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

Facebook's seized files published by MPs

bbc.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

501–507 of 507 posts

Re: Facebook's seized files published by MPs

#501

Post by [deleted] »

gowld wrote: post #282
rchaud wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CEOs and executives are the closest equivalent of royalty in the United States. Their media coverage is often hagiographic as a result. They are humanized and puffed up in the press to an extent that foreign press would never think to do about business leaders in their own countries. Inch upon inch of columns are dedicated to their morning habits, favourite TV shows and fashion choices, and other fluff content to mak…

Zuck has a bespoke hoodie, and ordered a pallet of them for the company so his employees could dress like him.

[deleted]

Re: Facebook's seized files published by MPs

#502

Post by rhizome »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #487
rhizome wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d be pretty upset if Congress subpoenaed user data from Facebook and then selectively published embarrassing info on their political enemies. Even if I hated those people. I think it's more like this, which if you've been paying attention has been going on for a long time. If you want to bet that the US hasn't snatched data they want when they know someone is in the country even temporarily, I'll take that bet. htt…

The government is invading our privacy with surveillance and border searches, agreed. No defense or denial of that here. But I don’t see stories where some congressperson is then publishing some of the fruits of that surveillance or searches just to embarrass political rivals. That would be especially beyond the pale.

Does everything have to be done by the American version of something before it's legitimate?

Re: Facebook's seized files published by MPs

#503

Post by rhizome »

varenc wrote: post #441
rhizome wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fascinati…

Facebook improved this years ago and you can see the discussion surrounding this change in the released emails...

This is the same elision they use. My question was, in the face of almost two generations of awareness of the principle of least privilege (almost typed "lead" again!), why did they design the API so that it gave away so much information and data in the first place?

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...)

https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/12/response-to-six4three-d...

Read the "Whitelisting" section. The only change they mention is turning off the ability to request permission to access the now-problematic data and information (let's say "D&I"). Of course, we also know that this is selectively applied. That's not "somewhat" anticompetitive, it's not necessarily different that the CA problem, and at any rate is only a marginal privacy improvement for users because there's (my estimate) no way in hell they're going to tell us who still has access to the APIs.

Re: Facebook's seized files published by MPs

#504

Post by rhizome »

cbkeller wrote: post #405
rhizome wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If what people are taking away from their time working for FB is, "you know what? Napoleon was pretty cool!" then that really buttons things up tidily, though probably not in the way you intend. Too bad he had the sads about his partner though, I guess. 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…

I see Spinoza, I upvote :) To give the benefit of the doubt I'm not sure if OP was objecting to the first step of placing a person or company along a good-bad continuum or the second step of reducing that continuum to a binary label. In either case though, no amount of complexity makes it unreasonable to consider whether a company like Facebook is a net positive or negative force on society -- which is a binary decis…

I'd argue that reduction is required for qualitative decisionmaking and so is no barrier to legitimate opinion.

First, because we can never know everything that is going on outside of investigations like this one and public statements by FB.

Second, language is a lossy codec for thought, so the investigations and public statements by FB are themselves reductive. It's turtles all the way down.

This applies to both examples then: thinking FB is good or bad, and being required to eliminate reduction in order to make that decision.

Re: Facebook's seized files published by MPs

#505

Post by varenc »

kjeetgill wrote: post #468
varenc wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fascinati…

Can't they trivially use your first name and/or email to correlate across apps? I'm pretty sure those are all part of the lowest permission class.

I don't think the Facebook API gives you access to your friends emails...but agreed there are still ways to correlate this. (hash of profile photos for example?)

Re: Facebook's seized files published by MPs

#506

Post by cbkeller »

rhizome wrote: post #504
cbkeller wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see Spinoza, I upvote :) To give the benefit of the doubt I'm not sure if OP was objecting to the first step of placing a person or company along a good-bad continuum or the second step of reducing that continuum to a binary label. In either case though, no amount of complexity makes it unreasonable to consider whether a company like Facebook is a net positive or negative force on society -- which is a binary decis…

I'd argue that reduction is required for qualitative decisionmaking and so is no barrier to legitimate opinion. First, because we can never know everything that is going on outside of investigations like this one and public statements by FB. Second, language is a lossy codec for thought, so the investigations and public statements by FB are themselves reductive. It's turtles all the way down. This applies to both exa…

Sounds fair enough to me

Re: Facebook's seized files published by MPs

#507

Post by tobylane »

Lio wrote: post #498
tobylane wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I read about this somewhere? Did the Observer write about it?

Yeah it was really widely reported, not just in the Guardian if you don't like that paper. Here's 4 other sources. There are many more on DuckDuckGo News. https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2018/07/18/elon-mus... https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-44870303 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/elon-musk-apologizes-blam... https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/18/elon-musk-apologizes-to-brit... From CNBC: > The apology c…

Sorry, I meant the smear campaign. It doesn't sound like the Guardian.
Post reply on HN