facebook's data. Facebook collected, maintained , and analyzed the data. It's their data, the fact that their users allowed Facebook to collect it does not change that fact. GDPR allows users to view the data Facebook collected about them. If users want manually request their data from Facebook and p…

>> this is their users' data

> No, it's not - short of a change in law it is Facebook's data.

Er, actually it is. Under GDPR, and under previous data protection rules that lacked meaningful enforcement, users own their data. Companies at most get to "borrow" and/or keep it safe for them.

Alas, this fundamental fact seems to not have quite made it everywhere yet..

https://digitalguardian.com/blog/tackling-gdpr-challenge-1-e...

Re: Facebook's seized files published by MPs

#239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WRT doing business in the UK. You need to understand that this is a highly unusual situation. Part of the UK Parliamentary system is that there are "Select Committees"on MPs, whose job is to review and hold to account the performance of government bodies and departments. They may also review areas of national interest within their remit, and invite witnesses to give evidence to them. For example, there have been sign…

> an invitation from a select committee to give evidence has the same sort of weight as a court summons to give evidence It doesn't! As you say yourself, one is a summons, the other is nothing more than an invitation to attend.

Strictly, you may be right - it is not a criminal offence to ignore an invitation form a select committee.

I believe (but may be wrong), that the committee can request Parliament to consider the matter, and at that point the Sargent at Arms (who does have legal powers) can fetch you to appear at the bar (entrance to) the House of Commons chamber.

Practically speaking, no-one in their right mind, based in the UK, ignores an invitation to attend a Select Committee hearing. Very bad form :-)

Re: Facebook's seized files published by MPs

#240

Good for them, thank you! The sooner facebook is controlled and broken up into pieces, the better. They are a massive net negative on civilization. Do you work at Facebook? Shame on you.

> Do you work at Facebook? Shame on you.

I think that's a bit harsh. You may think Facebook is terrible, but it's not so clear that everyone ought to agree with you.

If someone was working for organised crime, everyone should agree that's real social ill and should be discouraged. There's enough evidence on the table, over many years, about it.

The FB story is still unfolding. We're still in the process of hearing exactly what was done, and arguments about how good or bad it was.

Changing jobs is a somewhat big decision. Let people have a little think about things before you shame them for not making the leap when you - a guy with no skin in that game - decide FB is untouchable.

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