Facebook Loses Much Face In Secret Smear On Google • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook Loses Much Face In Secret Smear On Google

#81

Post by ortusdux » Thu, May 12, 2011, 4:34 PM UTC

vacri wrote: post #44

tytso wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not like this is the first evil thing Facebook has done.... there might be some who might argue that yanking around Facebook's defaults about users' privacy settings was far worse than using a PR sock puppet. Personally, I think using (or perhaps we should say, trying to use) a PR sock puppet was cowardly, and trying to bash a competing product by spreading anonymous innuendoes was crass. But not all would agree…

Just because something is legal doesn't forbid you from thinking it's cowardly or crass. Facebook are free to do distasteful things, but - and here's the important part - we are free to condemn them for doing so. Forbidding us from sharing our opinions because "hey, it's legal" is a self-defeating argument.

To take this to the extreme, bestiality was legal in Florida up until this week.

Re: Facebook Loses Much Face In Secret Smear On Google

#82

Post by AlexC04 » Thu, May 12, 2011, 4:34 PM UTC

maxklein wrote: post #29

Who cares? Facebook is a generic company. Google is a generic company. If they spy on each, smash each other, etc, it changes nothing. Neither for you nor for your startup or anything. Personifying these companies and then writing gossip stories about them is turning what should be real business into some kind of pseudo-fashion magazine. Just as little as I care for Snookie kissing JWoww, do I care about Facebook spy…

Honestly, I'm shocked my the downvotes being levied against all of these "who cares" type posts.

How much face is really being lost by Facebook? The audience of Facebook users that will read about the "negative PR campaign" will be infantesimally small (compared to their near 500 million accounts).

Then compare that infantesimally small number of users to the percentage who didn't already know that Facebook was dodgy as hell.

The relative impact of this discovery, while interesting, makes no difference in anything (save as being direct proof of Facebook's "Be Evil" corporate policy).

Anyways.

I'm happy to take it on the chin in terms of downvotes here too, but the way I see it there's nothing here that will impact anything.

Re: Facebook Loses Much Face In Secret Smear On Google

#83

Post by brown9-2 » Thu, May 12, 2011, 4:36 PM UTC

rryan wrote: post #78

brown9-2 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't the Facebook user need to allow their connections to be publicly accessed via the Graph API in order for it to be scrape-able in the first place? The main point here is that Google isn't doing anything with the "Facebook data" that the original user of that data (who actually owns it, let's be fair about that) hasn't approved of in one way or another.

Not sure about the Graph API, but your name, your profile picture, and your contact list are all fully public information and you can't control their visibility.

Are you sure about that? How does one access this info?

If I go to " rel="nofollow">http://graph.facebook.com/, the only data that is visible is:

  {
    "id": "...",
    "name": "...",
    "first_name": "...",
    "last_name": "...",
    "username": "...",
    "gender": "male",
    "locale": "en_US"
  }

Re: Facebook Loses Much Face In Secret Smear On Google

#84

Post by code_duck » Thu, May 12, 2011, 4:57 PM UTC

I'm so surprised! I always considered Facebook really honest, upright and trustworthy - a reflection of their founder.

Re: Facebook Loses Much Face In Secret Smear On Google

#85

Post by FJCruiser79 » Thu, May 12, 2011, 4:57 PM UTC

yalogin wrote: post #76

Where is the link to Facebook in those emails? What am I missing?

You need to read the Daily Beast article, here: http://bit.ly/koiEPd

Re: Facebook Loses Much Face In Secret Smear On Google

#86

Post by zmmz » Thu, May 12, 2011, 4:59 PM UTC

bostonpete wrote: post #56

JacobAldridge wrote: post #31

A key saying I provide all my clients with in regards to corporate culture and behaviours: a fish rots from the head. Usually this means things like 'if the boss is ten minutes late to every meeting, staff will assume it's acceptable for everyone to be ten minutes late to a meeting'. Given Zuckerbeg's reputation for sneaky behaviour and this example of his PR team, I now have an excellent example to share in the futu…

> I now have an excellent example to share in the future Your comment intuitively seems correct, and I'm inclined to agree with you. But I can't help but wonder if you just end up picking examples that support this claim. Most examples of corporate wrong-doing probably can't be correlated with traits of their CEO (they're just mistakes made by inept, or possibly malicious, individuals or groups). Statistically, some…

Saying that the "head" has to be the CEO is taking it too far.

In most large companies, you are only aware of the behaviour of the two levels of management above you. If you see your boss or your bosses boss behave in a certain way, you will think that this behaviour is acceptable.

For example, the CEO of some bank might be very long-term, risk free, investement oriented, but if the boss of the trading desk only cares about the next paycheck and is willing to take risks to get his bonus, chances are all the traders will do whatever it takes to get good results without more than a year ahead.

Re: Facebook Loses Much Face In Secret Smear On Google

#87

Post by eggoa » Thu, May 12, 2011, 5:03 PM UTC

ericdschmidt wrote: post #80

I don't think what Facebook did was unethical. It's certainly legal. They catch a lot of flack over privacy issues and they want to remind the media about their competitors' privacy issues and influence them to cover those more, so that they don't look as bad in comparison. That sort of work is done by PR firms, so they hired one to do it. In fact, they may not have even asked the PR firm to do it; the PR firm may ha…

I agree. Supposedly part of what they were doing was "urging [news organizations] to investigate claims that Google was invading people’s privacy." With a company as big and powerful as Google, there should always be people looking at this. If it happens to a reporter persuaded by a PR firm paid by a competitor, I don't we why that is necessarily a problem.

Re: Facebook Loses Much Face In Secret Smear On Google

#88

Post by michaelfairley » Thu, May 12, 2011, 5:07 PM UTC

brown9-2 wrote: post #83

rryan wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure about the Graph API, but your name, your profile picture, and your contact list are all fully public information and you can't control their visibility.

Are you sure about that? How does one access this info? If I go to " rel="nofollow">http://graph.facebook.com/ , the only data that is visible is: { "id": "...", "name": "...", "first_name": "...", "last_name": "...", "username": "...", "gender": "male", "locale": "en_US" }

https://graph.facebook.com/michaelfairley/picture?type=large for the picture.

Friends can be accessed similarly, but require an access token (_any_ access token, not just the user's that you're inspecting.

More details at Facebook's API docs: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/user/

Re: Facebook Loses Much Face In Secret Smear On Google

#89

Post by dhume » Thu, May 12, 2011, 5:13 PM UTC

I have no idea how the Facebook PR team thought that they’d avoid being caught doing this.

Perhaps Facebook's managers think themselves exempt from the changing privacy norms they keep telling us to accept?

Re: Facebook Loses Much Face In Secret Smear On Google

#90

Post by pstack » Thu, May 12, 2011, 5:16 PM UTC

zmmz wrote: post #86

bostonpete wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I now have an excellent example to share in the future Your comment intuitively seems correct, and I'm inclined to agree with you. But I can't help but wonder if you just end up picking examples that support this claim. Most examples of corporate wrong-doing probably can't be correlated with traits of their CEO (they're just mistakes made by inept, or possibly malicious, individuals or groups). Statistically, some…

Saying that the "head" has to be the CEO is taking it too far. In most large companies, you are only aware of the behaviour of the two levels of management above you. If you see your boss or your bosses boss behave in a certain way, you will think that this behaviour is acceptable. For example, the CEO of some bank might be very long-term, risk free, investement oriented, but if the boss of the trading desk only care…

That actually seems counter-intuitive, to me.

I work in a company of about 140k people and I'm far more aware of the CEO than I am my boss or his boss. I don't even know who my boss' boss is or what he does, but I hear about the CEO on a regular basis (beyond just showing up in movies). It seems to me that in a large company, you're aware of your boss and the figureheads and everywhere in-between those two levels are given the gift of obfuscation.