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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

#181

Post by dang »

inciampati wrote: post #147
InGodsName wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How Zuck doesn't seem smart? Have you seen " the social network " If you have to make assumption, let me make another data supported assumption, Zuck is Ashkenazi Jew, statistically he's got probability of having more IQ than a person belonging to some other ethinic group. /sarcasm Anyways, what makes you think he's not smart?

He is a copyful dullard who has no creativity and is only adept at implementing codes that do obvious things or stealing ideas had by creative types. He stands in contrast to real geniuses of the last centuries, whose every quote echoes through time. He is hack. The infiltration of the ivy league by the CIA makes it very possible that Facebook itself is a direct asset of US national intelligence services. Zuck would…

Personal attacks are not ok here, regardless of whom you're attacking. Maybe you don't owe better to reviled $billionaire but you owe much better to this community.

If you'd please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use this site as intended from now on, we'd appreciate it.

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

#182

Post by UncleMeat »

skybrian wrote: post #45
InclinedPlane wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would grant the app access to those permissions, not the companies. Oh hey, would you look at that: https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/14/16143354/facebook-messeng...

I'm a bit worried that some journalists (and some readers) no longer care to make any distinction between an app having access for legitimate reasons that respect users' intentions and the whole company having access to do whatever they like. At least, they don't explain it well.

Mark my words. There is going to be an article that grossly misunderstands oauth and tells people that facebook, twitter, etc, are all giving access user information to third party's willy nilly and that there is an entire system widely used across the web for encouraging this sort of behavior.

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

#183

Post by pmiller2 »

randomacct3847 wrote: post #91

It’s crazy that there ever is/was an endpoint to read a user’s private messages. What exactly would ever be a good use case for that where a user would knowingly agree to it.

Here’s one: I used to work for a company that made social media compliance software for financial companies. Agents/brokers/salespeople had to connect their FB accounts and agree to have their PMs monitored so the compliance department their home companies could monitor what they said. This was so the companies wouldn’t fall afoul of FINRA/SEC/etc.

IIRC, we could see the agrnt’s half of the exchange only, and they were certainly informed of exactly what was going on. The software did other things, too, such as being able to post approved content on their behalf, but this was a core function. Their alternative was to not be able to use Facebook at all.

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

#184

Post by freshfunk »

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…

I was a big fan of the NYT. I’ve always considered them a trustworthy source of news.

However, their coverage of Facebook since the election has showed me how much bias there is in the media as well as how much an entity can serve their own agenda.

Unfortunately the truth behind these integrations are beyond what your average person can understand. Your average person doesn’t understand how OAuth and user consent / permissioning works. And so media can prey on the ignorance of people to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt. NYTimes comes off just as bad as Fox News.

I bet you none of the authors have ever implemented 3rd party auth. I doubt any engineers were consulted. Instead they quote so called “media experts” that are just professors at universities who again know nothing about the technical integration and how it works.

I’ve seen some people who understand how OAuth works but these are clearly engineers. NYTimes could’ve used the opportunity to explain how people gave consent but instead chooses a different narrative in order to 1) get page views; 2) attack an arguably competitor in the media space and 3) blame FB for getting Trump elected.

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

#185

Post by koboll »

smackfu wrote: post #132
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.

It's not a matter of whether I trust them. It's a matter of whether any misuse of data actually occurred, or whether this is a lot of innuendo with no evidence that any harm was, or even could be, done.

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

#186

Post by scottlocklin »

adamson wrote: post #155
inciampati wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He is a copyful dullard who has no creativity and is only adept at implementing codes that do obvious things or stealing ideas had by creative types. He stands in contrast to real geniuses of the last centuries, whose every quote echoes through time. He is hack. The infiltration of the ivy league by the CIA makes it very possible that Facebook itself is a direct asset of US national intelligence services. Zuck would…

> The infiltration of the ivy league by the CIA What does this even mean? I can't imagine many more wasteful uses of government revenue than approaching dull undergraduates and coercing them into starting clandestine programs that prey on their peers.

That's where they recruit from.

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

#187

Post by 18pfsmt »

Puer wrote: post #142
jackvalentine wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this reply meant to be for me? It doesn't seem specifically relevant.

Facebook isn't tapping your phones microphone 24/7. It's a nice little dystopian theory that's been disproven time and again. A far more probable and less exciting explanation is that your credit card provider (or the store you bought the wine from) is selling your information and Facebook happens to be one of the buyers. Furthermore, people grossly overestimate how unique they are. At any given point in time you're…

I think something shady was going on with the company formally known as Axciom:

"On May 14, 2014, Acxiom announced that it had acquired LiveRamp, a data onboarding company, for $310 million. LiveRamp was founded in 2011 as a spinout of RapLeaf, a marketing data and software company founded in San Francisco, California in 2005 by Auren Hoffman and Manish Shah.

In May[2017], LiveRamp announced a consortium formed with two other ad tech companies, AppNexus and MediaMath, to compete with Facebook and Google in the area of programmatic advertising, the term used to refer to the use of automation software to buy advertising.

In 2016, LiveRamp acquired two data and identity-matching startups, Arbor and Circulate, for more than $140 million combined. The company also announced the launch of IdentityLink, a method of anonymizing consumer's identities as they are tracked across multiple platforms.

In February 2018, Acxiom announced a reorganization from three divisions into two - a Marketing Solutions group and its LiveRamp business. In May, the company announced international expansion into Brazil, Netherlands and Italy, and released Global Data Navigator (GDN), a portal for identifying available data elements by country. In June 2018, Consumer research firm GfK MRI has partnered with Acxiom."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveRamp#2010s

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

#188

Post by scottlocklin »

crocodiletears wrote: post #116
mda wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 anothe…

Just so. Also, though the western spooks can probably see some of the encrypted traffic through to those companies, if you send it to google or bing, they can see all of it.

And yes, you should be afraid of western spooks if you live in a western country. I wouldn't have said that 10 years ago.

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

#189

Post by munchbunny »

ardy42 wrote: post #60
mindgam3 wrote: post #6

“Among the revelations was that Facebook obtained data from multiple partners for a controversial friend-suggestion tool called “People You May Know.” The feature, introduced in 2008, continues even though some Facebook users have objected to it, unsettled by its knowledge of their real-world relationships. Gizmodo and other news outlets have reported cases of the tool’s recommending friend connections between patien…

> Well, that explains some of the conspiracy-mongering that was so rampant around this feature. Facebook (probably) wasn’t secretly recording your phone calls etc. They didn’t need to - they were getting streams of data from other partners. I really wish there was a law requiring real disclosure of such customer/user-data sharing agreements with enough detail to know what's actually happening. The disclosures should…

GDPR makes a pretty good attempt at that.

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

#190

Post by joefkelley »

squish78 wrote: post #149
NelsonMinar wrote: post #140

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?

Most likely why they aggressively hire college grads and keep the developer workforce young. I doubt they teach corporate ethics in any comp sci program.

I can only speak for Stanford when I was there, but almost every CS graduate took "Computers, Ethics and Public Policy" as it was the best way to satisfy the degree's "Technology in Society" requirement.

In talking to friends and coworkers it sounds like taking an ethics course was more common than not.

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