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Oh man this is bad. >the platform operations manager at Facebook responsible for policing data breaches [...] warned senior executives at the company that its
by scottmf 9y ago
Oh man this is bad.
>the platform operations manager at Facebook responsible for policing data breaches [...] warned senior executives at the company that its lax approach to data protection risked a major breach
>One Facebook executive advised him against looking too deeply at how the data was being used, warning him: “Do you really want to see what you’ll find?”
>They felt that it was better not to know. I found that utterly shocking and horrifying.
- 1337biz 9y agoIsn't that just part of FB's culture? Didn't the Zuck start out by scraping Harvard's student registry?
- txcwpalpha 9y agoLol, "this is bad"? This is normal. I can give you an entire list of F500 companies I've worked at that have the same mindset. I've sat in meetings with F100 CIOs where they were given the same warning and shrugged it off. I've been asked before to turn off security monitoring systems because executives prefer to not know about vulnerabilities rather than know about them and not be able to fix them. The only thing shocking and horrifying about this whole thing is how naive the American public must be to find any of this shocking and horrifying.
- peterwwillis 9y agoPeople love to pretend to be horrified by things they've assumed to be true. "What? A politician is corrupt? Outrage!!" "What? They're tracking me to build profiles on my use of all their advertising driven free services? Outrage!!" I'm sure there's a word for it in German.
- zinckiwi 9y agozückerfreude
- scottmf 9y agoHave you ever considered the possibility that many people actually are shocked? Why do “people love to pretend” that genuine outrage and the sincere desire to stop immoral practices doesn’t exist? Many people sincerely care about what’s right, even if they fall prey to human flaws and cognitive biases from time to time. Perhaps those who talk about how “everyone” just “loves to act like” x and “virtue signal” y are merely projecting their own values on to the rest of us?
- peterwwillis 9y agoThat's even more sad. It would mean that even though they care deeply about outcomes, they either willfully ignore the things that result in those outcomes, or have amnesia, or are just incapable of doing anything about it. Take Congress for example. Approval ratings are what, 20%? They're generally seen to be corrupt, and they don't get anything done, right? So why aren't they voted out of office? Why are people surprised when they end up having low morals or corrupt? If people honestly cared, wouldn't they immediately demand change? But the status quo remains. So either the people have no power to change things, or they collectively forget these things every day, or the real reason: they don't really care that much, but like to seem like they do.
- scottmf 9y agoThings aren’t so black and white. For your congress problem it’s actually none of the reasons you listed. The cause of the discrepancy is the 20% approval rating is for congress as a whole, but people don’t vote for congress as a whole, they vote for individual representatives. People do like their own representatives, and those approval ratings are often very good in their own district. It’s the rest of congress they don’t like.
- snarfy 9y agoFor the executives, it is better not to know. As soon as they know they are liable and must disclose it. As long as they don't know they can claim ignorance.