201–210 of 310 posts
Are they just flat out teaching people how to be super deceptive and how to tactically play stupid in MBA programs nowadays?
Don't give access to your contacts, location, emails and photos to not just FB, but also WhatsApp and Instagram. If you must use them, try doing so from incognito browser windows. Facebook has proven time and again it cannot be trusted.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There’s got to be a monetary loss here. Our email contacts are valuable. Why? Nobody lost their contacts, so what’s the $ amount it cost them? Facebook claims they’re deleting them. If that’s true, then Facebook isn’t gaining from the contacts. If users don’t lose anything and if Facebook doesn’t gain anything, what is the monetary loss? > especially at 150m user scale Where’s that number coming from? The article t…
>don’t forget that these users consciously gave Facebook their passwords. There is a lot of legal precedence about social engineering and how to prosecute it, this would completely fall under fraud. If I ask someone for their password to perform some service and they then I copy all of their data, that is a crime regardless of how stupid they are. This really doesn't matter at all in a case of fraud if you gave the p…
Majority of apps are just spyware anyware.
> Facebook says that it didn't mean to upload these contacts How can you not mean to? It's one thing to say that, were it something tangible, like paper, "Sorry, mate. These pages snuck in with the others. Sorry about that. We'll pull it out. No worries." Pulling contacts and uploading them is not a passive action but takes active action. > and is now in the process of deleting them. So, the question must then be ask…
It's my understanding that they used to do this entirely intentionally at one point via an "import contacts from mail" feature, then they dropped the feature and now when they added the "sign in with e-mail to verify your identity" feature someone reused the old code without being aware that it will also harvest the contacts and that they don't want that this time.
It's the opposite of "privacy by default", basically.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There’s got to be a monetary loss here. If there isn’t precedent for calculating that loss, such precedent should be established. Our email contacts are valuable, especially at 150m user scale. We could have all banded together and sold them, had Facebook not stolen them. These users should be compensated.
> There’s got to be a monetary loss here. Our email contacts are valuable. Why? Nobody lost their contacts, so what’s the $ amount it cost them? Facebook claims they’re deleting them. If that’s true, then Facebook isn’t gaining from the contacts. If users don’t lose anything and if Facebook doesn’t gain anything, what is the monetary loss? > especially at 150m user scale Where’s that number coming from? The article t…
Opportunity cost? If Facebook has these contacts now, then their third parties have them, so those contacts are no longer as valuable, if valuable at all.
> Where’s that number coming from? The article talks about 1.5 million users.
My bad, added two orders of magnitude by accident. I knew something was off there. Thanks for the correction.
First they ask for email passwords. Then the new users assume Facebook won't comprehensively mine their emails. Then Facebook awkwardly gets caught uploading 1.5 million users' email contacts. It doesn't make sense for people to trust the service at all unless you assume one of two things: 1 - Despite all the outrage on hackernews, and the NWT stories, our neighbours down the street and family members still don't kno…
There is no doubt that the public image about FB is significantly changing - a year from now things will not look better for Facebook then they are today, most likely worse I'd say. This is not something they can turn around anymore - the leadership is not making any learnings and repeats the same mistakes over and over again.
Saying "unintentionally" here is like saying you unintentionally stole someone's TV when they gave you their key to walk their dog. It takes extra work to upload those contacts, which means several managers and developers decided to do it and then spent time implementing it. For the FB employees reading this: what is your tipping point? Would you say no to that assignment?
“For the FB employees reading this: what is your tipping point? Would you say no to that assignment?” There is a good chance that they didn’t know how their work would eventually be used. That’s the problem with big companies. Most people are far away from seeing the consequences of their work.
The only way FB will change its ways is if (a) good engineers stop joining them, and (b) good engineers at FB start leaving. This will threaten their entire growth prospectives and finally bring about change. I was having discussions with FB recruiter and some of their senior managers. I just informed them that I won't be pursuing that anymore. FB engineers who are on HN: why are you still there? You can make similar…
> You can make similar money at several other companies without sacrificing your soul! I'm not so sure. Certainly Google, Amazon, et al are just as bad as facebook.