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U.S. FTC says Facebook misused privacy decree to shut down ad research

reuters.com

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Re: U.S. FTC says Facebook misused privacy decree to shut down ad research

#91

Post by kolmogorov »

seanieb wrote: post #61
bryan_w wrote: post #59

* Gets $5 billion fine for sharing data with "researchers" * FTC: "Now FB, don't you go sharing data with researchers again. You are responsible for preventing scraping of user data" FB: * consents * * Proceeds to not share data with researchers * FTC: * Shocked pikichu face *

The word "researchers" is doing a lot of work in your comment. What's being researched is important and the FTC makes the distinction in their statement, "good-faith research in the public interest".

Does good faith research in the public interest justify collecting any data through any means and storing it in any way you like ? On paper fb seems ridiculous but I don’t want to assume that said researchers collected and stored data appropriately. Those skills aren’t necessarily available to them easily

Re: U.S. FTC says Facebook misused privacy decree to shut down ad research

#92

Post by CPLX »

savant_penguin wrote: post #7

“The FTC received no notice that Facebook would be publicly invoking our consent decree to justify terminating academic research earlier this week.” Of course they didn't. After you are fined 5b it's no surprise you go full on defensive. What's the alternative? Asking the ftc every single time what they should do? I'm no fan of Facebook but if they didn't stop the research they could be found guilty again for the exa…

> consent decree

> Asking the ftc every single time what they should do?

You were so close to getting it.

Re: U.S. FTC says Facebook misused privacy decree to shut down ad research

#93

Post by CPLX »

babesh wrote: post #29
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #12

I love this new FTC. Feels like they are on the side of the humans again.

That is premature. They haven’t done anything yet. It may just be performative.

I do agree with you. But it’s often underestimated just how important the threat of action can be as well, when it’s coming from the government.

Re: U.S. FTC says Facebook misused privacy decree to shut down ad research

#94

Post by throwwebmaster »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #88
throwwebmaster wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s within anyone’s rights as website maintainers to block malicious IP addresses that scrape or otherwise within their discretion. Nobody is legally forcing websites to allow access to everyone, and accordingly, nobody is altering the law by blocking access to people (crawlers, hackers, spammers, malcontents, or anybody really) that they feel are not welcome. So exercising one’s existing rights isn’t an act of maki…

Hacking and other malicious behavious are actually illegal. Either Crawling does not belong on that list, or google exects should be in jail. Given that crawling is not malicious, what we are discussing now is 'someone is crawling my website in a way I dont like' which is a different gripe. It mighthave some merit, but robots txt is not legally binding.

As I stated before, Illegal or not, it is within the website owners’ rights to restrict access.

Re: U.S. FTC says Facebook misused privacy decree to shut down ad research

#95

Post by ErikVandeWater »

savant_penguin wrote: post #7

“The FTC received no notice that Facebook would be publicly invoking our consent decree to justify terminating academic research earlier this week.” Of course they didn't. After you are fined 5b it's no surprise you go full on defensive. What's the alternative? Asking the ftc every single time what they should do? I'm no fan of Facebook but if they didn't stop the research they could be found guilty again for the exa…

Facebook LIED saying the consent decree forced them to terminate research accounts.

The FTC would like to be notified when FB is making a statement related to FTC policy so they don't lie. If they hadn't misrepresented the FTC wouldn't have a problem.

Re: U.S. FTC says Facebook misused privacy decree to shut down ad research

#96

Post by ErikVandeWater »

seanieb wrote: post #64
RandomLensman wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bit of an odd one for me. Is the FTC in the business of deciding what research is "good faith" and "in the "public interest"? Could a company rely on such designation from them in the future when making decisions?

It's a government commission. That's it's entire purpose. "The FTC is a bipartisan federal agency with a unique dual mission to protect consumers and promote competition."

Just to note: Bipartisan does not mean apolitical. It just means it is represented by the two dominant parties.

Re: U.S. FTC says Facebook misused privacy decree to shut down ad research

#97

Post by nine_k »

TomSwirly wrote: post #81
nine_k wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, this is the problem with the European lack of notion of free speech :(

This is an offensive slur towards Europeans. In no country in the world, not even the US, is all speech legal. Moving from the US to Europe, I've found a much _wider_ range of speech here in practice, partly because money is NOT considered to be equivalent to speech here. And the latitude of speech is quite great. The Netherlands has some of the strictest laws about hate speech in the world, and yet one of our politi…

I did not say "Europeans", meaning the people. I said "European" meaning the general intellectual / political consensus that good speech should be allowed, while bad speech, for various notions of "bad", should be suppressed, gently or not.

I find this line of thinking quite perilous, even though it was the prevalent mode of thinking through centuries.

Silly slurs, like " is like ", can be discounted as silly. The real test is saying something really controversial and not obviously stupid. I'm afraid that in Europe it's not easier than in the US.

Re: U.S. FTC says Facebook misused privacy decree to shut down ad research

#98

Post by spywaregorilla »

nielsbot wrote: post #41
savant_penguin wrote: post #7

“The FTC received no notice that Facebook would be publicly invoking our consent decree to justify terminating academic research earlier this week.” Of course they didn't. After you are fined 5b it's no surprise you go full on defensive. What's the alternative? Asking the ftc every single time what they should do? I'm no fan of Facebook but if they didn't stop the research they could be found guilty again for the exa…

$5B is pennies to FB

No it isn't. People make arbitrary statements like this all the time when talking about big numbers and they often do not make sense. $5B is ~1/6 of their net income and a bit more than 5% of their revenue. That is a large number. It's not a death sentence, but it is a big hit.

Re: U.S. FTC says Facebook misused privacy decree to shut down ad research

#99

Post by tablespoon »

logifail wrote: post #51
tablespoon wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Of course they didn't. After you are fined 5b it's no surprise you go full on defensive. I'm not willing to cut Facebook so much slack here. They very much do not want any independent public oversight of their advertising operations (e.g. they want to release self-congratulatory reports with numbers that lack denominators, and they don't want anyone to be able to call them on the BS). I think any invocation of the…

> They very much do not want any independent public oversight of their advertising operations [..] This view isn't exactly _uncommon_ for such a large company that dominates their market. If you remove the word "advertising" it might apply to pretty much _any_ company...

Oh, totally. I was just responding to the subtext in the parent comment that government oversight was to blame for this action.

Re: U.S. FTC says Facebook misused privacy decree to shut down ad research

#100

Post by literallyaduck »

throwwebmaster wrote: post #5

Don’t most websites prohibit someone from scraping and harvesting the data on them? Most recently, I can think of Yelp, Amazon, and GitHub prohibiting this, as well as the Aaron Swartz case.

Are these "researchers" going to be charged the same as the martyr Swartz?
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