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FTC Probing Facebook for Use of Personal Data, Source Says

• colejohnson66 9y ago
  > If the FTC finds Facebook violated terms of the consent decree, it has the power to fine the company thousands of dollars a day per violation. Maybe I'm misreading this, but only a few thousand?
  • koolba 9y ago
    If each person is considered a separate violation then $1000/day adds up quickly.
    • fancyfacebook 9y ago
      Works out to $2 trillion in liability according to one (highly speculative) article I saw.
      • thesis 9y ago
        Where can I get my check? Or will the government spend it in my best interest?
        • toxican 9y ago
          Fear not citizen, it'll be put to use by the same government that's actively working to dismantle consumer protections.
        • drchiu 9y ago
          Almost certainly the latter. Although it would be whimsical to consider for a moment people retiring from Facebook’s misfortunes.
        • throwaway-hn123 9y ago
          Yeah, probably by wasting money on your shit startup.
        • nonbel 9y ago
          I've been saying for awhile if people were just payed fairly for the data all these companies were tricking them into giving away it would amount to a basic income of a couple thousand dollars a year. It basically requires collective action though. If everyone does it at once they will start paying your bills to track you.
          • grogenaut 9y ago
            If people were paid fairly for this data then these companies wouldn't exist. I'm not saying this is good or bad, but you'd turn around and be charged to use the service. Interesting side question, how do you see market forces working to set a proper payment for data to users? Right now Facebook is essentially saying your data is worth free photos and being advertised and propogandized and people seem to accept that. How does this not become the standard of exchange in your system for any popular network effect service?
            • nonbel 9y ago
              >"Right now Facebook is essentially saying your data is worth free photos and being advertised and propogandized and people seem to accept that. How does this not become the standard of exchange in your system for any popular network effect service?" The point would be that people started valuing their data "correctly". I don't know how high that is but it must be worth much more than free web hosting or else these companies wouldn't have gotten so huge.
          • conanbatt 9y ago
            Wow, how much money do you think facebook makes. They have 114$/person in the US revenue. And that's taking all the global revenue into account.
            • nonbel 9y ago
              Facebook is only one company. Start with the FANG companies, then banks + "partners", ISPs, etc.
      • beefield 9y ago
        That's a neat way to nationalize FB.
        • conanbatt 9y ago
          Is it. Because if it is immoral for facebook to sell data for electoral campaigns, what does it mean for the president to get all that data legally and at tax payer money.
          • beefield 9y ago
            I did not make claims whether nationalizing FB is neat or not. Just that if you want to nationalize a company, setting fines that make the company immediately insolvent and government by far largest creditor is quite a neat way to do it.
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  • wpietri 9y ago
    Yeah, this struck me too. It seems like the FTC's powers are far too light to deal with modern tech. I'd really like to see something like the NTSB here, but for privacy/security issues. After an incident, the NTSB comes in, investigates everything, and produces a very detailed report as to what happened and what the industry should be doing differently. You can see their recent reports here: https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Pages/AccidentReports.aspx https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Pages/Ac... It's very clear from Facebook's behavior since the elections that they can't be trusted to investigate and report on themselves. E.g., this article on how their execs thought it best not to say anything until forced by circumstances: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/technology/facebook-alex-stamos.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/technology/facebook-alex-...
    • laurentoget 9y ago
      European fines are much stiffer. https://www.gdpreu.org/compliance/fines-and-penalties/ https://www.gdpreu.org/compliance/fines-and-penalties/
• nepotism2018 9y ago
  "...50 million users..." Anyone know how this number was added up? Any reason not to believe it wasn't 500 million or 5 million?
  • jimbokun 9y ago
    It's the number of Facebook users whose data was accessed by Cambridge Analytica, allegedly without being authorized for how they used the data.
  • mtgx 9y ago
    The Guardian's original article on this says that number was shown in documents from 2015 [1]. However, the whistleblower said that by now it should be over 230 million [2]. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/cambridge-analytica-facebook-influence-us-election https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/cambridge-analy... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/data-war-whistleblower-christopher-wylie-faceook-nix-bannon-trump https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/data-war-whistl...
  • hanspeter 9y ago
    It's 270.000 users directly impacted. The friends of those users has also been fetched, but with a limited amount of data most of which is pulic already.
• HenryBemis 9y ago
  I expect that FB will be receiving a few milliong letters like this [1] in a couple of months, when GDPR will be kicking in. And following that, a few million requests (smaller number) for the "right to be forgotten" [2]. #1 was on the front page of HN a couple of days ago. [1]: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/nightmare-letter-subject-access-request-under-gdpr-karbaliotis/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/nightmare-letter-subject-acce... [2]: https://gdpr-info.com/the-right-to-be-forgotten/ https://gdpr-info.com/the-right-to-be-forgotten/
  • anonymouz 9y ago
    They already had an obligation to respond to such inquires under the older EU Data Protection Directive. But they generally ignored the requests or only gave incomplete data (e.g., you'd get your facebook posts, etc., but no tracking data they had on you).
• apo 9y ago
  It's laughable that any Facebook user assumes any degree of privacy. What's far more concerning, and what this probe doesn't appear to address, is what Facebook does with the information of non-users. https://fieldguide.gizmodo.com/all-the-ways-facebook-tracks-you-that-you-might-not-kno-1795604150 https://fieldguide.gizmodo.com/all-the-ways-facebook-tracks-... https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2016/06/02/facebook-ads-for-non-users https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2016/06/02/facebook-ads-f...
  • SkyPuncher 9y ago
    In my opinion, the problem isn't just with being an active Facebook user. Anytime you visit a website with a FB Pixel, "Like" button, or any other FB embedded content, you are tracked - whether or not you are a user.
    • 2sk21 9y ago
      I do have the Facebook trackers disabled in Ghostery but I wonder if that’s enough
      • FilterSweep 9y ago
        You're being additionally tracked in the reverse by a third party affiliate on the knowledge of you being a person who blocks Facebook, if that makes any sense. Adblock detectors that function in the same vein as "FuckAdblock" look at if the client blocked a Facebook pixel.
        • mitsubishi77 9y ago
          I do not doubt this, but do you have more information/sources?
        • theptip 9y ago
          Seems like the fingerprinting that can be done in this case is much less -- the affiliate would just get "ip / website / using-adblock" instead of "ip / website / FB profile ID" right? Or are the websites providing identifying information like email? (I've never heard of this but I'm not well-versed here).
• dahdum 9y ago
  Biggest concern for Facebook has got to be them investigating the other sharing of data beyond Cambridge Analytica. I seriously doubt they turned the other way for conservative but not liberal think tanks / firms.
  • dexterdog 9y ago
    https://ijr.com/2018/03/1077083-ex-obama-campaign-director-fb/ https://ijr.com/2018/03/1077083-ex-obama-campaign-director-f...
    • jerf 9y ago
      For those who may be concerned about this being a partisan hit job because it's a news article, the primary source from a verified account: https://twitter.com/cld276/status/975565844632821760 https://twitter.com/cld276/status/975565844632821760
      • drak0n1c 9y ago
        Also, a new article from the Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/facebooks-rules-for-accessing-user-data-lured-more-than-just-cambridge-analytica/2018/03/19/31f6979c-658e-43d6-a71f-afdd8bf1308b_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/facebooks-ru...
  • toufka 9y ago
    They also have datasets of 50M user profiles floating around out there filled with Facebook-like data. There still hasn't been a public leak of that kind of data that I can think of. I think a concern for Facebook is also what happens if/when 50M Americans' names, gender, hometown, birthday, and names of 500 closest friends become public for all to see. That's not really data that you can change or put back into a bottle.
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    • 9y ago
• kodablah 9y ago
  Better than a new law. I'm sure Congress is mulling one over, but surely they won't take a large sweeping, harm-the-good-more-than-the-bad, regulation-instead-of-enforcement approach.
  • Jaepa 9y ago
    I'd wage money that Feinstein will campaign on Facebook Regulation this year.
• d3ckard 9y ago
  I remember reading a book on Facebook in 2010 or so. I remember distinctly quote from Mark Zuckerberg that "privacy is the concept from the past". Then, a couple years later I read he bought houses surrounding his house to ensure his own privacy. Lost any respect I had for the guy in that moment. I really hope FTC will force FB to stop most of their unfair practices.
  • speps 9y ago
    > I really hope FTC will force FB to stop most of their unfair practices. Which ones do you want to keep?
    • d3ckard 9y ago
      None of course, but I don't believe they will get them all.
  • tyfon 9y ago
    Do as I say, not as I do. I'm getting more and more happy that I don't have an account there. However I'm not that confident that my plugins block all their affiliates and data gathering to my shadow profile.
    • bencollier49 9y ago
      GDPR ought to kill off shadow profiles..
      • monocasa 9y ago
        I mean, only the ones that are GeoIped in Europe, no?
        • TheLoneTechNerd 9y ago
          So that's going to be a really interesting thing to watch. Technically, the answer to your question is no - GDPR has nothing to do with being in the EU, it has to do with being a citizen of the EU. So if you're an American who travels to the EU, your shadow profile might get tagged with being in the EU, but you're still not eligible for GDPR protections. On the other hand, if you're an EU citizen living in the United States for the last 20 years (meaning, before the advent of Facebook), you technically have the right to request that all your data be deleted from Facebook's servers. Now, how will you know if they have data on you? Can you just assume that they do and make the request anyway? Will tech companies begin verifying your citizenship to tell if GDPR really applies to you? We'll soon see.
• therealmarv 9y ago
  So about what number roughly (FB needs to pay) do we talk here?
  • chopin 9y ago
    According to this article [1], trillions in possible fines. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/03/18/facebook-may-have-violated-ftc-privacy-deal-say-former-federal-officials-triggering-risk-of-massive-fines/?utm_term=.a6662b465919 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/03/18...
• bob_theslob646 9y ago
  This is crazy! Peter Thiel spoke on March 15,2018 and said this about tech companies :"...If they do not take these issues seriously there is a risk they will be regulated.." I have the video with the timestamp of the quote I mentioned, posted below.[1] Ridiculously ironic on the timing of all this (evermore so that it is his darling Facebook) because I think this recent blunder by Facebook is a shot across the bow for other tech companies and even borderline bordering their "vessels" for search and seizure by the U.S government. For those who do not know who he is. > Thiel became Facebook's first outside investor when he acquired a 10.2% stake for $500,000 in August 2004. He sold the majority of his shares in Facebook for over $1 billion in 2012, but remains on the board of directors. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel] [1][Tech investor Peter Thiel speaks at the New York Economic Club](https://youtu.be/sxWpvgTH9oI?t=33m52s https://youtu.be/sxWpvgTH9oI?t=33m52s)
  • katastic 9y ago
    Is that why they hate Peter Thiel so much and try to smear him in the media? ala https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2016/06/peter-thiel-is-a-petty-vindictive-dangerous-human.html https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2016/06/peter-thiel-i... (Kind of strange how they can target a gay guy for getting mad at being outed by a media company. Victim blame much?) Meanwhile, he apparently called Uber "ethically challenged." So far, he's got 2 and 0 for good quotes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/richkarlgaard/2014/12/10/do-jerks-always-win/#4cbfed2c2325 https://www.forbes.com/sites/richkarlgaard/2014/12/10/do-jer...
  • tinalumfoil 9y ago
    This is a particularly thorny issue for Thiel who said Gawker "ruined people's lives for no reason" after being outed as gay. Despite his involvement in Facebook, I think he's one of the few powerful people in tech who cares about people's privacy.
    • 9889095r3jh 9y ago
      If he cared about my privacy, he wouldn't have invested in Facebook. He cares about his own privacy. FYIGM
• ckastner 9y ago
  This presents an interesting opportunity for the FTC. The amount of data being amassed by Facebook, Google and others has become exorbitant, and apparently has already been abused (some might even say weaponized) in a major election. If Facebook indeed violated the 2011 consent decree, then the FTC can fine them up to "thousands of dollars a day per violation [per user]". This presents the FTC with the opportunity to send a message to these data hoarders: protect the data you collect, or else. Fine them to the point where they have to start asking themselves whether it's even worth it to collect and store certain data, and with whom to share it. It shouldn't be the government's job to ensure that the data gets protected, this should be in Facebook's own self interest.
  • mlb_hn 9y ago
    To your second point, I argued this sort of data was weaponsized and not just in an election (http://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/NCO-Journal/Archives/2017/November/Data-Driven-Propaganda/ http://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/NCO-Journal/Archives...). To the third point, focusing on Facebook seems like that scene from Casa Blanca though: "There's gambling going on, I'm shocked, shocked" "Your winnings, sir" Not confident FTC fines would actually change any trends.
    • crowbahr 9y ago
      Last I saw there were over 1 million accounts distributed by CA. Even assuming they were only distributed 3 months (unlikely) and there were only 1 million accounts (also unlikely) the maximum fine is: 1000x1000000x90 = 90 billion dollars. Imposing the maximum fine would be more than double their entire 4th quarter earnings last year. That's a bite. That would hurt any company.
      • apeace 9y ago
        From this article: > If the FTC finds Facebook violated terms of the consent decree, it has the power to fine the company more than $40,000 a day per violation. > Facebook Inc. is under investigation by a U.S. privacy watchdog over the use of personal data of 50 million users So I think the maximum (assuming this went on for 90 days) would be: 40,000 x 50,000,000 x 90 = 180,000,000,000,000 180 Trillion.
• api 9y ago
  In the long term we need HIPAA style regulation for all kinds of personal data: friend graphs, behavioral histories, private messages, and especially things like location data or voice assistant audio samples. Leak such data without explicit customer consent? That will be $10,000 per incident. So if you leak 100 data points of someone's location history that will be a $1,000,000 fine. Explicit consent must be per-incident as in "YES I give my consent to send this information to <recipient> for purpose of <...>." That would incentivize strong security practices and even more importantly dis-incentivize data hoarding beyond what is needed to provide a service. Hoarded personal data would be a gigantic risk and liability.
  • mixmastamyk 9y ago
    Yes, always thought it weird that folks are so protective about health data but nothing else. Why the dichotomy?
  • moduspol 9y ago
    It would just pass the buck. What everyone on HN is clamoring for will result in basically more bureaucracy and longer EULAs with no actual change in business practice. Businesses don't take it seriously because people don't actually care. Some do. The vast majority don't. They might say so in a survey, but at the end of the day, Facebook (and companies like it) will continue to survive doing what they always have been and people will continue using those services. That's the root of the issue, though. People really don't care as much as posters on HN think they do. If we could acknowledge that, I think we could come up with better solutions.
    • CaptainZapp 9y ago
      The GDPR should take care of that to a large degree. Consent must be asked for in a clear understandable fashion. Burrying some legalese crap at page 29 of your 12'000 word TOS doesn't cut it. Could be that Facebook tries to push the envelope yet again. They may come to regret it.
      • moduspol 9y ago
• hapnin 9y ago
  The Executive Branch deflecting from the Executive Branch.
• bantunes 9y ago
  That's why regulation always comes to be - no company can be trusted to do the right thing on its own.
  • goatlover 9y ago
    And that's what libertarians fail to grasp.
    • DINKDINK 9y ago
      Methods for choosing to ensure a market that operates how the public wants: Regulation: Laws that mandate exactly how something should be done and if the company doesn't do it that way they are shut down - with no regard to whether or not the legally-mandated process achieves the end. Quite literally it's politicians controlling the means to hope that a certain end occurs, regardless of that end being achieved. Prone to regulatory capture, rent seeking, anticompetitive practices. Apt for: when a negative outcome will absolutely devastate the public, there isn't much variability in how to achieve the end, the domains in which the market operates are stable. Tort Law: A company is free to change how some process works but is able to be held financially liable for all ramifications of their process. Prone to failure if the assets of a company are less than the damage they can produce. Apt for: a new market which is highly dynamic, the state of the art is constantly changing, ruin is limited to customers who have chosen to engage with the company (no to little externalities). Neocons: in favor of no regulation and castrated tort remedies Neoliberals: in favor of bloated regulation (rent seeking) and symbolic tort remedies: Libertarians: in favor of /extremely/ limited regulation and strong tort remedies.
      • tyfon 9y ago
        The problem with tort law is that by the time the government or court reacts, the perpetrators are long gone with the money and only a shell of a limited liability company is left. For that to work the owners of a company has to be personally responsible for the damages they create.
      • pjc50 9y ago
• throwmeariver 9y ago
  ...logical step in this chain of events is that the government will inbound all of Facebooks data for further investigation. Maybe with this move, we can skip the whole 2018 census. ;-)
• SirLJ 9y ago
  Nothing will change with government regulations, those companies like Facebook, Google, etc are gold mines for the FBI, CIA, NSA and other 3 letter organizations, so in the interest of national security, they will continue to harvest the user data... Only major boycott can do some damage...
• mtgx 9y ago
  Wait a minute..... Wasn't the FTC already "monitoring" Facebook? https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ftc-to-monitor-facebook-for-20-years-but-no-fine/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ftc-to-monitor-facebook-for-20-... Oh, that's right. That whole monitoring for 20 years thing, that they're also applying to Google and a few other companies is a complete joke. If anything, it has become almost a badge of honor/certification thing - like "Look, the FTC is monitoring us for 20 years, so that obviously means we can't possibly abuse your data or do anything nefarious with it!"
• davidgordon 9y ago
  Let us please remember that these incidents are not specific to Facebook, rather they are systemic to the big five. A couple of years or more I was posting on Facebook regarding Cambridge Analytica's practices and was considered a tin foil hat and crazy. No the reason I was able to shed some light at the time was I knew exactly how we could utilize the Facebook API back then to elicit the kind of data we are talking about, and completely legally. Nobody needed to circumvent FB API policies, it was yours for the taking. I didn't do it although I did put together multiple PoC's from 2011 to 2014 to see what was possible and it was bad. Another thing we should remember is that Cambridge Analytica is just one small tip of a fractal iceberg whose body is Facebook and the big five, your internet connection and certainly your smartphone themselves. Google, Apple and Amazon are no less culpable in this regard. The question now becomes which side of history we want to be on. Another question is we assume we want to take our privacy back and how we do that with consent and assurance. I don't have a Facebook account anymore but I'm still tracked as we all are. My mother doesn't like me not being there but a small price to pay. I can contact her elsewhere and do. Surely enough is enough? I think it is time to look for broad scale technologies that are better both in the real world and in our private world.
  • robin_reala 9y ago
    Out of interest, is there any evidence that Apple are collating data and making it available to 3rd parties in the same way as Facebook? They like to position themselves as more caring of the user’s privacy than the rest, but I’d definitely like to know more about any problems.
    • davidgordon 9y ago
      Lack of evidence is conspicuous in of itself, although that right now is tin foil hat territory. I'll tell you in a few years. On the other hand I'd refer you to Bletchley Park. Turing et al knew the decrypted Enigma messages but the Government were unable to act. For good reason. Secrecy is a thing
    • rockinghigh 9y ago
      Unlike Google and Facebook, Apple does not make money by selling user profiles for marketers to target.
• droopybuns 9y ago
  If we’re going to go this route, Google should be hauled in first. You can easily choose not to play with Facebook. Google? Not so much.
  • Etheryte 9y ago
    I don’t see how this argument makes sense. You can opt out of using Google’s services just the same, if you so choose.
    • adtac 9y ago
      Tbh, Google has a monopoly over search, but Facebook does not have a monopoly over social networks. Bing and DDG are much smaller competitions to Google in comparison to what Twitter, Snapchat, et al. are to Facebook. This means you don't have much choice when it comes to search, but you do when it comes to social networks. Obviously, you can live without both; but if you need both search and social networks in your life, it's obvious which company is more powerful. (IMO you can live without social networks, but not without search engines.)
    • aylmao 9y ago
      I have to disagree, and hopefully can make a better job at convincing you than the other comments. In terms of search "google" is a verb for a reason, but I actually do think you could use other search engines, true, I agree. What worries me is Android however. Perhaps not in the US, but in a lot of other places around the world Android is the only operating system accessible to people and a large majority of the market, since iPhones are an impossible purchase. Phone manufacturers depend on Android like computer manufacturers once depended on Windows. Apple is raking in the profits because it controls the vertical and sells expensive phones in premium markets, but in terms of raw market share things seem to be shaping towards a Mircosoft/Windows like situation. Android is close to passing the 75% mark [1] and judging by sales it probably will [2]. Maybe we're still not quite there, but it's shaping up in that direction. Facebook def has the lion's share on social networking, and messaging, but I can't help but believe that when it comes to Facebook it's mostly network effects keeping people in, since there are plenty of other (and sometimes better) messaging apps, lots of photo-sharing apps, and alternatives for event planning, getting your news, posting updates, etc. Idk if "Google should be hauled in first", but it should def be hauled in too (alongside Amazon, but that's a whole other story). [1]: http://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide/#monthly-200903-201802 http://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide/#... [2]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/266136/global-market-share-held-by-smartphone-operating-systems/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/266136/global-market-sha...
• chapill 9y ago
  Ah, the other shoe drops. This is the reason for the blitz of anti-Facebook stories all at once... Legal authority to examine all that juicy personal data Facebook holds. And if you think you are safe because you don't have an account, I have bad news for you.
  • jdhn 9y ago
    This is exactly how I see it. The government already has your “official” details like your SSN, bank account info, address and phone number, but it doesn’t have a very good look into the kind of things you like to do. Having access to that data would be a surveillance analyst’s wet dream.
  • 9889095r3jh 9y ago
    Nice try. The government already has your Facebook data. https://prod01-cdn07.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2016/08/PRISM_Collection_Details.jpg https://prod01-cdn07.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/20...
  • krapp 9y ago
    The government doesn't have to resort to conspiracies to get your personal data from Facebook, if it wants it, it can get it. We live in the age of PRISM (in which Facebook is a participant,) secret orders, and NSA bulk surveillance. They could literally just build or hack an app that uses Facebook's API, apparently, or buy something from the black market, or in the narrow case get a warrant. Not to mention... I don't think this would actually give anyone "Legal authority to examine all that juicy personal data Facebook holds." I don't think "legal authority" actually works that way, but IANAL.
• jsonne 9y ago
  We see companies doing this all the time and I hope there's some sort of fix here, but I'm curious about the individual to individual implications. If we're serious about fixing privacy then things like sharing private messages, doxxing, etc should be addressed as well imho. Not sure what that would look like without curtailing free speech however.
• hodder 9y ago
  To put the FB selloff into a market perspective: -Equifax is only off 13% from its peak after its unprecedented leak of nearly every American and many Canadians' credit info, leaving the population vulnerable to identity theft. The population mostly never agreed to give Equifax this information, but Equifax collects it anyways. FB is off 8.5% now as a client business failed to adhere to FB users' privacy for data that the users were willingly giving out to FB and the client (but not the third party). Not likely much more downside to the stock on this news imo.
  • matthewmcg 9y ago
    Perhaps the market's reaction reflects the widespread belief that this publicity may drive users away from Facebook, whereas Consumers can't really opt out of Equifax's collection.
• candybar 9y ago
  I'm somewhat surprised by the amount of criticism levied at Facebook here. Consider the following: 1) Both Android and iOS allow apps to access your contacts, which in aggregate is more or less the same kind of social graph that Facebook has. If you happen to be in someone else's contacts, you don't get a say here either. I suppose Facebook's data is richer in some ways, but not in other ways. 2) When Twitter removed API access for 3rd parties, there was an uproar in the developer community about how evil this is and so on. There's a trade-off here - openness at the platform level necessarily means less privacy for users. 3) A lot of the criticism Facebook has received in the past (both here and elsewhere) had to do with not allowing 3rd party developers to do more and hoarding user data, which is not theirs, for monetization. Here Facebook was explicitly giving the app owner and the user the power to decide - the app owner could ask and the user could either accept or decline. You could argue that this isn't adequate protection, but consider how this works for other platforms such as Windows, Mac OS, iOS and Android. Apps can access more or less everything and permission dialogs, even where they do exist, aren't taken seriously by the user. 4) Most publishers that are currently publishing these articles criticizing Facebook are also selling everything they know about you to marketers, often more explicitly for the purposes of targeting. The "scandal" here is that a third-party app gathered personal information that wasn't supposed to be used for targeting and the data ended up being used for targeted political ads. Most publishers have no problem explicitly selling whatever data they can get on you to these centralized data brokers who will sell that data to anyone. 5) All this talk about privacy and data aside, the motivation seems to be that the wrong guy won the presidential election - I don't see anyone whose personal data was supposedly used in this manner being upset nor anyone owning up to the fact that they were falsely manipulated into voting for Trump or not voting. It seems to be mainly Clinton supporters being upset that other people were manipulated into voting for the wrong guy, amplified by the same concern about privacy and social graph data ownership issue we've always had. 6) If we accept that it's the presidential election result that most people are upset about here, the media is even more culpable, both from creating this false narrative that it was not a close election and prematurely taking the moral high ground against the potential Clinton administration by focusing on the irrelevant stuff (emails, etc). And that's just the "mainstream" media, before we get to Fox News, etc.
  • 9y ago
• dgudkov 9y ago
  Isn't Facebook valuation is implicitly based on how Facebook can [ab]use personal data?
• bnzai 9y ago
  So it begins: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaHzUlR2MUg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaHzUlR2MUg
• bnzai 9y ago
  So it begins: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaHzUlR2MUg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaHzUlR2MUg If social media companies don't find the way to make things work i suspect outright media pressure and hard regulations.
• gabriel171 9y ago
  Submissions can't have both urls and text, so you need to pick one. If you keep the url, you can always post your text as a comment in the thread. https://www.thingiverse.com/gabriela171/about https://www.thingiverse.com/gabriela171/about
• marcoperaza 9y ago
  The focus of this scandal is curious. Does anyone seriously expect privacy for information that they willingly share with hundreds of people (their facebook friends)? If you think this kind of information floating around is damaging to society, then you're making an argument against the very idea of FB. Fine; it's at least worth thinking about how social media is changing our society. But to really be upset that this data is out there and being used, after willingly sharing it with many people, is kind of ridiculous. What did you expect? You should assume that anything you do on FB, short of private messages, is part of the public record. Everyone is targeting you based on information you put out in the world. Every major political campaign in the US works with a database of voters that includes party affiliation, past turnout, name, age, etc. They can also fold in the same data that advertisers use. Being a good citizen of a republic—and a savvy consumer—in the modern world means thinking critically about who is trying to persuade you and what their agenda is. The government cannot protect you from persuasion.
  • lozzo 9y ago
    You made your point very clear. Thanks. I concur.
• matz1 9y ago
  In the long run this should not affect facebook much, opportunity to buy FB.
• fortythirteen 9y ago
  Prediction: Facebook's goal for this investigation will be to make sure the public doesn't learn that Cambridge Analytica was only one of countless political actors that "somehow gained access" the pool of user information. I was in meetings with FB almost 10 years ago, as the OpenGraph API was being implemented, where they were openly selling, to anyone willing to pay, exactly what CA supposedly "hacked their way into".
  • mistermann 9y ago
    The Obama campaign was very proud of doing something at least as bad, but I don't think we'll see that on the news, which offers a glimpse into what the motives are here.
    • pcnix 9y ago
      The Obama campaign was involved in laughably simple PR and door to door efforts compared to the complexity and microtargeting of this one.
      • fortythirteen 9y ago
        CTR would be a better comparison, and perhaps even more nefarious, since they employ full-time... let's call them "engagers".
      • closeparen 9y ago
        The Obama campaign employed Big Data to target which doors to knock on and which issues to bring up at each one.
    • space_fountain 9y ago
      At least as bad seems a bit strong. The impression I'm getting is that they gave out an app explicitly from the campaign that also collected some info. There's a major difference between that and putting out an app and getting info under false pretenses
      • 9y ago
• torpfactory 9y ago
  To any engineers reading this who are now working at Facebook, you have a choice to make: Stay in the organization and work to turn it away form casual misuse of personal information. Prevent an Orwellian future of machine-learning assisted, personally targeted messaging preying upon our fears and insecurities. Stand up and speak out against the performance of unethical psychological experiments on unwitting participants. -OR- Leave now. This is one of the important moral issues of our time. To stay on the sidelines is unacceptable.
  • freeone3000 9y ago
    Or, you could make money off people who don't know what they're giving away and don't care even if they're told, be one of the experimenters, and make a lot of money doing so.
    • kss238 9y ago
      I'll take one of these, please
  • oflannabhra 9y ago
    In this forum, I think this is the most important comment. I think there is enough information available for Facebook employees to be faced with a decision, after which they are morally culpable for the growing net-negative effect that Facebook has on society. I'm not a Facebook engineer--and I'm probably not smart enough to be one--so I can't really say how I would act if faced with an ethical decision to provide for my family or take a stand. However, I think anyone who has been employed by Facebook is capable enough to be able to immediately find comparable employment. Similarly, I think there were lots of well-meaning people involved in Big Tobacco, who didn't realize they were contributing to the deaths of millions of people. I imagine there was a similar inflection point for them, as well. (Please note, I do not think Facebook is as damaging to the world as Big Tobacco. I also don't think that individual contributors are as culpable as leadership. I am not comparing the degree of moral evil, but am comparing the complicity of individual contributors.)
  • RpFLCL 9y ago
• strayamaaate 9y ago
  Reminds me of this quote from the tabbacco industry in the early 90s; “We don't smoke that shit. We just sell it. We reserve the right to smoke for the young, the poor, the black and the stupid." - R.J. Reynolds executive’s reply when asked why he didn’t smoke
• faramarz 9y ago
  I don't know where else to say this so i'll say it here as it's relavant. Is there not a way to have a browser extension that would scramble the meta data that is read by websits lik Facebook and Google? so we would still be feeding data to their brain but it would be worthless and random gibbrish. Does that make any snse?
  • teen 9y ago
    https://adnauseam.io/ https://adnauseam.io/ https://noiszy.com/ https://noiszy.com/
• hawski 9y ago
  Ok. I know it's off-topic here, but... Now what's good alternative to Facebook Messanger video calls? Signal doesn't support it - I read that it's in beta, but I can't enable it. Telegram doesn't seem to support it either. Skype is not an alternative. Is Matrix/Riot good enough right now? For me it should work on Linux, Android and iOS for my family. Now that I think about it, maybe I should setup some private WebRTC service for video calls. But it seems cumbersome for part of my family. However it probably would be easier for my parents and my in-laws. EDIT: As Thriptic mentioned Signal indeed does support video calls. I failed to find the functionality, because I expected to see separate button for video call. One has to first start calling and then enable video.
  • fwdpropaganda 9y ago
    Wire works ok for me. I use it on my desktop for video calls. I'm on Ubuntu.
  • Thriptic 9y ago
    Signal supports video calling on mobile at least. I've used it many times.
    • sgc 9y ago
      What is a socially acceptable way of getting people interested in Signal? I installed it and use it for messaging (Ive never been able to actually receive an mms with it). But I have not one contact on signal, so it's not doing much for me at this point. My daily work contacts don't seem like a prime target user base.
      • Thriptic 9y ago
        You're going to have a hard time convincing non-technical people / people who don't acutely care about privacy to use it in my experience. I generally try to shift people who are not in these demographics over to WhatsApp as that has a large user base and implements the signal protocol for end to end encryption. It's not a "safe" as signal but it's far better than something like messenger.
• mychael 9y ago
  Facebook is a net negative force in our society. Particularly for the startup ecosystem.
• angryasian 9y ago
  Facebook is just one target right now. Working in ad tech, you know how many data brokers are available and how much information your phone and apps, regardless of OS, leaks real time personal data. The issue is with the ad tech industry as a whole.
• TaylorGood 9y ago
  With these practices or lack of restriction on data pulling at Facebook, is it wrong to assume the board knew about this? Too many brilliant minds on their board, including pmarca, to not understand firms were able to do this.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• thrillgore 9y ago
  Facebook deserves a good deal of criticism for this, but I can't be the only one who thinks this is just a continuation of the anti-startup, anti-social media dialog the major press agencies have been pushing ever since the Election?
• rafiki6 9y ago
  Disclaimer: I'm anti-democracy in it's current form so before you down vote me think through my point carefully. What I don't get about this whole issue, is that we are basically admitting that the average person who uses these services has poor critical thinking skills and the American democratic process is easily gamed as such. I feel we are trying to fix the wrong thing. Sure, regulate FB and any other company that happens to collect lots of user data I don't have a problem with that. My fundamental issue is that FB is mostly an opt-in service. As far as I can see, the shadow profiles they create on a user who isn't signed up for their services doesn't really contain enough data to be of material impact for the type of things that a company like CA is doing (it's mostly to help in it's ad network to sell you more stuff rather and is rather well anonomyzed). The only argument against the fact that FB is an opt-in service is that it has a near monopoly on social media and seems to either buy or kill any serious threat. More important than trying to regulate FB's data collection and privacy would be ensuring that our antitrust and monopoly laws are being enforced to remove FB's near monopoly. Further, I'm not here to defend Facebook, but I feel it's being used as a scapegoat for an easily gamed democratic process where rather than biting the bullet and fixing that, we are saying it's FB and CA are the real evil here. In fact they are not. They are for-profit businesses who are operating within the current regulatory framework they've been provided. It seems obvious to me what really needs to be fixed is a broken electoral process.
  • googlemike 9y ago
    Isn't regulating companies like facebook part of fixing the democratic process? Or what did you have in mind?
  • sbov 9y ago
    The argument is that even if you give information to a company willingly, they should not be able to do whatever the hell they want with it. We have accepted this maxim for certain pieces of information already, I don't see why it can't apply to other information too. If you think FB can do no wrong since we willingly give them this information, what do you feel about HIPAA? Why is it okay for FB to sell data I willingly give them but a doctor can't? If the answer is "one is illegal, the other isn't", then you aren't arguing against the idea of it being made illegal, just that we don't currently have a law saying they can't do it. Laws change though.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• braderhart 9y ago
  I would like them to review my numerous fake profile reports to Facebook, which they ignored... it was probably in the 100s during this last election. They failed to act and I am pretty sure that they promote, allow and encourage the use of bots and fake accounts on their social network as it helps inflate their user count.
• jliptzin 9y ago
  Why don’t they just offer the option to turn off ads? If there’s no ads to show to you because you’re paying to opt out, there should be no reason to harvest your personal info. They have 2 billion active users and make around $50 billion a year. So they’d need to charge $2 per user per month to opt out of ads (and could probably charge more). The fact that this isn’t even an option just reeks of their holier than thou corporate attitude.
  • TAForObvReasons 9y ago
    The type of person to pay to turn off ads is generally the type of person that advertisers want to influence.
    • mrlala 9y ago
      I don't know about that.. those are probably the people who it's way harder to influence, or even not possible. It's not worth their time. Focus on the.. I don't know.. 70%? who doesn't care if ads are flying across their screen, it's easy to influence them.
• ablanton 9y ago
  I love how now this issue is alright to talk about on hacker news. For some reason when it was happening and all of the alarms were going off, it was banned content on hacker news. Technology is inherently political with political ramifications. -_-
• askatwork 9y ago
  As someone who wants to seen the societal view of facebook change, what's prevents a viral uninstall campaign from happening to facebook? #UninstallFacebook
• myegorov 9y ago
  Sincere question: It appears that it's crystal clear to everyone where the distinction between fake and real news lies, or who should be allowed to post (mis)information (serve ads, if you prefer) on the interwebs, or how to identify the culprits exhaustively. I fail to see a way in practice to draw the boundary and identify/persecute the offenders. Imho virtually all ads spread misinformation (push someone's agenda) to my detriment. My only means of resistance is inherent in my duty (civic, but also self-serving -- to keep my sanity) to consciously make the effort to seek/filter through multiple viewpoints.
• StanislavPetrov 9y ago
  Its simply astounding that the "use of personal data" is seemingly coming as a revelation to anyone. What's especially ridiculous is that arms of the government (like the FTC) are feigning indignation. The US government is - by far - the biggest collector and aggregator of personal data and information in the world. Both the government, corporations, "social media companies", and everyone else with access to data has been doing the same, and using this data to create models to influence people believe and support (or buy) whatever agenda or product that respective organization is pushing. Unfortunately this latest episode of faux outrage is very much like the faux outrage that has infected our cultural landscape for the last 18 months (due to Trump). Things that have been going on for decades are suddenly being attacked as evils unique to Trump. If the net result of this selective outrage led to substantive changes in our society, then perhaps it the outrage would be a "good" thing (despite its manufactured nature). Unfortunately, its very clear that all of these practices - the data mining, the troll farms, the bot-networks, the propaganda (both public and private) - will roll forward at full steam once Trump is consigned to the wastebin of history (where he belongs). Once the reigns of power are back into the hands of a trusted steward of global US military empire (rather than a deluded carnival barker) you should have absolutely no doubt that Comcast, and GE, and Disney will direct their minions in the media to focus your outrage somewhere else.
• mattnewton 9y ago
  I’m no fan of Facebook, and welcome this scrutiny. But what about all the people Facebook buys data from? Can we regulate them? What about Equifax? All these corps do it without even the veneer of informed consent; we should make sure we criminalize the activity and not just crucify a well known practitioner and call it a day.
• Myrannas 9y ago
  At a previous employer we had a high up executive from Facebook come out to give a presentation. One of my main take away was that one of FBs big goals was to build a 'knowledge economy'. It struck me as a bit of an odd objective at the time, but I think I am now starting to understand what this means (and it's a little scary).
• Trundle 9y ago
  abcdfghijee
• kgc 9y ago
  Not as bad as Equifax, yet... all this hoopla.
• fleetingmoments 9y ago
  I don't have much of an issue with targeted advertising or content by harvesting of data through what you make publicly available, as long as it is de-identified. It has plenty of applications for good as well. I hope that platforms are working on ways of taking these algorithms to edge nodes, making large master databases containing un-aggregated data that can be used to de-anonymise people less prevalent. I'm more immediately concerned about blatantly fake news, clickbait, bots, sock-puppets and fake accounts posing as trusted parties in order to harvest trusted information and spread misinformation.