291–300 of 310 posts
By now we all know how Mark Zuckerberg rolls. "Dumb fucks" wasn't just an episode, that's his character. He'd probably be a good friend of Martin Shkreli if he wouldn't care that much about what others think of him.
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…
Google collects significantly more data than Facebook, and has a sordid past with sexual harassment and inappropriate relationships. Lyft, Uber, and AirBnB have openly flouted regulations, and that doesn't count Uber's other scandals. LinkedIn grew by emailing everyone's contacts without their permission (if you think what FB did here is bad, LI was far worse). High frequency trading and other fintech companies engage in front-running and derivatives trading that may be contributing to market volatility and systemic risk.
Comparably paying companies pretty much all have questionable histories.
Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg has committed to investing in improving Facebook even at great expense (don't believe me? look up what triggered the nosedive in Facebook's stock last summer). Do you think Facebook will improve more if conscientious engineers left the company?
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Facebook is a multi-billion dollar company. This is gross negligence if they didn't spend time to QA this.
Doing QA at large tech companies is never that simple. You have lots of teams that share code. Imagine a scenario where Team A uses code written by Team B which uses code written by Team C. Team C makes a change to their code that breaks Team B's code but only for the way Team A uses it .
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> 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.
Who's the "et al" there? Microsoft and Apple would be the logical successors, but I don't think most people would consider them "just as bad as Facebook".
If the full scheme of Facebook's business strategy (and other companies' as well, for that matter) were clear enough, a mass exodus would take place.
I'm still hoping a mass exodus takes place some day, or at least, like Roger McNamee has suggested, log and data deletion is enforced in some way.
This has to stop. Even if there is some temporary outrage, these companies remain unaccountable and get away with whatever they want.
From now on, I think I'll stop replying to emails provided by companies whose trust I've long lost and use only Protonmail's encrypted link feature.
So, when is the FTC going to actually bring down the hammer on FB for violating the consent agreement? There's no way this was "unintentional." At $40,000 per user per day [1], even at just one day of violation, that's a $60 billion fine FB should be liable for. "Under the settlement, Facebook agreed to get consent from users before sharing their data with third parties," so this seems to be EXACTLY in violation of t…
Maybe I'm just ignorant, but I do not really see how this violates the FTC agreement, because it covers Facebook sharing user data (stored/tracked/gathered by Facebook) with third parties. However, what Facebook did is far worse than violating that agreement. Facebook gained accessed to user data on third party systems, to which they should never have had access. They gained this (unauthorized) access (at best withou…
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Not a lawyer, but at least in my jurisdiction, fraud requires a monetary loss by the victim. Generally, civil law is better suited for this sort of thing, no matter how good a pitchfork feels in your hand. As but one of the reasons, the required standard of proof is much lower.
Yeah, 18 USC 1030 (a)(2)(C) might be a better fit: > Whoever ... intentionally accesses a computer without authorization or exceeds authorized access, and thereby obtains ... information from any protected computer ... shall be punished as provided in subsection (c) of this section. (The definition of "protected computer" encompasses any computer that is "used in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce or communi…
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"Start by keeping the primary copy of the user's data on the user's own device" It's an organizational policy, procedural, ethics and legal question - not a technical one. They should have feature reviews before the code reviews. The feature review panel puts bounds on what the code can do.
> It's an organizational policy, procedural, ethics and legal question - not a technical one. Not really. You have to fall back to those things when a good technical solution isn't available, but sometimes it is. Suppose you have a car, and four children. You can enact all the laws and policies and procedures you like, you can lecture the kids not to misbehave a thousand times. But the most important thing you can do…
The Engineers at FB should be given product direction, and should not even be making decisions as to what information to ask users for. That's for Product.
Part of product management will involve legal review, risk management. Clearly, FB has a few other concerns that should be thrown in there as well.
This issue basically has nothing to do with technology.
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Maybe I'm just ignorant, but I do not really see how this violates the FTC agreement, because it covers Facebook sharing user data (stored/tracked/gathered by Facebook) with third parties. However, what Facebook did is far worse than violating that agreement. Facebook gained accessed to user data on third party systems, to which they should never have had access. They gained this (unauthorized) access (at best withou…
This is a federal crime as FB is accessing a system that it does not have permission to access. This is the same as you or me hacking into someone else's email. People have gone to jail for a long time for just this crime.
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Maybe I'm just ignorant, but I do not really see how this violates the FTC agreement, because it covers Facebook sharing user data (stored/tracked/gathered by Facebook) with third parties. However, what Facebook did is far worse than violating that agreement. Facebook gained accessed to user data on third party systems, to which they should never have had access. They gained this (unauthorized) access (at best withou…
Just stop using Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. I did, years ago, and absolutely nothing of value was lost.