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Facebook's seized files published by MPs

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Facebook's seized files published by MPs

#381

Post by rhizome »

Mahn wrote: post #307
amaccuish wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what precedent is that? The idea that companies aren't above the law? That's a precedent I wish was more enforced. I'm proud of my parliament today (and it's not often I can say that), even if in other parts they're tearing themselves apart.

What laws did Facebook break that warranted seizing and publishing internal documents?

The law against not screwing your users and not being anti-competitive. The latter is actual law, the former is the kind of thing that leads to street justice.

Re: Facebook's seized files published by MPs

#382

Post by rhizome »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #308
hkt wrote: post #73

Sometimes, even amidst the Brexit madness, I love our Parliament. Publishing and seizing documents like this is a move that proves politicians have the spine to look after people's interests. Time to get serious, act on this, and break up Facebook forever.

Seizing documents for a valid inquiry is one thing. But does that follow that publishing them is OK too? From the outside, it looks like these politicians are frustrated that a foreign CEO ignored their demand to appear before them (because he has no legal obligation to do so), and have decided to retaliate by releasing embarrassing private internal documents obtained during an investigation in the hopes that Faceboo…

It's getting hilarious to see people more offended by FB's information being exfiltrated than the exfiltration of everybody's data that FB aided and promoted. Ah, but those are just your fellow people, not the money man.

Re: Facebook's seized files published by MPs

#383

Post by dgzl »

SirensOfTitan wrote: post #231

I worked at Facebook for 5 years on Workplace and Internal Tools. I am typically very critical of the company nowadays, but even so find the discussion here difficult to digest. People are complex. They are more complex than an action, or even a group of actions. To take a person and alias them into being "good" or "bad" based on an action or a series of actions is to explicitly dehumanize them for the sake of making…

> if everyone good leaves organizations because they're "bad," well, those organizations will just be filled with the worst of us soon enough.

An interesting analogy... The 10th amendment to the Bill of Rights was intended on allowing each state to be diverse in its laws. If people in state x want the laws in state y to change, a constitutionalist would say that you should move to that state and work in changing the laws from the inside, via the 10th Amendment and the state's own Constitution. If you don't want to put in the work of changing the state from the inside, and would rather change the laws from the outside (i.e. via federal authority) then you're probably an authoritarian.

I guess the only point I'm trying to make, is yeah, it's hard. Thanks for your contribution.

Re: Facebook's seized files published by MPs

#384

Post by drewblaisdell »

mindslight wrote: post #335
drewblaisdell wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nice spin on it, but Facebook is still a bad actor (despite what you say). This needs to be a conclusion, not a premise. I do not have a firm belief about whether or not this is true, but I keep seeing people list bad things about FB and draw a straight line to “thus it is evil”. Ideally, we would list the good/bad it does and assign weights to these points to determine if it is net harmful. I want to be convinced,…

At its foundation, Faceboot is a man-in-the-middle attack dressed up to attract users. The standard "web 2.0 defense" was that these companies would remain benevolent in the interests of their users to maintain their own profits. The onus was really on them to demonstrate that trusting third parties with our communications is a reasonable thing to do. The more time passes, the more blatant the evidence gets that this…

> The onus was really on them to demonstrate that trusting third parties with our communications is a reasonable thing to do.

In general, I agree, but the context here is dozens of HN commenters claiming that FB is a bad actor/net negative for the world. These commenters cite lists of gripes about the company, many legitimate, some illegitimate, but get hand-wavy when someone asks about the "net" in "net negative".

I'm not rejecting the conclusion, here, by the way! If the company is ultimately bad for society, this line of questioning should embolden the consensus HN opinion.

Re: Facebook's seized files published by MPs

#385

Post by mandevil »

Facebook has released a statement[1] that accuses Six4Three of "cherrypicked" document dump, that is mostly just denials with no supporting evidence. If only they hadn't undermined their own trustworthiness by, a few weeks ago, denying that senior executives were culpable in their relationship with Definers and then doing a news dump right before a major US holiday admitting that they had lied in their first response, then people might believe their unsupported assertions.

[1]: https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/12/response-to-six4three-d...

Re: Facebook's seized files published by MPs

#386

Post by SheinhardtWigCo »

hkt wrote: post #73

Sometimes, even amidst the Brexit madness, I love our Parliament. Publishing and seizing documents like this is a move that proves politicians have the spine to look after people's interests. Time to get serious, act on this, and break up Facebook forever.

I don't think this move achieved much of anything, other than to encourage business executives to use ephemeral messaging for their confidential internal communications.

Re: Facebook's seized files published by MPs

#387

Post by [deleted] »

jahlove wrote: post #220
fosco wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

holy smokes... >Michael LeBeau – ‘He guys, as you know all the growth team is planning on shipping a permissions update on Android at the end of this month. They are going to include the ‘read call log’ permission, which will trigger the Android permissions dialog on update, requiring users to accept the update. They will then provide an in app opt in NUX for a feature that lets you continuously upload your SMS and c…

> This is a pretty high risk thing to do from a PR perspective What's "PR" here?

[deleted]

Re: Facebook's seized files published by MPs

#388

Post by bagacrap »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #311
natch wrote: post #210

Just to underline the obvious point the lawmaker is making, perhaps if Zuckerberg would show up to hearings that lawmakers invite him to, then he would be able to provide the context that Facebook says is missing.

Translation: if you turn down our "invitation", we'll misuse our legal power to seize your internal documents and then publish them to embarrass you. Accurate? To be clear, I'm not saying that they can't seize and investigate or even punish if the law was broken. That's the job of government. But this just seems like a petty attempt to embarrass. However, I'm American and haven't been following the story closely, so…

Is it misuse, or does it serve their ultimate purpose, which is to act in the best interest of their constituents? You could easily take the stance that parliament was being generous to give fb the opportunity to become part of the dialog beforehand (provide that context that was supposedly lacking), and that zuck was foolish to turn them down.

Re: Facebook's seized files published by MPs

#389

Post by flohofwoe »

SirensOfTitan wrote: post #231

I worked at Facebook for 5 years on Workplace and Internal Tools. I am typically very critical of the company nowadays, but even so find the discussion here difficult to digest. People are complex. They are more complex than an action, or even a group of actions. To take a person and alias them into being "good" or "bad" based on an action or a series of actions is to explicitly dehumanize them for the sake of making…

Not sure what point you're trying to make about Napoleon, he wasn't exactly someone to look up to. He was directly responsible for millions of deaths, basically a 19th century version of Stalin (and the other "great leaders" of the 20th century).

Re: Facebook's seized files published by MPs

#390

Post by sangnoir »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #311
natch wrote: post #210

Just to underline the obvious point the lawmaker is making, perhaps if Zuckerberg would show up to hearings that lawmakers invite him to, then he would be able to provide the context that Facebook says is missing.

Translation: if you turn down our "invitation", we'll misuse our legal power to seize your internal documents and then publish them to embarrass you. Accurate? To be clear, I'm not saying that they can't seize and investigate or even punish if the law was broken. That's the job of government. But this just seems like a petty attempt to embarrass. However, I'm American and haven't been following the story closely, so…

> I'm American [...] I may be missing context.

You are missing context: look up "Parliamentary Privilege" and "Parliamentary Sovereignty" which do not have US equivalents. The "invitation" was effectively a subpoena.

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