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ACLU exposes Facebook, Twitter for selling surveillance company user data

arstechnica.com

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Re: ACLU exposes Facebook, Twitter for selling surveillance company user data

#61

Post by aestetix »

mgalka wrote: post #54
aestetix wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. If the data in question were public, Facebook would not need to be the ones selling it. There would be a whole market of third party data aggregators. 2. If this were true, why would we need the Bill of Rights? The entire point of the Fourth Amendment, for example, is to protect citizens against unreasonable searches -- by law enforcement. 3. This would be true if the data were only shared on a need to know basis,…

1. The data is freely viewable to anyone on the internet. There is just no practical means of searching / discovering it without the companies' feeds. 2. They shouldn't call it user data, as if Twitter / Facebook were selling private information they store about users. This tool just searches the public stream of posts.

1. Practical and apparently legal means: https://lumendatabase.org/notices/2037976

"• Accessing Facebook or collecting user content or information using automated means without Facebook’s prior permission;"

So it's clear that if I know of someone's public data feed and gather it, that's fine. But what if I gather from a list of 10,000 peoples public data feeds? So I'd argue there are two points of contention here:

(1) Does making something hard to discover make it less public? Assuming there is such a thing as "public"

(2) By creating a legal barrier to a particular kind of discovery (automated), and then selling access to this data, does this make it less public?

2. I'd argue that there are different kinds of public. For example, in one kind, I can look at a room full of people, find a man, learn that his name is Mr. Brown, and see that he is wearing a green hat. In another kind, I'd need to create a request to find out if Mr. Brown exists, if he is wearing a hat, and if so, what color. In both instances of "public", this information is readily available to me, but in the second, I have to have some idea of what I want, and specifically request it.

What Facebook is doing, for me, seems like they are selling access to the first kind of public, and then allowing everyone else free access to the second kind of public, within limitations: I cannot write a script to cycle through a list of names and clothes, and I'm probably restricted in how many requests I can make within a certain timespan.

Re: ACLU exposes Facebook, Twitter for selling surveillance company user data

#62

Post by cyphar »

tremon wrote: post #59
cyphar wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is very good advice, but it's because of the fact that testimony given to a police officer can only ever be used against you (it's hearsay otherwise). Not to mention that if someone slips up and accidentally tells a lie in the middle of a testimony, that instills doubt in the entire testimony ("I didn't kill her, I've never killed anyone, I've never even used a gun, I wasn't in the area that night" sounds fine…

Which is very good advice, but [..] Wrong conjunction? It seems like you're explaining why it is good advice, not offering an opposing view. I think you have given a perfect illustration of the GGP's assertion that "if you're afraid to go ask a police officer for help [..] then something is very wrong about police". This is a good example where the law sets up the police as antagonists against the general population.

My point with the "but" was that the reason why lawyers advise this is not because police are trying to harm you. It's because in general, people are very bad at law and providing testimony. So maybe I should've clarified that -- the police are not at fault for doubting flawed testimony.

To be fair, police do engage in manipulative tactics in questioning, but that's kinda their job. The job of the person being interrogated is to ask for your lawyer and say nothing else.

Re: ACLU exposes Facebook, Twitter for selling surveillance company user data

#63

Post by geomark »

cyphar wrote: post #62
tremon wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is very good advice, but [..] Wrong conjunction? It seems like you're explaining why it is good advice, not offering an opposing view. I think you have given a perfect illustration of the GGP's assertion that "if you're afraid to go ask a police officer for help [..] then something is very wrong about police". This is a good example where the law sets up the police as antagonists against the general population.

My point with the "but" was that the reason why lawyers advise this is not because police are trying to harm you. It's because in general, people are very bad at law and providing testimony. So maybe I should've clarified that -- the police are not at fault for doubting flawed testimony. To be fair, police do engage in manipulative tactics in questioning, but that's kinda their job. The job of the person being interr…

It's good to keep in mind how police are incentivized. They are paid to arrest suspects and close cases. Whether or not they nab the wrong person hardly matters to them. So although they generally may not intend to harm you they will gladly do so if it increases the numbers on which they are graded. And if you happen to have some cash on you when you make the mistake of talking to them then there is the bonus opportunity of asset forfeiture.

Re: ACLU exposes Facebook, Twitter for selling surveillance company user data

#64

Post by solipsism »

imh wrote: post #44
iamdave wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I ask why you disagree?

Sure. I think that law enforcement is necessarily there to keep us from doing things. That is enough for me to think it's not necessarily the same as benevolence. At the risk of flying my ultra-nerd flag, it's like the lawful-chaotic vs good-bad axes. To paraphrase the comment I was questioning, I think it ought to be a person's reasonable expectation that law enforcement is a lawful actor, but A) we aren't even ther…

I expect police to be good people. Guess we differ there. I expect police to not follow evil laws. That's a bit hyperbolic though. More importantly, I expect police to use their judgment to do the right thing.

Police have an incredible amount of flexibility inherent in how they interpret laws. They choose when to put someone in jail and when to give them a break. They choose when pull their gun.

The law doesn't provide adequate guidance here. It cannot. Laws are made to be interpreted by people. Police, prosecutors, judges, and juries all apply their humanity to the ridiculously coarse and simplistic letter of the law.

I expect police to be the best of us. They need to be. It's an impossible goal but we could go a lot better than we do now.

Are you a programmer? If so, I hope it wouldn't offend you to suggest that you might be thinking of the law as a computer program, and police as machines that run it. If we ever create a benevolent machine to serve as our lawbook, I'll agree with you that humans should simply put their judgment aside and be simple agents of its will.

Re: ACLU exposes Facebook, Twitter for selling surveillance company user data

#65

Post by imh »

solipsism wrote: post #64
imh wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. I think that law enforcement is necessarily there to keep us from doing things. That is enough for me to think it's not necessarily the same as benevolence. At the risk of flying my ultra-nerd flag, it's like the lawful-chaotic vs good-bad axes. To paraphrase the comment I was questioning, I think it ought to be a person's reasonable expectation that law enforcement is a lawful actor, but A) we aren't even ther…

I expect police to be good people. Guess we differ there. I expect police to not follow evil laws. That's a bit hyperbolic though. More importantly, I expect police to use their judgment to do the right thing. Police have an incredible amount of flexibility inherent in how they interpret laws. They choose when to put someone in jail and when to give them a break. They choose when pull their gun. The law doesn't provi…

I think that flexibility is what puts laws as they exist (imperfect, maybe even bad) right next to the "ideal" social contract (good) in their mandate. With both of those in the job description, yeah, they ought to be good. That flexibility in enforcement and the judiciary can have bad unintended consequences (leaving the door wide open for the same action being legal for people in power and illegal for everyone else, or for bias to creep in), but on the whole we need it. You're totally right. Thanks for the insight.

Re: ACLU exposes Facebook, Twitter for selling surveillance company user data

#66

Post by dredmorbius »

pluma wrote: post #57

As a non-native speaker this headline took me way too many attempts to parse correctly. For anyone wondering the same, it's meant to be read as: ACLU exposes Facebook and Twitter for selling user data to a surveillance company The way I read it the first few times I thought they sold user data of a company, for surveillance.

As a native speaker, it's a poorly written headline.

One term for this form of misleading / confusing sentence (and especially headline) is a "crash blossom".

http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/fun-with-...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_ambiguity

Re: ACLU exposes Facebook, Twitter for selling surveillance company user data

#67

Post by pluma »

dredmorbius wrote: post #66
pluma wrote: post #57

As a non-native speaker this headline took me way too many attempts to parse correctly. For anyone wondering the same, it's meant to be read as: ACLU exposes Facebook and Twitter for selling user data to a surveillance company The way I read it the first few times I thought they sold user data of a company, for surveillance.

As a native speaker, it's a poorly written headline. One term for this form of misleading / confusing sentence (and especially headline) is a "crash blossom". http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/fun-with-... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_ambiguity

I think in this case it's made worse by the wording "selling X Y" as a substitute for "selling Y to X" being relatively rare and in this case both X and Y being compound words (surveillance company and user data).

So not only is it a crash blossom in the sense that it's ambiguous whether it's [surveillance] [company user data], [surveillance company] [user data] or [surveillance company user] [data], but it could also be read as [surveillance company user data]. There are at least four possible ways to attempt to parse the sentence and the only one that makes sense relies on unusual phrasing.

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