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Whistleblower to Congress: Facebook products harm kids and democracy

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Re: Whistleblower to Congress: Facebook products harm kids and democracy

#341

Post by BoxOfRain »

lexapro wrote: post #113
thepasswordis wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whistleblowers are anti-authoritarian, which is typically a right wing/conservative position in contemporary politics. To the people downvoting me here: can you list some figures who have been protesting authoritarianism who are left-coded in contemporary American society? I'm thinking of wikileaks, edward snowden, glenn greenwald. These people have all been "accused" of being right wingers. The people protesting loc…

Isn't anti-authoritarian typically considered a leftist position? So the opposite of what you are saying?

Not really, authoritarianism can be a property of both left and right wing ideologies. Mussolini's Italy and Stalin's USSR lay at opposite ends of the left/right spectrum yet were both undoubtedly authoritarian.

Re: Whistleblower to Congress: Facebook products harm kids and democracy

#342

Post by nullityrofl »

joelbluminator wrote: post #331
slg wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the complaints she is making and that people find most offensive regarding Facebook are not its data collection. I know that is an unpopular opinion here, but many people don't care about data collection because they don't see how that negatively impacts their lives. There are sizable populations of people that think the Facebook apps record all audio they hear and serve ads based off what you say in front of…

Where does it end though? Probably Brad Pitt and Elon Musk and Justin Bieber make a lot of people feel bad about their lives. Should media just stop reporting about them?

There have been a lot of people advocating for the death of the cult of celebrity and the narcissism it breeds in society, so maybe yes?

Re: Whistleblower to Congress: Facebook products harm kids and democracy

#343

Post by teucris »

handrous wrote: post #163
LurkingPenguin wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Make stalking at scale the same as stalking by creeping in the bushes outside someone's house or following them around town. Tracking everything people do isn't a "business model"—it's a crime. But the government benefits from Facebook (and Google's) stalking ability. Another recent example from HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28747699

Oh, I know. Which is why it'll never happen, and why the "message" (as in McLuhan) of the medium of the Internet is authoritarianism.

I think you’re getting downvotes by saying “it’ll never happen” which I find unfortunate because I think the observation that the Internet’s fundamental mode (“message”) as authoritarianism is incredibly interesting and worth discussing. The internet wasn’t created with this goal and yet it seems there is significant evidence to support this idea.

Re: Whistleblower to Congress: Facebook products harm kids and democracy

#344

Post by ghaff »

joelbluminator wrote: post #331
slg wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the complaints she is making and that people find most offensive regarding Facebook are not its data collection. I know that is an unpopular opinion here, but many people don't care about data collection because they don't see how that negatively impacts their lives. There are sizable populations of people that think the Facebook apps record all audio they hear and serve ads based off what you say in front of…

Where does it end though? Probably Brad Pitt and Elon Musk and Justin Bieber make a lot of people feel bad about their lives. Should media just stop reporting about them?

Honestly? Yes, the world would probably be a better place if there were less coverage of celebrities--at least in mainstream publications that purport to be at least significantly focused on important news.

Re: Whistleblower to Congress: Facebook products harm kids and democracy

#345

Post by tosser0001 »

nonfamous wrote: post #286
Permit wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I want them to ban the business model of stalking people online and selling intimate details of their lives. When you say "selling intimate details of their lives" you are misleading your reader. I don't know if this is intentional on your behalf but it makes it really hard to discuss real problems when you obfuscate them behind quarter truths like "Facebook sells your data".

When Facebook’s ad network sells and places ads in front of a person because they are gay, pregnant, devout, or disabled, you don’t consider those to be “intimate details of their lives”?

That is a mischaracterization of what Facebook is doing.

Facebook has a giant ontology of subjects. Based on their "stalking" of you, subjects in this ontology are connected to the user profile; i.e., the FB user's "interests".

Ad buyers are buying access to the ontology, not the individual users. They're not given a list of users to sift through and choose the user. They choose the subjects and FB's ad network shows the ad to users with matching interests. For what it's worth there's at least a buffer there.

You may still find this wrong, but the idea that they're providing "intimate details of their lives" oversells the argument against FB.

BTW: you have to at least give FB credit for giving users access to the interests that are tied to their profiles. I periodically sweep through them so that I show 0 interests and subsequently never get any ads. Ad buyers are looking to target people; if you're not in the target audience you wont be shown an ad.

Re: Whistleblower to Congress: Facebook products harm kids and democracy

#346

Post by pokstad »

fighterpilot wrote: post #12

The two best ideas I've heard: - Require age verification by law and ban kids from using it. We ban kids from alcohol we should ban them from this. - Require ID verification by law but allow people to use a fake name. Fixes the bots issue and the kid depression issue. The market isn't going to get there by itself because of competition. If insta implements this then they lose market share to snap. So there's a strong…

This. People are so worried about adults freely sharing information, but when it comes to children being influenced and manipulated we don’t make a big enough deal.

Re: Whistleblower to Congress: Facebook products harm kids and democracy

#347

Post by camdat »

mbesto wrote: post #227
roody15 wrote: post #31

To me this is a fake story being promoted as a way to further a political narrative. Nothing the whistleblower has revealed is shocking or previously unknown. Yes facebook tweaks an algorithm on your news feed to drive engagement and make money. Yes facebook allows some content that some would consider not to align with mainstream US narratives. My two cents this is an attempt to force facebook to kowtow to the US an…

> Nothing the whistleblower has revealed is shocking or previously unknown. Yes facebook tweaks an algorithm on your news feed to drive engagement and make money. Known and verified are two very distinct things. Does the public know that Facebook does this? Yes. Do they know it's harmful? Yes. Does Facebook also know this? Yes. Did they tell congress that they know this? No, in fact they told them the opposite. The w…

>This is an incredibly disingenuous description of the situation. Facebook's own (non-public, now publicly leaked) research indicates that Facebook causes harm to teens mental health. The only "US narrative" here is the one backed up my the incredible amount of research supporting the growing issue of mental health in the US (and the world for that matter).

This is disingenuous, that same data shows the majority of the teens surveyed said FB improved their mental health.

Re: Whistleblower to Congress: Facebook products harm kids and democracy

#348

Post by code_checker4 »

aeturnum wrote: post #278
trutannus wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Require ID verification I'll pass on putting my personal ID in the hands of an organization that sells data as a business . No matter how many flimsy laws they put in place to ban selling my PII, you'd have to be born yesterday to think that won't just delay the sale this new treasure-trove of information.

I think this just goes to show how useful some kind of digital identity verification service would be. Giving your ID to a third party isn't that risky (as I hand it over to grocery cashiers all the time) but we certainly have the tech to do better. It would be great to have a system with a municipal agency where you sign up for an account at the DMV and then they will sign low-info attestations of identity ("this pe…

This. Society evolving to require a service like this sounds great to me.

Re: Whistleblower to Congress: Facebook products harm kids and democracy

#350

Post by teawrecks »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #316
teawrecks wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be very difficult to make this a crime, because a lot of customers WANT companies to be able to track everything about them. What they don't want is for their information to then be sold and passed around willy-nilly.

> customers WANT companies to be able to track everything about them Customers want free shit. American culture remains prickly to being tracked.

Right, the "free shit" part is when they profit from the data behind your back. THAT is the part that should be illegal.

But it should be a perfectly valid business model for me to pay someone to (for example) watch everything I do and everything my body does, and give me personalized health advice, as long as they keep my data under lock and key for only my and their proprietary analysis algorithm's "eyes" to ever see.

It's not the "tracking all your info" that is bad, it's that they legitimately believe that it's their info to do with as they please.

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