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Facebook will shut down its controversial market research app for iOS

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Re: Facebook will shut down its controversial market research app for iOS

#31

Post by 11sdmb8m »

mrweasel wrote: post #25
11sdmb8m wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you fail to understand is that the average layman doesn't care about data collection and ad tech. If it pisses you off that people don't care about the same things you do, welcome to politics.

What I care about are companies that simply have no moral compass. If no one at Google or Facebook think that they're pushing a little too hard to get ever more data about their users, then something is terribly wrong at those companies. Google is particularly fascinating, their employees protest when their parent company want to be a supplier to the US military, but apparently they have no moral objection to buildin…

The agenda of those Google employees is to weaken the United States. They do that by working with ad tech (which, as you say, is build around increasing the gap between social classes and income inequality) and by sabotaging the military. There is nothing odd about what they do, once you understand that.

Re: Facebook will shut down its controversial market research app for iOS

#32

Post by gaius »

tasubotadas wrote: post #18

What a bullsh*t. People got some money for giving up some privacy. Nobody was forced to do this. And now everybody is freaking about a fairly reasonable trade. What's next? People will start harassing students/researchers that do paid studies?

And now everybody is freaking about a fairly reasonable trade

OK let’s imagine that you have a close friend or family member with some confidential issue - maybe an illness, maybe debt, maybe they are in the closet. Occasionally they message you, on old -fashioned SMS or email mentioning something about it.

How many dollars is a reasonable trade to tell a data collection agency everything you know so they can add it to their file on your friend/relative?

Re: Facebook will shut down its controversial market research app for iOS

#35

Post by zapzupnz »

princekolt wrote: post #30
11sdmb8m wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Caught doing what? What they did was perfectly fine. Legal even under the GDPR, and people were being paid for it, which is the usual lament here ("nobody is paying me for my data"). Admit it, you just hate Facebook.

Why do people defend large corporations so intensively?

Because the dream is still to get a job at one of them, for better or worse.

Re: Facebook will shut down its controversial market research app for iOS

#37

Post by sytelus »

mrweasel wrote: post #19
11sdmb8m wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Caught doing what? What they did was perfectly fine. Legal even under the GDPR, and people were being paid for it, which is the usual lament here ("nobody is paying me for my data"). Admit it, you just hate Facebook.

What Facebook, politicians, and many others fail to understand is that there's a difference between legal and morally right. Facebook makes it exceedingly easy for people to hate them, while technically doing nothing wrong. Well sometimes they break the law, but then Zuckerberg just says he's sorry and we all move on. It's getting tiresome to watch our industry behave recklessly in the pursuit of ad revenue and the p…

To be fair, the said app clearly told people what exact data would be collected and how it will be used. If people does want and chose to sell their data, is that still morally corrupt for the company collecting the data?

In my experience large majority of non-tech people do not care much about their data being collected and would be happily accept monetary reward for things like their location history, usage stats etc. Assume that data collector is using this information to show you relevant ad. I wonder why would it be so much bad to see relevant ad then irrelevant ad? It's not that you are going to stop seeing ads anytime soon.

So the question is: If data producer is happy to sell the information and data collector is using it to enhance the user experience (i.e. no evil intent), would you still consider this bad or immoral?

Re: Facebook will shut down its controversial market research app for iOS

#38

Post by 7Z7 »

11sdmb8m wrote: post #31
mrweasel wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I care about are companies that simply have no moral compass. If no one at Google or Facebook think that they're pushing a little too hard to get ever more data about their users, then something is terribly wrong at those companies. Google is particularly fascinating, their employees protest when their parent company want to be a supplier to the US military, but apparently they have no moral objection to buildin…

The agenda of those Google employees is to weaken the United States. They do that by working with ad tech (which, as you say, is build around increasing the gap between social classes and income inequality) and by sabotaging the military. There is nothing odd about what they do, once you understand that.

Funny you are accusing those employees of nefarious political motivations when you are pushing your politics up and down the thread (and others) in your sub-day-old anonymous account.

Re: Facebook will shut down its controversial market research app for iOS

#39

Post by zapzupnz »

tasubotadas wrote: post #18

What a bullsh*t. People got some money for giving up some privacy. Nobody was forced to do this. And now everybody is freaking about a fairly reasonable trade. What's next? People will start harassing students/researchers that do paid studies?

Certainly nobody was forced to do it, but it is more than likely that nobody understood what they were being asked to do. Not only that, children were being targeted by this scheme. Lastly, the implementation on iOS circumvented rules relating to an app distribution which shows Facebook’s proclivity for flouting the rules.

Pushing the app distribution thing aside, being aboveboard in every other respect is still insufficient justification for ethically questionable processes.

Facebook has a history of unscrupulous untrustworthiness which should not be overlooked when examining the implications of the scheme, particularly the requirement to install a root certificate. To ignore the context of the polemic, to pretend Facebook is just another company rather than one of the largest collectors of personal, private information on the planet, multiple times caught invading peoples' privacy through less than honourable means, is foolhardy at best and dangerous at worst.

Re: Facebook will shut down its controversial market research app for iOS

#40

Post by peteretep »

11sdmb8m wrote: post #24
throwaway2048 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a difference between not informed, and doesn't care. How many people would be comfortable if you laid out the full spectrum of what is possible with the data that is collected, and how said data is distributed and sold? Its frankly a massively dishonest claim that people "don't care so its all fine".

Users realise that the ads they see are targeted to them, and infer that those ads are chosen depending on their activity. Do you think people would stop using Facebook if you told them about this? Or maybe you're wishing for the government to step in?

> Users realise that the ads they see are targeted to them, and infer that those ads are chosen depending on their activity.

My experience is that most people are surprised and mildly horrified that Facebook has most of their browsing history.

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