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Facebook drains users' cellphone batteries intentionally says ex-employee

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Re: Facebook drains users' cellphone batteries intentionally says ex-employee

#111

Post by thih9 »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #43
hardwaresofton wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's how I imagine it was introduced: Engineer A: Hey how would we know whether loading this image as a .webp vs a .jpg would perform? Our lab testing is one thing but the different hardware out there vastly differs from phone to phone -- we need some data on the whether the average phone has enough optimizations for one versus the other. Engineer B: Oh, what if we just run a background task on some of the phones t…

Well, if you work for facebook, ethics is not your priority in the first place. On the other hand, if I ever decided to throw mine on the toilet and work for a company that manipulate people, and perform mass spying on them, then I would go all the way and just do things like this.

There are plenty of worse companies (direct scams, sketchy loans, ponzi schemes); I’d say going there would be “going all the way”.

There are good things you can do at fb too, e.g. expand the positive areas of FB or work on removing the negatives.

Re: Facebook drains users' cellphone batteries intentionally says ex-employee

#112

Post by pas »

sofixa wrote: post #54
scarface74 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn’t work for Facebook because I don’t hate myself enough. But I also don’t clutch my pearls and think that any for profit company is feeding starving children. You can make a negative case for any of the large tech company.

> You can make a negative case for any of the large tech company. Yes you can, but it's a spectrum. Microsoft abusing their monopolistic position to strangle competition and adding adware and spyware in an OS people pay for is ethically and morally bad, but is much less bad than Facebook profiting from and doing nothing to stop an actual active genocide. Facebook is by far the worst, ethically and morally, offender o…

Can FB even do anything meaningful against "an active genocide"?

It's important to assign some responsibility to those who have/had the ability to prevent it, but it's not clear to me that FB could have prevented it.

In close races like the US presidential election it's plausible that FB was the deciding factor, but places where genocides happen are not known for close races.

And to be clear, it's not like FB couldn't have done a lot more with a lot less money to filter out certain kinds of content, but they intentionally wanted some kind of neutrality, right? And that's probably noble (and the maximally harmless thing) when it comes to - let's say Norwegian politics - but not so great in a lot of other contexts. However engaging in moderation with the intent to prevent social ills is very non-trivial.

To me it looks like they realized they were in a hard place and then basically bailed out from the hard problem and instead went all in on trying to make as much money as they can.

Re: Facebook drains users' cellphone batteries intentionally says ex-employee

#114

Post by epistemer »

willyt wrote: post #36

Anecdata: I pretty much never go on Facebook anymore and now my phone battery comfortably lasts all day. The current worst app on my phone is Duolingo, it guzzles 15% in about 15 mins and makes the phone noticeably hot. The most impressive app is Apple Music which feels like it should use a lot of battery but doesn’t.

Just find a good Anki deck and get rid of Duolingo. To me, Duolingo is just a spaced repetition gateway drug to Anki.

Re: Facebook drains users' cellphone batteries intentionally says ex-employee

#115

Post by Beldin »

izacus wrote: post #106
amelius wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My version: Hey, Apple is now blocking our ads. They will eat our lunch. What can we do about it? Hmm... Let's drain the batteries of iPhone users faster. They will switch to Android. What if we get caught? We'll just make up some story about A/B testing. Oh and drain some Android user's batteries too, for plausible deniability. Great plan, implement it!

Noone sane would believe that people would switch to Android over that, that's some imagination you have there. Not caring about battery use? Yeah sure, even the enlightened developers of HN rarely give a crap about that. Deliberately draining battery to force people to replace their phones? C'mon.

You wouldn't get the tech-savvy people with that, no. But it's easy to imagine someone barely making it through a day, not quite cottoning on, but hearing how Android phones last longer - and dismissing reports about iPhones lasting longer because their iPhone... doesn't.

They're not replacing their phones over this, but for their next phone they're choosing an Android. For battery reasons. Fastforward 2-3 years and most of these folks are switching (with renewal of subscription).

My main question regarding such a scenario: could they find the right balance, ie. drain the battery enough to annoy, but not so much as to attract investigation that'll definitively identify facebook's app as the culprit?

That I doubt.

Re: Facebook drains users' cellphone batteries intentionally says ex-employee

#116

Post by nerde7788 »

For the ab testing, I can think of testing whether having low battery would affect messaging to certain people(or if battery is low would they respond or how much time they are ready to spend if you combine with gps data it is even better)at given time and then ranging these people by importance for the user.

Re: Facebook drains users' cellphone batteries intentionally says ex-employee

#117

Post by ilostmyshoes »

thih9 wrote: post #111
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if you work for facebook, ethics is not your priority in the first place. On the other hand, if I ever decided to throw mine on the toilet and work for a company that manipulate people, and perform mass spying on them, then I would go all the way and just do things like this.

There are plenty of worse companies (direct scams, sketchy loans, ponzi schemes); I’d say going there would be “going all the way”. There are good things you can do at fb too, e.g. expand the positive areas of FB or work on removing the negatives.

Good things like inciting war and political division? Maybe building tools to easily spread misinformation that drowns out factual information?

Re: Facebook drains users' cellphone batteries intentionally says ex-employee

#118

Post by kyleyeats »

seanhunter wrote: post #102
kyleyeats wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of the mentioned tests had anything to do with directly testing power drain or low-power performance. He just thinks they aren't giving enough weight to battery drain as an undesirable side effect of features that don't directly benefit the user. That's it. That's his whole gripe. They're testing how fast an image loads, that uses up the user's battery, and that's bad for the user.

TFA literally says the battery drain was the purpose, not a side-effect: If you believe former Facebook employee George Hayward, a data scientist, Facebook can secretly drain the battery on its users' cellphones on purpose.

Okay, but the "you" in this sentence doesn't transfer to other readers. It's you when you read it, but when I read it, it's me. And I don't believe him.

Re: Facebook drains users' cellphone batteries intentionally says ex-employee

#119

Post by shadowgovt »

izacus wrote: post #107
shadowgovt wrote: post #96

Not that I disbelieve the allegations, but the battery tracker on my phone consistently tells me that the largest consumer is Chrome, with Facebook Messenger somewhere way, way down the list. If they are bumping up battery consumption, either I've never been in the test group or they aren't bumping it enough to be a real risk.

But that's probably because you're actually using Chrome a lot? That tracker isn't very accurate and its very biased towards apps you're actually using (which makes sense doesn't it?).

If Facebook's experiment isn't draining more battery than actual use, I'm not seeing the risk of harm.

Re: Facebook drains users' cellphone batteries intentionally says ex-employee

#120

Post by dado3212 »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #39
mkl95 wrote: post #12

What I can't believe: Facebook shipped a feature to drain users' batteries. What I can believe: Engineers at Facebook were micromanaged into dismissing issues such as users' batteries being drained.

Here's how I imagine it was introduced: Engineer A: Hey how would we know whether loading this image as a .webp vs a .jpg would perform? Our lab testing is one thing but the different hardware out there vastly differs from phone to phone -- we need some data on the whether the average phone has enough optimizations for one versus the other. Engineer B: Oh, what if we just run a background task on some of the phones t…

Would you put holdouts of good features in the same bucket as negative testing? Let’s say someone develops an ML model that cuts down spam by 90%. It’s launched to all but 1% of users, so that you can consistently measure that the spam reduction is 90%, that the users are benefiting from it, and that the false positive rate is low.

From a different POV you’re intentionally worsening the experience for 1% of users. Is this a negative test? If so, is it morally different?

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