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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

#311

Post by simonh »

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.

I’d prefer to say negligence than stupidity. Being stupid isn’t something you can avoid, but being negligent is something within their power to avoid and is a legitimate target of legal sanction.

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

#312

Post by dredmorbius »

colordrops wrote: post #291
dredmorbius wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whataboutism (also known as whataboutery) is a variant of the tu quoque logical fallacy... The term "whataboutery" has been used in Britain and Ireland since the period of the Troubles (conflict) in Northern Ireland.[10][11][12] Lexicographers date the first appearance of the variant whataboutism to the 1990s[1][10] or 1970s... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=t…

The problem with the term "whataboutism" is that its users wield it to prevent discussion about anything that doesn't fit their agenda. In particular, its main use has been to amplify the Russiagate conspiracy which was never backed by any evidence and yet was the forefront of public attention for almost three years. If you pointed out actual evidence-based foreign influence such as that put forward by the Saudis, yo…

You're labouring under several grave misapprehensions. This addresses one of them:

https://archive.org/details/muellerreport/page/n7

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

#313

Post by macspoofing »

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…

>Seems like they should add another 0 to the fine after the recent hat trick

You're under the impression that regulators are in the business of bankrupting companies.

All the instances you cited of Facebook's wrongdoing are not worth a $50billion(!!) fine. They just aren't.

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

#314

Post by modriano »

misterman0 wrote: post #270
modriano wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. So, whether it's your own two year old or a malicious adult, you think it's wrong to respond differently because they both produced the same harm?

I think it's not wrong to treat an adult exactly like you would a child if he's acting like one. I interpret parent poster as trying to make a point about how we cannot tell anything about intent so we should judge on the action, solely.

> I think it's not wrong to treat an adult exactly like you would a child if he's acting like one.

So, are you saying that the malicious adult poo-tracker is being childish and should be treated with the leniency we afford to children?

> I interpret parent poster as trying to make a point about how we cannot tell anything about intent so we should judge on the action, solely.

Why on Earth do you think we can't deduce someone's intent? In the case I posited, you can know the intent of both the child (no malicious intent) and the malicious poo-tracker (malicious intent). In many other cases, you can also deduce intent from someone's behavior.

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

#315

Post by ionised »

rock_hard wrote: post #97
artursapek wrote: post #74

Why doesn't Zuck just quit? He's so rich. I would have fucked off and retired so long ago.

I would guess because he truly cares about making the world more open and connected and issn't in it for the money. He also pledged to donate all his wealth along with Bill Gates and Warren Buffet

Well it's a nice way of not having your wealth taxed isn't it?

Then, when your children are all grown up you can get around those promises you made to the pesky public about not giving your privileged children billions of dollars by simply making them life-long directors of your charitable foundation.

Besides, some of the most evil and warped people in history were convinced they were somehow making the world better even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

We call these people ideologues and fundamentalists.

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

#316

Post by dhimes »

scotchmi_st wrote: post #185
beatgammit wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There definitely is a difference between someone accidentally tracking dog poo into your house vs someone doing it intentionally; in the first case, you all them to clean it up, and in the second case you break the friendship and/or seek criminal prosection. Likewise for big companies. If a company is acting badly, you need to figure out if it was intentional. In both cases you seek damages, but your approach to maki…

> There definitely is a difference between someone accidentally tracking dog poo into your house vs someone doing it intentionally; in the first case, you all them to clean it up, and in the second case you break the friendship and/or seek criminal prosection. But the point is that this assumes you're able to tell the difference between the two cases- intent is often a really hard thing to prove. And often discussion…

But if we can reduce that to a second-order effect we will be better off. For example, if you made the rule ('regulation') that "shoes shall not be worn in the house" then you can avert the situation and never need to try to determine motivation.

I think this is basic good that regulations- thoughtful ones- serv. Because if Facebook makes money by being evil, then their competitors will be pressured to do the same in order to stay in business. But by leveling the playing field you can help prevent these monopolies from getting so big and powerful.

We can't rely on businesses to act "morally." That ship has sailed. We have to compel them to behave, not by social shaming but by making non-compliance painful and repeated non-compliance an existential threat.

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

#317

Post by shhehebehdh »

ionised wrote: post #303
colejohnson66 wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we quit it with posting this quote every time something negative on Facebook comes up. It’s practically a meme now and, quite honestly, it’s getting annoying.

The only people who find this annoying seem to be Facebook employees, shareholders or people with vested interests in being allowed to go about the kind of cavalier data collection that Facebook does. On the contrary, I think we need to keep repeating it. Everything I know about Zuckerberg, everything he says, the lies he tells, his actions and the actions of his company...they all lead me to one conclusion; that tha…

I am none of those things you mentioned (employee, shareholder, other vested interest), and I also find it annoying. It’s something Zuck said when he was much younger. If his views haven’t changed since that age then he is an unusual person indeed.

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

#318

Post by chopin »

icedchai wrote: post #213
fuzz4lyfe wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So their incompetence lies in lacking configuration management in production as opposed to a lack of testing? Why are they manually configuring production servers anyway at that scale?

It's not really that simple. Sometimes you need to enable request logging in production... maybe for performance analysis, maybe for debugging.

And you make sure that you can purge the logs afterwards.

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

#319

Post by nkozyra »

fuzz4lyfe wrote: post #137
nkozyra wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, the single, non-distributed, file-backed log Facebook uses.

You have no problem with the create_user function? Obviously it's pseudocode my point is there are a finite number of log locations and checking for an instance of a known string among them isn't difficult.

The point is aptly demonstrated within this thread; sometimes things that look trivial at a glance aren't so trivial in reality.

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

#320

Post by ionised »

shhehebehdh wrote: post #317
ionised wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only people who find this annoying seem to be Facebook employees, shareholders or people with vested interests in being allowed to go about the kind of cavalier data collection that Facebook does. On the contrary, I think we need to keep repeating it. Everything I know about Zuckerberg, everything he says, the lies he tells, his actions and the actions of his company...they all lead me to one conclusion; that tha…

I am none of those things you mentioned (employee, shareholder, other vested interest), and I also find it annoying. It’s something Zuck said when he was much younger. If his views haven’t changed since that age then he is an unusual person indeed.

I think it's pretty clear that his views haven't changed.

Judge him by his actions, not his PR.

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