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Facebook retracted Zuckerberg’s messages from recipients’ inboxes

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Re: Facebook retracted Zuckerberg’s messages from recipients’ inboxes

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We should also be asking ourselves whether an organization that has the power to be so influential in the destinies of nations should be run by executives who see every issue as a PR issue to be dealt with, rather than ones that should teach them fundamental lessons. That's an extremely insightful statement but unfortunately also describes the DNC and RNC, which are already in control of the US.

Yes, as citizens we should do as much as possible to diminish their power. I've posted lots of comments about removing parties from the ballot process. Let them endorse a candidate, whatever, but private organizations shouldn't have any direct role in determining which names appear on ballots.

My personal take:

We the people should stand up and say, "I will never again vote for someone who doesn't run their campaign solely on public funding."

Who gets public funding? Anyone with X signatures, where X is relatively small.

Having our politicians spend almost all of their time fund-raising, and designing their campaigns and message around improving their fund-raising, is just destroying us.

Re: Facebook retracted Zuckerberg’s messages from recipients’ inboxes

#102
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I only count two seats which are not either (D) or (R). I’d say the DNC and RNC still matter quite a bit for these elections.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/4/17/1653154/-DNC-DCCC... The DCCC handles House elections and is nothing to do with the DNC. DSCC is the same for the Senate.

I would note that the DCCC and DSCC primarily support (or don't) Democratic candidates after the primary. Unlike the DNC, they do not usually play a role in candidate selection. They also don't really try to influence policy; they usually support candidates where they believe that their extra help will make a difference, and provide less support in extremely safe or totally dead races, and not based on how "good" of a Democrat the candidate is.

Re: Facebook retracted Zuckerberg’s messages from recipients’ inboxes

#104

I think it's clear from nearly a decade's worth of Facebook's trysts with privacy issues that it is a company that doesn't have a fundamental stance that's in favor of user privacy. Over and over again it has either intentionally built features that disregard privacy, or put in wrong defaults, or simply brushed off criticisms when others have misused Facebook. At this point we should be asking ourselves why we expect…

All I need is a better chat app, that Facebook won't buy. I can now text, voice record, send photos/selfies and video messages easily to my social circles. Connecting to second degree connections is fast and everyone I know has an account. I want to leave Facebook but I can't give up such an amazing chat experience that keeps me connected to my family and close friends. Even if I got my immediate family to use a diff…

I'm pretty sure what we all need is a better chat protocol, and multiple apps that implement it.

Re: Facebook retracted Zuckerberg’s messages from recipients’ inboxes

#105
post #28
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone can controls who can send them friend requests.

Most users can only set it as restrictive as "friends of friends", but if you have 10k+ followers or are verified then you can restrict it further.

Which frankly makes a lot of sense!

Building products is all about finding the right balances...an engineers mind often wants to expose all possible options to users, just because they can.

But I have never seen that work with users at scale...you need to curate, only give people the controls they absolutely need

Re: Facebook retracted Zuckerberg’s messages from recipients’ inboxes

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the contrary, everyone's willingness to accept this kind of behavior as normal indicates how far the Overton window has moved when it comes to the trustworthiness of our digital services. We need a collective effort to shift things back where they belong.

I disagree, privacy-conscious people have been warning that Facebook has been doing these things since forever, so people (especially here on HN) can't claim that they didn't know these things were going on. This is just the same old story: people being upset about the consequences of what they were warned about many many times.

I feel like you're both right though. We can't claim we didn't know, but the fact that we accept this en masse is concerning.

Re: Facebook retracted Zuckerberg’s messages from recipients’ inboxes

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I think they've pretty much used up their plausible deniability quota for the year, or decade...

Facebook, however, has a massive codebase. Their app is easily one of the biggest Android apps, in fact it's so huge they repeatedly (?) had to hack the Android runtime environment to allow it to run. Their backend and frontend code is likely also a huge monster. In addition they're doing ML/AI stuff which is even harder to debug.

You’re implying their ML/AI interefered with Mark’/ dislike button? Bit of a stretch.

Re: Facebook retracted Zuckerberg’s messages from recipients’ inboxes

#108
The basic endpoint of Facebook and Google whatever their stated objectives is to build detailed long term profiles of every individual, like the stasi or any totalitarian state.

This appetite for user data is so great simply tracking location and content across devices is not enough. Here is Facebook trying to do deals with hospitals to access all their patient data [1]

It's easy to see where this goes and how encompassing it becomes. People in the ad ecosystem will hand wave, diminish and deny but that's just self interest. For wider society the effect is sinister.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/05/facebook-building-8-explored...

Re: Facebook retracted Zuckerberg’s messages from recipients’ inboxes

#109
post #25

I recently saw the name @Mat available on instagram, I registered it. Twice. Both times the name was taken from me by a Facebook employee and eventually given to this Mat Henley guy from Uber. Screenshots of Facebook staff forcefully resetting the account names: https://i.succ.in/WuwuV1IH.png https://i.succ.in/WuMMtKTr.png (The revert button does nothing, just offers to change your password) It seems like FB employee…

Whoa!!! This sounds nefarious and also highly problematic. If employees can arbitrarily change names, how can anyone trust that they wouldn’t be able to change entire conversations, posts, media, etc., and shame someone (at best) or implicate someone as involved in a heinous crime or plotting one? It’s so bizarre if these are possible and have no oversight, policies and punishments.

Re: Facebook retracted Zuckerberg’s messages from recipients’ inboxes

#110
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I disagree that specific regulatory oversight is needed. - and - > If we want privacy to be respected we need a right to privacy law. You're almost disagreeing with yourself unless you see a significant difference between regulatory oversight and privacy laws. Both reflect government authority over Facebook (etc.) to protect its citizens. Myself, I would be happy with either option. We have neither now.

I don't always want privacy though. Is privacy at odds with accountability? We were talking about how disclosing salary and compensation information for everyone would help everyone in the long run and some people objected saying they want privacy. We have a lot of information that some people know but most do not. We have to think carefully what is private and what isn't. For example, your employer knows how much th…

> We were talking about how disclosing salary and compensation information for everyone would help everyone in the long run and some people objected saying they want privacy.

> For example, your employer knows how much they pay you. I say it isn't private.

It's also likely that your employer has shared your salary with other employers, so when you interview for a new job they know how much you're currently making without having to ask. For an example, see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_Number

http://acceptance.theworknumber.com/Employees/DataReport/

I requested my report recently, and it had the last 5 years of my salary history, updated monthly.

Salary data isn't private, because everyone who can use it against you already has access.

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