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Facebook’s Surveillance Machine

nytimes.com

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Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine

#101

Post by gotofritz »

roadbeats wrote: post #42
hellofunk wrote: post #31

I wish quite badly that the benefit of deactivating FB would outweigh the inconvenience, but FB has become such a mainstay that I'd lose touch with lots of people I really have no other way of contacting. I could say "good riddance," if there is no other way to contact them then perhaps they are not important enough to my life, but that's just not true. Or what about all the local forums (FB groups) in my city that h…

What is the point of staying in contact only in Facebook ? If someone is important for me, I'd be in contact with them in real life or another platform. Also, lots of people seem to be unaware of that you can delete your Facebook account. They don't have a link to the delete page from settings menu though. It's here: https://facebook.com/account/delete

This is one of those 'soooo obvious but untrue' statements

I use it to keep in touch with far away or unimportant people. Second degree aunts, ex schoolmates, etc. Without FB it's a nightmare keeping in touch the few times I want to (people change email addresses all the time). Also, many groups are useful

Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine

#102

Post by titzer »

titzer wrote: post #36

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” ― Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked Facebook and Google are not evil. They are made up of ordinary people with ordinary likes, dislikes, biases, histories, failings. Those people don't have to be evil or wrong or even misguided to give rise to this situation. No matter how much th…

Didn't really expect downvotes. Perhaps it wasn't entirely clear from what I wrote, but what I meant was:

Facebook and Google don't necessarily have to be evil for this to happen.

My point that this is a consequence of economics, and statistically speaking, no matter how nice of people you put in these positions, they are going to tend towards making more money. Surveillance makes money. So surveillance is what you get.

That is orthogonal to the question of whether they actually ARE evil.

Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine

#103

Post by nhebb »

rovek wrote: post #52
wepple wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think there was any exploit. My understanding is that a third-party app asked for access, and people gave consent, and CA mined data. I’m the last person you’d see defending FB, but this just seems like the same thing everyone has been doing on FB as a platform since FarmVille launched years ago?

A major part of Facebook's culpability here is that they knew for 2 years that tens of millions of their users were being profiled as part of a political propaganda war on their platform and their response was practically nothing. Edit: FB also knew the data was collected under an academic license and was being processed, outside that license, for financial gain.

2 years? Try 6. According to Obama campaign adviser Carol Davidsen, they farmed the data in 2012 with FB's knowledge:

From https://twitter.com/cld276/status/975565844632821760:

> "Facebook was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn’t stop us once they realized that was what we were doing."

> "They came to office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side."

Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine

#104

Post by notacoward »

anonu wrote: post #85
hellofunk wrote: post #31

I wish quite badly that the benefit of deactivating FB would outweigh the inconvenience, but FB has become such a mainstay that I'd lose touch with lots of people I really have no other way of contacting. I could say "good riddance," if there is no other way to contact them then perhaps they are not important enough to my life, but that's just not true. Or what about all the local forums (FB groups) in my city that h…

What happened to good ol' emails? Serious question... Can't you organize amongst friends with emails? I hate to suggest Slack as well... But there are alternatives is the point... What about Meetup.com for bigger groups?

Any UX expert can tell you that every little bit of friction counts. I see that mentioned or assumed every day here on HN, but somehow in discussions about using vs. abandoning Facebook it gets thrown out the window. I might be comfortable with email, you might be comfortable with Slack, but my uncle or my high-school friend who's a massage therapist might not be. Also, they and a couple of dozen other older, younger, or less tech-savvy friends are already on Facebook and comfortable doing things there. Getting them to switch to a different platform is a hard sell even if it's more convenient, and if it's even marginally less convenient then forget it. Ease of use and network effects are both real things.

Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine

#106

Post by IshKebab »

Azeralthefallen wrote: post #35

Maybe i am misunderstanding something about this whole issue, but was there an exploit or a bug that allowed this to happen on Facebooks end? I guess my confusion is that whenever someone grants third party access to your facebook, you can query that users list of friends (which i have seen used for things like games and high scores, etc). But you didn't get the full friends profile, instead you got a small subset of…

It used to be that you could get more information than just the friends list but that hasn't been the case since 2015:

https://techcrunch.com/2015/04/28/facebook-api-shut-down/

Perhaps the academic involved was given special access under the condition that he didn't give the data to any third parties, and he did.

Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine

#107

Post by gotofritz »

This is good because it might make people question what they read on FB, but the reality is that (a) the whole digital economy is based on that. FB are no better than Google or Apple (who know where you are, right now!) or a miriad others (b) FB serves some purposes (my old aunt wouldn't be able to work out email, but FB is easy enough for her, for example) and (c) it seems that the trend is away from 'public' platforms like FB and towards non publicly accessible groups such as WhatsApp groups (also owned by FB..) or Telegram or Snapchat etc, so an anti-FB backlash may not achieve much in terms of a "healthier public discourse"

Also, it all depends on how you use it. I subscribe to a lot of food based groups and art events groups, and share next to nothing about what I do. OK, some AI can infer that if I like Lebanese AND Mexican I am probably left leaning. OK, now what? What are they going to do with that info?

Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine

#108

Post by gregknicholson »

jackstraw14 wrote: post #90
3chelon wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're absolutely right we should all leave FB. It's the only way to make them change. I've been seriously considering it for a while - I'd lose some exposure in my hobby groups, and my mother would miss the kids' photo updates, but I could just about live with that.

If they announced a totally different business model, you would trust them and go back? I’m just asking because that’s an interesting thought, making Facebook change. How can you trust them enough after quitting in protest? If we expect to have any success, people need to remove this idea that they need social media in their lives. All this is hypothetical too — last I checked Facebook brought in more cash than the 1…

> people need to remove this idea that they need social media in their lives

People need to remove the idea that they need social media companies in their social media.

Social media itself is fine. The problem is service providers whose interests aren't aligned with their users.

Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine

#109

Post by dictum »

rufugee wrote: post #105

They collect browser histories? Shouldn't that technically be impossible unless they're using their ad partners across multiple sites?

No need for ad partners; their share button scripts are enough for this task. (Google Analytics is the leader on this technique, compounded by secondary tracking inside Google search results, but FB is one of the leading third-party request destinations in the web)

Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine

#110

Post by rovek »

prepend wrote: post #91
rovek wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A major part of Facebook's culpability here is that they knew for 2 years that tens of millions of their users were being profiled as part of a political propaganda war on their platform and their response was practically nothing. Edit: FB also knew the data was collected under an academic license and was being processed, outside that license, for financial gain.

Is political propaganda against their TOS? I don’t like it, but I don’t like all the other propaganda (re “ads”). I don’t see how this is worse than a targeted ad trying to get me to invest with Schwab. Also a pretty coordinated campaign. Or just Doubleclick in general. This comes down to people wanting to limit some ads. There are already laws for political ads. Should we change them? I think they currently apply to…

This prompted me to research UK political advertising regulations, or rather the fact that there are none at all for non-broadcast content. That is insane.
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