My interview with Steven Levy re. leaking of my Facebook Goodbye post

Post by JulianMorrison » Tue, Oct 26, 2021, 1:44 PM UTC

fareesh wrote: post #6

On the popularity of Haugen: I find it amusing how your government treats a whistleblower who is promoting government control over social media, vs the way your government treats a whistleblower who leaks evidence of government spying and abuse. The fact that Edward Snowden and Julian Assange are treated the way they are (and the earlier treatment of Manning) gives the US government zero credibility on press freedom,…

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Oct 26, 2021, 1:45 PM UTC

splatzone wrote: post #10

I wonder what the mood is like at Facebook at the moment. It must be pretty demoralising to see revelations about your company's behaviour in the press, especially if you believe in the mission. Yet I wonder if there's a different narrative that employees internally are believing in. I've been freelance my entire life and never worked for a large corp, so I don't know what it's like. But I'd be fascinated to be a fly…

Post by swalsh » Tue, Oct 26, 2021, 1:46 PM UTC

danjac wrote: post #58

yodsanklai wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN is a bit schizophrenic on this topic. On one hand, it seems everybody wants more freedom and less surveillance, but they give FB a hard time for not monitoring content better. Hopefully these aren't the same people expressing these contradictory points of view. I'd be curious to know what both side think the ideal social network should look like.

Maybe the ideal social network is no one big "social network", i.e. get rid of your Facebooks and Twitters and go back to small, decentralized, localized forums and interest groups running on independent, secure, open-source platforms that are easy for laypeople to set up, maintain and moderate.

Post by golemotron » Tue, Oct 26, 2021, 1:48 PM UTC

sanedigital wrote: post #45

bostonsre wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> her suggestions really do not align with what the tech community wants at all. I feel like we as a tech community should take a step back and consider whether or not we should not be the only ones that decide what should or should not be done. It is a massive country with many opposing viewpoints. We have massive conflicts of interest and some tech companies have shown over and over that greed trumps morals in many…

In my opinion, domain experts have a moral obligation to speak up regarding policy that involves their area of expertise. On the topic of encryption, we're the only community with an understanding of what "breaking encryption" means. There are no skeleton keys, only vulnerabilities. We have a moral and ethical duty to fight for encryption, privacy, and security, not against it.

Post by vintermann » Tue, Oct 26, 2021, 1:48 PM UTC

nojito wrote: post #30

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #2

As cited in this article, Frances Haugen is arguing against allowing Facebook to use end-to-end encryption because she suggests Facebook should have more surveillance of private communications: https://twitter.com/AlecMuffett/status/1452309133928054799?s... A lot of people jumped to the defense of the Facebook leaker because the media so successfully framed it as a “whistleblower” situation, but that’s not really wha…

This is a very common deflection tactic by corporations. Try and discredit the leaker over the information that was leaked. We saw it with Wikileaks and now we will see as more and more tech employees start sharing what goes on behind the curtains.