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Facebook has not been doing enough to comply with a 2020 privacy order: FTC

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Re: Facebook has not been doing enough to comply with a 2020 privacy order: FTC

#21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, it's probably more of a shake down/way to get more campaign contributions.

Or it was lobbied for by a competitor.

So? People lobby for all sorts of stuff. The existence of lobbyists doesn’t tell you if a proposed policy is good or bad.

Re: Facebook has not been doing enough to comply with a 2020 privacy order: FTC

#22

How can a corporation be furious? After reading the article, they don't say anything about the company or people inside the company being furious. The closest thing I could find is that a Meta spokesperson said they plan to fight it vigorously and expect to win. Maybe the headline should be "Meta opposed to proposed FTC ban on monetizing youth data".

One way is to train an AI on the entire collection of conversations every employee at Meta has had, and then after sufficient training ask the AI how it feels about this ban. It may then respond that it is furious!!! Thus we can determine the corporation is furious.

For some remote first companies that communicate primarily through platforms like Slack or email, this should be trivial to do.

Re: Facebook has not been doing enough to comply with a 2020 privacy order: FTC

#23

I don't know why my opinion is so out of the mainstream but I really think it's good that people's information is used vs not used... I think it's a great boon for ads to become more relevant instead of less relevant. Wasting time looking at ads that aren't for me sucks, it's much better if they could actually improve my life. Literally think making children have less relevant ads is doing them harm.

Ads, targeted ones even more so, make you buy things you don’t need. If you need them, you would go out of your way to buy them without requiring an ad manipulating you.

Re: Facebook has not been doing enough to comply with a 2020 privacy order: FTC

#24
Mark Zuckerberg himself seems to understand the importance of privacy very well, taping over the microphone and camera on his MacBook Pro, keeping his trash can from being scavenged by others, and FB spending heavily to protect his security, so why does he have the exact opposite attitude towards others?

Re: Facebook has not been doing enough to comply with a 2020 privacy order: FTC

#25
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We'd be better off without Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and Instagram. Anything that hurts these businesses probably helps society. There is just no big benefit to justify the amount of damage done to mental health and privacy.

You forgot Snap.

And Google, and Microsoft and ...

Re: Facebook has not been doing enough to comply with a 2020 privacy order: FTC

#26

Since there is bound to be a lot of Facebook bashing I’ll point out that they occasionally do some good. In the case of software they can be good stewards of FOSS. I listened to this CoRecursive episode about the history of Zstandard compression algorithm and how FB allowed the author, Yann Collet, to fully open source it while other companies wanted to keep it proprietary. https://corecursive.com/data-compression-ya…

Good points, but it aligns with Shell, for example, making a big deal about investing a few hundred thousand dollars in setting up solar power at one of their least productive refineries.

Like, that's great, but...

Re: Facebook has not been doing enough to comply with a 2020 privacy order: FTC

#28

I don't know why my opinion is so out of the mainstream but I really think it's good that people's information is used vs not used... I think it's a great boon for ads to become more relevant instead of less relevant. Wasting time looking at ads that aren't for me sucks, it's much better if they could actually improve my life. Literally think making children have less relevant ads is doing them harm.

Sales is an asymmetric information game. The more the seller knows about you, compared with what you know about them, the worse a deal you get.

The goal of companies like Facebook and Google is to know everything about you while you only know what they want you know.

Re: Facebook has not been doing enough to comply with a 2020 privacy order: FTC

#29
I would caution against believing “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” when that would make the government your friend. Yes, Facebook has been awful and done great harm in some ways, but crucially it is not the case that Facebook was only able to do such harm because the FTC lacked the ability to unilaterally and without oversight deploy extreme powers like “you may not monetize this data” or “you may not release features or products without our permission”. The FTC has some insane thumbscrews now, and though it may be satisfying to see them use their thumbscrews to make Facebook squeal, you still shouldn’t be happy that the FTC has thumbscrews.

Re: Facebook has not been doing enough to comply with a 2020 privacy order: FTC

#30
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We'd be better off without Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and Instagram. Anything that hurts these businesses probably helps society. There is just no big benefit to justify the amount of damage done to mental health and privacy.

You forgot Snap.

Snap is more of a messaging app afaict. I'm pretty sure the biggest harms from social media come from algorithmic targeting of content, echo chamber creation, and the ability to hugely amplify fringe opinions and destabilise debate.

If your only concern is data handling, though, then fair enough.

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