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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

#51
post #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 fea…

Not a good framing. The government is not static to be loved or hated. It is rather like a cyborg who has behavior modifications and parts added and removed over time. It's a mess and a kludge and it does things we don't like, does contradictory things, because of how we change it to suit ourselves.

When the cyborg does something I like, I am happy and say "good cyborg, nice cyborg". I do not call the cyborg a friend, but rather I approve its current behavior. That is what democracy is: it's living with a cyborg that you don't fully control. It's not a friend, its not an enemy, its vast complex slow machine that is a thing we put up with because it's better than nothing.

The primary alternative is a coherent cyborg fully owned and operated by one person. Humans are always tempted by this vision of a government that is finally all good, all friend. Yet we have learned time and again that this almost always is even greater misery. (The exception is when the scale is smaller and the autocrat is capable and the need is immediate and finite. Singapore's Lee Kwan Yew comes to mind. Startup leaders can also fall in this category.)

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

#52
post #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.

If I trained an AI on what you said, it couldn't tell me how you feel. Category error.

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

#53

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".

I thought corporations are considered people in US.

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

#56

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.

We all very much are. This is the entire business model of Google and Meta

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

#57

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…

I wonder if it kind of sucks to recognize that your job in FOSS is just a token gesture. Does FB really care about React’s contribution to the community? Or is it just happy to pay a few salaries to look good?

FB actively uses it, so it's a win win isn't it?

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

#58

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".

I thought corporations are considered people in US.

Not emotionally.

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

#59

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…

I wonder if it kind of sucks to recognize that your job in FOSS is just a token gesture. Does FB really care about React’s contribution to the community? Or is it just happy to pay a few salaries to look good?

I don’t think it’s even a token gesture. Someone (the author) just cared enough to do the paperwork and set up the meetings + it couldn’t be monetized in a meaningful way. Most companies are mundane boring places.

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

#60

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".

> How can a corporation be furious?

In the same way that an agency can propose: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synecdoche

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