21–30 of 201 posts
It's well within their rights as a private company, right? We need to have a serious discussion about the power these FAANGs are exerting and we need to stop making excuses for them.
Is it within the rights of a company to dictate what software I have installed on my personal machine? If Facebook wants to ban every account using the software that is within their rights, but they don't get a say in what I have installed.
I don't understand what the researchers violated - it looks like they didn't sign the FB's EULA, nor did they perform anything resembling CFAA violation. It is the FB users who signed the EULA and use "unapproved" user-agent to access FB services and to voluntarily share the data (isn't FB a sharing platform btw?) in "unapproved" way. Thus FB should go after the real violators - their users. I wonder why FB didn't do…
Facebook says it's a privacy issue. So it doesn't make sense to go after individual users - users can violate their own privacy if they really want - but it might make sense to go after the researchers if Facebook thinks they're tricking people into giving up more privacy than they expect. (I hate to sound like a broken record, because this comes up truly constantly, but the Cambridge Analytica scandal was caused by…
Large alliances spanning countries and multiple institutions, hundreds of researchers working in tandem. Thats the best way to tame a beast this large.
Same goes for regulators/legal strategies/journalism etc. Associations and alliances are key.
It's well within their rights as a private company, right? We need to have a serious discussion about the power these FAANGs are exerting and we need to stop making excuses for them.
"Government is that which governs" Who governs information and speech online? Washington DC or Silicon Valley?
It's well within their rights as a private company, right? We need to have a serious discussion about the power these FAANGs are exerting and we need to stop making excuses for them.
In my opinion you don't really need to do the NYU study. Intellectually honestly, many political ads will disproportionately appear in front of users with different demographics than their census tracts, regardless of their targeting parameters. In my experience many of the demographics of users in many software products are arbitrary, telling you nothing about the content and much more about acquisition channels and technology usage patterns at a particular point in time.
As far as I know, Facebook allows some targeting parameters for political ads. So they should publish how often those targeting parameters are selected. Great, advocate for that.
Intellectually honestly, that will conclusively show that ad buyers have a wide diversity of targeting parameters that, in aggregate, represent a complex mix of objectives oftentimes only adjacent to a specific election. Almost certainly Facebook already looked at this and found that geography, gender, age and proxies for user's race (like "multicultural affinity") are among the top choices, and that looks bad, even though it may be an important part of all ads targeted anywhere.
Is NYU's study going to have enough power to measure targeting in an intellectually honest way? They can certainly write something descriptive.
That descriptive, "Well here are some ads we looked at, and some of them disproportionately appeared in front of users with e.g. this ethnicity more often than others, which we editorially chose" - I can see how that is a lose-lose for Facebook.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, the FAANGs are very close to being public utilities, and therefore deserve a special treatment.
I see this repeated often, but it's totally incorrect, they do not resemble utilities at all, not even a little bit. I think everyone agrees these companies need more regulation, but the idea that they are in any way comparable to utilities is absurd.
It's well within their rights as a private company, right? We need to have a serious discussion about the power these FAANGs are exerting and we need to stop making excuses for them.
Yes, the FAANGs are very close to being public utilities, and therefore deserve a special treatment.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see this repeated often, but it's totally incorrect, they do not resemble utilities at all, not even a little bit. I think everyone agrees these companies need more regulation, but the idea that they are in any way comparable to utilities is absurd.
How so?
However, for the sake of discussion, I'll start out with the fact that a privately owned website is not an example of shared public infrastructure. Think water, electricity and other basic staples of civilization... Facebook is not an example of that.
Unbelievable. So now they want to prevent people from helping others share what appears on their computer screens? And they have the face to even WRITE IT! Just say no.
Unbelievable. So now they want to prevent people from helping others share what appears on their computer screens? And they have the face to even WRITE IT! Just say no.
"Please don't fulminate."
"Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized."