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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

#41

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?

In practical terms, Mark is a target. You're not.

When surveillance is cheap enough, everyone's a target.

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

#42

> “Facebook has repeatedly violated its privacy promises,” Samuel Levine, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in a press release. If you're pissing off Facebook, you're probably doing something right.

> If you're pissing off Facebook, you're probably doing something right.

I generally agree.

FWIW, I just listened to an interesting CoRecursive interview with Facebook's Jason Gauci (February 2021) [0]. He addresses that question head-on at this point [1] in the interview.

[0] https://corecursive.com/061-reinforcement-learning/

[1] https://corecursive.com/061-reinforcement-learning/#the-soci...

P.S. I don't listen to many podcasts, but CoRecursive is great. I highly recommend other software developers check it out.

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

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have we gotten to the point where "bad for Facebook" ~= "good for society"? It's both a good indicator for progress and a sad place to be as a community.

...Wait, so you thought there was ever a point when "good for Facebook" == "good for society"? IMO "bad for Facebook" ~= "good for society" has always been true. It's not a "sad place to be as community", they are a corp and their bait-and-switch was expected ever since they got created, at least from the people who don't idolize corporations that is. It was extremely obvious they'll position themselves as helpful, p…

I'd say Facebook was on-the-whole good when it was limited to .edu users.

It had a purpose, it solved it better than previous options, and (critically!) it had a ceiling on total addressable userbase.

Once it metastisized into "extract maximum revenue from maximum number of people," I think its soul was lost to greed.

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

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have we gotten to the point where "bad for Facebook" ~= "good for society"? It's both a good indicator for progress and a sad place to be as a community.

...Wait, so you thought there was ever a point when "good for Facebook" == "good for society"? IMO "bad for Facebook" ~= "good for society" has always been true. It's not a "sad place to be as community", they are a corp and their bait-and-switch was expected ever since they got created, at least from the people who don't idolize corporations that is. It was extremely obvious they'll position themselves as helpful, p…

> ...Wait, so you thought there was ever a point when "good for Facebook" == "good for society"?

At least for a subset, 2005-2006, back when they had network pages. You'd gain access based on your email's domain, it has a shared calendar and worked as a planning location for everyone at the same college/university.

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

#45

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.

You could make ads relevant the old fashioned way: asking people what they are interested in or actually doing consumer research, instead of simply using their data they "give up" with a freemium service to make ads more "relevant". I used quotes on 'relevant' because I have never, ever, felt that advertising has suddenly become wildly more relevant or successfully targeted with the advent of social media or google.…

Agreed. I subscribe to a jazz magazine partly for the ads - I want to know about album releases and jazz festivals. Maybe FB has improved in the years since I deleted my account but I never received ads as relevant to my interests as what I see in magazines.

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

#46
Regulators should not procrastinate as this only prolongs the agony and the multifaceted damage. Damage to society as it has no protection against such hyperscale, algorithmic, private-data slurping intermediaries. Financial and economic damage as the entire tech sector, while predictably lured by the abnormal profitability of adtech, is long-term undermined by a business model that may actually have no right to exist in a decent, democratic society.

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

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Children become addicted to Snapchat streaks and their peers in school shun them socially based on whether they have big streaks with popular kids or not. It's like Lord of the Flies mixed with an episode of Black Mirror.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/lets-talk-tween/2017...

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

#48

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".

The headline here is the government of the United States has alleged that Meta has violated an existing privacy order severely enough that they should not be allowed to retain data on children at all, that they've lied to parents about what they are doing with their kids data, and that bugs or mistakenly applied product features had enabled kids to message with strangers despite promises that the product was not able to do that.

Interestingly enough, that is in fact basically what the first few paragraphs of the article say pretty clearly. How this kind of headline exists in a tech driven publication who knows right.

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

#49

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.

I visited a friend a couple of years ago. His son was about 3, and they put on a movie while he was eating dinner. The kid’s fork had food on it and it froze halfway to his mouth while he watched the movie. He held it there for half an hour or something, hovering in the air while his eyes were glued to the screen.

Do you think kids are smart enough to understand advertising? Or resist the temptations they bring?

Personally I think all advertising targeted at children should be banned completely. Little Jimmy doesn’t need to be bombarded with ads for Peppa Pig merch. Especially if those ads are targeted just for him. Gross!

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

#50

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.

Why do you feel this way for under 18? I think it’s particularly weird to target people who likely don’t have disposable income and that income should be influenced through targeted advertising that’s trying to not only to cause you to shift your spending but also on increasing your overall spend, usually on useless shit you don’t actually need and scams.

I would in fact encourage this go the other way and ads become more highly regulated/banned outright because mass propaganda feels unhealthy but this might crash our economy and the economics of the internet considering how so many business plans and large amounts of revenue in large businesses don’t work without that (and all that would be also politically infeasible / and the US’s free speech amendment might prevent it in America so it would have to come out of the EU and Canada first). It would be offset by businesses running more cheaply but I suspect that’s not much compared to a potentially reduced amount of income overall from consumers on “frivolous shit they don’t need”.

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