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U.S. FTC says Facebook misused privacy decree to shut down ad research

reuters.com

41–50 of 122 posts

Re: U.S. FTC says Facebook misused privacy decree to shut down ad research

#41

“The FTC received no notice that Facebook would be publicly invoking our consent decree to justify terminating academic research earlier this week.” Of course they didn't. After you are fined 5b it's no surprise you go full on defensive. What's the alternative? Asking the ftc every single time what they should do? I'm no fan of Facebook but if they didn't stop the research they could be found guilty again for the exa…

$5B is pennies to FB

Re: U.S. FTC says Facebook misused privacy decree to shut down ad research

#42
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Prohibit” is an interesting word that in the world of public web publishing of data is actually pretty meaningless. Certainly companies take measures to prevent bulk scraping when they can detect it and have legal remedies if copyrighted or owned material is republished. But simply telling me I am prohibited to hold on to a copy of your site’s data is pretty meaningless when my browser caches your page and you want…

By accessing the data on a website, you are forming a contract with that website and are subject to the website’s terms and conditions. As a website owner, beyond that, there is no need to tell someone they cannot access your site if you simply block them from accessing your servers instead using a multitude of techniques. Where does caching come into play at all here? You cannot cache content to begin with if the se…

I'm pretty sure that first paragraph is false. Until I explicitly agree to a contract, or "terms and conditions", I am not bound by anything. If a site I navigate to embeds content from another website I am not immediately bound by the terms and conditions of that neclsred site, to think otherwise would invite madness.

Not to mention the fact that terms and conditions are not contracts. I don't think they carry the same weight, although someone please correct me on this if I am incorrect.

Re: U.S. FTC says Facebook misused privacy decree to shut down ad research

#43

“The FTC received no notice that Facebook would be publicly invoking our consent decree to justify terminating academic research earlier this week.” Of course they didn't. After you are fined 5b it's no surprise you go full on defensive. What's the alternative? Asking the ftc every single time what they should do? I'm no fan of Facebook but if they didn't stop the research they could be found guilty again for the exa…

[deleted]

Re: U.S. FTC says Facebook misused privacy decree to shut down ad research

#44
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many (like me) believe Facebook is net good for the world. I’m able to stay connected with friends (many of whom live very far), like know what’s going on in their lives and share my world.

They banned me when I was doing nothing except for posting pictures of food and setting my profile text to “useless idiot”. No recourse. About a week later they told me it was all a big mistake. It was the final push that got me to cancel my account. Also, good luck trying to get a dump of your content. That kept failing for me. They really don’t want you to leave. So many dark patterns. Most tech organizations are c…

Also I love how HN has degenerated to downvotes. Instead of contesting a statement with facts, you downvote facts that you don’t like. Downvote enough and you will hide/gray out facts from other people.

You are making this a cesspool. Bad drives out good.

Re: U.S. FTC says Facebook misused privacy decree to shut down ad research

#45

“The FTC received no notice that Facebook would be publicly invoking our consent decree to justify terminating academic research earlier this week.” Of course they didn't. After you are fined 5b it's no surprise you go full on defensive. What's the alternative? Asking the ftc every single time what they should do? I'm no fan of Facebook but if they didn't stop the research they could be found guilty again for the exa…

$5B is pennies to FB

Not sure why you’re downvoted. But sadly this is true. Fb knows it is financially better off to pay the fine than change their operations. It just goes to show how capitalistic the US really is and how tolerant this country is towards unprecedented market power. No way it will fly in the EU. And that is why there is no FB in the EU.

Re: U.S. FTC says Facebook misused privacy decree to shut down ad research

#46
With so many whistle blowers it is now clear that FB does not want to eradicate any political party’s misinformation campaigns. They know they are much better off going with the flow, become a valuable tool for the powerful and gain market access and dominate.

In a way, I feel the American government also wants FB to do the same as it advances the US centric world order.

If there is a global monopoly. American wants it. This is evident in America’s position in negotiating the digital tax with the EU.

Re: U.S. FTC says Facebook misused privacy decree to shut down ad research

#47
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I'm anything but a fan of Facebook, but in this case they seem to be in an f'ed if you do, f'ed if you don't -type of situation.

I mean, they can both let the ad observer programme go on and stop the shady advertising practices.

Yes, but that's incompatible with their current existence.

Re: U.S. FTC says Facebook misused privacy decree to shut down ad research

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$5B is pennies to FB

Not sure why you’re downvoted. But sadly this is true. Fb knows it is financially better off to pay the fine than change their operations. It just goes to show how capitalistic the US really is and how tolerant this country is towards unprecedented market power. No way it will fly in the EU. And that is why there is no FB in the EU.

The $5B fine comes with a lot of enforced changes to the company's operations: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2019/07/ftc-i...

Though it does tend to have fewer regulations than the EU, the claim that this settlement has resulted in no operational changes does not appear to be true.

Re: U.S. FTC says Facebook misused privacy decree to shut down ad research

#49
post #34

So Facebook has a comprehensive access control system in the internal APIs. As part of the FTC consent decree, Facebook has been doing sweeps of all data types and having the owners of those data types tighten up the access control rules on those data types - particularly, product teams have to remove access control checks that aren’t fine grained enough. I’m guessing one such change broke the ads research tool.

Why didn’t they fix it rather than revoke access permanently?

Re: U.S. FTC says Facebook misused privacy decree to shut down ad research

#50
post #3

So this is basically just a strongly worded letter. Anything here or elsewhere suggestive of the FTC actually doing anything else, like investigating for other wrongful denial of service? ....would that even be within their powers to investigate?

These letters help to set the record straight as to what Facebooks actions really mean.

Fb tried to justify its action as if it was forced to do so by FTC regulations; FTC is saying, “nice try, but no”.

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