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Zuckerberg Takes Steps to Calm Facebook Employees

258 points by SREinSF 9y ago

JumpCrisscross 9y ago
Facebook's Board of Directors is a remarkable collection of silent-yet-complicit heavyweights: -Marc Andreessen; -Erskine Bowles ("President Emeritus of the University of North Carolina" and "White House Chief of Staff from 1996 to 1998"); -Ken Chenault ("Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of American Express Company"); -Susan Desmond-Hellmann ("Chief Executive Officer of The Gates Foundation" and former "Chancellor at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) from 2009 to 2014"); -Reed Hastings ("Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the board of directors of Netflix"); -Jan Koum ("co-founder and CEO of WhatsApp"); and -Peter Thiel [1]. Might not be a bad idea to pen a letter to their Board [2] with your state attorney general [3] and perhaps a U.S. Senator [4] copied. [1] https://investor.fb.com/corporate-governance/default.aspx https://investor.fb.com/corporate-governance/default.aspx [2] https://investor.fb.com/corporate-governance/?section=contact https://investor.fb.com/corporate-governance/?section=contac... [3] http://naag.org/naag/attorneys-general/whos-my-ag.php http://naag.org/naag/attorneys-general/whos-my-ag.php [4] https://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm https://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_...
- swyx 9y ago
  probably because speaking out would cause more trouble than its worth. i recall an Uber director decided to open his mouth during the incidents of last year...
  - hkmurakami 9y ago
    Or recall the HP leaks.
    - JumpCrisscross 9y ago
      > the HP leaks The HP leak and spying scandal was so convoluted and left so many loose ends that I question its pedagogical utility. "On September 5, 2006, Newsweek revealed that Hewlett-Packard's general counsel, at the behest of HP chairwoman Patricia Dunn, had contracted a team of independent security experts to investigate board members and several journalists in order to identify the source of an information leak. In turn, those security experts recruited private investigators who used a spying technique known as pretexting. The pretexting involved investigators impersonating HP board members and nine journalists (including reporters for CNET, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal) in order to obtain their phone records. The information leaked related to HP's long-term strategy and was published as part of a CNET article. Board member George Keyworth was ultimately accused of being the source and on September 12, 2006, he resigned, although he continued to deny making unauthorized disclosures of confidential information to journalists and was thanked by Mark Hurd for his board service. It was also announced at that time that Dunn would continue as chairwoman until January 18, 2007, at which point HP CEO Mark Hurd would succeed her. Then, on September 22, 2006 HP announced that Dunn had resigned as chairwoman because of the "distraction her presence on our board" created. On September 28, 2006, Ann Baskins, HP's general counsel, resigned hours before she was to appear as a witness before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, where she would ultimately invoke the Fifth Amendment to refuse to answer questions." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hewlett-Packard_spying_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hewlett-Packard_spying_scandal
      - hkmurakami 9y ago
        Tom Perkins' memoir recounts this.
- chrischen 9y ago
  Doesn't Zuckerberg have full control of the board?
  - JumpCrisscross 9y ago
    > Doesn't Zuckerberg have full control of the board? Zuckerberg has voting control of Facebook, in part due to some financial engineering in 2016 [1]. He does not control the Board. Board members have a fiduciary "duty of care," i.e. "the duty to pay attention and to try to make good decision" [2]. This duty is to the company as a whole, not just its majority vote-holder [3][4]. (That said "American courts simply do not hold directors liable for business decisions, made without a conflict of interest, unless those decisions are completely irrational. The doctrine of noninterference is known as the business judgment rule." [2]) [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-04-28/mark-zuckerberg-gets-to-control-facebook-a-while-longer https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-04-28/mark-zuck... [2] http://www.oecd.org/daf/ca/corporategovernanceprinciples/1872746.pdf http://www.oecd.org/daf/ca/corporategovernanceprinciples/187... page 6 [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareholder_oppression https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareholder_oppression [4] http://www.sgalaw.com/news-and-views/2010/4/27/shareholder-oppression-in-delaware.html http://www.sgalaw.com/news-and-views/2010/4/27/shareholder-o...
    - chrischen 9y ago
      What does that mean? He can't control the opinion of the board members but he can control the decisions of the board as whole?
- feelin_googley 9y ago
  "He's surrounded himself with people just like him -- Silicon Valley entrepreneurs," says Stuart Grant, who deposed the Facebook founder during a lawsuit filed by investors opposed to the company's proposal. Facebook withdrew the proposal last month, just days before Zuckerberg was set to testify in the suit in Delaware Chancery Court. ... There's a reason for diversity -- it gives you a mix of opinions and ideas," says Grant, partner and co-founder of Grant & Eisenhofer, a Wilmington, Delaware, firm that specializes in securities and corporate-governance cases. The board's near-uniformity of experience has led to a consensus of opinion that defers to Zuckerberg on all matters, Grant told CNBC. That can stray from what is best for shareholders." For example, allowing Zuckerberg to reduce his economic interest in Facebook "dramatically" -- by selling tens of millions of shares -- while allowing him to maintain "absolute control" over corporate decision-making was a bad idea that the board should have voted down, Grant argues. "You never want to divide economic consequences from decision-making," he says. Zuckerberg's plan would have created three classes of shares, one with no voting rights, and allowed him to maintain voting control of the company even after selling most of his stake." Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/05/attorney-who-deposed-mark-zuckerberg-says-facebook-board-lacks-diversity.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/05/attorney-who-deposed-mark-zu... (Poll: Do you think it would be interesting to see the video from that deposition?) Lead up: "Discovery revealed that Zuckerberg in fact used his relationship with Andreessen to undermine the special committee process. Andreessen leaked Zuckerberg confidential information about the committee members' thoughts and concerns, and coached Zuckerberg through his negotiations with the committee. In one instance, Andreessen and Zuckerberg texted back and forth during a group call with the committee, with Andreessen telling Zuckerberg things like, "This line of argument is not helping. J" and "THIS is the key topic."" ... "Trial was set for Tuesday, Sept. 26, 2017, with Zuckerberg slated to testify as the plaintiffs' first witness. On Thursday evening, Sept. 21, however, Zuckerberg asked Facebook's board to withdraw the reclassification, which it did. This withdrawal mooted the plaintiffs' litigation and averted the billions of dollars of harm to Class A stockholders that plaintiffs sought to prevent." Source: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://www.law.com/thelegalintelligencer/2018/02/19/zuckerberg-forced-to-capitulate-on-plan-to-unlawfu/ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/.... "But Andreessen, a venture capitalist at Andreessen Horowitz and a long-time Facebook board member, is a close Zuckerberg ally. While on the committee, Andreessen slipped Zuckerberg information about their progress and concerns, helping Zuckerberg negotiate against them, according to court documents. The documents include the transcripts of private texts between the two men, revealing the inner workings of the board of directors at a pivotal time for Facebook. ... Most of Andreessen`s texts to Zuckerberg during the negotiations over the non-voting shares focused on how to talk to the other two committee members. Susan Desmond-Hellmann, Facebook`s lead independent director and chief executive officer of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, also led the special committee and discussed the matter on its behalf with Zuckerberg personally -- a call that Andreessen helped Zuckerberg prepare for. Bowles, former President Bill Clinton`s chief of staff and past president of the University of North Carolina system, was especially skeptical of Zuckerberg`s proposition, as depicted in the suit. Many of Andreessen`s texts focused on persuading him. Among other things, Bowles worried that one of the concessions Zuckerberg wanted -- to allow the billionaire to serve two years in government without losing control of Facebook -- would look particularly irresponsible, according to court filings. Bowles did not respond to requests for comment. Andreessen sought to persuade Bowles that if Zuckerberg went into politics, the government would likely require him to give up control of Facebook anyway, so the point was moot, according to the documents. A couple weeks later, Andreessen prevailed, and the vote was brought to shareholders. (The stock reclassification is on hold pending the results of the lawsuit, though.) "The cat`s in the bag and the bag`s in the river,`` he messaged Zuckerberg. "Does that mean the cat`s dead?" Zuckerberg texted back, not understanding the spy speak. Andreessen replied: "Mission accomplished :-)"" Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-08/facebook-s-investors-criticize-marc-andreessen-for-conflict-of-interest https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-08/facebook-... The deposition must have gone well. Heres what the plaintiffs lawyer had to say before Zuckerberg withdrew his proposal. "This case is said to mark just the second time Zuckerberg testifies as a witness. He previously testified earlier this year over a lawsuit against Facebook-owned Oculus -- a case Facebook lost. Stuart Grant, the attorney representing the shareholders in the dispute, didn't mince words. He suggested Zuckerberg's limited courtroom experience puts him at a disadvantage in this case. "That gives me an advantage because I've been doing this for 30 plus years," Grant told CNN Tech. "If we were sitting down to do coding together, I'd bet on Mark, but we're not coding." Source: http://money.cnn.com/2017/09/20/technology/business/mark-zuckerberg-court/ http://money.cnn.com/2017/09/20/technology/business/mark-zuc...
BadassFractal 9y ago
On the plus side, it's good to know that Facebook has employees who care about being ethical citizens of the Internet ecosystem. Hopefully they can exert pressure on the upper ranks in some way to bring things under control. Facebook has the opportunity to be a force for good, while also accomplishing its business model, but it won't naturally lean in that direction.
kerng 9y ago
Recommended read to add to this[1]. Employee was shocked with the amount of data they have access to without clear business need. [1] Might be behind paywall: https://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/mar/17/ex-facebook-employee-rips-mark-zuckerbergs-secret-/ https://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/mar/17/ex-facebook-e...
mehrdadn 9y ago
I feel like someone should also give Zuckerberg the memo that it's only a matter of time before an insider also goes rogue and abuses data access (edit: or otherwise; see below). Facebook fundamentally seems to trust itself way too much, and it worries me that it thinks the only threats are external entities... to me, this is another silently ticking time bomb. EDIT: And don't forget that going rogue is just one scenario. Another is just a bigger attack surface: the more insiders have broad system access, the more credentials there are that can be phished by/leaked to/stolen by outsiders. Really, it would be completely missing the point of security to have arguments about how exactly insiders' credentials might get compromised.
- feelin_googley 9y ago
  "Our efforts to protect our company data or the information we receive may also be unsuccessful due to software bugs or other technical malfunctions, employee error or malfeasance, government surveillance, or other factors. "In addition, third parties may attempt to fraudulently induce employees or users to disclose information in order to gain access to our data or our users' data." "Although we have developed systems and processes that are designed to protect our data and user data and to prevent data loss and other security breaches, we cannot assure you that such measures will provide absolute security." "In addition, some of our developers or other partners, such as those that help us measure the effectiveness of ads, may receive or store information provided by us or by our users through mobile or web applications integrated with Facebook. We provide limited information to such third parties based on the scope of services provided to us. However, if these third parties or developers fail to adopt or adhere to adequate data security practices, or in the event of a breach of their networks, our data or our users' data may be improperly accessed, used, or disclosed." Source: MD&A, 2015 Facebook annual report
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - ams6110 9y ago
    Honestly that is all just legal boilerplate that could be found in the annual report of any public internet business.
SirLJ 9y ago
Man up and resign...
colordrops 9y ago
What could they possibly do to fix things that wouldn't destroy their business model?
- ihsw2 9y ago
  Their business model is leaky abstractions as a rule and malicious compliance when exceptions occur -- we (our policymakers) have to know the underlying complexity (of Facebook in order to issue permission for its continuing existence), otherwise it's a foot-gun by default (for constituents of those policymakers), and furthermore when we need Facebook's help to clean up its messes then it's half-hearted and doesn't address the underlying issue. There's not much they can do other than assume absolute pacifism and absolute neutrality, to a fault. Effectively they must be resolute in their support for the stability of society, and that includes putting down political activists like Antifa and BLM. Facebook must no longer be a platform for activism of any kind, where all content deemed objectionable by anyone is pruned.
- heurist 9y ago
  Their business model does not rely on third parties accessing private user information.
  - renaudg 9y ago
    Agreed, it's quite the opposite in fact : their business model relies on jealously guarding private user information to remain the only entity in the world who can sell highly-targeted ads
    - fatbird 9y ago
      How do you sell highly targeted ads without revealing your data? How did the Obama campaign download the entire U.S. social graph in 2012, and brag about doing so, with Facebook’s approval? How did Cambridge Analytica do a comparable thing in 2016? Facebook doesn’t sound that jealous to me.
      - 9y ago
knuththetruth 9y ago
These performances by CEOs before their employees to “calm” them reminds me of Jonestown or some other cult. Everyone kind of knows the leaders are corrupt liars and false prophets. It’s all a scam. But they’ve invested so much of their lives and identities into the ideology, there’s not really any turning back. It’s like some “When Prophesy Fails” inflection point for the whole industry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Prophecy_Fails https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Prophecy_Fails
- drcode 9y ago
  > These performances by CEOs before their employees to “calm” them reminds me of Jonestown or some other cult. To be fair, the sentence that refers to "calming the employees" was from the New York Times and probably supposed to evoke that sort of feeling. The facts presented in the article are simply that Zuck had a meeting with employees to talk about current issues, which is pretty much standard practice for any company.
suyash 9y ago
Zuckerberg should resign at this moment. Facebook needs new leadership if it wants to change the way it has been operating.
- gus_massa 9y ago
  Nah. In a week all of this will be forgotten (do you still remember the helicopter in the river, and the bridge that collapsed?). You and me and a few more people will remember, but we all already know that everything that is posted privately on Facebook will be leaked sooner or later. I even expect to see a few angry post from people that decided to delete their account now, and when they tried to undelete the account after a few weeks they surprisingly discover that all the old information was missing and Facebook can't recover it because it is deleted. fake quote > If they used Windows instead of Linux, they could have send the account to the Recycler Bin, and recover it now.
  - cloakandswagger 9y ago
    I thought the same a week ago. Nearly bought some FB calls even. But this controversy has surprised me with its staying power. The real sizzle comes not from the emotional outrage but the calls for government inquiry and potential regulation, which would do structural damage to all of Silicon Valley. This has been a stunningly bipartisan effort, the left supporting it ostensibly because they like regulating big businesses, and the right supporting it because they (perhaps correctly) see Silicon Valley megacorps as adversaries.
    - tehlike 9y ago
      I did buy some calls. I am sweating currently, bad timing with all the other economic developments.
  - vanilla_nut 9y ago
    I don't think anybody expects this surge of anti-Facebook articles to continue indefinitely. Personally I'm just hoping that all of this makes people dislike the company just enough to shatter the illusion of usefulness. Plenty of people will still heavily use Facebook, but if we can pull even 5% of the technologically-aware, that's a smidgen of influence that Facebook no longer has and a chunk of people who no longer serve as lures for others to join. It's not going to happen quickly, but if this awareness gains momentum a much more healthy (federated, preferably open source) social media site could have a higher chance of survival. I think that's worth something.
madez 9y ago
Facebook is an enabler for individuals to successfully undermine our democratic mechanisms. It shouldn't feel nice to work for a company that has to explain itself in front of the government. The employees of Facebook should be aware of what monster they are building.
- ExcelSaga 9y ago
  This is why they’re being “calmed” and kept comfortable. In the immortal words of Pickle Rick, I think it's helped a lot of people get comfortable and stop panicking, which is a state of mind we value in the animals we eat, but not something I want for myself. Plus they can bury any qualms they have in piles of money and rationalizations.
- sp527 9y ago
  No they’re not. They’re in denial. I used to work there as an intern, so I get a front row seat to how a lot of employees are reacting. The word I would use is: indignation. I’ve seen this us-against-them mentality play out elsewhere in various toxic cult-like organizational cultures. The NSA was a great public example of just how manifestly horrifying things can get with tens to hundreds of decent people willfully participating in corrupt or unethical practices. The way this all works is terribly fascinating, but the short of it is that you have to become closed off and indoctrinated in order to fit in. Particularly at places like Facebook, Google, and generally anywhere else that provides free on-campus dinners (a good heuristic), employees build their social circles and identities around the company. This, coupled with various other factors, permits an astounding cognitive dissonance amongst a large group of otherwise benign and rational people. EDIT There’s an interesting additional complication I’ve seen at times: internal spin. The media gets things about companies so wrong so frequently that it’s almost too easy to discount the things with an uncomfortable shred of truth as ‘fake news’.
  - Karrot_Kream 9y ago
    Agreed. I've never been at FB, but been at a similarly big "darling" software company (don't want to go into specifics for identification reasons) and it largely is about creating an internal "us-vs-them" mentality and a culture that lionizes the good deeds over the bad. Don't think of the employees as evil, they are probably legitimately not aware of the entirety of what's going on. Like soldiers in a war, they only know how their battles are going, not the war.
discordance 9y ago
Sounds like Facebook is having their NSA moment
- yorby 9y ago
  can't wait for the next Snowden
  - mynameishere 9y ago
    I still remember the first Snowden, who revealed to a shocked world that the NSA was involved in signals intelligence. I suspect that the next Snowden will reveal to a shocked world that 3rd party databases have a tendency to leak into other 3rd party databases.
    - craigyk 9y ago
      What amazed me the most from the first Snowden leak was that the NSA was vastly more effective and competent in their efforts than I had expected.
      - yorby 9y ago
        I think that most people think that...
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
thotaway 9y ago
Are we going to talk about the fact that a whole bunch of these employees are former elected officials, or related to one? Which is part of why Zuckerberg isn’t actually concerned about the political fallout?
- SirLJ 9y ago
  Running for president...
Mc_Big_G 9y ago
I hope anyone worth their weight in salt leaves Facebook as an employee and as a user. Employees should already feel shame since the election. They all know what Facebook is built on and what they've done and what they're doing.
- legostormtroopr 9y ago
  Which election are you talking about? The 2016 one where everyone cares about Facebook helping elect the US president, or the 2008 and 2012 elections where everyone was ok with Facebook helping elect the US president?
  - esturk 9y ago
    Why `or`? why not all 3? Because FB's role in all 3 elections has been disgusting and has made modern election into a degenerative state than it once was.
  - craigyk 9y ago
    I've seen this nonsense spouted a few places now. Personally, I think there is a big difference between the two, one focused primarily on cheerleading to get out the vote, the other using inflammatory fabrications to enrage your base (and get out the vote). I see this as a classic example of when "the ends don't justify the means".
- heurist 9y ago
  This is only the first major company to experience an issue like this. More will follow. If it wasn't Facebook, it would have been another.
tbrock 9y ago
I respect Facebook and their engineering chops as much as the next person, they are truly world class programmers, but how the holy hell is everyone daydreaming that they don’t work for an advertising company? You sell and use people’s data to get money: this is the business plan. Full stop. Connecting people can definitely be lucrative and useful in other ways but facebooks particular implementation is impression based not action/outcome based.
- swyx 9y ago
  not too long ago the emphasis was on whether Facebook is a -media- or a -tech- company. Media companies have more responsibility to censor content then tech companies do. Interesting how quickly the narrative changes.
- ramphastidae 9y ago
  Because they’re paid well. Very well. Everyone I know that works at FB for 2+ years is making 300-500k (including stock) and already owns or is on their way to purchasing a home. That makes it a lot easier to ignore the reality of FB. Meanwhile chumps like me that consider the ethics of their employer will be renting forever. I honestly don’t blame them.
  - bamboozled 9y ago
    Agreed, a lot of cognitive dissonance happening on campus.
    - woolvalley 9y ago
      Maybe what the article says it is and what reality is a bit different?
  - JohnJamesRambo 9y ago
    You can only sell your soul once, the second time there is nothing left.
  - tbrock 9y ago
bogomipz 9y ago
>"There was a feeling, said one of the people, that Facebook wanted to take aggressive steps to make sure it could regain user trust. And over all, he said, confidence was up." I'm curious what might be the source of this regained "confidence."? The idea that this will all just blow ever in a few months?
tuna-piano 9y ago
Can someone explain to me why the Cambridge Analytica story is making people so much angrier than the later revelation that Facebook was scraping call+text info? That seems to be the larger problem to me. Somewhere at Facebook there is a team of people who wrote software to scrape, store and analyze the personal call+text data that users didn't explicitly mean to give to Facebook. The data that Cambridge Analytica attained (from Facebook's API) doesn't seem surprising at all. Isn't the Cambridge Analytics headline really just, "Group doesn't follow website's terms of service from five years ago".
- Analemma_ 9y ago
  Because people are really, really bad at understanding threats that have vague, uncertain consequences. For the last 15 years, trying to get people to seriously worry about privacy has had about as much success as getting them to worry about climate change: they claim to care, but their revealed preferences tell a different story. The problem is that the downsides are uncertain and in the future, whereas the upsides are immediate and certain. Our ape brains are horrible at evaluating tradeoffs of this kind. But the flip side to this is why the CA story has blown up: for once, the consequences— "CA got Trump elected!"— are immediate and graspable, in a way that "Facebook is scraping your text info" is not (even if it's probably not true). When the effects are right in your face and not time-delayed, people sit up and pay attention.
- jnbiche 9y ago
  Probably because of some of the things that Cambridge Analytica stands accused of, or else things they have blatantly admitted to while being secretly recorded: blackmail and bribery of politicians in multiple countries, hacking election results, and even more unethical acts[1,2]. People are upset that their data was essentially stolen from Facebook (it was collected for use in an academic study, then turned around and sold for profit to CA), used by a company with ethical failures as serious as Cambridge Analytica, and then Facebook buried the story. It was two years before it came to light thanks to Guardian journalist Carole Cadwalladr. Facebook also worked closely with CA during the Trump campaign, even though they would have known by that time that data obtained under the pretense of an academic study had been sold to CA. 1. http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-43528219 http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-43528219 2. https://www.channel4.com/news/cambridge-analytica-revealed-trumps-election-consultants-filmed-saying-they-use-bribes-and-sex-workers-to-entrap-politicians-investigation https://www.channel4.com/news/cambridge-analytica-revealed-t...
stretchwithme 9y ago
This one company's unauthorized access to millions of records may just be the tip of the iceberg.
joshjdr 9y ago
How fast can I kill all my karma by pointing out that the 3 of the top 4 articles on HN are some realization that Facebook does not give an ef about anybody's privacy?
- colejohnson66 9y ago
  On ArsTechnica, you just need to bring up Obama’s use of FB’s social graph
- noxecanexx 9y ago
  It's been almost a week of this. Actually wondering when we'll get back to interesting tech
  - jhayward 9y ago
    It is attitudes like this that created the problem in the first place.
marcoperaza 9y ago
I don’t really understand the outrage. Just what do you expect when you share things with hundreds of people (your FB friends) online? For it not to be used? The only reasonable assumption is that anyone and everyone can read whatever you share on FB.
avoidit 9y ago
Someone I know closely worked at Facebook in its heyday, but it has been a while since he left. I asked him around 2014 (he had just left the company) "So what do you think about the way Facebook handles privacy issues?" His response was not defensive at all. Rather, it was a very curious "FB is one of the most open cultures you can ever work in. Any employee can ask any question of anyone at the highest levels and expect to get a honest answer". My thought was "So you didn't have anything to ask questions about?". He was actually a pretty nice fellow, so I stopped asking anything else at that point. But I remember thinking that it was a very funny, cult-member like response. And you can test this too. Ask your friends who work at FB and I bet you will get some pre-programmed response very similar to that.
- helloindia 9y ago
  Nobody mentions the elephant in the room, because elephant in the room feeds the people in the room.
- renaudg 9y ago
  I worked at Facebook even longer ago than that. What makes you assume it's got to be a pre-programmed, cult-member like response and cannot believe that this is the actual work culture ?
  - avoidit 9y ago
    Ok, perhaps you are the best person to ask. 1. What was Mark Zuckerberg's response when people asked him if Facebook might be overstepping bounds in terms of data collection (shadow profiles)? 2. What did the company employees think of the backlash over their beacon project? 3. When Facebook told the EU that they cannot match FB user profiles and WhatsApp user profiles to create a single profile (remembering that they would be fined), what was the general consensus among employees? Did they know that FB had lied? Were they still OK with that? If they were, was there not a single person expressing dissent?
newscracker 9y ago
Seriously, I don’t have much respect, if any, for those working for Facebook...unless they’re working on and can implement drastic changes in how privacy, tracking and profiling are handled for the betterment of humankind. But Facebook being an advertising company that thrives on such details, I doubt if employees would have much say on these aspects or can do anything. There ought to be a #quitfacebook topic to get many employees to quit. But I don’t believe that would get much traction due to the attractiveness of compensation/benefits and probably some challenging work. If someone working at Facebook believes that things will get better, I’d say they’re just deluding themselves. It cannot happen with the current management. P.S.: Since this post is about Facebook, I’m not going to talk about other companies.
feelin_googley 9y ago
"KW: Mark, can you give us a sense of the timing and cost for this? Like, the audits that you're talking about. Is there any sense of how quickly you could do it and what kind of cost it would be to the company? I think it depends on what we find. But we're going to be investigating and reviewing tens of thousands of apps from before 2014, and assuming that there's some suspicious activity we're probably going to be doing a number of formal audits, so I think this is going to be pretty expensive. You know, the conversations we have been having internally on this is, "Are there enough people who are trained auditors in the world to do the number of audits that we're going to need quickly?" But I think this is going to cost many millions of dollars and take a number of months and hopefully not longer than that in order to get this fully complete." Source: https://www.recode.net/2018/3/22/17150814/transcript-interview-facebook-mark-zuckerberg-cambridge-analytica-controversy https://www.recode.net/2018/3/22/17150814/transcript-intervi...
- brrrrr 9y ago
  And even if anyone ever considers it "complete," the reality is, that it's just going to be white wash and bullshit. Why waste the fucking money. Quit being sentimental. Just trash Facebook and pivot (lol pivot). Be a real motherfucker, and let Facebook burn. Make something cooler than Facebook. Fuck this audit stupidity. Come on, man.
jk2323 9y ago
Honestly, I am not very worried about rouge data analytic companies or Russian trolls on facebook. I am worried that questionable semi-private German entity can block me (e.g. 30 days ban) on facebook at will. I am an US citizen and don't live in Germany. This is outrageous.
- fenk85 9y ago
  Whatabout a semi-private German entity?
  - jk2323 9y ago
    Take this as a start (I know, Breitbart) http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015/09/17/german-govt-hires-ex-stasi-agent-patrol-facebook-xenophobic-comments/ http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015/09/17/german-govt-hires... I just read about "FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection Regarding Reported Concerns about Facebook Privacy Practices". Since I am an American citizen and was blocked for 30 days on facebook by this dubious organisation, I may actually drop the FTC an email and ask about their opinion on this.
jondubois 9y ago
>> One of [the Facebook employees] said he had avoided a trip home to see his family last weekend because he did not want to answer questions about the company he worked for. Wow, some people/families are way too media-sensitive. It's just hypocrisy. Facebook is fundamentally the same company as it was last week, last year and 5 years ago. Everyone knew this, especially Facebook employees. Facebook today is mostly made up of two kinds of employees; money-hungry sociopaths and hypocrites.
- slivym 9y ago
  There's a big difference between a theoretical "Well technically they have all our data and they could share it with anyone and they could use it to target ads quite precisely" In fact, that statement is true of the government as well. Most people just think it won't really happen, and if it does happen it'll be something fairly trivial like selling me shaving kits because I'm a man, and that my data isn't really all that revealing. That is vastly different from: "This specific data you gave facebook went to this specific company, in violation of facebook's own policies. The breach of ToS wasn't followed up, and we have video of the CEO bragging about fake news, blackmail and honey traps. This wasn't even a US company influencing the election. Your data was directly used to campaign for someone you probably deeply oppose. Not only that, but this specific targeting was probably highly important because we know the result of the election relied upon victories in specific states that are important to the electoral college whilst losing the popular vote. It also turns out that what had seemed to be deep real organic discussion topics turned out to be targeted propaganda showing a scary ability to control the public discourse Oh. And this is all carried out by a company whose CEO openly wants to run for political office and could use this to get himself elected next time."
mankash666 9y ago
Let's cut to the chase. Would you work for Facebook in your dream role, at industry leading pay. The answer, for most of us is an emphatic 'yes'
- rimliu 9y ago
  My dreams exclude anything with "Google", "Facebook" and "Uber". And if the role we talk about involves iOS, then Facebook is even less attractive, because imho their app is an example how not to do an iOS application.
- gaius 9y ago
  Ask instead who would work for a Big Tobacco company, it’s the same thing. Not me.

258 points by SREinSF 9y ago

Facebook's Board of Directors is a remarkable collection of silent-yet-complicit heavyweights: -Marc Andreessen; -Erskine Bowles ("President Emeritus of the University of North Carolina" and "White House Chief of Staff from 1996 to 1998"); -Ken Chenault ("Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of American Express Company"); -Susan Desmond-Hellmann ("Chief Executive Officer of The Gates Foundation" and former "Chancellor at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) from 2009 to 2014"); -Reed Hastings ("Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the board of directors of Netflix"); -Jan Koum ("co-founder and CEO of WhatsApp"); and -Peter Thiel [1]. Might not be a bad idea to pen a letter to their Board [2] with your state attorney general [3] and perhaps a U.S. Senator [4] copied. [1] https://investor.fb.com/corporate-governance/default.aspx https://investor.fb.com/corporate-governance/default.aspx [2] https://investor.fb.com/corporate-governance/?section=contact https://investor.fb.com/corporate-governance/?section=contac... [3] http://naag.org/naag/attorneys-general/whos-my-ag.php http://naag.org/naag/attorneys-general/whos-my-ag.php [4] https://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm https://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_...

swyx 9y ago
probably because speaking out would cause more trouble than its worth. i recall an Uber director decided to open his mouth during the incidents of last year...
- hkmurakami 9y ago
  Or recall the HP leaks.
  - JumpCrisscross 9y ago
    > the HP leaks The HP leak and spying scandal was so convoluted and left so many loose ends that I question its pedagogical utility. "On September 5, 2006, Newsweek revealed that Hewlett-Packard's general counsel, at the behest of HP chairwoman Patricia Dunn, had contracted a team of independent security experts to investigate board members and several journalists in order to identify the source of an information leak. In turn, those security experts recruited private investigators who used a spying technique known as pretexting. The pretexting involved investigators impersonating HP board members and nine journalists (including reporters for CNET, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal) in order to obtain their phone records. The information leaked related to HP's long-term strategy and was published as part of a CNET article. Board member George Keyworth was ultimately accused of being the source and on September 12, 2006, he resigned, although he continued to deny making unauthorized disclosures of confidential information to journalists and was thanked by Mark Hurd for his board service. It was also announced at that time that Dunn would continue as chairwoman until January 18, 2007, at which point HP CEO Mark Hurd would succeed her. Then, on September 22, 2006 HP announced that Dunn had resigned as chairwoman because of the "distraction her presence on our board" created. On September 28, 2006, Ann Baskins, HP's general counsel, resigned hours before she was to appear as a witness before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, where she would ultimately invoke the Fifth Amendment to refuse to answer questions." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hewlett-Packard_spying_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hewlett-Packard_spying_scandal
    - hkmurakami 9y ago
      Tom Perkins' memoir recounts this.
chrischen 9y ago
Doesn't Zuckerberg have full control of the board?
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago
  > Doesn't Zuckerberg have full control of the board? Zuckerberg has voting control of Facebook, in part due to some financial engineering in 2016 [1]. He does not control the Board. Board members have a fiduciary "duty of care," i.e. "the duty to pay attention and to try to make good decision" [2]. This duty is to the company as a whole, not just its majority vote-holder [3][4]. (That said "American courts simply do not hold directors liable for business decisions, made without a conflict of interest, unless those decisions are completely irrational. The doctrine of noninterference is known as the business judgment rule." [2]) [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-04-28/mark-zuckerberg-gets-to-control-facebook-a-while-longer https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-04-28/mark-zuck... [2] http://www.oecd.org/daf/ca/corporategovernanceprinciples/1872746.pdf http://www.oecd.org/daf/ca/corporategovernanceprinciples/187... page 6 [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareholder_oppression https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareholder_oppression [4] http://www.sgalaw.com/news-and-views/2010/4/27/shareholder-oppression-in-delaware.html http://www.sgalaw.com/news-and-views/2010/4/27/shareholder-o...
  - chrischen 9y ago
    What does that mean? He can't control the opinion of the board members but he can control the decisions of the board as whole?
feelin_googley 9y ago
"He's surrounded himself with people just like him -- Silicon Valley entrepreneurs," says Stuart Grant, who deposed the Facebook founder during a lawsuit filed by investors opposed to the company's proposal. Facebook withdrew the proposal last month, just days before Zuckerberg was set to testify in the suit in Delaware Chancery Court. ... There's a reason for diversity -- it gives you a mix of opinions and ideas," says Grant, partner and co-founder of Grant & Eisenhofer, a Wilmington, Delaware, firm that specializes in securities and corporate-governance cases. The board's near-uniformity of experience has led to a consensus of opinion that defers to Zuckerberg on all matters, Grant told CNBC. That can stray from what is best for shareholders." For example, allowing Zuckerberg to reduce his economic interest in Facebook "dramatically" -- by selling tens of millions of shares -- while allowing him to maintain "absolute control" over corporate decision-making was a bad idea that the board should have voted down, Grant argues. "You never want to divide economic consequences from decision-making," he says. Zuckerberg's plan would have created three classes of shares, one with no voting rights, and allowed him to maintain voting control of the company even after selling most of his stake." Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/05/attorney-who-deposed-mark-zuckerberg-says-facebook-board-lacks-diversity.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/05/attorney-who-deposed-mark-zu... (Poll: Do you think it would be interesting to see the video from that deposition?) Lead up: "Discovery revealed that Zuckerberg in fact used his relationship with Andreessen to undermine the special committee process. Andreessen leaked Zuckerberg confidential information about the committee members' thoughts and concerns, and coached Zuckerberg through his negotiations with the committee. In one instance, Andreessen and Zuckerberg texted back and forth during a group call with the committee, with Andreessen telling Zuckerberg things like, "This line of argument is not helping. J" and "THIS is the key topic."" ... "Trial was set for Tuesday, Sept. 26, 2017, with Zuckerberg slated to testify as the plaintiffs' first witness. On Thursday evening, Sept. 21, however, Zuckerberg asked Facebook's board to withdraw the reclassification, which it did. This withdrawal mooted the plaintiffs' litigation and averted the billions of dollars of harm to Class A stockholders that plaintiffs sought to prevent." Source: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://www.law.com/thelegalintelligencer/2018/02/19/zuckerberg-forced-to-capitulate-on-plan-to-unlawfu/ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/.... "But Andreessen, a venture capitalist at Andreessen Horowitz and a long-time Facebook board member, is a close Zuckerberg ally. While on the committee, Andreessen slipped Zuckerberg information about their progress and concerns, helping Zuckerberg negotiate against them, according to court documents. The documents include the transcripts of private texts between the two men, revealing the inner workings of the board of directors at a pivotal time for Facebook. ... Most of Andreessen`s texts to Zuckerberg during the negotiations over the non-voting shares focused on how to talk to the other two committee members. Susan Desmond-Hellmann, Facebook`s lead independent director and chief executive officer of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, also led the special committee and discussed the matter on its behalf with Zuckerberg personally -- a call that Andreessen helped Zuckerberg prepare for. Bowles, former President Bill Clinton`s chief of staff and past president of the University of North Carolina system, was especially skeptical of Zuckerberg`s proposition, as depicted in the suit. Many of Andreessen`s texts focused on persuading him. Among other things, Bowles worried that one of the concessions Zuckerberg wanted -- to allow the billionaire to serve two years in government without losing control of Facebook -- would look particularly irresponsible, according to court filings. Bowles did not respond to requests for comment. Andreessen sought to persuade Bowles that if Zuckerberg went into politics, the government would likely require him to give up control of Facebook anyway, so the point was moot, according to the documents. A couple weeks later, Andreessen prevailed, and the vote was brought to shareholders. (The stock reclassification is on hold pending the results of the lawsuit, though.) "The cat`s in the bag and the bag`s in the river,`` he messaged Zuckerberg. "Does that mean the cat`s dead?" Zuckerberg texted back, not understanding the spy speak. Andreessen replied: "Mission accomplished :-)"" Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-08/facebook-s-investors-criticize-marc-andreessen-for-conflict-of-interest https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-08/facebook-... The deposition must have gone well. Heres what the plaintiffs lawyer had to say before Zuckerberg withdrew his proposal. "This case is said to mark just the second time Zuckerberg testifies as a witness. He previously testified earlier this year over a lawsuit against Facebook-owned Oculus -- a case Facebook lost. Stuart Grant, the attorney representing the shareholders in the dispute, didn't mince words. He suggested Zuckerberg's limited courtroom experience puts him at a disadvantage in this case. "That gives me an advantage because I've been doing this for 30 plus years," Grant told CNN Tech. "If we were sitting down to do coding together, I'd bet on Mark, but we're not coding." Source: http://money.cnn.com/2017/09/20/technology/business/mark-zuckerberg-court/ http://money.cnn.com/2017/09/20/technology/business/mark-zuc...

BadassFractal 9y ago

On the plus side, it's good to know that Facebook has employees who care about being ethical citizens of the Internet ecosystem. Hopefully they can exert pressure on the upper ranks in some way to bring things under control. Facebook has the opportunity to be a force for good, while also accomplishing its business model, but it won't naturally lean in that direction.

kerng 9y ago

Recommended read to add to this[1]. Employee was shocked with the amount of data they have access to without clear business need. [1] Might be behind paywall: https://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/mar/17/ex-facebook-employee-rips-mark-zuckerbergs-secret-/ https://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/mar/17/ex-facebook-e...

mehrdadn 9y ago

I feel like someone should also give Zuckerberg the memo that it's only a matter of time before an insider also goes rogue and abuses data access (edit: or otherwise; see below). Facebook fundamentally seems to trust itself way too much, and it worries me that it thinks the only threats are external entities... to me, this is another silently ticking time bomb. EDIT: And don't forget that going rogue is just one scenario. Another is just a bigger attack surface: the more insiders have broad system access, the more credentials there are that can be phished by/leaked to/stolen by outsiders. Really, it would be completely missing the point of security to have arguments about how exactly insiders' credentials might get compromised.

feelin_googley 9y ago
"Our efforts to protect our company data or the information we receive may also be unsuccessful due to software bugs or other technical malfunctions, employee error or malfeasance, government surveillance, or other factors. "In addition, third parties may attempt to fraudulently induce employees or users to disclose information in order to gain access to our data or our users' data." "Although we have developed systems and processes that are designed to protect our data and user data and to prevent data loss and other security breaches, we cannot assure you that such measures will provide absolute security." "In addition, some of our developers or other partners, such as those that help us measure the effectiveness of ads, may receive or store information provided by us or by our users through mobile or web applications integrated with Facebook. We provide limited information to such third parties based on the scope of services provided to us. However, if these third parties or developers fail to adopt or adhere to adequate data security practices, or in the event of a breach of their networks, our data or our users' data may be improperly accessed, used, or disclosed." Source: MD&A, 2015 Facebook annual report
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- ams6110 9y ago
  Honestly that is all just legal boilerplate that could be found in the annual report of any public internet business.

SirLJ 9y ago

Man up and resign...

colordrops 9y ago

What could they possibly do to fix things that wouldn't destroy their business model?

ihsw2 9y ago
Their business model is leaky abstractions as a rule and malicious compliance when exceptions occur -- we (our policymakers) have to know the underlying complexity (of Facebook in order to issue permission for its continuing existence), otherwise it's a foot-gun by default (for constituents of those policymakers), and furthermore when we need Facebook's help to clean up its messes then it's half-hearted and doesn't address the underlying issue. There's not much they can do other than assume absolute pacifism and absolute neutrality, to a fault. Effectively they must be resolute in their support for the stability of society, and that includes putting down political activists like Antifa and BLM. Facebook must no longer be a platform for activism of any kind, where all content deemed objectionable by anyone is pruned.
heurist 9y ago
Their business model does not rely on third parties accessing private user information.
- renaudg 9y ago
  Agreed, it's quite the opposite in fact : their business model relies on jealously guarding private user information to remain the only entity in the world who can sell highly-targeted ads
  - fatbird 9y ago
    How do you sell highly targeted ads without revealing your data? How did the Obama campaign download the entire U.S. social graph in 2012, and brag about doing so, with Facebook’s approval? How did Cambridge Analytica do a comparable thing in 2016? Facebook doesn’t sound that jealous to me.
    - 9y ago

knuththetruth 9y ago

These performances by CEOs before their employees to “calm” them reminds me of Jonestown or some other cult. Everyone kind of knows the leaders are corrupt liars and false prophets. It’s all a scam. But they’ve invested so much of their lives and identities into the ideology, there’s not really any turning back. It’s like some “When Prophesy Fails” inflection point for the whole industry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Prophecy_Fails https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Prophecy_Fails

drcode 9y ago
> These performances by CEOs before their employees to “calm” them reminds me of Jonestown or some other cult. To be fair, the sentence that refers to "calming the employees" was from the New York Times and probably supposed to evoke that sort of feeling. The facts presented in the article are simply that Zuck had a meeting with employees to talk about current issues, which is pretty much standard practice for any company.

suyash 9y ago

Zuckerberg should resign at this moment. Facebook needs new leadership if it wants to change the way it has been operating.

gus_massa 9y ago
Nah. In a week all of this will be forgotten (do you still remember the helicopter in the river, and the bridge that collapsed?). You and me and a few more people will remember, but we all already know that everything that is posted privately on Facebook will be leaked sooner or later. I even expect to see a few angry post from people that decided to delete their account now, and when they tried to undelete the account after a few weeks they surprisingly discover that all the old information was missing and Facebook can't recover it because it is deleted. fake quote > If they used Windows instead of Linux, they could have send the account to the Recycler Bin, and recover it now.
- cloakandswagger 9y ago
  I thought the same a week ago. Nearly bought some FB calls even. But this controversy has surprised me with its staying power. The real sizzle comes not from the emotional outrage but the calls for government inquiry and potential regulation, which would do structural damage to all of Silicon Valley. This has been a stunningly bipartisan effort, the left supporting it ostensibly because they like regulating big businesses, and the right supporting it because they (perhaps correctly) see Silicon Valley megacorps as adversaries.
  - tehlike 9y ago
    I did buy some calls. I am sweating currently, bad timing with all the other economic developments.
- vanilla_nut 9y ago
  I don't think anybody expects this surge of anti-Facebook articles to continue indefinitely. Personally I'm just hoping that all of this makes people dislike the company just enough to shatter the illusion of usefulness. Plenty of people will still heavily use Facebook, but if we can pull even 5% of the technologically-aware, that's a smidgen of influence that Facebook no longer has and a chunk of people who no longer serve as lures for others to join. It's not going to happen quickly, but if this awareness gains momentum a much more healthy (federated, preferably open source) social media site could have a higher chance of survival. I think that's worth something.

madez 9y ago

Facebook is an enabler for individuals to successfully undermine our democratic mechanisms. It shouldn't feel nice to work for a company that has to explain itself in front of the government. The employees of Facebook should be aware of what monster they are building.

ExcelSaga 9y ago
This is why they’re being “calmed” and kept comfortable. In the immortal words of Pickle Rick, I think it's helped a lot of people get comfortable and stop panicking, which is a state of mind we value in the animals we eat, but not something I want for myself. Plus they can bury any qualms they have in piles of money and rationalizations.
sp527 9y ago
No they’re not. They’re in denial. I used to work there as an intern, so I get a front row seat to how a lot of employees are reacting. The word I would use is: indignation. I’ve seen this us-against-them mentality play out elsewhere in various toxic cult-like organizational cultures. The NSA was a great public example of just how manifestly horrifying things can get with tens to hundreds of decent people willfully participating in corrupt or unethical practices. The way this all works is terribly fascinating, but the short of it is that you have to become closed off and indoctrinated in order to fit in. Particularly at places like Facebook, Google, and generally anywhere else that provides free on-campus dinners (a good heuristic), employees build their social circles and identities around the company. This, coupled with various other factors, permits an astounding cognitive dissonance amongst a large group of otherwise benign and rational people. EDIT There’s an interesting additional complication I’ve seen at times: internal spin. The media gets things about companies so wrong so frequently that it’s almost too easy to discount the things with an uncomfortable shred of truth as ‘fake news’.
- Karrot_Kream 9y ago
  Agreed. I've never been at FB, but been at a similarly big "darling" software company (don't want to go into specifics for identification reasons) and it largely is about creating an internal "us-vs-them" mentality and a culture that lionizes the good deeds over the bad. Don't think of the employees as evil, they are probably legitimately not aware of the entirety of what's going on. Like soldiers in a war, they only know how their battles are going, not the war.

discordance 9y ago

Sounds like Facebook is having their NSA moment

yorby 9y ago
can't wait for the next Snowden
- mynameishere 9y ago
  I still remember the first Snowden, who revealed to a shocked world that the NSA was involved in signals intelligence. I suspect that the next Snowden will reveal to a shocked world that 3rd party databases have a tendency to leak into other 3rd party databases.
  - craigyk 9y ago
    What amazed me the most from the first Snowden leak was that the NSA was vastly more effective and competent in their efforts than I had expected.
    - yorby 9y ago
      I think that most people think that...

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

thotaway 9y ago

Are we going to talk about the fact that a whole bunch of these employees are former elected officials, or related to one? Which is part of why Zuckerberg isn’t actually concerned about the political fallout?

SirLJ 9y ago
Running for president...

Mc_Big_G 9y ago

I hope anyone worth their weight in salt leaves Facebook as an employee and as a user. Employees should already feel shame since the election. They all know what Facebook is built on and what they've done and what they're doing.

legostormtroopr 9y ago
Which election are you talking about? The 2016 one where everyone cares about Facebook helping elect the US president, or the 2008 and 2012 elections where everyone was ok with Facebook helping elect the US president?
- esturk 9y ago
  Why `or`? why not all 3? Because FB's role in all 3 elections has been disgusting and has made modern election into a degenerative state than it once was.
- craigyk 9y ago
  I've seen this nonsense spouted a few places now. Personally, I think there is a big difference between the two, one focused primarily on cheerleading to get out the vote, the other using inflammatory fabrications to enrage your base (and get out the vote). I see this as a classic example of when "the ends don't justify the means".
heurist 9y ago
This is only the first major company to experience an issue like this. More will follow. If it wasn't Facebook, it would have been another.

tbrock 9y ago

I respect Facebook and their engineering chops as much as the next person, they are truly world class programmers, but how the holy hell is everyone daydreaming that they don’t work for an advertising company? You sell and use people’s data to get money: this is the business plan. Full stop. Connecting people can definitely be lucrative and useful in other ways but facebooks particular implementation is impression based not action/outcome based.

swyx 9y ago
not too long ago the emphasis was on whether Facebook is a -media- or a -tech- company. Media companies have more responsibility to censor content then tech companies do. Interesting how quickly the narrative changes.
ramphastidae 9y ago
Because they’re paid well. Very well. Everyone I know that works at FB for 2+ years is making 300-500k (including stock) and already owns or is on their way to purchasing a home. That makes it a lot easier to ignore the reality of FB. Meanwhile chumps like me that consider the ethics of their employer will be renting forever. I honestly don’t blame them.
- bamboozled 9y ago
  Agreed, a lot of cognitive dissonance happening on campus.
  - woolvalley 9y ago
    Maybe what the article says it is and what reality is a bit different?
- JohnJamesRambo 9y ago
  You can only sell your soul once, the second time there is nothing left.
- tbrock 9y ago

bogomipz 9y ago

>"There was a feeling, said one of the people, that Facebook wanted to take aggressive steps to make sure it could regain user trust. And over all, he said, confidence was up." I'm curious what might be the source of this regained "confidence."? The idea that this will all just blow ever in a few months?

tuna-piano 9y ago

Can someone explain to me why the Cambridge Analytica story is making people so much angrier than the later revelation that Facebook was scraping call+text info? That seems to be the larger problem to me. Somewhere at Facebook there is a team of people who wrote software to scrape, store and analyze the personal call+text data that users didn't explicitly mean to give to Facebook. The data that Cambridge Analytica attained (from Facebook's API) doesn't seem surprising at all. Isn't the Cambridge Analytics headline really just, "Group doesn't follow website's terms of service from five years ago".

Analemma_ 9y ago
Because people are really, really bad at understanding threats that have vague, uncertain consequences. For the last 15 years, trying to get people to seriously worry about privacy has had about as much success as getting them to worry about climate change: they claim to care, but their revealed preferences tell a different story. The problem is that the downsides are uncertain and in the future, whereas the upsides are immediate and certain. Our ape brains are horrible at evaluating tradeoffs of this kind. But the flip side to this is why the CA story has blown up: for once, the consequences— "CA got Trump elected!"— are immediate and graspable, in a way that "Facebook is scraping your text info" is not (even if it's probably not true). When the effects are right in your face and not time-delayed, people sit up and pay attention.
jnbiche 9y ago
Probably because of some of the things that Cambridge Analytica stands accused of, or else things they have blatantly admitted to while being secretly recorded: blackmail and bribery of politicians in multiple countries, hacking election results, and even more unethical acts[1,2]. People are upset that their data was essentially stolen from Facebook (it was collected for use in an academic study, then turned around and sold for profit to CA), used by a company with ethical failures as serious as Cambridge Analytica, and then Facebook buried the story. It was two years before it came to light thanks to Guardian journalist Carole Cadwalladr. Facebook also worked closely with CA during the Trump campaign, even though they would have known by that time that data obtained under the pretense of an academic study had been sold to CA. 1. http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-43528219 http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-43528219 2. https://www.channel4.com/news/cambridge-analytica-revealed-trumps-election-consultants-filmed-saying-they-use-bribes-and-sex-workers-to-entrap-politicians-investigation https://www.channel4.com/news/cambridge-analytica-revealed-t...

stretchwithme 9y ago

This one company's unauthorized access to millions of records may just be the tip of the iceberg.

joshjdr 9y ago

How fast can I kill all my karma by pointing out that the 3 of the top 4 articles on HN are some realization that Facebook does not give an ef about anybody's privacy?

colejohnson66 9y ago
On ArsTechnica, you just need to bring up Obama’s use of FB’s social graph
noxecanexx 9y ago
It's been almost a week of this. Actually wondering when we'll get back to interesting tech
- jhayward 9y ago
  It is attitudes like this that created the problem in the first place.

marcoperaza 9y ago

I don’t really understand the outrage. Just what do you expect when you share things with hundreds of people (your FB friends) online? For it not to be used? The only reasonable assumption is that anyone and everyone can read whatever you share on FB.

avoidit 9y ago

Someone I know closely worked at Facebook in its heyday, but it has been a while since he left. I asked him around 2014 (he had just left the company) "So what do you think about the way Facebook handles privacy issues?" His response was not defensive at all. Rather, it was a very curious "FB is one of the most open cultures you can ever work in. Any employee can ask any question of anyone at the highest levels and expect to get a honest answer". My thought was "So you didn't have anything to ask questions about?". He was actually a pretty nice fellow, so I stopped asking anything else at that point. But I remember thinking that it was a very funny, cult-member like response. And you can test this too. Ask your friends who work at FB and I bet you will get some pre-programmed response very similar to that.

helloindia 9y ago
Nobody mentions the elephant in the room, because elephant in the room feeds the people in the room.
renaudg 9y ago
I worked at Facebook even longer ago than that. What makes you assume it's got to be a pre-programmed, cult-member like response and cannot believe that this is the actual work culture ?
- avoidit 9y ago
  Ok, perhaps you are the best person to ask. 1. What was Mark Zuckerberg's response when people asked him if Facebook might be overstepping bounds in terms of data collection (shadow profiles)? 2. What did the company employees think of the backlash over their beacon project? 3. When Facebook told the EU that they cannot match FB user profiles and WhatsApp user profiles to create a single profile (remembering that they would be fined), what was the general consensus among employees? Did they know that FB had lied? Were they still OK with that? If they were, was there not a single person expressing dissent?

newscracker 9y ago

Seriously, I don’t have much respect, if any, for those working for Facebook...unless they’re working on and can implement drastic changes in how privacy, tracking and profiling are handled for the betterment of humankind. But Facebook being an advertising company that thrives on such details, I doubt if employees would have much say on these aspects or can do anything. There ought to be a #quitfacebook topic to get many employees to quit. But I don’t believe that would get much traction due to the attractiveness of compensation/benefits and probably some challenging work. If someone working at Facebook believes that things will get better, I’d say they’re just deluding themselves. It cannot happen with the current management. P.S.: Since this post is about Facebook, I’m not going to talk about other companies.

feelin_googley 9y ago

"KW: Mark, can you give us a sense of the timing and cost for this? Like, the audits that you're talking about. Is there any sense of how quickly you could do it and what kind of cost it would be to the company? I think it depends on what we find. But we're going to be investigating and reviewing tens of thousands of apps from before 2014, and assuming that there's some suspicious activity we're probably going to be doing a number of formal audits, so I think this is going to be pretty expensive. You know, the conversations we have been having internally on this is, "Are there enough people who are trained auditors in the world to do the number of audits that we're going to need quickly?" But I think this is going to cost many millions of dollars and take a number of months and hopefully not longer than that in order to get this fully complete." Source: https://www.recode.net/2018/3/22/17150814/transcript-interview-facebook-mark-zuckerberg-cambridge-analytica-controversy https://www.recode.net/2018/3/22/17150814/transcript-intervi...

brrrrr 9y ago
And even if anyone ever considers it "complete," the reality is, that it's just going to be white wash and bullshit. Why waste the fucking money. Quit being sentimental. Just trash Facebook and pivot (lol pivot). Be a real motherfucker, and let Facebook burn. Make something cooler than Facebook. Fuck this audit stupidity. Come on, man.

jk2323 9y ago

Honestly, I am not very worried about rouge data analytic companies or Russian trolls on facebook. I am worried that questionable semi-private German entity can block me (e.g. 30 days ban) on facebook at will. I am an US citizen and don't live in Germany. This is outrageous.

fenk85 9y ago
Whatabout a semi-private German entity?
- jk2323 9y ago
  Take this as a start (I know, Breitbart) http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015/09/17/german-govt-hires-ex-stasi-agent-patrol-facebook-xenophobic-comments/ http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015/09/17/german-govt-hires... I just read about "FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection Regarding Reported Concerns about Facebook Privacy Practices". Since I am an American citizen and was blocked for 30 days on facebook by this dubious organisation, I may actually drop the FTC an email and ask about their opinion on this.

jondubois 9y ago

>> One of [the Facebook employees] said he had avoided a trip home to see his family last weekend because he did not want to answer questions about the company he worked for. Wow, some people/families are way too media-sensitive. It's just hypocrisy. Facebook is fundamentally the same company as it was last week, last year and 5 years ago. Everyone knew this, especially Facebook employees. Facebook today is mostly made up of two kinds of employees; money-hungry sociopaths and hypocrites.

slivym 9y ago
There's a big difference between a theoretical "Well technically they have all our data and they could share it with anyone and they could use it to target ads quite precisely" In fact, that statement is true of the government as well. Most people just think it won't really happen, and if it does happen it'll be something fairly trivial like selling me shaving kits because I'm a man, and that my data isn't really all that revealing. That is vastly different from: "This specific data you gave facebook went to this specific company, in violation of facebook's own policies. The breach of ToS wasn't followed up, and we have video of the CEO bragging about fake news, blackmail and honey traps. This wasn't even a US company influencing the election. Your data was directly used to campaign for someone you probably deeply oppose. Not only that, but this specific targeting was probably highly important because we know the result of the election relied upon victories in specific states that are important to the electoral college whilst losing the popular vote. It also turns out that what had seemed to be deep real organic discussion topics turned out to be targeted propaganda showing a scary ability to control the public discourse Oh. And this is all carried out by a company whose CEO openly wants to run for political office and could use this to get himself elected next time."

mankash666 9y ago

Let's cut to the chase. Would you work for Facebook in your dream role, at industry leading pay. The answer, for most of us is an emphatic 'yes'

rimliu 9y ago
My dreams exclude anything with "Google", "Facebook" and "Uber". And if the role we talk about involves iOS, then Facebook is even less attractive, because imho their app is an example how not to do an iOS application.
gaius 9y ago
Ask instead who would work for a Big Tobacco company, it’s the same thing. Not me.