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

nytimes.com

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

#131

Post by makomk »

IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #113
a_bonobo wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

The usual way these partnerships worked is that Facebook allowed partners to ask users to grant them more account access than ordinary Facebook apps were allowed - in the form of special partner-only Facebook app permissions that could only be obtained by approved apps. That is, it didn't bypass the normal need to request permission from the user, it just allowed them to request extra permissions. There's no reason to believe that the Spotify integration is any different. Even those leaked emails just talked about adding more permissions that companies could request.

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

#132

Post by smackfu »

koboll wrote: post #82

I'd love to hear a Facebook critic rebut this thread re: the article: https://twitter.com/_mades/status/1075228269845336064 What this seems to boil down to is a side channel for certain partners with looser technical controls but tighter monitoring of misuse, and no evidence that that tradeoff actually resulted in any misuse that couldn't have occurred through normal data access channels.

If you don’t trust Facebook to do the right thing, that thread is not much of a defense, since it just says they will police their partners.

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

#133

Post by wtmt »

doodliego wrote: post #84
wmeredith wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sure Zuck will offer a heartfelt apology.

Hopefully from Federal prison with a life sentence. Literally billions of times he and his execs, managers, and engineers have violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, Electronic Communications Privacy Act, Federal Wiretap Act, and more.

> Hopefully from Federal prison with a life sentence. Literally billions of times he and his execs, managers, and engineers have violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, Electronic Communications Privacy Act, Federal Wiretap Act, and more.

Preferably multiple life sentences to ensure he can never get out or create another monstrosity like FB. Also get laws created/strengthened against such repeat abusers of people.

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

#134

Post by wtmt »

rhizome wrote: post #96
BoiledCabbage wrote: post #11

It is absolutely obscene how much of a breach of trust and decency these are. Facebook still hasn't fully come clean because they knew they were doing unsavory activities and just wanted to not get caught and keep getting away with it.

If worse comes to worst, they can become a credit rating agency. There should be a CFAA for personal information.

Slightly related: The Chinese government is already working on a social credit rating system using mass surveillance. I shudder to even imagine living in such a world.

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

#135

Post by porpoisely »

pookieinc wrote: post #103
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/

While I'm also disappointed by many news organizations / journalists these days, NYT is not one of them. In fact, they are one of the few newspapers that are keeping larger entities in check and doing their job by reporting them. I've been continually impressed by NYT, specifically, for its care in ensuring the highest level of integrity. Mistakes do happen and as far as I know, they've been pretty good about apologi…

For me, the nytimes and the big media companies are the biggest disappointments. Smaller and local media companies tend to be far more reliable and trustworthy than large corporations. And integrity isn't a word I'd associate with the nytimes or any major corporation for that matter. They are greedy self-serving entities with their own agenda, like every business.

I do believe corporations like the NYTimes and facebook have accrued too much power and are corrupt and a destructive force in the country and the world. I think we need more competition in the traditional media and social media space.

For all the talk about monopolies in tech, we talk too little about the monopolies in news and media along with every other industry from agriculture to banking.

Also, Facebook is a symptom of a national ( or international ) economic system that applies to pretty much every major industry today. Too much consolidation and too little respect for privacy. Facebook is providing what every industry ( including the news industry ) wants. Information and data. And every industry is invading their own customers' privacy and selling data. Credit card and banks sell your data. The NYTimes sells your data ( after all they sell ads too ).

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

#136

Post by happppy »

temp123131123 wrote: post #121
happppy wrote: post #120

Now I really doubt if whatsapp is secure, even though they say it has end-to-end encryption.

its not secure. if you have facebook app and whatsapp installed. the whatsapp can share data with the facebook app and upload it to their servers. messages on your phone are not encrypted. they are only encrypted during sending.

Oh my goodness, I should just delete fb.

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

#137

Post by kevmo »

cageface wrote: post #78
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,…

I guess this sort of defeats the purpose of switching from Google search to Bing over privacy concerns.

I've been using DuckDuckGo as my default. I mostly only use google for news search now. No complaints.

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

#139

Post by ceejayoz »

Puer wrote: post #85
ceejayoz wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook's permissions scopes have never been that granular - if you get approved for a permission it's generally access to create, edit, view, and delete all in one.

(Citation needed)

It's a little hard to cite now - most of the user-level permissions are gone, or are behind a "This permission is restricted to a limited set of partners and usage requires prior approval by Facebook" restriction.

They've clamped down repeatedly on how much data comes out of the API - you used to get full info on friends, then just their names and IDs, then that list wound up filtered to just other friends who'd authorized the same app.

It used to be extremely wide-open.

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

#140

Post by NelsonMinar »

I always wonder about the engineers at Facebook who implemented a feature like this. Someone like me, more or less. Did they stop to wonder why they were being told to bypass user privacy preferences? Did they raise any internal questions about ethics? Did any of them consider becoming a whistleblower? Or perhaps everyone who works for Facebook is convinced this kind of data sharing is OK?
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