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Washington Post's Privacy Tip: Stop Using Chrome, Delete Meta Apps (and Yandex)

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Re: Washington Post's Privacy Tip: Stop Using Chrome, Delete Meta Apps (and Yandex)

#171

Post by thatguy0900 »

capyba wrote: post #162

I don’t know anyone that works at Meta, so I’m hoping that someone here could answer this for me- What makes employees there feel good (or at least okay) about doing stuff like this? You're spying on people, no? Surveilling ordinary people, not enemy combatants or foreign militaries? Perhaps a friend of a friend or even a family member? This kind of thing is so creepy and disturbing to me, not that it’s anything new…

History suggests there is no shortage of people who will throw all semblance of morality away as long as they are surrounded by people who they believe have done the same. I almost think the people who are not willing to cave in this way are the rare ones.

Re: Washington Post's Privacy Tip: Stop Using Chrome, Delete Meta Apps (and Yandex)

#172

Post by potamic »

capyba wrote: post #162

I don’t know anyone that works at Meta, so I’m hoping that someone here could answer this for me- What makes employees there feel good (or at least okay) about doing stuff like this? You're spying on people, no? Surveilling ordinary people, not enemy combatants or foreign militaries? Perhaps a friend of a friend or even a family member? This kind of thing is so creepy and disturbing to me, not that it’s anything new…

There are many industries which are inherently hostile to users, insurance, betting, marketing, etc. If you ask people if they feel good about enabling the kind of things these companies tend to do, you probably won't get an answer. I don't think Meta is an outlier here nor are they the only one. Even across other industries you will find many questionable practices in usual operations. If pushing the boundaries of ethics gives a business an advantage, you can guarantee that someone will be doing it, and eventually most will be doing it. It's simply the natural tendency of any system with competing entities. The question we should rather be asking is, how do we tweak the system. What can be done to disincentivize pushing the boundary like this?

Re: Washington Post's Privacy Tip: Stop Using Chrome, Delete Meta Apps (and Yandex)

#173

Post by throwaway290 »

jeffbee wrote: post #69

It's sort of interesting that Brave was not affected by this because they already blocked the technique used by the Yandex app. I wonder if Brave devs were aware of that specific abuse, or if they just thought that localhost traffic was distasteful categorically.

Firefox in strict mode should be unaffected?

Re: Washington Post's Privacy Tip: Stop Using Chrome, Delete Meta Apps (and Yandex)

#174

Post by whstl »

capyba wrote: post #162

I don’t know anyone that works at Meta, so I’m hoping that someone here could answer this for me- What makes employees there feel good (or at least okay) about doing stuff like this? You're spying on people, no? Surveilling ordinary people, not enemy combatants or foreign militaries? Perhaps a friend of a friend or even a family member? This kind of thing is so creepy and disturbing to me, not that it’s anything new…

The sad reality is that this behavior gets normalized in the name of making money.

For employees it gets normalized at the first signal that your livelihood might be affected if you don't comply.

As someone who's privacy conscious, it's an uphill battle to convince co-workers to actually follow laws instead of trying to find loopholes.

I've worked at places who collect every possible data point and distributes it willy nilly in Excel spreadsheets posted in Slack. I raised it to a CISO and the response was "all that information is available for everyone anyway via the interface". I know a German company requires you to "accept" data collection and processing in order to settle a debt. I reported this to their legal department which I personally knew a person and they said they'd "look into it ASAP" two years ago.

In the end people just roll along with it. I know this is unpopular, but the only forward I see way to prevent this from happening seems to be using courts and tightened legislation.

Re: Washington Post's Privacy Tip: Stop Using Chrome, Delete Meta Apps (and Yandex)

#177

Post by lurking_swe »

whstl wrote: post #174
capyba wrote: post #162

I don’t know anyone that works at Meta, so I’m hoping that someone here could answer this for me- What makes employees there feel good (or at least okay) about doing stuff like this? You're spying on people, no? Surveilling ordinary people, not enemy combatants or foreign militaries? Perhaps a friend of a friend or even a family member? This kind of thing is so creepy and disturbing to me, not that it’s anything new…

The sad reality is that this behavior gets normalized in the name of making money. For employees it gets normalized at the first signal that your livelihood might be affected if you don't comply. As someone who's privacy conscious, it's an uphill battle to convince co-workers to actually follow laws instead of trying to find loopholes. I've worked at places who collect every possible data point and distributes it wil…

[flagged]

Re: Washington Post's Privacy Tip: Stop Using Chrome, Delete Meta Apps (and Yandex)

#178

Post by godelski »

kb_dev wrote: post #167
capyba wrote: post #162

I don’t know anyone that works at Meta, so I’m hoping that someone here could answer this for me- What makes employees there feel good (or at least okay) about doing stuff like this? You're spying on people, no? Surveilling ordinary people, not enemy combatants or foreign militaries? Perhaps a friend of a friend or even a family member? This kind of thing is so creepy and disturbing to me, not that it’s anything new…

In principle, I think most people believe their morals would prevent them from working at a company like Meta. On the flip side, how much are morals worth if you have the opportunity to be financially free? There's also the opportunity to work on interesting problems. Anecdotally, of course, I know a Meta engineer at the L7 level (generally staff engineer in these large tech companies). He makes over seven figures a…

Are the people working on the interesting problems doing most of the spying?

I'm sure there's overlap like people working on AR scraping images of people's homes to build better models but they also do a ton of research where they use open datasets.

I'm curious what this distribution is.

I'm also curious what the answer is for just average programmers. Meta has like 70k employees. Surely a lot of them aren't doing interesting stuff

Re: Washington Post's Privacy Tip: Stop Using Chrome, Delete Meta Apps (and Yandex)

#179

Post by bloomca »

capyba wrote: post #162

I don’t know anyone that works at Meta, so I’m hoping that someone here could answer this for me- What makes employees there feel good (or at least okay) about doing stuff like this? You're spying on people, no? Surveilling ordinary people, not enemy combatants or foreign militaries? Perhaps a friend of a friend or even a family member? This kind of thing is so creepy and disturbing to me, not that it’s anything new…

Money, it's just business. I think every big corp is morally bankrupt (otherwise they wouldn't be big). There are some exceptions, of course, if a company found a sustainable way to monetize their output.

But the baseline is really bad.

Re: Washington Post's Privacy Tip: Stop Using Chrome, Delete Meta Apps (and Yandex)

#180

Post by righthand »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #55
bitpush wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Written by the same person who wrote Washington Post article. All very confusing.

MSN is all rehosted articles I believe. Several times I've searched major paper headlines to read the full story on MSN. No idea what kind of deal these places have with Microsoft.

MSN used to be this special variation of Internet Explorer on Windows during the early era of the internet. My grandmother used it and the rebranded browser was packaged with other software products (if I recall correctly, I could be conflating it with preinstalled trash back in the day). It had a different color theme and allowed you to log into your hotmail account. I think at one point it became an IE addon.

I remember it revolved around giving you the news and maybe even loading hotmail with a special ui button. I have a foggy memory of it, but this MSN forum thread confirms the MSN Explorer existed[0].

You could even build a personal home page of sorts with the weather.

[0] https://answers.msn.com/thread.aspx?threadid=2fa8c100-ed43-4...

Any ways it had a following of people who got their news and it still exists in some form today. I know the website msn.com always catered to news stories, but I don’t know if they were always reposted if they once had writers. I think it’s always been some sort of data harvesting/media credibility facade news-focused branch of Microsoft.

Here is a screenshot:

https://img.informer.com/screenshots/53/53675_1.jpg

From the screenshot it appears the news has always been reposted and FUD based. It probably worked well (for Microsoft) in the golden age of RSS.

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