"Six4Three lodged its original case in 2015 shortly after Facebook removed developers’ access to friends’ data. The company said it had invested $250,000 in developing an app called Pikinis that filtered users’ friends photos to find any of them in swimwear. Its launch was met with controversy." So basically this company tried to do something creepy and invasive with users' data, were stopped by Facebook, and now the…
I don't care about Six4Three or their motives; I care about Facebook and privacy. It might be unfair to Facebook but from the little I know about their business practices, they hardly have clean hands or deserve much sympathy. > $250,000 That doesn't sound like much for a years-long lawsuit against a major company with deep pockets; unless they are suing for far more, there won't be much, if any, net profit even if t…
Honestly it sounds like a developer (or group of developers) through together an app that appeals to creepers and they felt arbitrarily singled out for creating a blatantly creepy app whereas the ones that quietly monetize the same data (via data brokers or something to that effect) get a free pass.
Ordinarily, a developer would bugger off but they (presumably) have alt-right activist leanings and they're trying to make a mountain out of a molehill. Check 4chan on any day and there will be "FB/IG creep" threads where users anonymously upload photos of their female Facebook and Instagram friends in skimpy/swimwear clothing.
Only tangentially related, but the second image in the article [1] — the one with all the cameras right in Zuckerberg's face — is crazy. What a strange and surreal experience that must be.
In this particular article, "weaponise" doesn't mean private data as a weapon against the users (like Richard Stallman critiques of Facebook[1]). Instead, the journalists and the lawsuit are talking about desirable user data as a weapon against the API developers . The article has interwoven 2 themes in a disjointed way and I had to read it several times to separate the components of the dispute. The 1st theme is tha…
"Editorial control" as justification for selective access is interesting, and seems in tension with their need to remain considered a "platform" instead of a publication. (They aren't a platform; utility surplus from user participation doesn't flow to the users.) > wrote an app to find photos of friends in bikinis [....] Facebook later pulled the rug out from under them In this case, I think I'm just rooting for inju…
I agree with Bill Gates' description of platforms as companies which provide tools which are used by other entities to generate more economic value than the value of the owners of those tools. How you measure said economic value is another story and one I am grappling with. And I think social media companies are ultimately aggregators, not platforms. What I think should come out of any regulation is an obligation for aggregators at a certain scale to 1) stop calling themselves neutral platforms, because that's not accurate, 2) be required to disclose in verifiable, auditable detail how they are prioritizing content from an algorithmic perspective, how they are compensating generators of both paid and organic content from a both monetary and "in app currency" perspective (likes, etc), and 3) when they do exercise their editorial judgment and kick 3rd party apps off their APIs, explain how and why they came to such a judgment, not in a storytelling kind of way, but in a parametric (they hit this number, so we took action) kind of way. And if there is a human in the loop, that human needs to have certain competencies, which would resemble professionalism like that of lawyers and doctors. These three requirements would have to be agreed upon like international standards of a sort. Now, I am aware that everything I am requesting is also likely to be infected by 'bureacracy' and that is something I'm not sure I have a way to solve for.
I don't care about Six4Three or their motives; I care about Facebook and privacy. It might be unfair to Facebook but from the little I know about their business practices, they hardly have clean hands or deserve much sympathy. > $250,000 That doesn't sound like much for a years-long lawsuit against a major company with deep pockets; unless they are suing for far more, there won't be much, if any, net profit even if t…
Honestly it sounds like a developer (or group of developers) through together an app that appeals to creepers and they felt arbitrarily singled out for creating a blatantly creepy app whereas the ones that quietly monetize the same data (via data brokers or something to that effect) get a free pass. Ordinarily, a developer would bugger off but they (presumably) have alt-right activist leanings and they're trying to m…
What is alt-right? I thought it was people who don't like immigration. Seems to have nothing to do with this.
Gothic High Tech: Consciously weaponized bullshit.
Gollumization: The impoverishment of a system through ephmeralization and weaponized attention.
Bullshit:
1. Data (often a firehose) produced by someone who is indifferent to the truth or falsity of what is being said.
2. Data that appears to contain more information than it actually does.
3. Noise randomly tagged with truth-values to give it apparent legibility.
4. Non-requisite variety.
Legibility: the apparent absence of noise in data.
Data: Any collection of information, bullshit and noise.
Information:
Data that has been judged to be true or false through comparison with observed reality at a given point in time.
Honestly it sounds like a developer (or group of developers) through together an app that appeals to creepers and they felt arbitrarily singled out for creating a blatantly creepy app whereas the ones that quietly monetize the same data (via data brokers or something to that effect) get a free pass. Ordinarily, a developer would bugger off but they (presumably) have alt-right activist leanings and they're trying to m…
What is alt-right? I thought it was people who don't like immigration. Seems to have nothing to do with this. Edit: Just read up on the term. It's meaningless.
Exactly. Not to start a whole thing, but almost anytime you read alt-right, in context it means “person I don’t like the internet said exists”.
In this particular article, "weaponise" doesn't mean private data as a weapon against the users (like Richard Stallman critiques of Facebook[1]). Instead, the journalists and the lawsuit are talking about desirable user data as a weapon against the API developers . The article has interwoven 2 themes in a disjointed way and I had to read it several times to separate the components of the dispute. The 1st theme is tha…
> The 2nd theme that's mentioned in passing is the Six4Three bikini API dispute as a forensic discovery into how the Cambridge Analytica abuse was deliberately engineered into the platform in 2011 and was approved by Facebook senior management. I think this is the more interesting angle that the Guardian writers should have focused more text on.
Is that intentional aspect of the lawsuit or just a side-effect? It would be interesting if a privacy advocate gained control of a defunct entity with standing to sue Facebook over data-related dispute like this, and used discovery to dig into Facebook's privacy practices.
"Six4Three lodged its original case in 2015 shortly after Facebook removed developers’ access to friends’ data. The company said it had invested $250,000 in developing an app called Pikinis that filtered users’ friends photos to find any of them in swimwear. Its launch was met with controversy." So basically this company tried to do something creepy and invasive with users' data, were stopped by Facebook, and now the…
250k????? I bet their engineer to manager ratio was quite low.