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Facebook Expects to Be Fined Up to $5B by FTC Over Privacy Issues

nytimes.com

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Re: Facebook Expects to Be Fined Up to $5B by FTC Over Privacy Issues

#151

Post by scotchmi_st »

remarkEon wrote: post #149
scotchmi_st wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to contradict your overall sentiment, but people often focus on intention with these issues. I think that's wrong. Like, if someone treads dog poo into my house on their shoes, it doesn't really matter if they did it by mistake, or spent ages walking around town trying to find some dog poo to step in before coming to my house; the effect is that there is now dog poo on my carpet. We need to be more dispassionate…

> which can probably only be mitigated by breaking it up. I think about this a lot with regard to Big Tech. For some companies it looks easy and obvious (e.g., Amazon spins off AWS). For Facebook is it really as obvious as "spin off Instagram"? I'm not really convinced of that. It seems like their power is so ingrained in Facebook itself that it's not immediately obvious what splicing off Instagram would do. What wou…

Honestly I can't say if it's definitely the right course of action, although in the last few years there have been reports of millions of 16-35 year-old Americans leaving Facebook, only to move to Instagram. I do think the ability of these companies to buy their nearest rivals is an antitrust issue that needs addressing, for the health of this relatively new market, if nothing else.

Re: Facebook Expects to Be Fined Up to $5B by FTC Over Privacy Issues

#152

Post by robbrown451 »

slg wrote: post #125
scotchmi_st wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to contradict your overall sentiment, but people often focus on intention with these issues. I think that's wrong. Like, if someone treads dog poo into my house on their shoes, it doesn't really matter if they did it by mistake, or spent ages walking around town trying to find some dog poo to step in before coming to my house; the effect is that there is now dog poo on my carpet. We need to be more dispassionate…

Words like malice and evil require intent. If we don't want the conversation to be about intent, we should use words like amoral. Facebook isn't actively trying to harm their customers, they simply don't care about them. That is amoral not evil.

Evil and amoral lie on a spectrum (with things like "altruistic" and "noble" on the other end).

Trying to fit things into neat little boxes so you can apply words to them isn't particularly helpful. What Facebook is doing is some form of wrong. They aren't murdering children, but still, what they are doing is not good and they are doing it at a massive scale, so the harm is multiplied.

Re: Facebook Expects to Be Fined Up to $5B by FTC Over Privacy Issues

#153

Post by oneepic »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #23

Seems like they should add another 0 to the fine after the recent hat trick: 1) Prompting users to give Facebook their email passwords.[0] 2) Using that email access to "inadvertently" upload the information of their email contacts.[1] 3) Storing said passwords and others in plaintext. [2] It's pretty impressive that a company could do something so brazenly malevolent and be confident that they will escape with no mo…

If I understand this right, #3 happened and was (allegedly) resolved before #1 and #2 happened, so that's not a fair shake. #1 and #2 are still valid points.

Re: Facebook Expects to Be Fined Up to $5B by FTC Over Privacy Issues

#155

Post by joering2 »

Great news! Now that investors know how much the bank robbers have to return as a form of punishment, they are on their way to the next bank. Stock is up breaking $200 after hours, and we will see you all +40% up in few years at the next "punishment pit stop".

Re: Facebook Expects to Be Fined Up to $5B by FTC Over Privacy Issues

#156

Post by robbrown451 »

They should take that $5 billion and use it to fund an alternative to Facebook.

(and one that is smart as to how to approach it, given Facebook's network monopoly. I.e. it should allow you to "use Facebook" in the same way I "use Yahoo mail" when I communicate with a Yahoo mail user from my Gmail account)

Re: Facebook Expects to Be Fined Up to $5B by FTC Over Privacy Issues

#157

Post by _cs2017_ »

monsieurbanana wrote: post #42
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #23

Seems like they should add another 0 to the fine after the recent hat trick: 1) Prompting users to give Facebook their email passwords.[0] 2) Using that email access to "inadvertently" upload the information of their email contacts.[1] 3) Storing said passwords and others in plaintext. [2] It's pretty impressive that a company could do something so brazenly malevolent and be confident that they will escape with no mo…

I'm ashamed to say that up until now, when I saw Facebook (or similar) acting evil I thought about the quote, "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity". Well, fuck that and fuck me, those people are not idiots, they're criminals.

Maybe I misread, but none of the articles linked above suggest any malicious intent. Could you clarify what specifically you're referring to?

Re: Facebook Expects to Be Fined Up to $5B by FTC Over Privacy Issues

#159

Post by slg »

tkxxx7 wrote: post #145
slg wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That isn't evil. You wouldn't call a hurricane or a fire evil. You wouldn't call a person who kills someone in a no fault car accident evil. Evil isn't about results. It is about intent and motive. You can call Facebook a number of things from amoral to negligent or even criminal, but once you start talking about evilness you have to start judging their intentions and motives.

> That isn't evil. You wouldn't call a hurricane or a fire evil. You wouldn't call a person who kills someone in a no fault car accident evil. All of these things are no one's fault. > Evil isn't about results. It is about intent and motive. Exactly. Prioritizing profit at the cost of customers' well-being is a deliberate decision; if not, seeing that customers are harmed by your own, continued actions and doing noth…

I think that is just too broad of a definition for evil. According to that, everyone who isn't carbon neutral would be evil. We are worsening climate change through our "own, continued actions and doing nothing to change it". And if we are all evil then evilness has no real meaning.
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