21–30 of 58 posts
Unfortunately investors would greatly prefer a slow death of the company, while committing constant invasions of privacy on the entire world, than the great risk of a self induced reform.
Especially when they can get half the benefits for free by leaking fake memos and ineffective privacy control knobs.
Hilarious. This is not something that employees and engineers have any control over, and framing it like this is passing the buck. Furthermore, user privacy is a fundamental top down engineering decision, not something that any individual can "do better on."
Who makes these decisions? Surely it's from people higher to the top than the bottom and not at all the kind of people that would implement such a feature.
Actions speak louder than words and it would have been more meaningful to set some actual policy and protections for people bringing such privacy-violating product decisions to task rather then send the corporate equivalent of a "like and share" post.
I've never met an engineer that was anti-privacy or anti-security... Those traits are exclusively donned by product people trying to push a feature out on time or hit a kpi at the expense of bigger picture thinking.
Hilarious. This is not something that employees and engineers have any control over, and framing it like this is passing the buck. Furthermore, user privacy is a fundamental top down engineering decision, not something that any individual can "do better on."
So perhaps programmers working totally on their own can make privacy work for Facebook.
Rogue Google employees did a good job breaking up Google's search monopoly, so there's precedent for this kind of roll-up-your-sleeves success.
My cynical view on this is that Facebook has realized they can better protect their market dominance by raising the walls on their garden and locking down your data as much as possible, and calling that privacy. I expect them to fight data portability initiatives tooth and nail in the name of said "privacy."
a quote from a recent post where Google has been testing a replacement for third-party cookies[1]
There is no such thing as a modern advertising company that cares about privacy. The idea is laughable.
Hilarious. This is not something that employees and engineers have any control over, and framing it like this is passing the buck. Furthermore, user privacy is a fundamental top down engineering decision, not something that any individual can "do better on."
It was programmers working totally on their own ruined Volkswagen with their pesky cheating algo for the emissions test. So perhaps programmers working totally on their own can make privacy work for Facebook. Rogue Google employees did a good job breaking up Google's search monopoly, so there's precedent for this kind of roll-up-your-sleeves success.
Google has 90% market share still. I'd thus still call that monopoly unbroken.
OK, so this is coming from the head of Facebook Reality Labs, i.e. Oculus. Which is incredibly ironic, because Oculus very recently required FB accounts to use the device, which was met with a huge privacy-focused backlash, including from Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus. So either they are planning to reverse that completely anti-privacy decision, or the author is totally full of shit. Can't have it both ways.
Bosworth's job is to come up with new flavors of Kool-Aid no matter what position he's officially in.
"Why would you send this? Is your company so out of control that you need to send memos like this to get people to 'do better' on privacy? Why are these decisions not being made by the executive team? Does your company care so little about privacy that such concerns are irrelevant to executives? Or is this some poorly-conceived ploy to place the blame on employees?"
Are they leaving the user information and Ads business? ...
It would be a useful legacy if Facebook managed to impact the industry's privacy practices the way Microsoft impacted the industry's security practices, but I am not holding my breath.
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/10-years-since-the-bill-gates-...