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Facebook's seized files published by MPs

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Facebook's seized files published by MPs

#321

Post by cbkeller »

SirensOfTitan wrote: post #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…

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

Is this not potentially an optimal outcome?

If companies who have a track record of doing unethical things suffer for it by being depleted of all employees who are not either unethical, incompetent, or both, this should dramatically compromise the effectiveness of the company. If this happens repeatably, it provides a disincentive for unethical corporate behavior.

Re: Facebook's seized files published by MPs

#322

Post by beart »

spunker540 wrote: post #276
soared wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That means that any site that allows two people to communicate can be complicit -- be it forums, discussion boards or chat/messages. Criminals can easily adopt code words, or encrypt their plaintext communications in ways that a website would be unable to police. How about email? Are email providers also required to detect all criminal activity occurring in their emails? Ultimately it's a massive burden placed on com…

I think it's worth considering just how much influence Facebook has that many of the other entities you mentioned do not. I also think it's worth considering possible solutions to problems that Facebook may or may not be the direct cause of before jumping directly to "Welp! Slippery slope, cant do anything about it i guess!".

Re: Facebook's seized files published by MPs

#323

Post by ryanwaggoner »

throwaway572091 wrote: post #57

https://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons-committees/cultu... Exhibit 170 – Mark Zuckerberg discussing linking data to revenue Mark Zuckerberg email – dated 7 October 2012 'I've been thinking about platform business model a lot this weekend…if we make it so devs can generate revenue for us in different ways, then it makes it more acceptable for us to charge them quite a bit more for using platform. The basic idea i…

Seems pretty reasonable to me? Especially in the context of tossing ideas around.

Note that I don't read this as "let's get devs on board and then yank the rug out from under them later". Rather, it seems like they're trying to find a way to make it win/win, where devs can either pay for the platform directly, or use it for free if they can do so with a business model that helps Facebook make money elsewhere.

Re: Facebook's seized files published by MPs

#324

Post by matt4077 »

criddell wrote: post #79
makomk wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bigger problem is that, as I understand it, all of these documents were obtained from someone suing Facebook who had access to them as part of a lawsuit against Facebook under a court order that required them to be kept confidential.

That makes me wonder if a confidentiality agreement should ever include sharing that information with the government? Maybe NDAs from publicly traded companies should always exempt sharing with elected officials?

You cannot agree to a contract requiring you to break the law. A lawful seizure therefore cannot trigger liability.

Re: Facebook's seized files published by MPs

#325

Post by koko775 »

PavlovsCat wrote: post #306
drewblaisdell wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nice spin on it, but Facebook is still a bad actor (despite what you say). This needs to be a conclusion, not a premise. I do not have a firm belief about whether or not this is true, but I keep seeing people list bad things about FB and draw a straight line to “thus it is evil”. Ideally, we would list the good/bad it does and assign weights to these points to determine if it is net harmful. I want to be convinced,…

> This needs to be a conclusion, not a premise. What makes you think it's a premise and not a conclusion? > Ideally, we would list the good/bad it does and assign weights to these points to determine if it is net harmful. I have 11 years of data points and experiences about FB, I'm not going to enumerate all of them whenever there is another. I'll just say "typically fucking Facebook". At this point, I don't even fee…

> At this point, I don't even feel obligated to remember it all -- I can trust myself enough. We do that with "evil" people in our lives, too. We don't remember every dirty detail. We remember that there were a bunch of things, and that overall, we had it at some point. I save the conclusion and the checksums and that's enough.

> If you think I'm operating on a premise, instead of having come to a conclusion, how is that not you operating on a premise?

A mental conclusion can be a discussion premise. It doesn't invalidate your conclusion to say it should be a conclusion not a premise, because you're asserting a premise in a discussion which you are not (yet) supporting.

Also consider that you have seen eleven years of data points and experiences from the point of view of a small subset of users; there could perhaps be an equivalent cache of positive datapoints which tend to be significantly less interesting to report on.

Thus, supporting your point with concrete examples is how you contribute to a discussion, because then you and any adversaries can challenge you on the merits of your argument.

That's what the conclusion/premise separation is about.

Re: Facebook's seized files published by MPs

#326

Post by nathan_long »

Mahn wrote: post #299
AlexandrB wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's really striking is how user-hostile this conversation is. Forget about whether the user wants to share their data or not - it's all about what Facebook wants to do. In this case, that's snuffing competition by denying access, in the case of Cambridge Analytica, it's sharing data for purposes of shady data "research".

There's nothing that Facebook did here than any other company, in tech or otherwise, wouldn't have done. And for the record, Facebook did not "share data with Cambridge Analytica for shady research purposes". A rogue third party developer created one of those shitty quiz apps for Facebook, and then proceed to get users to signup for it; several million did, which allowed said developer to harvest data thanks to the v…

> There's nothing that Facebook did here than any other company, in tech or otherwise, wouldn't have done.

This isn't true. Lots of companies wouldn't steal users' call logs - eg, Mozilla, Signal, and plenty of boring, normal ones who make TODO list apps or whatever.

It also isn't relevant. See how that argument flies in criminal court. "Anybody else would have stolen that car."

What we see here (again) is that FB does nasty things and it's in the public interest to stop them - along with "any other company" who does the same things.

Re: Facebook's seized files published by MPs

#327

Post by shawnz »

interesthrow2 wrote: post #309
shawnz wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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". But "blacklist" could be seen in a negative light in at least some circumstances whereas that's not possible for "blocklist" in any circumstance. So why not use it? What…

Well, who decides what is deemed "not inclusive" now? you? > So why not use it? What's the harm? The harm is you likes with your intimidation and harassment tactics on social media trying to force your morals and political beliefs on everyone else in every possible circle and the insane finger pointing at those who refuse to fall in line because they don't agree with your ideology. Antirez, author of redis has someth…

I don't know why you're strawmanning me into being responsible for every act of suppression by a person who claimed to be acting for social justice. I am not deeming anything any which way. I am just saying that there are obvious conceivable negative interpretations of the terms "whitelist" and "blacklist" that don't exist with the terms "allowlist" and "blocklist". And the work required to change the language that you use in this case is very small, so it's worth considering. That's it, that's the entirety of the argument here. Nobody is demanding suppression of anyone's ideas.

Re: Facebook's seized files published by MPs

#328

Post by craigsmansion »

SirensOfTitan wrote: post #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…

> critical of the company nowadays

As opposed to when? When you worked there? When was this period that Facebook was a beacon of ethical behaviour?

> to explicitly dehumanize them for the sake of making the world simpler.

Like aliasing people into a point on a social graph and a wallet? Dehumanising behaviour and monetising that is the main ethical problem with Facebook. It's a bit rich to accuse opponents of over simplification.

>It is a poor model

FB market cap seems to disagree. Pidgeon-holing people for profit is an exceptionally lucrative model.

> Projects like charitable causes have raised a lot for charity

And the trains in Italy ran on time!

You worked there for five years and never had a clue. Maybe you're not the right person to provide a judgement on judgement.

Re: Facebook's seized files published by MPs

#329

Post by ryanwaggoner »

kodablah wrote: post #186
notacoward wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I do work at Facebook. I'm not going to get into some protracted argument about whether that makes me a bad person, or already was, but I'd like to give you something to think about. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that we can neatly divide tech workers into good and bad. Likewise for companies. All categories are non-empty, and certain to remain so. What's the optimal assignment of workers to companies? Is…

I don't work at FB and wouldn't (nor do I even have an account), but even I can recognize that to many the benefits of FB outweigh the negatives. In a tech-centric board such as this one coupled with media/government-driven narratives to the contrary, it can appear to be obvious that there are way more negatives than positives, the world would be better w/out FB, and you should quit. But in a non-tech-environment the…

This is a microcosm of our political environment where when one subjectively determines the weight of harm, they attempt to objectively apply it to others. Sure, FB does immoral things. But why can't we simply recognize that people disagree about whether harm exists, whether value exists, and what weights are applied to each?

This is a really important point. Political movements often attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by a differing value system, but that doesn't rile up your base like proclaiming the other side is evil.

I should remember this myself :)

Re: Facebook's seized files published by MPs

#330

Post by patejam »

PavlovsCat wrote: post #272
5trokerac3 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's 100% true. They never sold people's data. They sold access to people's data . Slimy, corporate lawyerese 101.

Wow, that seems crazy even for lawyerese.. I mean, if I have an "all you can eat" restaurant, do I sell food, or do I just sell access to food? What about a buffet where a person can fill their plate once, but can pick among many things?

Not really. It's like buying a space on the wall to advertise inside the all you can eat restaurant.

The restaurant isn't telling you who goes into the restaurant. They're just selling you access to those people through that ad.

-----

The other problem, the Cambridge Analytica problem, is a bit different.

It's like saying that the restaurant requires you to tell them your name and other personal information in order to eat at the restaurant. Maybe it's to send flyers or deals, doesn't matter.

The problem happens when the restaurant also asks for your friends personal information, and you give it to them without asking your friends.

That's basically what Facebook is under fire about. Allowing your friends to very easily give your information out without you knowing.

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