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

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

#231

Post by likpok »

cowpig wrote: post #206
shubhamjain wrote: post #101

It seems beside the "the bug bounty is far less than it would have sold for in the dark market" another meme has taken hold of HN. No matter how significant the fine is, there always be people clamoring how trivial it is compared to their revenues. It could have been $10B and you would hear the same thing. The only fine, then, worth slapping is one that bankrupts the entire company. Facebook made ~$7B net income in 2…

Facebook earned about $172 billion since 2013. Do you think facebook would have earned $167 billion while behaving legally? What about ethically? How much do you think Facebook would have earned if it acted responsibly? Once you add punitive damages, I don't understand how you could possibly think $5 billion is anything less than an order of magnitude off.

The relevant privacy issues (Cambridge Analytica) did almost nothing for facebook. The core product, sharing information with apps so they could be social, was a bad idea and never took off. It was shuttered in 2014 (a little bit after Kogan made his app and extracted a bunch of data). So of that 172B in revenue, basically none of it came about as a result of the product that Cambridge Analytica (and others) used.

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

#232

Post by traek »

cowpig wrote: post #206
shubhamjain wrote: post #101

It seems beside the "the bug bounty is far less than it would have sold for in the dark market" another meme has taken hold of HN. No matter how significant the fine is, there always be people clamoring how trivial it is compared to their revenues. It could have been $10B and you would hear the same thing. The only fine, then, worth slapping is one that bankrupts the entire company. Facebook made ~$7B net income in 2…

Facebook earned about $172 billion since 2013. Do you think facebook would have earned $167 billion while behaving legally? What about ethically? How much do you think Facebook would have earned if it acted responsibly? Once you add punitive damages, I don't understand how you could possibly think $5 billion is anything less than an order of magnitude off.

> Facebook earned about $172 billion since 2013.

No, they didn't, it's around $56.3 billion [0].

[0] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/FB/facebook/net-in...

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

#233

Post by traek »

djakjxnanjak wrote: post #224
cowpig wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook earned about $172 billion since 2013. Do you think facebook would have earned $167 billion while behaving legally? What about ethically? How much do you think Facebook would have earned if it acted responsibly? Once you add punitive damages, I don't understand how you could possibly think $5 billion is anything less than an order of magnitude off.

This fine is not for everything unethical Facebook ever did. This fine is for Facebook giving data to Cambridge Analytica. I don’t think Facebook got paid for that at all. When trying to google around for what people paid CA for the use of the data, I found numbers in the hundreds of thousands. So in fact, Facebook is paying billions because they made a bad decision when choosing to grant access to data for research.…

> Facebook is paying billions because they made a bad decision when choosing to grant access to data for research

For clarity, Facebook didn't "choose to grant access to data" specifically to Cambridge Analytica. It used to be the case that Facebook's API would let the client app see all the information a FB user could see once they authorized it, including information about their friends. That's what CA exploited.

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

#234

Post by pdonis »

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.

> "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"

My response to that quote is, to paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke: "Sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice."

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

#235

Post by pdonis »

scotchmi_st wrote: post #112
monsieurbanana wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

> 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

Yes, but if someone treads dog poo into your house every day for a year, their repeated claims that it was a mistake every time are not going to carry as much weight. With FB we're not talking about a single incident of treading dog poo; we're talking about a repeated pattern of getting dog poo all over the place.

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

#236

Post by jcims »

asutekku wrote: post #211
jcims wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, a capitalist system is going to reflect the moral framework of the participants. The participant here is the stock market, and its moral framework is based on economic growth and profit for shareholders. In that regard this was a good outcome and, as a result, is rewarded.

Which means it has no morality no matter how you try to twist it.

Sure, no intrinsic morality...more of a passthrough.

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

#238

Post by pdonis »

slg wrote: post #139
tkxxx7 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Facebook isn't actively trying to harm their customers, they simply don't care about them. That is amoral not evil. Don't bend yourself out of shape. Actively, happily ignoring the evil you have caused and continue to cause is evil.

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.

> You wouldn't call a hurricane or a fire evil.

No, but you would call it evil if someone repeatedly built rickety buildings in a hurricane zone or built structures out of dry wood and paper next to a forest at high risk for a forest fire, and then acted like they had no responsibility when the buildings repeatedly got destroyed by fires and hurricanes and people's personal property got lost forever or looted in the resulting disorder.

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

#239

Post by dredmorbius »

scotchmi_st wrote: post #112
monsieurbanana wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

actus reaus vs. mens rea.

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

#240

Post by Maximus9000 »

bhandziuk wrote: post #171
killyp wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that I completely disagree with you, but lets not pretend that leaking SSN is equivalent to possibly leaking emails and passwords. One of those is far more important than the others. There was also tons of evidence of insider trading by Equifax execs. If anything the Equifax stuff proved to me that the American public doesn't care about privacy and so neither should investors.

Which one are you saying is more sensitive: my ssn or my email password?

Maybe real dollar values will help this discussion:

https://www.bankrate.com/finance/credit/what-your-identity-i...

And gmail credentials:

https://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2013-07/how-much-y...

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