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

As Facebook Raised a Privacy Wall, It Carved an Opening for Tech Giants

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 205 posts

Re: As Facebook Raised a Privacy Wall, It Carved an Opening for Tech Giants

#111

Post by bad_user »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #4

> The social network allowed Microsoft’s Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users’ friends without consent, the records show, and gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages. > The social network permitted Amazon to obtain users’ names and contact information through their friends, and it let Yahoo view streams of friends’ posts as recently as this summer,…

>> "they also overlap with GDPR"

Both Facebook and Google were hit with GDPR-related lawsuits since the first day of GDPR enforcement.

Companies are being sued left and right by privacy advocates and by "ambulance chasers".

Which is great IMO, I hope Facebook gets at least a big fine for this.

Re: As Facebook Raised a Privacy Wall, It Carved an Opening for Tech Giants

#112

Post by jkravitz61 »

molteanu wrote: post #93
alexis_fr wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook could be considered as a strategic military asset, as it is capable of quite accurately mapping people around the world. Relationships between people in Iran, same place same time, same IP, ghost profiles... If you were the CIA, wouldn’t you work on protecting/ preventing such people from having a trial?

Of course it is. I agree with your comment. I also think FB is the work of secret services, from its inception to the present day. I've seen Zuck talk, and he doesn't strike me as a specially smart guy. But he's young and always smiling, shows enthusiasm and that's what people need. It's a nice cover.

If you don’t look at Facebook’s origin story this could almost be believable.

Re: As Facebook Raised a Privacy Wall, It Carved an Opening for Tech Giants

#113

Post by IfOnlyYouKnew »

a_bonobo wrote: post #105
rock_hard wrote: post #101

After reading facebooks response I am once again disappointed by the art of journalism we have to deal with these days :( Turns out NYT either doesn’t understand the technical details or doesn’t want to https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/12/facebooks-partners/

Not sure what you're talking about, Facebook explicitly confirms what NYT writes??? >Did partners get access to messages? >Yes. But people had to explicitly sign in to Facebook first to use a partner’s messaging feature. Take Spotify for example. After signing in to your Facebook account in Spotify’s desktop app, you could then send and receive messages without ever leaving the app. Our API provided partners with acc…

If we carefully parse this, and suspend any usual assumption of good faith, this actually seems much worse:

> But people had to explicitly sign in to Facebook first to use a partner’s messaging feature.

This does not say you had to "explicitly sign in first for Spotify to get access". It says you had to sign in to use the feature enabled by Spotify already having access.

> After signing in to your Facebook account in Spotify’s desktop app, you could then send and receive messages without ever leaving the app.

This says exactly the same, only using the Spotify example. It again dodges the question when data sharing started.

I hold the idea of assuming good faith in the highest regard. But a statement as important as this must have gone through several layers of lawyers with the finest combs available, right? To then so artfully miss answering the actual question... It would be quite a coincidence.

If indeed it is deliberate, OP of this thread falling for this artfully crafted admission of guilt should actually command some respect for the craftsmanship of their PR people, in a certain, ethically-challenged light. Although people ignorantly finding fault with everything the Times does may just be an easy mark for PR wordsmiths.

Edit: After perusing OP rock_hard’s history, I will have to once again break “assumption of good faith”, sorry. Almost literally all their posts are defending Facebook, or making accusations against Apple, Google, or the New York Times. I’ve often seen responsible disclosures of self-interest by, among others, people working at Google here. This is the first time I’ve seen a pattern this suggestive of the opposite.

Re: As Facebook Raised a Privacy Wall, It Carved an Opening for Tech Giants

#114

Post by edhelas »

> Facebook empowered Apple to hide from Facebook users all indicators that its devices were asking for data. Apple devices also had access to the contact numbers and calendar entries of people who had changed their account settings to disable all sharing, the records show.

> Apple officials said they were not aware that Facebook had granted its devices any special access. They added that any shared data remained on the devices and was not available to anyone other than the users.

Any more information about that? I would be curious to know if we have actual proofs about those statements.

Re: As Facebook Raised a Privacy Wall, It Carved an Opening for Tech Giants

#115

Post by a3n »

matt4077 wrote: post #104
rock_hard wrote: post #101

After reading facebooks response I am once again disappointed by the art of journalism we have to deal with these days :( Turns out NYT either doesn’t understand the technical details or doesn’t want to https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/12/facebooks-partners/

I actually stumbled upon the following in their report: “Internal documents obtained by The Times show that Facebook shared data with more than 150 companies — most of them tech businesses, but also automakers, media organizations (including The Times) and others.“ I think it takes an awful lot of motivated reasoning not to hold an organisation in the highest regard that freely works against its own interest, in the…

When NYT asks me to "please disable your ad blocker," I always mentally raise a finger to them and read on.

I think that finger just got a permanent hard on.

Re: As Facebook Raised a Privacy Wall, It Carved an Opening for Tech Giants

#116

Post by crocodiletears »

mda wrote: post #110
crocodiletears wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For general queries, I use Searx.me. Occasionally I'll use Google if Searx is down, or I need technical information that I need search operators for. For current events, I use Searx, Bing, Yandex, Yahoo, and Baidu (if I'm really digging). I don't trust any one provider on politically sensitive topics, and the the order/kinds of the results can occasionally carry as much signal as the the content of them. I'm not cons…

Trusting Bing, Yandex and Baidu for politically sensitive topics? Are you being sarcastic?

Hardly. I use multiple search engines specifically because I lack trust.

While I'm more than likely to take the papers of record at their words, I've known more than enough police officers, journalists, and armchair philosophers to know that consciously or not, individual biases can color the processing and presentation of information.

Details that may seem obvious or superfluous through one lens may not be to another.

Only by extracting perspectives and datapoints from each source I access, can I confidently say that I have a reasonable understanding of the progression of any given event, as well as the metanarratives surrounding it.

Depending on the topic at hand, omission from one search engine can be as damning as the inclusion of propaganda in another.

The obsession with reputability is why I abandoned Google. In narrowing the array of sources the search engine surfaced in the hopes of protecting the average user from misinformation, it narrowed access to fringe sources of knowledge, which although unreliable can be a goldmine of supplemental information.

Say what you will of Baidu and Yandex, if you know a bit about their nation's leadership and international policies, you can guess their biases and can guess how they'll adjust what you see. That's useful. American companies can be much less predictable.

Re: As Facebook Raised a Privacy Wall, It Carved an Opening for Tech Giants

#118

Post by Despegar »

edhelas wrote: post #114

> Facebook empowered Apple to hide from Facebook users all indicators that its devices were asking for data. Apple devices also had access to the contact numbers and calendar entries of people who had changed their account settings to disable all sharing, the records show. > Apple officials said they were not aware that Facebook had granted its devices any special access. They added that any shared data remained on t…

That's referring to the Facebook integration in iOS. There were similar integrations for Flickr, Vimeo and Twitter as well. These have been removed as of iOS 11.

It would let you sync your contacts and add their Facebook profile pic to them, as well as post to Facebook using a system UI. Apparently this API gave Apple more permission than was needed for these features, but that Apple was unaware of it.

https://www.macrumors.com/2017/06/05/facebook-twitter-integr...

Re: As Facebook Raised a Privacy Wall, It Carved an Opening for Tech Giants

#119

Post by sangnoir »

jkravitz61 wrote: post #112
molteanu wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it is. I agree with your comment. I also think FB is the work of secret services, from its inception to the present day. I've seen Zuck talk, and he doesn't strike me as a specially smart guy. But he's young and always smiling, shows enthusiasm and that's what people need. It's a nice cover.

If you don’t look at Facebook’s origin story this could almost be believable.

The Onion is ahead[1] of y'all

1. https://www.theonion.com/cias-facebook-program-dramatically-...

Post reply on HN