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Facebook says one hundred API users may have improperly accessed user data

nbcnews.com

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Re: Facebook says one hundred API users may have improperly accessed user data

#31

Post by jdkee »

forgingahead wrote: post #28
jdkee wrote: post #23

We watched this documentary in the fake news class I taught this past summer. https://www.netflix.com/title/80117542 While some of the assertions in the film are unsubstantiated, the resulting classroom discussion on the role of social media and privacy were immensely constructive.

Did your class cover any aspect of how the mainstream media, like cable and broadcast TV news channels and the top printed newspapers in the country, also practice heavy bias in their reporting, and how the members of your class could become aware whenever those biases arose?

Yes, we did. We cover the difference between journalism and its ethics for the social good and the media, which is produced for consumption.

Re: Facebook says one hundred API users may have improperly accessed user data

#32

Post by dang »

jsnell wrote: post #12

The Facebook blog post would probably be a better source, since it explains the nature of the data: https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2019/11/05/changes... I.e. apps added to a group by an admin could get some metadata about members of the group. (That blog post would also have been harder to mis-interpret than the NBC article. Half the early comments seem to think that this was about Facebook engineers impro…

If we do that, people will say that we're trying to protect FB by replacing a news article with a corporate press release. Is there a better third-party article?

Re: Facebook says one hundred API users may have improperly accessed user data

#33

Post by sdan »

Regardless of how many developers have "improperly accessed user data", you can do a lot of stuff as a regular person such as tracking how long all your friends sleep:

https://github.com/sqren/fb-sleep-stats

After I found one of my friends doing this, I quit FB (this reason among others).

Re: Facebook says one hundred API users may have improperly accessed user data

#34

Post by chillacy »

jdkee wrote: post #23

We watched this documentary in the fake news class I taught this past summer. https://www.netflix.com/title/80117542 While some of the assertions in the film are unsubstantiated, the resulting classroom discussion on the role of social media and privacy were immensely constructive.

I was a bit underwhelmed, while some of the voter suppression stuff was pretty abhorrent, I thought building personality profiles and launching targeted ads was pretty mundane at the end of the day.

The next level of discussion that interests me is why social media manipulation is so powerful in the first place.

If people's beliefs are so heavily influenced by who we communicate with, what are the chances that we aren't under those same forces, and is there even an objective point of view in any of this?

Re: Facebook says one hundred API users may have improperly accessed user data

#35

Post by anongraddebt »

jdkee wrote: post #31
forgingahead wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did your class cover any aspect of how the mainstream media, like cable and broadcast TV news channels and the top printed newspapers in the country, also practice heavy bias in their reporting, and how the members of your class could become aware whenever those biases arose?

Yes, we did. We cover the difference between journalism and its ethics for the social good and the media, which is produced for consumption.

A key problem is the dearth of actual journalism today. The Economist being one of the few exceptions, along with Reuters (not sure how to classify them though).

Re: Facebook says one hundred API users may have improperly accessed user data

#36

Post by jonny_eh »

jsnell wrote: post #12

The Facebook blog post would probably be a better source, since it explains the nature of the data: https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2019/11/05/changes... I.e. apps added to a group by an admin could get some metadata about members of the group. (That blog post would also have been harder to mis-interpret than the NBC article. Half the early comments seem to think that this was about Facebook engineers impro…

In the context of a Facebook user, what is the difference between data and metadata?

Re: Facebook says one hundred API users may have improperly accessed user data

#37

Post by knzhou »

chillacy wrote: post #34
jdkee wrote: post #23

We watched this documentary in the fake news class I taught this past summer. https://www.netflix.com/title/80117542 While some of the assertions in the film are unsubstantiated, the resulting classroom discussion on the role of social media and privacy were immensely constructive.

I was a bit underwhelmed, while some of the voter suppression stuff was pretty abhorrent, I thought building personality profiles and launching targeted ads was pretty mundane at the end of the day. The next level of discussion that interests me is why social media manipulation is so powerful in the first place. If people's beliefs are so heavily influenced by who we communicate with, what are the chances that we are…

> I thought building personality profiles and launching targeted ads was pretty mundane at the end of the day. The next level of discussion that interests me is why social media manipulation is so powerful in the first place.

Well, if you push in that direction then the whole narrative falls apart. There is absolutely no evidence that social media based personality profiles are actually effective -- why would knowing somebody likes Taylor Swift be better for targeting political ads than knowing where they live and their party affiliation, like in traditional ad targeting?

It's just absurd, and nobody ever counters this narrative because nobody has an incentive to. Journalists want people to believe this to get them afraid of Facebook. Facebook wants people to believe it because that makes their ads worth paying for. Doubly so for Cambridge Analytica and the like.

Re: Facebook says one hundred API users may have improperly accessed user data

#38

Post by knzhou »

sdan wrote: post #33

Regardless of how many developers have "improperly accessed user data", you can do a lot of stuff as a regular person such as tracking how long all your friends sleep: https://github.com/sqren/fb-sleep-stats After I found one of my friends doing this, I quit FB (this reason among others).

You could find much much more personal information about your friends before social media, the old fashioned way -- stalking. Both stalking and this kind of data scraping have the same response: get better friends.

Re: Facebook says one hundred API users may have improperly accessed user data

#39

Post by tobr »

Remember that Facebook PR has a habit of releasing a tiny number when they break bad news. The actual number has been as much as 100 times larger[1], but they get the smaller number into articles and the news cycle moves on. For some strange reason their initial wrong estimates are always in favor of Facebook.

Based on that, this “one hundred” may well turn out to be “ten thousand”.

1: https://www.vox.com/2019/4/18/18485528/facebook-instagram-pa...

Re: Facebook says one hundred API users may have improperly accessed user data

#40

Post by knzhou »

jdkee wrote: post #23

We watched this documentary in the fake news class I taught this past summer. https://www.netflix.com/title/80117542 While some of the assertions in the film are unsubstantiated, the resulting classroom discussion on the role of social media and privacy were immensely constructive.

I once took a "media and society" class where I was told that critical thinking meant to take all my facts from the New York Times alone, that the NYT was infallible, and that I shouldn't even try to evaluate facts from "unauthorized sources" because they were all definitely lies anyway.

On reflection, I think this kind of class is bad for society. Are you sure you aren't running that kind of class?

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