Facebook's seized files published by MPs • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook's seized files published by MPs

#441

Post by varenc » Wed, Dec 05, 2018, 9:46 PM UTC

rhizome wrote: post #377

Mahn wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If exfiltration of user information and data was not the explicit purpose of FB's API policies, they soundly rejected the principle of lead privilege, which dates back 45 years and is no doubt incorporated into FB's own systems. thanks to the very permissive APIs that Facebook provided Why did they do this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_privilege

Facebook improved this years ago and you can see the discussion surrounding this change in the released emails. These days a Facebook app can't ask for your entire friends list, instead, it only gets to see your friends that have also authorized that app. Also, user IDs now have a per-app namespace so they can't be (easily) correlated between different apps.

The discussion revealed in this release is pretty fascinating. For example, you can see that at some point Zuck's friends authorized 31 apps and 76% of those apps had "read_stream" access giving access to their entire newsfeed.

Through one lens this is Facebook locking down their API in an anti-competitive way, which is somewhat true, but mostly this feels like an API change making privacy improvements for users. (The Cambridge Analytica data came from an older app that was running before these changes were made...)

Re: Facebook's seized files published by MPs

#442

Post by tareqak » Wed, Dec 05, 2018, 9:46 PM UTC

Facebook's response: Response to Six4Three Documents - https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/12/response-to-six4three-d... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18611492

Re: Facebook's seized files published by MPs

#443

Post by oska » Wed, Dec 05, 2018, 10:03 PM UTC

e40 wrote: post #177

evilzuku wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing says evil more than preparing reactive PR to bury your competitors. And the nonchalant way his response sends chills down my spine. These people will suffocate innovation just to win.

> These people will suffocate innovation just to win. I don't like Zuck, but come on, you just described every CEO in America, that when they have a choice they will do this.

I don't agree that Elon Musk is like this (quite the reverse) and I'm sure there are many other CEOs who aren't too.

Let's not normalise sociopathology, even given its prevalence amongst business executives.

Re: Facebook's seized files published by MPs

#444

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Dec 05, 2018, 10:06 PM UTC

raverbashing wrote: post #317

tpush wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really interesting stuff in there. > Facebook email 24 January 2013 > Justin Osofsky – ‘Twitter launched Vine today which lets you shoot multiple short video segments to make one single, 6-second video. As part of their NUX, you can find friends via FB. Unless anyone raises objections, we will shut down their friends API access today. We’ve prepared reactive PR, and I will let Jana know our decision. > MZ – ‘Yup, go…

It's official, Mark Zuckerberg is the new Bill Gates. As in "we don't care about ethics"

[deleted]

Re: Facebook's seized files published by MPs

#445

Post by oska » Wed, Dec 05, 2018, 10:12 PM UTC

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.

This is just complete rubbish and it appears you are still rationalising the time you spent working for the company. If you are trying to achieve 'good' inside a company like Facebook then you are a complete sucker or, as Zuckerberg would say, just a 'dumb fuck'. You're being played. Facebook is not interested in doing good; that has been abundantly clear since almost day 1.

Re: Facebook's seized files published by MPs

#446

Post by disgruntledphd2 » Wed, Dec 05, 2018, 10:14 PM UTC

pmart123 wrote: post #293

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google got all of this data first-party, as search logs are very informative about which websites/services are popular. I'm sure that things like that factored into the decision to buy YouTube, for example. Onavo was a company that tried to sell VPN access to reduce data costs, found out that didn't make money and pivoted to selling reports to publishers and advertisers. Then FB bought them, and treated them like an…

Hasn't AppAnnie accomplished being "the Neilsen of the mobile age" in some ways? I'm not sure how AppAnnie collects its data. My guess would be that it is buying data from Foursquare, etc. I don't have much of a problem with that. I suppose I'm more opposed to a large company offering an app that promises privacy yet delivers the exact opposite of privacy.

So AppAnnie is directionally accurate, but not massively. Onavo (as far as I understand it), did lots of bias correction (standard survey/panel adjustments really) that tended to give them better population accuracy (which is what you normally care about).

Re: Facebook's seized files published by MPs

#447

Post by xanipher » Wed, Dec 05, 2018, 10:18 PM UTC

manfredo wrote: post #194

johnnyfaehell wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If users want manually request their data from Facebook and provide it to competing apps they can. Actually, for a lot of it they can't. The GDPR downloads are incomplete and are missing lots of data like many other GDPR downloads. And in some cases these aren't competing, they just aren't making Facebook money so Facebook denies them access and tells them what they need to do to add Facebook to process so they can…

The requirement to make GDPR downloads available was never well thought out. For instance, say you requested a log of your Facebook chat logs. Should Facebook provide this without redaction of the recipients' identities? I'd say no, providing this data without that redaction is a violation of the recipients' privacy. Especially for a service that is all about networking and sharing, it's difficult to walk the line be…

>Should Facebook provide this without redaction of the recipients' identities? I'd say no, providing this data without that redaction is a violation of the recipients' privacy.

How is it a violation of privacy to tell a user with which other users they have communicated in the past?

Re: Facebook's seized files published by MPs

#448

Post by Lio » Wed, Dec 05, 2018, 10:19 PM UTC

oska wrote: post #443

e40 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These people will suffocate innovation just to win. I don't like Zuck, but come on, you just described every CEO in America, that when they have a choice they will do this.

I don't agree that Elon Musk is like this (quite the reverse) and I'm sure there are many other CEOs who aren't too. Let's not normalise sociopathology, even given its prevalence amongst business executives.

I am definitely no fan of Zuck but on the subject of Elon Musk, this is the same guy who tried to use his high media profile to call an innocent man a pedophile just because he would follow Musk’s crazy plan.[1]

So that another one off the “CEO billionaire but not a sociopath” list.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/15/elon-musk...

Re: Facebook's seized files published by MPs

#449

Post by InTheArena » Wed, Dec 05, 2018, 10:24 PM UTC

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…

It's worth remembering that Facebook did share data in violation of their own terms of use with the Clinton came - in fact, that policy came about because Obama "abused" Facebook to collect contact information for friends of people who liked or followed his campaign. Despite this policy change, Facebook allowed Clinton to do the same. They claimed it was by mistake, but even after the mistake was revealed, they didn't change it or cut off Clinton. Clinton's campaign manager speculated it was because "they agreed with us", but also thought that the Trump campaign had similar access (so far, no evidence has emerged to that).

Facebook is not a good actor, anyway you look at it. They are selling data to first or second parties, who are using it to damage our country.

Re: Facebook's seized files published by MPs

#450

Post by ryanwaggoner » Wed, Dec 05, 2018, 10:28 PM UTC

kazen44 wrote: post #393

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Translation: if you turn down our "invitation", we'll misuse our legal power to seize your internal documents and then publish them to embarrass you. Accurate? To be clear, I'm not saying that they can't seize and investigate or even punish if the law was broken. That's the job of government. But this just seems like a petty attempt to embarrass. However, I'm American and haven't been following the story closely, so…

they cannot misuse their legal powers, as parliament is Sovereign in the UK. Facebook took the risk by not complying with the wishes of a sovreign state, and that state then takes legal action against facebook. facebook arrogance in this matter is staggering, and by some could even be seen as a direct confrontation with parlaiment. If parliament did not respond, it would look weak and in some sense even delegitemize…

they cannot misuse their legal powers, as parliament is Sovereign in the UK.

Wow. So anything they do can’t be a misuse of power as long as it’s technically legal? And if it’s not legal, can they just change the laws and then do it?

My issue is not with retaliation, but if Facebook did something wrong, why not investigate and prosecute? Instead they’re going to just try and embarrass them. Which indicates that they don’t actually have any legal case.