Facebook Doesn’t Tell Users Everything It Really Knows About Them • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook Doesn’t Tell Users Everything It Really Knows About Them

#241

Post by rhizome » Fri, Dec 30, 2016, 6:05 PM UTC

harry8 wrote: post #124

thr0waway1239 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SoftGooFace: We can easily double your current salary. Engineer: Oh SoftGooFace: You don't have to worry about employment ever after Engineer: Oh Soft: We are so powerful, we can dump unwanted OS upgrades on people Goo: We are so powerful, people are terrified of linking to other sites Face: We are so powerful, even heads of state better watch out before criticizing us Engineer: Uh.. SoftGooFace: Every time someone m…

And yet they underpay and also use their lobbying muscle/money to change laws to keep engineering pay down. Note the sheer desperation to keep the pay secret so it doesn't turn into an auction for scarce resources for engineering talent the way it does with lawyers, bankers, MBA's. If you're in it fore the money don't work for facebrick.

Lobbying to keep pay down? To what does this refer?

Re: Facebook Doesn’t Tell Users Everything It Really Knows About Them

#242

Post by throwaway12145 » Fri, Dec 30, 2016, 6:11 PM UTC

bigmofo wrote: post #81

How do the data brokers know whether one shops at dollar stores? Who is leaking our inforamtion to the brokers? Is the store or the credit card company releasing information to a third party? Store gets the customer name from the credit card. Credit card company knows that a transaction took place at the dollar store. Any other possibilities?

Visa requires at least some of their banking/prepaid partners to periodically upload customer data to an Acxiom FTP site. It's considered a "compliance" ask.

Source: helped write a microservice for said FTP upload.

Re: Facebook Doesn’t Tell Users Everything It Really Knows About Them

#243

Post by throwaway12145 » Fri, Dec 30, 2016, 6:38 PM UTC

nxc18 wrote: post #69

bogomipz wrote: post #16

>"For instance, opting out of Oracle’s Datalogix, which provides about 350 types of data to Facebook according to our analysis, requires “sending a written request, along with a copy of government-issued identification” in postal mail to Oracle’s chief privacy officer." This is outrageous. Why is the onus on a user who never gave permission to a data broker in the first place? They deal in digitial domain when it com…

It isn't your data. It is their data about you, which is a very important distinction. Facebook and Oracle aren't the bad actors here, if you think there is a bad actor. The baddies are the people giving Oracle (and others) that data about you. (And now I have to hang my head in shame for saying something that sounds like it is a defense of Oracle. They're baddies for many, many other reasons, just not this one)

Some of those "baddies" you refer to are forced by contract to willingly upload that data and keep quiet about it. The penalties for breach of contract are severe; an entire company can go bankrupt overnight if they break the seal.

It's not black and white, I'm afraid. Those companies writing up the unfair contracts (Oracle, Visa, etc.) deserve a decent share of the blame, too.

Re: Facebook Doesn’t Tell Users Everything It Really Knows About Them

#244

Post by scalio » Fri, Dec 30, 2016, 9:09 PM UTC

closeparen wrote: post #158

api wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surveillance could indeed have many beneficial uses in a benevolent, voluntarist sort of society. Unfortunately we don't live there. The world is still largely run by warlords, narcissists, and sociopaths.

The "standard" counterargument here is that warlords, narcissists, and sociopaths can only operate effectively in private, and their capabilities would be severely limited in a world where secrets are hard to keep.

Why would the warlords, narcissists and sociopaths get rid of their own privacy? Zuckerberg seems very keen on preserving his...

Re: Facebook Doesn’t Tell Users Everything It Really Knows About Them

#245

Post by scalio » Fri, Dec 30, 2016, 9:35 PM UTC

morgante wrote: post #159

ForrestN wrote: post #39

There must be many HNers who work at Facebook. Anyone willing to make a throwaway account and tell us how it feels from the inside for Facebook to be one the wrong side of so many ethical issues? It just seems like in so many dimensions they've been caught saying wrong things or appearing to outright lie, and I'm curious how developers who work for them think about aiding a company that seems to be so compromised at…

Not everyone agrees with your ethics. I have no financial stake in Facebook (don't work there), but really don't see many moral problems with what it does. And I think their mission of connecting the world in a single easily discoverable network is absolutely world-changing and noteworthy. It's changed my world for sure.

I think a lot of fear is rightly grounded in history: it's clear that this much power in very few hands turns to shit at some point. Facebook may well be humanity's biggest concentration of power (knowledge being power). How do you keep an advantage when the other side knows >> than you could ever know? There's also the disparity in availability of AI, since large applications need powerful and thus expensive hardware.

Re: Facebook Doesn’t Tell Users Everything It Really Knows About Them

#246

Post by MarkMc » Fri, Dec 30, 2016, 10:01 PM UTC

optionalparens wrote: post #208

MarkMc wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a Facebook employee, but I don't see any particular ethical problem with the company. There's nothing in the law or Facebook's terms of use that obligates the company to release data they buy from third-party sources.

I'm not trying to agree or disagree with you here (for the record, I despise Facebook and anyone who works there), rather I want to point out that ethics often has no correlation with law. The difficulty in making ethical determinations is precisely that there is often no well-defined written criteria like a law or terms of use that dictate what are the ethical boundaries or what might be ethically or morally reprehe…

Yes, I agree there can be unethical behaviour that is still lawful. But regarding the specific charge of deception it becomes much harder to convict Facebook if the company has done everything that they explicitly agreed to do.

In this particular case I cannot even see any shade of grey. I apply for a credit card. The application form states that the credit card company may pass the information about me to third parties. The credit card company tells Facebook my income. Facebook does not reveal to me that they know my income. Where is the deception?

Re: Facebook Doesn’t Tell Users Everything It Really Knows About Them

#247

Post by closeparen » Fri, Dec 30, 2016, 11:46 PM UTC

lithos wrote: post #193

closeparen wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easy to forget on HN, but there is far from universal buy-in for the notion that having or collecting data on people is unethical. Some may even consider it noble to optimize and perfect the world and its institutions (including commerce, via efficient advertising) using large-scale personal data. The impulse to make something better by applying a database engine that you might feel for business processes, can j…

The US doesn't have the privacy parts is WWII in memory. Where govt workers had to scramble to destroy what data they could before it was seized, where fire fighters let document storage burn as long as possible because it had census data, where others where forced to go through govt. Data to sentence neighbors to death, and similar hero/horror stories. I feel that the IT world is irresponsible in its collection of d…

If the ability to enumerate targets for holocaust is our concern, then tech companies are a bizarre place to start caring. The institutions we should be attacking are the DMV, voter registration, and the Social Security Administration

Re: Facebook Doesn’t Tell Users Everything It Really Knows About Them

#248

Post by xg15 » Fri, Dec 30, 2016, 11:56 PM UTC

closeparen wrote: post #247

lithos wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US doesn't have the privacy parts is WWII in memory. Where govt workers had to scramble to destroy what data they could before it was seized, where fire fighters let document storage burn as long as possible because it had census data, where others where forced to go through govt. Data to sentence neighbors to death, and similar hero/horror stories. I feel that the IT world is irresponsible in its collection of d…

If the ability to enumerate targets for holocaust is our concern, then tech companies are a bizarre place to start caring. The institutions we should be attacking are the DMV, voter registration, and the Social Security Administration

Why that? The data collection you're talking about is relatively constrained and transparent - all those institutions have a well-defined range of data they are allowed to collect, using well-known procedures.

On the other hand, the data private organisations collect is not restricted - neither what data is collected, nor how or from who.

If voter registration started to ask for skin color, there would be immediate public outrage. If credit scoring services include skin color as a scoring factor, it's a trade secret...

Re: Facebook Doesn’t Tell Users Everything It Really Knows About Them

#249

Post by xg15 » Fri, Dec 30, 2016, 11:58 PM UTC

closeparen wrote: post #84

ForrestN wrote: post #39

There must be many HNers who work at Facebook. Anyone willing to make a throwaway account and tell us how it feels from the inside for Facebook to be one the wrong side of so many ethical issues? It just seems like in so many dimensions they've been caught saying wrong things or appearing to outright lie, and I'm curious how developers who work for them think about aiding a company that seems to be so compromised at…

It's easy to forget on HN, but there is far from universal buy-in for the notion that having or collecting data on people is unethical. Some may even consider it noble to optimize and perfect the world and its institutions (including commerce, via efficient advertising) using large-scale personal data. The impulse to make something better by applying a database engine that you might feel for business processes, can j…

> Some may even consider it noble to optimize and perfect the world and its institutions (including commerce, via efficient advertising) using large-scale personal data.

Data they don't own. So I suppose, "noble" in the Robin Hood kind of way.

Also, "efficient" in what way? What metric do they optimize that lets advertising benefit society?

Re: Facebook Doesn’t Tell Users Everything It Really Knows About Them

#250

Post by creepydata » Sat, Dec 31, 2016, 12:06 AM UTC

aub3bhat wrote: post #161

creepydata wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why you believe I am somehow confused about the legal agreement I entered into with my husband. I am not, I know what civil marriage is. I mentioned it to illustrate that we didn't have a venue or wedding planner so they couldn't have made a newspaper announcement for us. Transunion is a private for-profit company; it has nothing to do with Social Security or the legal or taxation systems. Transunion get…

I think you misunderstand just how tightly integrated the credit reporting system is with government. The fact that "Transunion is a private for-profit company" is immaterial. or that it "only" gets information via "voluntarily reports to it, as a business arrangement, (credit card companies, mostly) pulled from publicly available sources" is plain wrong. Just because some information is not "publicly available" does…

I'm not going to argue anymore because it's pointless but I'd like to see any hard evidence my state reports directly to Transunion because they have no reason to.