13 ms·

Facebook’s Surveillance Machine

677 points by imartin2k 9y ago

DyslexicAtheist 9y ago
when talking about Cambridge Analytica we should also discuss Palantir from 5 years ago: https://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2013-06/mysterious-silicon-valley-company-helping-nsa-spy-americans https://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2013-06/mysterious... Palantir ‘wields as much real-world power as Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple, but unlike them, Palantir operates so far under the radar, it is special ops.’ https://channels.theinnovationenterprise.com/articles/is-palantir-a-force-for-good-or-evil https://channels.theinnovationenterprise.com/articles/is-pal... Yes, that's the same Thiel who is suing Gawker for outing him while developing predictive analytics that disproportionately target minorities. See: Peter Thiel’s Palantir wins $876 million U.S. Army contract https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-09/peter-thiel-s-palantir-wins-876-million-u-s-army-contract https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-09/peter-thi... https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/27/17054740/palantir-predictive-policing-tool-new-orleans-nopd https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/27/17054740/palantir-predict... not just facebook but Silicon Valley has in general a total disregard for privacy. You can't hate on Facebook from another corner of the swamp. Also we should be thinking about what's ahead in IoT (Turning IOT sensor data into behavioral insights) https://www.sentiance.com/ https://www.sentiance.com/ Not to mention the gazillion IoT devices with poor factory reset which is the web's equivalent to delete-account function which only disables a users login but retains the data. apologies for my emotional tone, this obviously has hit a nerve.
- kaybe 9y ago
  Wow, sentiance is super creepy.
  - ccozan 9y ago
    wow+1. Truly creepy. But this is possible because we let them use this data. Thankfully, in EU the GDRP makes this almost impossible. On a side note, working on a platform that is similar to sentiance in data aquisition, but for totally other purpose and zero effect on privacy, due to a transparent anonymization.
    - jakeogh 9y ago
      Are you going to invade a foreign power when one of their sovereigns ignores your demand to forget?
      - ccozan 9y ago
        Legally, I cannot collect any data and keep the source. So I do strip all the possible identification, until someone's effort to pin point to any personal data becomes economically unfeasible. I also tend to store as little as possible raw data and in some cases, I do data scrambling, where the data as in values is not important for the engine. A demand to forget has to show that I have data on that person. Without this, claim is impossible. No invasion.
        pdkl95 9y ago
        > I do strip all the possible identification "Anonymizing" data is a myth; stripped or hashed columns can usually be recovered by correlating the remaining data with other data sets. > until someone's effort to pin point to any personal data becomes economically unfeasible. Which admits that the data probably is recoverable, just "economically infeasible". Do you have proof of that claim? Unfeasible for who? In general, the difficulty of re-correlating data goes down as the amount of data grows. > I do data scrambling, where the data as in values is not important for the engine. DJB once described[1] hashing as "magic crypto pixie dust" that "takes personally identifiable information and makes it incomprehensible to the marketing department". > A demand to forget has to show that I have data on that person. So you're trying to launder data to circumvent the letter of the law. This kind of scofflaw, antisocial attitude is how you attract reactionary, heavy handed regulations. [1] https://projectbullrun.org/surveillance/2015/video-2015.html#bernstein https://projectbullrun.org/surveillance/2015/video-2015.html...
        ccozan 9y ago
        I suppose you talk a bit from outsite. There is no other data set to correlate. Simply all the external context data is not recorded anywhere. Not even in logs. Unless some higher agency is going to hack some network driver to pick up the tcpip source, etc, I don't see how the data could be associated with datetime and location. This is why I was talking about "economically infeasible". Data scrambling doesn't mean hashing. Sorry, here you are wrong. It's a on-the-fly frequency/timedomain scrambling, means someone has to physically, again, access a server and pick up from the memory the algorithm. And no marketing department, all research here! The other stuff, I wound't reply, but let me asure you, there is no law circumventing. We are open and if someone can pinpoint of some personal data, there is no issue removing it.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    Holy fuck. After watching the video on their site, I agree.
  - oblio 9y ago
    And people keep whining about the GDPR.
  - ParanoidShroom 9y ago
    I was recruited to work there, since they are from my local neighborhood I know them some time already. They have a history of analyzing data with financial support from Samsung. They are a smart bunch, don't have bad intentions towards people. That being said, their goal is indeed ... Well not something I value personally. But they are all good guys that are eager to make an amazingly powerful product. I agree that the result can be abused. That being said, there should be a middle ground where both parties should benefit. I normally don't comment, but I don't want to see them look like a villain. They are excited engineers.
    - titzer 9y ago
      > They are excited engineers. It doesn't really matter how nice, smart, talented, excited, curious, or well-meaning a person is. Judge them by their actions. What they build and what it is used for. If you could pass a message them, please tell them to get a grip and realize how insanely creepy what they are doing is, and they should probably not do it, even if it makes them a bunch of money.
    - rainingmonkey 9y ago
      >I don't want to see them look like a villain. They are excited engineers. I suspect the idea that these two categories are mutually exclusive is at the root of most of the questionable applications of technology today.
    - toss1 9y ago
      >they are all good guys that are eager to make an amazingly powerful product Lovely. They are also devoid of vision and ethics about the likely results of their actions. In short, they fail to consider the saying: "The road to hell is paved with good intentions". Have they even considered the question: Which of their targets would EVER sign-up for their service? Who are their customers, and why would they pay for the service? The only plausible reason to pay Sentiance is to understand a target's behavior at a fine-grained level in order to insert a stimulus to get them to do something they would otherwise not do willingly. (or a stalker, to assault them). So, they are making a wonderfully powerful tool to enable strangers to change a target's behavior without permission. Yet they are not bright enough to avoid putting a "sign up" popup on their website in a way that interrupts their own video. They will enable someone to cause serious damage to our world. Please get a message to them that they need to stop and shut down. If they want to build something REALLY powerful, they should pivot to building something to allow us to DETECT & PREVENT other software on our phones/computers from doing what they are now trying to do. I'd pay for that, and I'm not the only one.
- danso 9y ago
  From the theinnovationenterprise.com article you linked to: > It is essentially an interface that sits on top of existing data sets and displays data to users for analysis, helping to identify connections otherwise impossible to find. Users do not have to use SQL queries or employ engineers to write strings in order to search petabytes of data. Instead, natural language is used to query data and results are returned in real-time. It is not designed to do any single thing, its main strength is that it is flexible and powerful enough to accommodate the requirements of any organization that needs to process large amounts of both personal and abstract data. This makes it more useful for managing HUMINT, or intelligence from human sources, than SIGINT, or intelligence from signals. The problem with Palantir is that everything it is said to be doing is so vague that it could just be colorful dashboards based on not particularly great or new data. For example, this is how the Bloomberg story you linked to describes it: > Founded in 2004, Palantir is used by dozens of federal, state and local law enforcement agencies to aggregate far-flung data, find patterns and present results in colorful, easy-to-interpret graphics. Its use by police in Los Angeles, Chicago, New Orleans and elsewhere has raised ethical concerns about the potential for unfairly targeting minorities. I'm not arguing whether Palantir is living up to its contracts. Just that it doesn't seem to produce or have the unique and expansive kind of data that Facebook, Google, and Amazon have. Though I guess there's nothing that prevented them from doing a massive data pull from FB's API, in the same way CA managed to do it. FWIW, not everything about Palantir is necessarily a secret. You can see some descriptions of what they offer and at what price via various FOIA requests that have been done: https://www.muckrock.com/foi/list/?q=palantir&status=done&user-autocomplete=&agency-autocomplete=&jurisdiction-autocomplete=&projects-autocomplete=&tags-autocomplete=&has_embargo=&has_crowdfund=&minimum_pages=&date_range_0=&date_range_1= https://www.muckrock.com/foi/list/?q=palantir&status=done&us...
  - g09980 9y ago
    If the task is "taking datasets and making them more searchable," it seems like that company gets the heat simply for making the task easier. Excel, SQL databases (or, heck, huge CSV files) don't get as much attention even though they could be used for the same purpose, even if very awkwardly.
- simula67 9y ago
  Thiel did not sue Gawker, Terry Bollea ( known professionally as "Hulk Hogan" ) did, Thiel only bankrolled the suit. Gawker going down was their own fault, they defied a court order in a very explicit manner : https://web.archive.org/web/20130428130143/http://gawker.com/a-judge-told-us-to-take-down-our-hulk-hogan-sex-tape-po-481328088 https://web.archive.org/web/20130428130143/http://gawker.com...
  - DyslexicAtheist 9y ago
    you're right yes. I should make clear that I shed no tears for gawker. good riddance. but Thiel's position on everything (from voting Trump to supporting surveillance capitalism) is still noteworthy.
ensiferum 9y ago
I think it's time to finally close the FB account, move on to Firefox and disable 3rd party trackers and start using VPN routinely.
- ccozan 9y ago
  But careful with the VPNs. They are leaking and selling data too. Can't find the article at this moment, but there was on HN not long ago.
  - DyslexicAtheist 9y ago
    yepp, VPNs are really just shifting the trust from ISP to the VPN.
  - mirimir 9y ago
    Sure, there's no way to know. But it is possible to distribute trust across multiple VPN services, such that none of them alone can compromise you. You just nest one VPN inside another. It's easy using VMs. Most simply, connect to one VPN provider in the host machine, and to another in a VM. Using pfSense VMs as VPN gateways, you can chain more deeply. It's the same idea that's behind Tor using three-relay circuits. But less anonymous, because routes are static.
    - ccozan 9y ago
      Do you realise that this kind of behaviour will make you automatically a suspect? Remember, is not the data that you transfer, but the metadata of it which is always visible. Maintain appearance of normal, but block just what is doing really harm, like advertising and certain cookies. And don't post anything personal online. Use firefox on private window.
      - mirimir 9y ago
        Which "you"? Mirimir, for sure. But being a suspect is unavoidable for that persona. However, to my ISP and its friends, I'm just a VPN user. Who torrents, which is pretty common where I'm located. I've never connected directly to Tor, even. And what metadata? All Mirimir metadata points to the final VPN service. I'm sure that resourceful TLAs could use traffic analysis, and walk either way through the VPN chain. But I can't imagine that I'm that interesting. And indeed, I doubt that they'd find much to prosecute. I mean, all that Mirimir does is write about this stuff, mainly here and on Wilders Security Forums. And occasional stuff that's published by IVPN. Other personas do more iffy stuff, such as seeing how well Freenet nodes worked as Tor onion services. Freenet being sadly loaded with CP. But those personas used different nested VPN chains, and then Whonix for Tor. So they're not related to either Mirimir or my meatspace identity. Also, there are no overlaps in interests or Internet activity between Mirimir and my meatspace identity. In communications as my meatspace identity, I rarely use English. Not with family, friends or clients. Occasionally in work-related stuff, but never in social media. So there's not much basis for stylometry. Finally, I must say the the setup is extremely easy to use. I have VPN client in the host machine, plus several pfSense VMsxas VPN gateways, which can easily be arranged and rearrabged in nested chains. I introduce new middle VMs occasionally, but generally don't change the entry and exit very often. Just update VBox and the VMs periodically.
gerbal 9y ago
It's worth looking through Zenyep Tufekci's other op-eds [1] and her fantastic book "Twitter and Teargass" [2]. A lot of her analysis borders on prescient. She's someone to pay attention to. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/column/zeynep-tufekci https://www.nytimes.com/column/zeynep-tufekci [2] https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300215120/twitter-and-tear-gas https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300215120/twitter-and-te...
- hendler 9y ago
  Agreed. TED talk was good too. https://www.ted.com/talks/zeynep_tufekci_we_re_building_a_dystopia_just_to_make_people_click_on_ads https://www.ted.com/talks/zeynep_tufekci_we_re_building_a_dy...
  - 4h53n 9y ago
    A realistic dystopia, lovely.
rtx 9y ago
We have to decide if people should have powers like this. "Build tools that measure the rate and spread of stories and rumors, and model how it works and who has the biggest impact. Tools can tell us about the origin of stories and the impact of any venue, person or theme. Connect polling into this in some way. Find a way to do polling online and not on phones. Analytics and data science and modeling, polling and resource optimization tools. For each voter, a score is computed ranking probability of the right vote. Analytics can model demographics, social factors and many other attributes of the needed voters. Modeling will tell us what who we need to turn out and why, and studies of effectiveness will let us know what approaches work well. Machine intelligence across the data should identify the most important factors for turnout, and preference. It should be possible to link the voter records in Van with upcoming databases from companies like Comcast and others for media measurement purposes. The analytics tools can be built in house or partnered with a set of vendors." Edit- Source - https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/37262 https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/37262
mattbierner 9y ago
Seeking advice: how do I tell friends and family about the negative aspects of Facebook without coming across as all “I don’t even own a TV” or “meat is murder”? Is that even possible?
- kaybe 9y ago
  Right now I'm considering to just show them the video on sentiance's homepage.. (https://www.sentiance.com https://www.sentiance.com as linked above)
- mr_spothawk 9y ago
  instead of deleting my account, i wrote an email which i bcc’d to my “real” friends: i’m deleting our facebook friendship, i love you and expect we can stay in touch just fine without. then i deleted all my fb connections, and left a public account with no friends and a publi message about how to find me. if i want to spam a post to my people, i use the bcc email
- bgarbiak 9y ago
  It's not only Facebook though. If you look for a restaurant at Google it will show you a link to that restaurant's website, opening hours, etc. but also: how popular the place is at any time, and how much time people spend there. All thanks to tracking phones. In case of Google you can disable that in the phone's settings (and trust that opt-out works), but you can't really do that with your phone operator. Or with the apps that do the same but don't brag about it. To answer your question directly: I showed a search result page to my friends, and showed them how to disable location tracking. Some were terrified, but - sadly - most of them didn't and don't mind being tracked.
  - antocv 9y ago
    > Some were terrified, but - sadly - most of them didn't and don't mind being tracked. For those friends, I ask them if they can just carry this nickle of mine for me, it will track them and Ill know where they are if I need them. They all refuse to be tracked by me. Then I ask them if they want a raspberry pi or a router from me, with ads blocked and personal access to my virtual private network with access to all my movies music etc, but dont worry of course _I_ will see every domain-name your computers lookup, Ill even warn you, friend, if I notice bad-name lookups, and I pinky promise not to remotely access the router. They all act like I am a creep and refuse. But, google, an entity they dont even know or have a relationship with - thats fine to let them into their house and know what time they watch porn and how long. When the surveillence is put into context like this, it usually works, friends smirk and think one more time.
zby 9y ago
Physicists became aware about the ethical implications of their work after the A bomb - with information science there will not be any such sharp censure - but the implications might be even more profound.
g09980 9y ago
Am I understanding correctly is that the primary blame on Facebook is in enabling apps (via API) to collect data? This stuff has unfortunately existed for years, no different from an Android "beautiful waterfall wallpapers" app that also happens to ask for permission to access your contacts/messages. People consent to their data being public (sometimes in second-degree through their friends), data gets collected. And what about all those helpful Chrome extensions that want access to all of your browsing tabs? I never authorize third-party apps on my accounts (or even install non-local Chrome extensions), but I'm likely in the minority.
mfrommil 9y ago
In many cases, industry self-regulation can be a good solution to protecting customers from being wronged. PCI is a great example- there can be huge fines on merchants that don't meet strict regulations for handling customer financial transactions according to the strict standards set by PCI. What has become extremely clear from this situation is that we are far past the point of self-regulation being the answer for protecting personal data. Facebook knowingly enabled a 3rd party to pay $1-$2 to 300k people to acquire facebook data that may have been marked private/don't share for 50 million users. Roughly $500k for 50 million people's personal data, or in other words, a penny per person. This data is connected to influencing the election of the POTUS. There needs to be significant overhaul of how personal data is protected or this will continue to happen.
- Juliate 9y ago
  > In many cases, industry self-regulation can be a good solution to protecting customers from being wronged. PCI is a self-regulation by self-interest: not to protect the card holders, but merely to protect the card issuers first. Because legislation made issuers responsible for most mishaps in payments. What are documented examples of industry self-regulation in the interest of customers? (true question, I'm genuinely wondering about it)
  - lostlogin 9y ago
    The trick is to have customers that aren’t users.
- CaptainZapp 9y ago
  In addition: You need reasonably trustworthy entities if you want them to self-regulate and self-certify. Facebook, with their behavior over the years, have lost any benefit of a doubt. This may not be a popular opinion here, but given their behavior, their evasions and their lies it's time for the law to crack down on them; hard!
- CaptSpify 9y ago
  As someone who has worked with PCI compliance, I'm not sure I'd say it's a great example. Sure, it's better than nothing, but it's also relatively trivial to bypass, and is done so regularly. I think the governing organization should have much sharper teeth. That's not to say that self-regulating won't work, but I don't think PCI is a great example of it in action.
sidcool 9y ago
Technology has yet to face its A-bomb moment that physicists faced decades ago.
hellofunk 9y ago
I wish quite badly that the benefit of deactivating FB would outweigh the inconvenience, but FB has become such a mainstay that I'd lose touch with lots of people I really have no other way of contacting. I could say "good riddance," if there is no other way to contact them then perhaps they are not important enough to my life, but that's just not true. Or what about all the local forums (FB groups) in my city that have lots of immediate help about all sorts of things -- I'd immediately lose access to all that. I wish there was a better way, but I can't see myself getting rid of FB without a notable disruption to my life. #sad
- wepple 9y ago
  If you haven’t already, I encourage you to try without it for 30 days: if you truly can’t find a way around it, fine, check it every second day. You might be surprised how unimportant it ends up being
  - tasssko 9y ago
    Yes I do this as well. I don't use facebook for platform, news or ads. I use facebook every other day to comment on what friends are doing and its useful for my local community news, events via groups or are they pages not sure. I don't trust Facebook and don't upload or share my personal information.
  - paulie_a 9y ago
    I've slowly stopped using it because the quality of content is just so incredibly low. Facebook has created a negative feedback loop for me, the more "suggested" bullshit they attempt to push the less I care. I when every third post is that sort of thing it becomes less useful. I've personally been blocked from "hiding" ads on numerous occasions.
- roadbeats 9y ago
  What is the point of staying in contact only in Facebook ? If someone is important for me, I'd be in contact with them in real life or another platform. Also, lots of people seem to be unaware of that you can delete your Facebook account. They don't have a link to the delete page from settings menu though. It's here: https://facebook.com/account/delete https://facebook.com/account/delete
newnewpdro 9y ago
The only reason this stuff is being reported on in this way is the president they successfully got elected sucks. None of this is news. Facebook has _never_ been regarded as some kind of privacy-respecting entity. Users have been willingly participating in the exchange of privacy for convenience as far as I can remember.
Azeralthefallen 9y ago
Maybe i am misunderstanding something about this whole issue, but was there an exploit or a bug that allowed this to happen on Facebooks end? I guess my confusion is that whenever someone grants third party access to your facebook, you can query that users list of friends (which i have seen used for things like games and high scores, etc). But you didn't get the full friends profile, instead you got a small subset of it. Did they find some way around that and managed to retrieve the full user profile? If not then isn't Cambridge Analytica at fault here for misusing someones data? Facebook provides an API and users consented to allowing a third party to access their data. I guess you could remove the friends list, from the API.
- wepple 9y ago
  I don’t think there was any exploit. My understanding is that a third-party app asked for access, and people gave consent, and CA mined data. I’m the last person you’d see defending FB, but this just seems like the same thing everyone has been doing on FB as a platform since FarmVille launched years ago?
  - rovek 9y ago
    A major part of Facebook's culpability here is that they knew for 2 years that tens of millions of their users were being profiled as part of a political propaganda war on their platform and their response was practically nothing. Edit: FB also knew the data was collected under an academic license and was being processed, outside that license, for financial gain.
    - Azeralthefallen 9y ago
      I guess my question is from a security standpoint, how do you prevent something like this if you were facebook? Do you ask any company who does a huge number of API requests requesting peoples friends lists? To verify how they are using the data? How do you actually confirm they are doing what they said? According to the article only ~200k people installed the app and consented. Unless there was an exploit, you get a minimal version of the data in their friend list (user id, name, that is all i really see) not a full profile. So didn't they only really get the names of 49.8 million people? Is the solution to just not allow allow a third party token to access a friend list, and only your personal information? I am not trying to defend what is going on, i am just struggling to see how they were able to use the extremely minimal amount of information the friend list api returns to make a full profile on 50 million people.
titzer 9y ago
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” ― Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked Facebook and Google are not evil. They are made up of ordinary people with ordinary likes, dislikes, biases, histories, failings. Those people don't have to be evil or wrong or even misguided to give rise to this situation. No matter how much they try to (and want to!) do the right thing, they are just trying to make money. Everyone's economic incentive is to make more money. The shareholders demand it! Economics is what underlies all of this, and it is completely inescapable. The market is rewarding those who track users and profile them in order to predict their behavior, jam ads in their face, or sell them stuff. Entities that do this make more money than entities that don't. Like, a lot more. $100billion/yr more. So. You are going to get more companies finding more ways to track and profile people to figure out how to make more money. Facebook and Google and Twitter and ad networks and everyone else can be absolute angels in their hearts, but the sheer mathematics of economics is like a pervasive wind that just keeps pushing them in this direction. You either push back, HARD, with your feet and with the law, or you suffer the consequences along with everyone else.
- arvinsim 9y ago
  I agree. In the end, incentives is what drives behaviour, not ideals.
- hudon 9y ago
  > Facebook and Google are not evil. [...] Everyone's economic incentive is to make more money. I don't buy the claim that everyone just wants more money above all else and you seem to agree if you're claiming that people can "push back, HARD". We all have the capacity to place ethics above money. Never questioning the impact of your actions--especially when it affects the lives of millions--and simply doing what greed dictates, is indeed a form of malevolence, or "evil"... the 20th century is a testament to that. Furthermore, if a company's leadership is filled to the brim with these unethical and greedy people, I believe it's acceptable to call the company evil as well. Tech just needs to stop building tech for tech's sake and start thinking deeply about humans... and holding each other accountable.
zhyder 9y ago
It's interesting that we have 2 big scandals in tech right now: one with Uber's self-driving car killing a pedestrian, and the other with Facebook revealing too much data about users and their friends to third-party apps. With Uber, we're asking for data (telemetry leading up to the accident) to be recorded and access to be more open. With Facebook, we're asking for access to be more closed; ironic that we usually criticize Facebook for being a walled garden. Assuming data needs to be recorded in the first place to make the products work better, what's ethically better, open access or closed? Is it better for a few big tech companies to wield so much power with their troves of user data, or is it better to distribute it across numerous companies/governments who can be even more unscrupulous (e.g. Cambridge Analytica, Russia)? EDIT: even now, with full benefit of hindsight, should Facebook allow accessing friend lists with user permission (would lead to more cases of abuse by third-party apps), or not (would perpetuate their walled garden and monopoly on social media)?
- n4r9 9y ago
  I'm not sure that's a useful binary. In both cases we're asking corporations to handle their data in a responsible way. Neither open nor closed is absolutely more ethical, it depends on the context.
- js8 9y ago
  In addition to what n4r9 said, we organize our moral code around freedom of individuals, and not freedom of other entities. So it's morally acceptable to ask for privacy of individuals, yet ask for things and institutions to be surveilled by society at large.
twsted 9y ago
"Should we all just leave Facebook? That may sound attractive but it is not a viable solution. In many countries, Facebook and its products simply are the internet." _That_ is the problem.
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chiefalchemist 9y ago
I read "Dragnet Nation" shortly after it came out. http://juliaangwin.com/dragnet-nation-available-now/ http://juliaangwin.com/dragnet-nation-available-now/ And a couple years later "Chaos Monkeys." https://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/06/29/business/dealbook/review-chaos-monkeys-is-a-guide-to-the-spirit-of-silicon-valley.html https://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/06/29/business/dealbook/revi... Obviously there are others, as well as articles in between. In terms of FB et al, we are the product. They know this. We know this. And the prevailing (USA) cultural wind is "Privacy? Who needs it?" If there's a surprise, it's that its taken this long for this issue to get any significant attention. Let's see how long it lasts. If it lasts.
- camillomiller 9y ago
  Here in Germany online privacy is a social value, and Facebook is gonna have a even harder time from now on. I don't see it happen in the rest of the world. I give this three months: when the news cycle will have died out, for Facebook it's gonna be business as usual. Zuckerberg is in such a denial about the real mission of his creature, that I don't see how it will ever be able to steer the boat, even if he wanted to. Does he ever lie in bed at night, staring at the ceiling, asking himself "what the fuck did I create"? Will he ever?
  - 1over137 9y ago
    Why do you think Zuckerberg is in denial? (Honest question.) Seems to me he knows exactly what he's doing.
    - camillomiller 9y ago
      Ok, this may sound bad, very way-out-there and not P.C. at all, so forgive me in advance, as it is my (almost fictional) speculation: I think he's in denial because of his lingering autism. My theory is that, for Zuckerberg, Facebook has always been a perfect data machine to figure out the complexity governing social interactions. The same social interactions that have always escaped him in real life, due to his high-functioning autism. Facebook, for the first time in history, made possible to quantify social interactions. The next step after such an enlighting discovery (it really is, actually) was to scale the analysis on a global level. Everyone - in Mark's mind - couldn't do but benefit from such formalization of social interactions. He might have asked himself: if only social interactions where as easy to analyse as a calculus problem, or as simple to formalize in a giant set of rules as grammar, wouldn't we all be better off? Years later, he's still so autistically enamored with his own Leviathan, that he's now in denial about the evil applications his beloved monster has made possible. He's still positive that such a perfect machine can't be used for bad purposes. Sure, there have been speedbumps, but the road is still stretching towards a brighter future where technology can help us rationalize the irrational and ethereal world of mutual interactions. Long story short: he's an autistic with a delusion of grandeur about his own creature. Such delusions are aggravated buy the shield put up around him by his fellow executives, such as Sheryl "only good news" Sandberg. Again, this is nothing but my own literary divertissement. He might just be another silicon valley asshole executive, and that's it.
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nomercy400 9y ago
How convenient for Facebook that large dubious data collection practices like this are exposed only two months before the European GDPR privacy law comes into effect.
bambax 9y ago
> Facebook makes money, in other words, by profiling us and then selling our attention to advertisers, political actors and others. These are Facebook’s true customers, whom it works hard to please. And you just figured this out now? This is like saying "wow, who knew we would get so fat by feeding only on pizza, hamburgers and coke, aren't those companies evil". Well, yes, companies are evil. They don't work for you; they either sell something to you, that is usually bad for you (why else would you want it), or take something from you, that they can then sell to somebody else. > Should we all just leave Facebook? That may sound attractive but it is not a viable solution. Of course it is. It's the only solution. If you think Facebook's management care about anything else except the number of active users, you're crazy. The only way to have them change their ways (maybe) is to make that number go down. It's also good for you, like drinking water instead of soda.
- antocv 9y ago
  Change is upon us, join patchwork at secure scuttlebutt. The social network is the network, no central services, federation or global anything.
  - littlepinkpill 9y ago
    Thanks for this pointer--if enough people adopted something like this FB would eventually wither away. I wondered when someone would use this model for social networking.
- 3chelon 9y ago
  You're absolutely right we should all leave FB. It's the only way to make them change. I've been seriously considering it for a while - I'd lose some exposure in my hobby groups, and my mother would miss the kids' photo updates, but I could just about live with that.
  - shard972 9y ago
    You could use Diaspora. I haven't used either FB or Diaspora in quite a few years know but I would have to imagine it still exists.
3chelon 9y ago
> Some employers and landlords demand to see Facebook profiles I may be wrong - please correct me if I am - but I'm pretty sure that's illegal?
prepend 9y ago
The positive outcome of this could be society’s shift away from marketing to meaning. This isn’t unique to Facebook. It’s true of many large media companies that rely on advertising (Comcast with NBC, Disney with ABC, NYTimes, Google, etc). Facebook is just among the best at advertising’s extreme optimization. The election is high attention now, but I’m looking for research on whether society is worth off from drinking Coke and sitting for hours watching video.
therealmarv 9y ago
Close a FB account is no option... ever lived in a country where FB is essential? It's maybe not USA or many bigger Europe countries but if you go to smaller countries (where Google Maps is even bad) you will loose a lot (groups, buying/selling, advices).
- Jyaif 9y ago
  You are repeating what is in the article.
- TheCoelacanth 9y ago
  Just because you don't have a Facebook account doesn't mean they don't have data about you. They create a shadow profile for people whose existence they have inferred from other people's accounts.
cyphar 9y ago
> Should we all just leave Facebook? That may sound attractive but it is not a viable solution. It's the only sane response, and has been the only sane response, for the past decade. The only counter-argument given by NYT is that in some countries Facebook has a stranglehold. I don't see how that's relevant to people who don't live in those countries. As for organisers of political groups exclusively using Facebook (which is just a terrifying idea for a number of reasons), just pull a Stallman and email them explaining the problem with Facebook and ask if there's another way of staying abreast of the group. You can't fix the problem if you don't even try. By not exercising your ability to protest against systemic and deep-seated abuse of user privacy, you're just making the world worse for the people who don't have that option currently (because it just tightens their stranglehold).
- gt_ 9y ago
  “Protest” by way of market choice is such a tired fallacy. It’s really amazing so many HN readers are so ready to take such outdated philosophy to the grave.
  - cyphar 9y ago
    I am in very strongly favour of GDPR and other similar regulations. I just also think that enabling giants like Facebook to abuse you by admitting that you are unable to function without them is a bad strategy. Diversify if you can, and regulate to protect those who cannot. Nobody said you cannot approach something like this on more than one front.
    - Pokepokalypse 9y ago
      My (individual) approach has been to try to carefully curate my content where it's associated with my Real Name: FB and LinkedIn. LI especially - I think everybody does this. I am absolutely not the person I portray on FB. Co workers. People I know, they're all pretty aware of this. It is an extra level of intimacy in my personal relationships that I allow them to know the real me. Other social networks, where I can use sock puppets - I get out my frustrations by talking about things I would never talk about on FB. In this way, I maximize the usefulness of these tools, and I minimize my usefulness as a tool for them.
rufugee 9y ago
They collect browser histories? Shouldn't that technically be impossible unless they're using their ad partners across multiple sites?
- dictum 9y ago
  No need for ad partners; their share button scripts are enough for this task. (Google Analytics is the leader on this technique, compounded by secondary tracking inside Google search results, but FB is one of the leading third-party request destinations in the web)
- astura 9y ago
  I thought it was fairly well know those Facebook "like" and "share" buttons you find places were also trackers. At least I recall reading that several years ago, things may have changed.
gotofritz 9y ago
This is good because it might make people question what they read on FB, but the reality is that (a) the whole digital economy is based on that. FB are no better than Google or Apple (who know where you are, right now!) or a miriad others (b) FB serves some purposes (my old aunt wouldn't be able to work out email, but FB is easy enough for her, for example) and (c) it seems that the trend is away from 'public' platforms like FB and towards non publicly accessible groups such as WhatsApp groups (also owned by FB..) or Telegram or Snapchat etc, so an anti-FB backlash may not achieve much in terms of a "healthier public discourse" Also, it all depends on how you use it. I subscribe to a lot of food based groups and art events groups, and share next to nothing about what I do. OK, some AI can infer that if I like Lebanese AND Mexican I am probably left leaning. OK, now what? What are they going to do with that info?
mark_l_watson 9y ago
Better than average article about long term dangers posed by Internet super-companies like FB and Google. The author is a professor of information and library science. The only way, I think, that we in the USA can solve this problem is to pass user rights and privacy laws similar to those in Europe. Given our corrupt political system this will be difficult but I think possible if enough individuals keep contributing to the EFF, ACLU, FSF, etc. It takes money to fight back.
- inanutshellus 9y ago
  > Given our corrupt political system This is an unhelpful "truism" that encourages us all to lose faith in a system entirely built on trust. It's a sentence easy to bandy about--especially unqualified--and impossible to counter (in any government). It also fails to bolster your argument. Your post without those words would be just as effective. Please reconsider.
joering2 9y ago
If someone thinks about building a new, better and more mature social network where users data wouldnt be sell to the Facebook’s tune, this is your time! You dont have to have your startup listed on stock exchange and answer to shareholders how you squeezing out every possible penny out of your users; you just need to show enough ads to keep servers running and paying for salaries. And now you dont have to show off to everyone that you so nice tou only make $1 salary per tear — keep a cool million bucks annul to yourself. Thats a small percentage of ads shown and small percentage of dollars collected that Facebook is harvesting right now, to be able to run similar size of enterprise. And you be on your way of helping out our civilization in truly noble way.
gfodor 9y ago
I was one of the co-founders of an early social VR startup and observed first hand the technical capabilities that these applications will afford bad actors to use for surveillance. You can easily capture voice, body tracking, and interaction data, and basically record a full view of the world through the eyes of another human being. It's quite remarkable being able to record and play back a copy of yourself in seconds from a remote server, but the potential for abuse is immense. Facebook's made a move, probably the biggest move of any company, into VR. They bought Oculus for $2B while everyone else was scratching their heads. Social VR is their focus at Facebook proper, and they are leaving the entire rest of the VR ecosystem to their subsidiary Oculus. Isn't it obvious why? VR, if it becomes the dominant form of human communication, will make their current surveillance machine look like a joke. Facebook would be in a position to be an intermediary for every human interaction on earth that doesn't take place in physical space. It's nice to see the public become aware of what they've done before they are able to take it to the next level of nearly being inside of our heads. This is the primary underlying motivation for why we are working on building an alternative open communication platform for Mixed Reality at Mozilla. We're heads down building stuff now but you can expect to see us shipping things soon. https://blog.mozvr.com/enabling-the-social-3d-web/ https://blog.mozvr.com/enabling-the-social-3d-web/
- mliker 9y ago
  VR hasn’t taken off as promised and the hype is dying down now. The headset is too clunky in its current incarnation. People view it as a novelty item rather than a useful tool, so I’m inclined to believe this won’t be the massive surveillance tool VR proponents think it’ll be.
  - gfodor 9y ago
    Untethered standalone VR devices are likely a prerequisite to any mainstream adoption and are shipping this year. Your guess is as good as mine if they will reach mass appeal, but to assume VR is not viable before these devices are available at low prices is probably wrong. The one to keep your eye on is the Oculus Go which is a self contained device for $199. (Also a Facebook product, probably going to have all this social functionality burned in. My guess is this is their first big play.)
tn_ 9y ago
Not that this would ever happen..probably, but if Amazon were to offer users a $20 amazon store voucher to get users to disable their FB account and port all their pictures to a social media solution they build, I could see myself doing that. This platform would only be accessible to users with Amazon Prime accounts and that would be a way for them to keep it ad-free.
owly 9y ago
Serious question, to where are companies who were previously dependent on FB moving their advertising and marketing?
- freehunter 9y ago
  That's a very good question. As a business owner, as far as I'm concerned I'm tied to Facebook. As someone who writes a local blog, Facebook is where I get most of my information about my city. The Internet (and this thread) is full of people telling you to get off Facebook and go to something else, but especially for businesses, what else is there? I have thousands of followers on Facebook and Facebook drives 90% of the traffic to my site, meanwhile my email newsletter has 6 subscribers. When I'm walking, I like to know where my next step is before I take it. Without that, shutting down Facebook means shutting down my business. A lot of people here are telling me to take the step, but can anyone tell me where my foot is going to land when I do?
  - kossae 9y ago
    In that case I would recommend pushing as many subscribers over to your e-mail newsletter as possible. I'm sure this has already been attempted to some degree on your part, but e-mail marketing is very effective when done right and could potentially displace some negative impact from if/when Facebook decides/regulates that your business is no longer needed on their platform.
    - freehunter 9y ago
      >if/when Facebook decides/regulates that your business is no longer needed on their platform. That's really my fear, I'm trying to create a critical mass where Facebook isn't required anymore. I took a big hit earlier this year when they decided to stop showing people content from pages. But a huge problem is, any article I write that doesn't get posted to Facebook gets zero hits. Posting to Facebook gets thousands of hits. No one is visiting my site without being provided a link to click on. And my audience is Millennials, which is a demographic that doesn't use email as much as others. Even pulling all my current followers into the email newsletter, though, doesn't solve the problem of finding a new audience. Right now I can pay Facebook $1/day and reliably get 30 new followers every week. Even though my audience is all within my small town, building that audience on Facebook is far cheaper than even the most conservative physical advertising plan. That is assuming, of course, that Facebook followers translate into actual readers. And it certainly has been an ongoing struggle to get Facebook to show my content to the people who have explicitly opted-in to see my content. The two situations I face: either rely on Facebook (which is cheap and easy) until the day they decide I shouldn't be a business anymore, or do anything but Facebook, which is harder and more expensive. That's why people use Facebook: no one trusts it, but it's so damn easy, even when they constantly make it harder.
Nitramp 9y ago
I think it's worth noting that there's a big difference between (1) allowing advertisers to display ads on your platform based on user profiles (e.g. matching certain demographics etc) on the one hand, and (2) handing out arbitrary user data on the other. With the former, you stay in control and are able to enforce access and use, including the guarantees you gave users on how their data is handled. With the latter model, you're handing over the keys to the castle to random and possibly quite shady third parties that you cannot have the slightest chance at controlling. It seems rather reckless to do (2), both regarding your responsibility towards users, but also economically – if a bad actor exfiltrates all user data into their competing ad service, you have little to keep them from doing that.
zeveb 9y ago
This isn't limited to Facebook. Yesterday I saw that PUBG just came out for Android. I've heard great things about it, so I looked for it on the Play Store and took a look at the permissions. It demands the ability to read my phone's logs & see running apps. What possible reason could it have for that? It's a free app. While I know that there are in-app purchases, is Tencent also selling information about me if I install it? No thanks — I chose not to install it. The modern web/app/software platform is built on users trading their privacy & security for value, rather than trading money for value. I'd really rather just pay.
- stordoff 9y ago
  > It demands the ability to read my phone's logs & see running apps. What possible reason could it have for that? Possibly anti-cheat?
ahartmetz 9y ago
It is interesting how much traditional media likes to bash Facebook - they are competing with it for advertising dollars after all... The only thing that surprises me is that it took them so long. Maybe they had to wait until they could do it without opposing public sentiment too much. That said, I vastly prefer traditional media over Facebook. You can do propaganda on both, but only Facebook has and exploits everyone's personal data. On traditional media, campaigns also need to be balanced to avoid alienating the general public, while on Facebook, extremist ads can target extremist people with no downsides.
Ancalagon 9y ago
All these articles coming out now definitely feel like a smear campaign against facebook. Im not saying I agree with facebook's actions, or that I even enjoy the site. But is anyone really surprised by any of this?
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Teracotage 9y ago
Let's not forget that Alteryx sells the data of 123 Million American Households. That data Was Exposed Online https://www.upguard.com/breaches/cloud-leak-alteryx https://www.upguard.com/breaches/cloud-leak-alteryx "the data was part of a product - the Alteryx Designer With Data - that sells for around $38,995 per license. In its own marketing for the Experian service, Alteryx notes that the database contains "consumer demographics, life event, direct response, property, and mortgage information for more than 235 million consumers." 'It included an extraordinary range of personal details on residents, including addresses, ethnicity, interests and hobbies, income, right down to what kind of mortgage the house was under and how many children lived at the property. In total, there were 248 different data fields for each household, according to the researcher who uncovered the leak data this week. Whilst there were no names exposed, Chris Vickery, a cybersecurity researcher from UpGuard, told Forbes it was simple to determine who the data was linked to, either by looking at the details or by crosschecking with previous leaks. He found the data was sitting in an Amazon Web Services storage "bucket," left open to anyone with an account, which are free to obtain." https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2017/12/19/120m-american-households-exposed-in-massive-consumerview-database-leak/#61b6cc047961 https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2017/12/19/120m-...
cja 9y ago
"Should we all just leave Facebook? That may sound attractive but it is not a viable solution. In many countries, Facebook and its products simply are the internet. Some employers and landlords demand to see Facebook profiles, and there are increasingly vast swaths of public and civic life — from volunteer groups to political campaigns to marches and protests — that are accessible or organized only via Facebook." I have a Facebook account so that I can participate in groups used by clubs I belong to and so that I can follow musical artists. My account has no friends and I have entered no information about myself. Problem solved?

677 points by imartin2k 9y ago

when talking about Cambridge Analytica we should also discuss Palantir from 5 years ago: https://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2013-06/mysterious-silicon-valley-company-helping-nsa-spy-americans https://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2013-06/mysterious... Palantir ‘wields as much real-world power as Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple, but unlike them, Palantir operates so far under the radar, it is special ops.’ https://channels.theinnovationenterprise.com/articles/is-palantir-a-force-for-good-or-evil https://channels.theinnovationenterprise.com/articles/is-pal... Yes, that's the same Thiel who is suing Gawker for outing him while developing predictive analytics that disproportionately target minorities. See: Peter Thiel’s Palantir wins $876 million U.S. Army contract https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-09/peter-thiel-s-palantir-wins-876-million-u-s-army-contract https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-09/peter-thi... https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/27/17054740/palantir-predictive-policing-tool-new-orleans-nopd https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/27/17054740/palantir-predict... not just facebook but Silicon Valley has in general a total disregard for privacy. You can't hate on Facebook from another corner of the swamp. Also we should be thinking about what's ahead in IoT (Turning IOT sensor data into behavioral insights) https://www.sentiance.com/ https://www.sentiance.com/ Not to mention the gazillion IoT devices with poor factory reset which is the web's equivalent to delete-account function which only disables a users login but retains the data. apologies for my emotional tone, this obviously has hit a nerve.

kaybe 9y ago
Wow, sentiance is super creepy.
- ccozan 9y ago
  wow+1. Truly creepy. But this is possible because we let them use this data. Thankfully, in EU the GDRP makes this almost impossible. On a side note, working on a platform that is similar to sentiance in data aquisition, but for totally other purpose and zero effect on privacy, due to a transparent anonymization.
  - jakeogh 9y ago
    Are you going to invade a foreign power when one of their sovereigns ignores your demand to forget?
    - ccozan 9y ago
      Legally, I cannot collect any data and keep the source. So I do strip all the possible identification, until someone's effort to pin point to any personal data becomes economically unfeasible. I also tend to store as little as possible raw data and in some cases, I do data scrambling, where the data as in values is not important for the engine. A demand to forget has to show that I have data on that person. Without this, claim is impossible. No invasion.
      - pdkl95 9y ago
        > I do strip all the possible identification "Anonymizing" data is a myth; stripped or hashed columns can usually be recovered by correlating the remaining data with other data sets. > until someone's effort to pin point to any personal data becomes economically unfeasible. Which admits that the data probably is recoverable, just "economically infeasible". Do you have proof of that claim? Unfeasible for who? In general, the difficulty of re-correlating data goes down as the amount of data grows. > I do data scrambling, where the data as in values is not important for the engine. DJB once described[1] hashing as "magic crypto pixie dust" that "takes personally identifiable information and makes it incomprehensible to the marketing department". > A demand to forget has to show that I have data on that person. So you're trying to launder data to circumvent the letter of the law. This kind of scofflaw, antisocial attitude is how you attract reactionary, heavy handed regulations. [1] https://projectbullrun.org/surveillance/2015/video-2015.html#bernstein https://projectbullrun.org/surveillance/2015/video-2015.html...
        ccozan 9y ago
        I suppose you talk a bit from outsite. There is no other data set to correlate. Simply all the external context data is not recorded anywhere. Not even in logs. Unless some higher agency is going to hack some network driver to pick up the tcpip source, etc, I don't see how the data could be associated with datetime and location. This is why I was talking about "economically infeasible". Data scrambling doesn't mean hashing. Sorry, here you are wrong. It's a on-the-fly frequency/timedomain scrambling, means someone has to physically, again, access a server and pick up from the memory the algorithm. And no marketing department, all research here! The other stuff, I wound't reply, but let me asure you, there is no law circumventing. We are open and if someone can pinpoint of some personal data, there is no issue removing it.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  Holy fuck. After watching the video on their site, I agree.
- oblio 9y ago
  And people keep whining about the GDPR.
- ParanoidShroom 9y ago
  I was recruited to work there, since they are from my local neighborhood I know them some time already. They have a history of analyzing data with financial support from Samsung. They are a smart bunch, don't have bad intentions towards people. That being said, their goal is indeed ... Well not something I value personally. But they are all good guys that are eager to make an amazingly powerful product. I agree that the result can be abused. That being said, there should be a middle ground where both parties should benefit. I normally don't comment, but I don't want to see them look like a villain. They are excited engineers.
  - titzer 9y ago
    > They are excited engineers. It doesn't really matter how nice, smart, talented, excited, curious, or well-meaning a person is. Judge them by their actions. What they build and what it is used for. If you could pass a message them, please tell them to get a grip and realize how insanely creepy what they are doing is, and they should probably not do it, even if it makes them a bunch of money.
  - rainingmonkey 9y ago
    >I don't want to see them look like a villain. They are excited engineers. I suspect the idea that these two categories are mutually exclusive is at the root of most of the questionable applications of technology today.
  - toss1 9y ago
    >they are all good guys that are eager to make an amazingly powerful product Lovely. They are also devoid of vision and ethics about the likely results of their actions. In short, they fail to consider the saying: "The road to hell is paved with good intentions". Have they even considered the question: Which of their targets would EVER sign-up for their service? Who are their customers, and why would they pay for the service? The only plausible reason to pay Sentiance is to understand a target's behavior at a fine-grained level in order to insert a stimulus to get them to do something they would otherwise not do willingly. (or a stalker, to assault them). So, they are making a wonderfully powerful tool to enable strangers to change a target's behavior without permission. Yet they are not bright enough to avoid putting a "sign up" popup on their website in a way that interrupts their own video. They will enable someone to cause serious damage to our world. Please get a message to them that they need to stop and shut down. If they want to build something REALLY powerful, they should pivot to building something to allow us to DETECT & PREVENT other software on our phones/computers from doing what they are now trying to do. I'd pay for that, and I'm not the only one.
danso 9y ago
From the theinnovationenterprise.com article you linked to: > It is essentially an interface that sits on top of existing data sets and displays data to users for analysis, helping to identify connections otherwise impossible to find. Users do not have to use SQL queries or employ engineers to write strings in order to search petabytes of data. Instead, natural language is used to query data and results are returned in real-time. It is not designed to do any single thing, its main strength is that it is flexible and powerful enough to accommodate the requirements of any organization that needs to process large amounts of both personal and abstract data. This makes it more useful for managing HUMINT, or intelligence from human sources, than SIGINT, or intelligence from signals. The problem with Palantir is that everything it is said to be doing is so vague that it could just be colorful dashboards based on not particularly great or new data. For example, this is how the Bloomberg story you linked to describes it: > Founded in 2004, Palantir is used by dozens of federal, state and local law enforcement agencies to aggregate far-flung data, find patterns and present results in colorful, easy-to-interpret graphics. Its use by police in Los Angeles, Chicago, New Orleans and elsewhere has raised ethical concerns about the potential for unfairly targeting minorities. I'm not arguing whether Palantir is living up to its contracts. Just that it doesn't seem to produce or have the unique and expansive kind of data that Facebook, Google, and Amazon have. Though I guess there's nothing that prevented them from doing a massive data pull from FB's API, in the same way CA managed to do it. FWIW, not everything about Palantir is necessarily a secret. You can see some descriptions of what they offer and at what price via various FOIA requests that have been done: https://www.muckrock.com/foi/list/?q=palantir&status=done&user-autocomplete=&agency-autocomplete=&jurisdiction-autocomplete=&projects-autocomplete=&tags-autocomplete=&has_embargo=&has_crowdfund=&minimum_pages=&date_range_0=&date_range_1= https://www.muckrock.com/foi/list/?q=palantir&status=done&us...
- g09980 9y ago
  If the task is "taking datasets and making them more searchable," it seems like that company gets the heat simply for making the task easier. Excel, SQL databases (or, heck, huge CSV files) don't get as much attention even though they could be used for the same purpose, even if very awkwardly.
simula67 9y ago
Thiel did not sue Gawker, Terry Bollea ( known professionally as "Hulk Hogan" ) did, Thiel only bankrolled the suit. Gawker going down was their own fault, they defied a court order in a very explicit manner : https://web.archive.org/web/20130428130143/http://gawker.com/a-judge-told-us-to-take-down-our-hulk-hogan-sex-tape-po-481328088 https://web.archive.org/web/20130428130143/http://gawker.com...
- DyslexicAtheist 9y ago
  you're right yes. I should make clear that I shed no tears for gawker. good riddance. but Thiel's position on everything (from voting Trump to supporting surveillance capitalism) is still noteworthy.

ensiferum 9y ago

I think it's time to finally close the FB account, move on to Firefox and disable 3rd party trackers and start using VPN routinely.

ccozan 9y ago
But careful with the VPNs. They are leaking and selling data too. Can't find the article at this moment, but there was on HN not long ago.
- DyslexicAtheist 9y ago
  yepp, VPNs are really just shifting the trust from ISP to the VPN.
- mirimir 9y ago
  Sure, there's no way to know. But it is possible to distribute trust across multiple VPN services, such that none of them alone can compromise you. You just nest one VPN inside another. It's easy using VMs. Most simply, connect to one VPN provider in the host machine, and to another in a VM. Using pfSense VMs as VPN gateways, you can chain more deeply. It's the same idea that's behind Tor using three-relay circuits. But less anonymous, because routes are static.
  - ccozan 9y ago
    Do you realise that this kind of behaviour will make you automatically a suspect? Remember, is not the data that you transfer, but the metadata of it which is always visible. Maintain appearance of normal, but block just what is doing really harm, like advertising and certain cookies. And don't post anything personal online. Use firefox on private window.
    - mirimir 9y ago
      Which "you"? Mirimir, for sure. But being a suspect is unavoidable for that persona. However, to my ISP and its friends, I'm just a VPN user. Who torrents, which is pretty common where I'm located. I've never connected directly to Tor, even. And what metadata? All Mirimir metadata points to the final VPN service. I'm sure that resourceful TLAs could use traffic analysis, and walk either way through the VPN chain. But I can't imagine that I'm that interesting. And indeed, I doubt that they'd find much to prosecute. I mean, all that Mirimir does is write about this stuff, mainly here and on Wilders Security Forums. And occasional stuff that's published by IVPN. Other personas do more iffy stuff, such as seeing how well Freenet nodes worked as Tor onion services. Freenet being sadly loaded with CP. But those personas used different nested VPN chains, and then Whonix for Tor. So they're not related to either Mirimir or my meatspace identity. Also, there are no overlaps in interests or Internet activity between Mirimir and my meatspace identity. In communications as my meatspace identity, I rarely use English. Not with family, friends or clients. Occasionally in work-related stuff, but never in social media. So there's not much basis for stylometry. Finally, I must say the the setup is extremely easy to use. I have VPN client in the host machine, plus several pfSense VMsxas VPN gateways, which can easily be arranged and rearrabged in nested chains. I introduce new middle VMs occasionally, but generally don't change the entry and exit very often. Just update VBox and the VMs periodically.

gerbal 9y ago

It's worth looking through Zenyep Tufekci's other op-eds [1] and her fantastic book "Twitter and Teargass" [2]. A lot of her analysis borders on prescient. She's someone to pay attention to. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/column/zeynep-tufekci https://www.nytimes.com/column/zeynep-tufekci [2] https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300215120/twitter-and-tear-gas https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300215120/twitter-and-te...

hendler 9y ago
Agreed. TED talk was good too. https://www.ted.com/talks/zeynep_tufekci_we_re_building_a_dystopia_just_to_make_people_click_on_ads https://www.ted.com/talks/zeynep_tufekci_we_re_building_a_dy...
- 4h53n 9y ago
  A realistic dystopia, lovely.

rtx 9y ago

We have to decide if people should have powers like this. "Build tools that measure the rate and spread of stories and rumors, and model how it works and who has the biggest impact. Tools can tell us about the origin of stories and the impact of any venue, person or theme. Connect polling into this in some way. Find a way to do polling online and not on phones. Analytics and data science and modeling, polling and resource optimization tools. For each voter, a score is computed ranking probability of the right vote. Analytics can model demographics, social factors and many other attributes of the needed voters. Modeling will tell us what who we need to turn out and why, and studies of effectiveness will let us know what approaches work well. Machine intelligence across the data should identify the most important factors for turnout, and preference. It should be possible to link the voter records in Van with upcoming databases from companies like Comcast and others for media measurement purposes. The analytics tools can be built in house or partnered with a set of vendors." Edit- Source - https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/37262 https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/37262

mattbierner 9y ago

Seeking advice: how do I tell friends and family about the negative aspects of Facebook without coming across as all “I don’t even own a TV” or “meat is murder”? Is that even possible?

kaybe 9y ago
Right now I'm considering to just show them the video on sentiance's homepage.. (https://www.sentiance.com https://www.sentiance.com as linked above)
mr_spothawk 9y ago
instead of deleting my account, i wrote an email which i bcc’d to my “real” friends: i’m deleting our facebook friendship, i love you and expect we can stay in touch just fine without. then i deleted all my fb connections, and left a public account with no friends and a publi message about how to find me. if i want to spam a post to my people, i use the bcc email
bgarbiak 9y ago
It's not only Facebook though. If you look for a restaurant at Google it will show you a link to that restaurant's website, opening hours, etc. but also: how popular the place is at any time, and how much time people spend there. All thanks to tracking phones. In case of Google you can disable that in the phone's settings (and trust that opt-out works), but you can't really do that with your phone operator. Or with the apps that do the same but don't brag about it. To answer your question directly: I showed a search result page to my friends, and showed them how to disable location tracking. Some were terrified, but - sadly - most of them didn't and don't mind being tracked.
- antocv 9y ago
  > Some were terrified, but - sadly - most of them didn't and don't mind being tracked. For those friends, I ask them if they can just carry this nickle of mine for me, it will track them and Ill know where they are if I need them. They all refuse to be tracked by me. Then I ask them if they want a raspberry pi or a router from me, with ads blocked and personal access to my virtual private network with access to all my movies music etc, but dont worry of course _I_ will see every domain-name your computers lookup, Ill even warn you, friend, if I notice bad-name lookups, and I pinky promise not to remotely access the router. They all act like I am a creep and refuse. But, google, an entity they dont even know or have a relationship with - thats fine to let them into their house and know what time they watch porn and how long. When the surveillence is put into context like this, it usually works, friends smirk and think one more time.

zby 9y ago

Physicists became aware about the ethical implications of their work after the A bomb - with information science there will not be any such sharp censure - but the implications might be even more profound.

g09980 9y ago

Am I understanding correctly is that the primary blame on Facebook is in enabling apps (via API) to collect data? This stuff has unfortunately existed for years, no different from an Android "beautiful waterfall wallpapers" app that also happens to ask for permission to access your contacts/messages. People consent to their data being public (sometimes in second-degree through their friends), data gets collected. And what about all those helpful Chrome extensions that want access to all of your browsing tabs? I never authorize third-party apps on my accounts (or even install non-local Chrome extensions), but I'm likely in the minority.

mfrommil 9y ago

In many cases, industry self-regulation can be a good solution to protecting customers from being wronged. PCI is a great example- there can be huge fines on merchants that don't meet strict regulations for handling customer financial transactions according to the strict standards set by PCI. What has become extremely clear from this situation is that we are far past the point of self-regulation being the answer for protecting personal data. Facebook knowingly enabled a 3rd party to pay $1-$2 to 300k people to acquire facebook data that may have been marked private/don't share for 50 million users. Roughly $500k for 50 million people's personal data, or in other words, a penny per person. This data is connected to influencing the election of the POTUS. There needs to be significant overhaul of how personal data is protected or this will continue to happen.

Juliate 9y ago
> In many cases, industry self-regulation can be a good solution to protecting customers from being wronged. PCI is a self-regulation by self-interest: not to protect the card holders, but merely to protect the card issuers first. Because legislation made issuers responsible for most mishaps in payments. What are documented examples of industry self-regulation in the interest of customers? (true question, I'm genuinely wondering about it)
- lostlogin 9y ago
  The trick is to have customers that aren’t users.
CaptainZapp 9y ago
In addition: You need reasonably trustworthy entities if you want them to self-regulate and self-certify. Facebook, with their behavior over the years, have lost any benefit of a doubt. This may not be a popular opinion here, but given their behavior, their evasions and their lies it's time for the law to crack down on them; hard!
CaptSpify 9y ago
As someone who has worked with PCI compliance, I'm not sure I'd say it's a great example. Sure, it's better than nothing, but it's also relatively trivial to bypass, and is done so regularly. I think the governing organization should have much sharper teeth. That's not to say that self-regulating won't work, but I don't think PCI is a great example of it in action.

sidcool 9y ago

Technology has yet to face its A-bomb moment that physicists faced decades ago.

hellofunk 9y ago

I wish quite badly that the benefit of deactivating FB would outweigh the inconvenience, but FB has become such a mainstay that I'd lose touch with lots of people I really have no other way of contacting. I could say "good riddance," if there is no other way to contact them then perhaps they are not important enough to my life, but that's just not true. Or what about all the local forums (FB groups) in my city that have lots of immediate help about all sorts of things -- I'd immediately lose access to all that. I wish there was a better way, but I can't see myself getting rid of FB without a notable disruption to my life. #sad

wepple 9y ago
If you haven’t already, I encourage you to try without it for 30 days: if you truly can’t find a way around it, fine, check it every second day. You might be surprised how unimportant it ends up being
- tasssko 9y ago
  Yes I do this as well. I don't use facebook for platform, news or ads. I use facebook every other day to comment on what friends are doing and its useful for my local community news, events via groups or are they pages not sure. I don't trust Facebook and don't upload or share my personal information.
- paulie_a 9y ago
  I've slowly stopped using it because the quality of content is just so incredibly low. Facebook has created a negative feedback loop for me, the more "suggested" bullshit they attempt to push the less I care. I when every third post is that sort of thing it becomes less useful. I've personally been blocked from "hiding" ads on numerous occasions.
roadbeats 9y ago
What is the point of staying in contact only in Facebook ? If someone is important for me, I'd be in contact with them in real life or another platform. Also, lots of people seem to be unaware of that you can delete your Facebook account. They don't have a link to the delete page from settings menu though. It's here: https://facebook.com/account/delete https://facebook.com/account/delete

newnewpdro 9y ago

The only reason this stuff is being reported on in this way is the president they successfully got elected sucks. None of this is news. Facebook has _never_ been regarded as some kind of privacy-respecting entity. Users have been willingly participating in the exchange of privacy for convenience as far as I can remember.

Azeralthefallen 9y ago

Maybe i am misunderstanding something about this whole issue, but was there an exploit or a bug that allowed this to happen on Facebooks end? I guess my confusion is that whenever someone grants third party access to your facebook, you can query that users list of friends (which i have seen used for things like games and high scores, etc). But you didn't get the full friends profile, instead you got a small subset of it. Did they find some way around that and managed to retrieve the full user profile? If not then isn't Cambridge Analytica at fault here for misusing someones data? Facebook provides an API and users consented to allowing a third party to access their data. I guess you could remove the friends list, from the API.

wepple 9y ago
I don’t think there was any exploit. My understanding is that a third-party app asked for access, and people gave consent, and CA mined data. I’m the last person you’d see defending FB, but this just seems like the same thing everyone has been doing on FB as a platform since FarmVille launched years ago?
- rovek 9y ago
  A major part of Facebook's culpability here is that they knew for 2 years that tens of millions of their users were being profiled as part of a political propaganda war on their platform and their response was practically nothing. Edit: FB also knew the data was collected under an academic license and was being processed, outside that license, for financial gain.
  - Azeralthefallen 9y ago
    I guess my question is from a security standpoint, how do you prevent something like this if you were facebook? Do you ask any company who does a huge number of API requests requesting peoples friends lists? To verify how they are using the data? How do you actually confirm they are doing what they said? According to the article only ~200k people installed the app and consented. Unless there was an exploit, you get a minimal version of the data in their friend list (user id, name, that is all i really see) not a full profile. So didn't they only really get the names of 49.8 million people? Is the solution to just not allow allow a third party token to access a friend list, and only your personal information? I am not trying to defend what is going on, i am just struggling to see how they were able to use the extremely minimal amount of information the friend list api returns to make a full profile on 50 million people.

titzer 9y ago

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” ― Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked Facebook and Google are not evil. They are made up of ordinary people with ordinary likes, dislikes, biases, histories, failings. Those people don't have to be evil or wrong or even misguided to give rise to this situation. No matter how much they try to (and want to!) do the right thing, they are just trying to make money. Everyone's economic incentive is to make more money. The shareholders demand it! Economics is what underlies all of this, and it is completely inescapable. The market is rewarding those who track users and profile them in order to predict their behavior, jam ads in their face, or sell them stuff. Entities that do this make more money than entities that don't. Like, a lot more. $100billion/yr more. So. You are going to get more companies finding more ways to track and profile people to figure out how to make more money. Facebook and Google and Twitter and ad networks and everyone else can be absolute angels in their hearts, but the sheer mathematics of economics is like a pervasive wind that just keeps pushing them in this direction. You either push back, HARD, with your feet and with the law, or you suffer the consequences along with everyone else.

arvinsim 9y ago
I agree. In the end, incentives is what drives behaviour, not ideals.
hudon 9y ago
> Facebook and Google are not evil. [...] Everyone's economic incentive is to make more money. I don't buy the claim that everyone just wants more money above all else and you seem to agree if you're claiming that people can "push back, HARD". We all have the capacity to place ethics above money. Never questioning the impact of your actions--especially when it affects the lives of millions--and simply doing what greed dictates, is indeed a form of malevolence, or "evil"... the 20th century is a testament to that. Furthermore, if a company's leadership is filled to the brim with these unethical and greedy people, I believe it's acceptable to call the company evil as well. Tech just needs to stop building tech for tech's sake and start thinking deeply about humans... and holding each other accountable.

zhyder 9y ago

It's interesting that we have 2 big scandals in tech right now: one with Uber's self-driving car killing a pedestrian, and the other with Facebook revealing too much data about users and their friends to third-party apps. With Uber, we're asking for data (telemetry leading up to the accident) to be recorded and access to be more open. With Facebook, we're asking for access to be more closed; ironic that we usually criticize Facebook for being a walled garden. Assuming data needs to be recorded in the first place to make the products work better, what's ethically better, open access or closed? Is it better for a few big tech companies to wield so much power with their troves of user data, or is it better to distribute it across numerous companies/governments who can be even more unscrupulous (e.g. Cambridge Analytica, Russia)? EDIT: even now, with full benefit of hindsight, should Facebook allow accessing friend lists with user permission (would lead to more cases of abuse by third-party apps), or not (would perpetuate their walled garden and monopoly on social media)?

n4r9 9y ago
I'm not sure that's a useful binary. In both cases we're asking corporations to handle their data in a responsible way. Neither open nor closed is absolutely more ethical, it depends on the context.
js8 9y ago
In addition to what n4r9 said, we organize our moral code around freedom of individuals, and not freedom of other entities. So it's morally acceptable to ask for privacy of individuals, yet ask for things and institutions to be surveilled by society at large.

twsted 9y ago

"Should we all just leave Facebook? That may sound attractive but it is not a viable solution. In many countries, Facebook and its products simply are the internet." _That_ is the problem.

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chiefalchemist 9y ago

I read "Dragnet Nation" shortly after it came out. http://juliaangwin.com/dragnet-nation-available-now/ http://juliaangwin.com/dragnet-nation-available-now/ And a couple years later "Chaos Monkeys." https://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/06/29/business/dealbook/review-chaos-monkeys-is-a-guide-to-the-spirit-of-silicon-valley.html https://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/06/29/business/dealbook/revi... Obviously there are others, as well as articles in between. In terms of FB et al, we are the product. They know this. We know this. And the prevailing (USA) cultural wind is "Privacy? Who needs it?" If there's a surprise, it's that its taken this long for this issue to get any significant attention. Let's see how long it lasts. If it lasts.

camillomiller 9y ago
Here in Germany online privacy is a social value, and Facebook is gonna have a even harder time from now on. I don't see it happen in the rest of the world. I give this three months: when the news cycle will have died out, for Facebook it's gonna be business as usual. Zuckerberg is in such a denial about the real mission of his creature, that I don't see how it will ever be able to steer the boat, even if he wanted to. Does he ever lie in bed at night, staring at the ceiling, asking himself "what the fuck did I create"? Will he ever?
- 1over137 9y ago
  Why do you think Zuckerberg is in denial? (Honest question.) Seems to me he knows exactly what he's doing.
  - camillomiller 9y ago
    Ok, this may sound bad, very way-out-there and not P.C. at all, so forgive me in advance, as it is my (almost fictional) speculation: I think he's in denial because of his lingering autism. My theory is that, for Zuckerberg, Facebook has always been a perfect data machine to figure out the complexity governing social interactions. The same social interactions that have always escaped him in real life, due to his high-functioning autism. Facebook, for the first time in history, made possible to quantify social interactions. The next step after such an enlighting discovery (it really is, actually) was to scale the analysis on a global level. Everyone - in Mark's mind - couldn't do but benefit from such formalization of social interactions. He might have asked himself: if only social interactions where as easy to analyse as a calculus problem, or as simple to formalize in a giant set of rules as grammar, wouldn't we all be better off? Years later, he's still so autistically enamored with his own Leviathan, that he's now in denial about the evil applications his beloved monster has made possible. He's still positive that such a perfect machine can't be used for bad purposes. Sure, there have been speedbumps, but the road is still stretching towards a brighter future where technology can help us rationalize the irrational and ethereal world of mutual interactions. Long story short: he's an autistic with a delusion of grandeur about his own creature. Such delusions are aggravated buy the shield put up around him by his fellow executives, such as Sheryl "only good news" Sandberg. Again, this is nothing but my own literary divertissement. He might just be another silicon valley asshole executive, and that's it.

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nomercy400 9y ago

How convenient for Facebook that large dubious data collection practices like this are exposed only two months before the European GDPR privacy law comes into effect.

bambax 9y ago

> Facebook makes money, in other words, by profiling us and then selling our attention to advertisers, political actors and others. These are Facebook’s true customers, whom it works hard to please. And you just figured this out now? This is like saying "wow, who knew we would get so fat by feeding only on pizza, hamburgers and coke, aren't those companies evil". Well, yes, companies are evil. They don't work for you; they either sell something to you, that is usually bad for you (why else would you want it), or take something from you, that they can then sell to somebody else. > Should we all just leave Facebook? That may sound attractive but it is not a viable solution. Of course it is. It's the only solution. If you think Facebook's management care about anything else except the number of active users, you're crazy. The only way to have them change their ways (maybe) is to make that number go down. It's also good for you, like drinking water instead of soda.

antocv 9y ago
Change is upon us, join patchwork at secure scuttlebutt. The social network is the network, no central services, federation or global anything.
- littlepinkpill 9y ago
  Thanks for this pointer--if enough people adopted something like this FB would eventually wither away. I wondered when someone would use this model for social networking.
3chelon 9y ago
You're absolutely right we should all leave FB. It's the only way to make them change. I've been seriously considering it for a while - I'd lose some exposure in my hobby groups, and my mother would miss the kids' photo updates, but I could just about live with that.
- shard972 9y ago
  You could use Diaspora. I haven't used either FB or Diaspora in quite a few years know but I would have to imagine it still exists.

3chelon 9y ago

> Some employers and landlords demand to see Facebook profiles I may be wrong - please correct me if I am - but I'm pretty sure that's illegal?

prepend 9y ago

The positive outcome of this could be society’s shift away from marketing to meaning. This isn’t unique to Facebook. It’s true of many large media companies that rely on advertising (Comcast with NBC, Disney with ABC, NYTimes, Google, etc). Facebook is just among the best at advertising’s extreme optimization. The election is high attention now, but I’m looking for research on whether society is worth off from drinking Coke and sitting for hours watching video.

therealmarv 9y ago

Close a FB account is no option... ever lived in a country where FB is essential? It's maybe not USA or many bigger Europe countries but if you go to smaller countries (where Google Maps is even bad) you will loose a lot (groups, buying/selling, advices).

Jyaif 9y ago
You are repeating what is in the article.
TheCoelacanth 9y ago
Just because you don't have a Facebook account doesn't mean they don't have data about you. They create a shadow profile for people whose existence they have inferred from other people's accounts.

cyphar 9y ago

> Should we all just leave Facebook? That may sound attractive but it is not a viable solution. It's the only sane response, and has been the only sane response, for the past decade. The only counter-argument given by NYT is that in some countries Facebook has a stranglehold. I don't see how that's relevant to people who don't live in those countries. As for organisers of political groups exclusively using Facebook (which is just a terrifying idea for a number of reasons), just pull a Stallman and email them explaining the problem with Facebook and ask if there's another way of staying abreast of the group. You can't fix the problem if you don't even try. By not exercising your ability to protest against systemic and deep-seated abuse of user privacy, you're just making the world worse for the people who don't have that option currently (because it just tightens their stranglehold).

gt_ 9y ago
“Protest” by way of market choice is such a tired fallacy. It’s really amazing so many HN readers are so ready to take such outdated philosophy to the grave.
- cyphar 9y ago
  I am in very strongly favour of GDPR and other similar regulations. I just also think that enabling giants like Facebook to abuse you by admitting that you are unable to function without them is a bad strategy. Diversify if you can, and regulate to protect those who cannot. Nobody said you cannot approach something like this on more than one front.
  - Pokepokalypse 9y ago
    My (individual) approach has been to try to carefully curate my content where it's associated with my Real Name: FB and LinkedIn. LI especially - I think everybody does this. I am absolutely not the person I portray on FB. Co workers. People I know, they're all pretty aware of this. It is an extra level of intimacy in my personal relationships that I allow them to know the real me. Other social networks, where I can use sock puppets - I get out my frustrations by talking about things I would never talk about on FB. In this way, I maximize the usefulness of these tools, and I minimize my usefulness as a tool for them.

rufugee 9y ago

They collect browser histories? Shouldn't that technically be impossible unless they're using their ad partners across multiple sites?

dictum 9y ago
No need for ad partners; their share button scripts are enough for this task. (Google Analytics is the leader on this technique, compounded by secondary tracking inside Google search results, but FB is one of the leading third-party request destinations in the web)
astura 9y ago
I thought it was fairly well know those Facebook "like" and "share" buttons you find places were also trackers. At least I recall reading that several years ago, things may have changed.

gotofritz 9y ago

This is good because it might make people question what they read on FB, but the reality is that (a) the whole digital economy is based on that. FB are no better than Google or Apple (who know where you are, right now!) or a miriad others (b) FB serves some purposes (my old aunt wouldn't be able to work out email, but FB is easy enough for her, for example) and (c) it seems that the trend is away from 'public' platforms like FB and towards non publicly accessible groups such as WhatsApp groups (also owned by FB..) or Telegram or Snapchat etc, so an anti-FB backlash may not achieve much in terms of a "healthier public discourse" Also, it all depends on how you use it. I subscribe to a lot of food based groups and art events groups, and share next to nothing about what I do. OK, some AI can infer that if I like Lebanese AND Mexican I am probably left leaning. OK, now what? What are they going to do with that info?

mark_l_watson 9y ago

Better than average article about long term dangers posed by Internet super-companies like FB and Google. The author is a professor of information and library science. The only way, I think, that we in the USA can solve this problem is to pass user rights and privacy laws similar to those in Europe. Given our corrupt political system this will be difficult but I think possible if enough individuals keep contributing to the EFF, ACLU, FSF, etc. It takes money to fight back.

inanutshellus 9y ago
> Given our corrupt political system This is an unhelpful "truism" that encourages us all to lose faith in a system entirely built on trust. It's a sentence easy to bandy about--especially unqualified--and impossible to counter (in any government). It also fails to bolster your argument. Your post without those words would be just as effective. Please reconsider.

joering2 9y ago

If someone thinks about building a new, better and more mature social network where users data wouldnt be sell to the Facebook’s tune, this is your time! You dont have to have your startup listed on stock exchange and answer to shareholders how you squeezing out every possible penny out of your users; you just need to show enough ads to keep servers running and paying for salaries. And now you dont have to show off to everyone that you so nice tou only make $1 salary per tear — keep a cool million bucks annul to yourself. Thats a small percentage of ads shown and small percentage of dollars collected that Facebook is harvesting right now, to be able to run similar size of enterprise. And you be on your way of helping out our civilization in truly noble way.

gfodor 9y ago

I was one of the co-founders of an early social VR startup and observed first hand the technical capabilities that these applications will afford bad actors to use for surveillance. You can easily capture voice, body tracking, and interaction data, and basically record a full view of the world through the eyes of another human being. It's quite remarkable being able to record and play back a copy of yourself in seconds from a remote server, but the potential for abuse is immense. Facebook's made a move, probably the biggest move of any company, into VR. They bought Oculus for $2B while everyone else was scratching their heads. Social VR is their focus at Facebook proper, and they are leaving the entire rest of the VR ecosystem to their subsidiary Oculus. Isn't it obvious why? VR, if it becomes the dominant form of human communication, will make their current surveillance machine look like a joke. Facebook would be in a position to be an intermediary for every human interaction on earth that doesn't take place in physical space. It's nice to see the public become aware of what they've done before they are able to take it to the next level of nearly being inside of our heads. This is the primary underlying motivation for why we are working on building an alternative open communication platform for Mixed Reality at Mozilla. We're heads down building stuff now but you can expect to see us shipping things soon. https://blog.mozvr.com/enabling-the-social-3d-web/ https://blog.mozvr.com/enabling-the-social-3d-web/

mliker 9y ago
VR hasn’t taken off as promised and the hype is dying down now. The headset is too clunky in its current incarnation. People view it as a novelty item rather than a useful tool, so I’m inclined to believe this won’t be the massive surveillance tool VR proponents think it’ll be.
- gfodor 9y ago
  Untethered standalone VR devices are likely a prerequisite to any mainstream adoption and are shipping this year. Your guess is as good as mine if they will reach mass appeal, but to assume VR is not viable before these devices are available at low prices is probably wrong. The one to keep your eye on is the Oculus Go which is a self contained device for $199. (Also a Facebook product, probably going to have all this social functionality burned in. My guess is this is their first big play.)

tn_ 9y ago

Not that this would ever happen..probably, but if Amazon were to offer users a $20 amazon store voucher to get users to disable their FB account and port all their pictures to a social media solution they build, I could see myself doing that. This platform would only be accessible to users with Amazon Prime accounts and that would be a way for them to keep it ad-free.

owly 9y ago

Serious question, to where are companies who were previously dependent on FB moving their advertising and marketing?

freehunter 9y ago
That's a very good question. As a business owner, as far as I'm concerned I'm tied to Facebook. As someone who writes a local blog, Facebook is where I get most of my information about my city. The Internet (and this thread) is full of people telling you to get off Facebook and go to something else, but especially for businesses, what else is there? I have thousands of followers on Facebook and Facebook drives 90% of the traffic to my site, meanwhile my email newsletter has 6 subscribers. When I'm walking, I like to know where my next step is before I take it. Without that, shutting down Facebook means shutting down my business. A lot of people here are telling me to take the step, but can anyone tell me where my foot is going to land when I do?
- kossae 9y ago
  In that case I would recommend pushing as many subscribers over to your e-mail newsletter as possible. I'm sure this has already been attempted to some degree on your part, but e-mail marketing is very effective when done right and could potentially displace some negative impact from if/when Facebook decides/regulates that your business is no longer needed on their platform.
  - freehunter 9y ago
    >if/when Facebook decides/regulates that your business is no longer needed on their platform. That's really my fear, I'm trying to create a critical mass where Facebook isn't required anymore. I took a big hit earlier this year when they decided to stop showing people content from pages. But a huge problem is, any article I write that doesn't get posted to Facebook gets zero hits. Posting to Facebook gets thousands of hits. No one is visiting my site without being provided a link to click on. And my audience is Millennials, which is a demographic that doesn't use email as much as others. Even pulling all my current followers into the email newsletter, though, doesn't solve the problem of finding a new audience. Right now I can pay Facebook $1/day and reliably get 30 new followers every week. Even though my audience is all within my small town, building that audience on Facebook is far cheaper than even the most conservative physical advertising plan. That is assuming, of course, that Facebook followers translate into actual readers. And it certainly has been an ongoing struggle to get Facebook to show my content to the people who have explicitly opted-in to see my content. The two situations I face: either rely on Facebook (which is cheap and easy) until the day they decide I shouldn't be a business anymore, or do anything but Facebook, which is harder and more expensive. That's why people use Facebook: no one trusts it, but it's so damn easy, even when they constantly make it harder.

Nitramp 9y ago

I think it's worth noting that there's a big difference between (1) allowing advertisers to display ads on your platform based on user profiles (e.g. matching certain demographics etc) on the one hand, and (2) handing out arbitrary user data on the other. With the former, you stay in control and are able to enforce access and use, including the guarantees you gave users on how their data is handled. With the latter model, you're handing over the keys to the castle to random and possibly quite shady third parties that you cannot have the slightest chance at controlling. It seems rather reckless to do (2), both regarding your responsibility towards users, but also economically – if a bad actor exfiltrates all user data into their competing ad service, you have little to keep them from doing that.

zeveb 9y ago

This isn't limited to Facebook. Yesterday I saw that PUBG just came out for Android. I've heard great things about it, so I looked for it on the Play Store and took a look at the permissions. It demands the ability to read my phone's logs & see running apps. What possible reason could it have for that? It's a free app. While I know that there are in-app purchases, is Tencent also selling information about me if I install it? No thanks — I chose not to install it. The modern web/app/software platform is built on users trading their privacy & security for value, rather than trading money for value. I'd really rather just pay.

stordoff 9y ago
> It demands the ability to read my phone's logs & see running apps. What possible reason could it have for that? Possibly anti-cheat?

ahartmetz 9y ago

It is interesting how much traditional media likes to bash Facebook - they are competing with it for advertising dollars after all... The only thing that surprises me is that it took them so long. Maybe they had to wait until they could do it without opposing public sentiment too much. That said, I vastly prefer traditional media over Facebook. You can do propaganda on both, but only Facebook has and exploits everyone's personal data. On traditional media, campaigns also need to be balanced to avoid alienating the general public, while on Facebook, extremist ads can target extremist people with no downsides.

Ancalagon 9y ago

All these articles coming out now definitely feel like a smear campaign against facebook. Im not saying I agree with facebook's actions, or that I even enjoy the site. But is anyone really surprised by any of this?

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Teracotage 9y ago

Let's not forget that Alteryx sells the data of 123 Million American Households. That data Was Exposed Online https://www.upguard.com/breaches/cloud-leak-alteryx https://www.upguard.com/breaches/cloud-leak-alteryx "the data was part of a product - the Alteryx Designer With Data - that sells for around $38,995 per license. In its own marketing for the Experian service, Alteryx notes that the database contains "consumer demographics, life event, direct response, property, and mortgage information for more than 235 million consumers." 'It included an extraordinary range of personal details on residents, including addresses, ethnicity, interests and hobbies, income, right down to what kind of mortgage the house was under and how many children lived at the property. In total, there were 248 different data fields for each household, according to the researcher who uncovered the leak data this week. Whilst there were no names exposed, Chris Vickery, a cybersecurity researcher from UpGuard, told Forbes it was simple to determine who the data was linked to, either by looking at the details or by crosschecking with previous leaks. He found the data was sitting in an Amazon Web Services storage "bucket," left open to anyone with an account, which are free to obtain." https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2017/12/19/120m-american-households-exposed-in-massive-consumerview-database-leak/#61b6cc047961 https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2017/12/19/120m-...

cja 9y ago

"Should we all just leave Facebook? That may sound attractive but it is not a viable solution. In many countries, Facebook and its products simply are the internet. Some employers and landlords demand to see Facebook profiles, and there are increasingly vast swaths of public and civic life — from volunteer groups to political campaigns to marches and protests — that are accessible or organized only via Facebook." I have a Facebook account so that I can participate in groups used by clubs I belong to and so that I can follow musical artists. My account has no friends and I have entered no information about myself. Problem solved?