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It's their own problem and they're complaining to the European Coercers about that. The post makes it sound like they're somehow trying to defend public interest. Nope.
> It also prevents any developer, researcher, or organization to develop tools, critical insights, and research designed to educate and empower users to understand and therefore resist targeted disinformation campaigns. Is Mozilla building some sort of visualization tool for the marketing done on the upcoming EU elections?
Maybe, maybe not. But I have a number of academic colleagues working on marketing/news/misinformation on online platforms, and Facebook has always been a problem for analysis. It's next to impossible to get raw data unless you're Facebook, which makes investigating these questions very difficult. For comparison, Twitter is comparatively easy to work with (though getting harder as time goes on) and Reddit is very open…
Come to think of it any proxy depersonalisation services that maybe cache xyz data then show you how you payload would look were you to participate in the study?
Edit: no need to cache, download some js, xslt, rdf or similar to allow you to verify what you were sending locally? Public comment section for discussion of implications of studies and releasing data sets.. lots of interesting possibilities in this space of taking ownership of your data but also sharing it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe, maybe not. But I have a number of academic colleagues working on marketing/news/misinformation on online platforms, and Facebook has always been a problem for analysis. It's next to impossible to get raw data unless you're Facebook, which makes investigating these questions very difficult. For comparison, Twitter is comparatively easy to work with (though getting harder as time goes on) and Reddit is very open…
Any legitimate reasons for not allowing access to raw data? Could it violate people's privacy for example?
Not everything is like this, though. For example, there's been next to no public data about how the news feed algorithm works and no way of tracking how ads are being targeted. Both of these are commercially sensitive (and it's clearly in Facebook's interest to keep its cards to its chest) but a royal pain compared with, say, newspaper research where you can see what is being served to whom along with which adverts on a day-by-day basis.
And there's essentially no public API even to get those things to which you do potentially have access - so there's no way of getting the membership of public groups without web scraping or recording by hand, AFAIK. And certainly the first of these is prohibited by TOS, which means many university ethics committees will reject the research even if the researcher does have the capability to get it.
It's basically a large black box. And, as a political scientist, black boxes with political salience concern me.
Since the former CEO of Mozilla left, Mozilla has installed plugins without users’ permission, made terrible commercial recommendations to companies they had commercial ties to, but no transparency, and if you review their code, it is littered with telemetry. Mozilla is no longer the Mozilla we once knew. It’s high time we fork it.
Since the former CEO of Mozilla left, Mozilla has installed plugins without users’ permission, made terrible commercial recommendations to companies they had commercial ties to, but no transparency, and if you review their code, it is littered with telemetry. Mozilla is no longer the Mozilla we once knew. It’s high time we fork it.
Didn't Debian do that already, with Iceweasel?
Since the former CEO of Mozilla left, Mozilla has installed plugins without users’ permission, made terrible commercial recommendations to companies they had commercial ties to, but no transparency, and if you review their code, it is littered with telemetry. Mozilla is no longer the Mozilla we once knew. It’s high time we fork it.
1) why they don't install ublock origin by default
2) why they install pocket by default
3) why they keep doing ad-experiments?
Mozilla needs to stop pretending they are some saints. But thanks for calling fb out.
The only difference between Facebook and other ad agencies is that Facebook has a structured system in place inviting better PII and relationship data submitted directly by the users. While people demonize Facebook for this behavior other ad agencies would kill to be in that position.
> “We regularly improve the ways we prevent unauthorized access by third parties like web browser plugins to keep people’s information safe,” Facebook spokesperson Beth Gautier said. “This was a routine update and applied to ad blocking and ad scraping plugins, which can expose people’s information to bad actors in ways they did not expect.”
Seriously, after all the scandals with third parties where action wasn't taken in a timely manner, it's clear that Facebook will do something if and only if it benefits from it.
Like with ad blockers, can't these extensions change this into an arms race where it becomes futile for Facebook to keep fighting them? Or are these organizations restraining themselves, hoping that Facebook will somehow change its mind?
[1]: https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-blocks-ad-transp...
As a fan of Firefox (see username) and user since 2006, and as someone who doesn't like fb- maybe Mozilla should start by being more transparent about: 1) why they don't install ublock origin by default 2) why they install pocket by default 3) why they keep doing ad-experiments? Mozilla needs to stop pretending they are some saints. But thanks for calling fb out.