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Statement by FTC Regarding Reported Concerns about Facebook Privacy Practices
- pmalynin 9y agoAnd the ironic cherry on top is the line right under the report “Like the FTC on Facebook.” It this a farce?
- cycrutchfield 9y agoHow exactly is that irony?
- candreasen 9y agoNot ironic in the classic sense but it is a humorous coincidence, and it says a lot about Facebook's ubiquity.
- gberger 9y agoIronic in the Alanis Morisette sense :)
- chimeracoder 9y agoIt's ironic because it provides a subversion of expectations: the FTC is releasing a statement in which they are trying to demonstrate some sort of power and authority over Facebook, but at the same time using one of Facebook's product, thereby undermining (in a very minor way) their own statement. It's not deeply ironic, but it's definitely an example of irony. Source: My partner wrote his doctoral dissertation on irony, so I happen to have picked up an appreciation for the subject.
- sweeneyrod 9y agoIrony: "a state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects and is often wryly amusing as a result". One would not expect a webpage condemning Facebook to suggest its readers use Facebook to promote that statement. It is wryly amusing that it does.
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- gberger 9y agoI'm sure you know that, but that paragraph looks like a standard blurb that is pasted onto all press releases.
- wmeredith 9y agoIt does come off as farcical, but alas it is not. It's the reality of the situation and nicely illustrates the scale of the issue. Good or bad, Facebook is infrastructure and it's been paid for with privacy.
- hodder 9y agoRemember the delete Uber campaign, the Equifax breach, the WFC accounts, the Bank of America suits, the Intel chip vulnerability? The market doesn't. The market has a short memory, and FB is not going anywhere. However, there may be some welcomed changes in data abuse. With that said, I think the stock is a bargain today.
- DataWorker 9y agoWas with you up to that last sentence. On what do you base your valuation exactly?
- tetrep 9y agoWell, if you were following along, they mention that the market has not remembered those transgressions, which heavily implies the stock price before this incident will be reached again. The stock will hit a local minima, and then bounce back (the symptom of the market "forgetting").
- imglorp 9y agoYep. See also INTC, who got hit down to 44 for that little thing that affected most of their products. They're back to 50 today. The gap between those two might be the temporary social fear factor, that vanishes in a few weeks.
- dominotw 9y ago> On what do you base your valuation exactly Is it even possible to come up with an answer for this?
- adambyrtek 9y agoWhen somebody claims that a stock is a "bargain" it's not unreasonable to expect to base that on something more concrete than just a gut feeling.
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- swarnie_ 9y agoShares off 5% today and still falling. Its really dragging down FNGU as well...
- orbifold 9y agoI really hope that eventually they will get thrown out of the European market, GDPR is a start. I think their business model has no place in a free and open society.
- pknerd 9y agoAgree with those who says it will not effect Fb much and it's incomparable with other past apps/social media platforms. The reason is that unlike others Facebook exploited us, humans in such a way with help of technology and psychology that there is almost no friction to get into Facebook world. On top of that the content people see on their feeds make them glued all the time. I have not been using Facebook for weeks and since then the news broke of privacy and stalking I shared multiple times with friends and family but no one gives a damn about privacy(unless one suffers him/herself) so they are happy to have some happy moments reading religious, political posts or joke. So, #deletefacebook campaign might work among some tech elites but not among commons, specially among villagers in long distant areas of Pakistan who use Facebook to interact with family members in cities.
- pknerd 9y agoNot sure why was I down voted? A little explanation could help.
- erikpukinskis 9y agoI don’t know either, but it’s against the HN posting guidelines to inquire. It’s hard to know where sentiment comes from, I’d recommend not dwelling on it too long. Just keep writing comments you believe in.
- oehpr 9y agoThe problem is with no feedback, it can be hard to adjust in the right direction. And I'm not 100% sure of this, but I think downvotes on this platform have consequences beyond just hiding one comment. I've noticed ordering anomalies here where people who posted newer comments and had > 0 points were ranked below people who posted older comments and had <= 0 points. There was some intrinsic ranking going on.
- pknerd 9y agoThanks! I was not aware of it. It was just curiosity to find reason to correct myself rather than running for scores.
- kchoudhu 9y agoIf Zuckerberg has any game at all, he will welcome this investigation, 'educate' the regulators, and then build a regulatory moat around Facebook that no one can breach. The big four banks did this after 2009, and they are even more entrenched and systematically important than they were before. Expect Facebook to borrow liberally from their playbook.
- bogomipz 9y agoCan you elaborate on exactly how "big four banks" built a regulatory moat that no one can breach?
- habosa 9y agoThe regulatory costs of running a bank are much higher now than before the financial crisis. This means that the chance of an upstart challenging the big players has actually gone down, even though some of the regulation was meant to address concerns of "too big to fail".
- vuln 9y agoWhich is the Trump administration is trying to change that to give smaller regional banks a fighting chance. It's weird tat people are against this.
- wmeredith 9y agoI agree. The tribalism in the current political climate of the US is really damaging on all sides. Trump has done more than a handful of good things and a lot of my friends/family don't want to hear it. Just like my Dad (Fox News watcher, Limbaugh fan, etc...) almost foams at the mouth when you mention Obama/Clinton; it's crazy. He's been conditioned. It reminds of the effects of the two minutes hate from 1984[0]. Too many citizens are completely disengaged from the political process and too many of those that are have bought into these cults of personality. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Minutes_Hate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Minutes_Hate
- lumberjack 9y ago>Foremost among these tools is enforcement action against companies that fail to honor their privacy promises This is the crux of the issue. The problem is that when Facebook asks for "location information", the consequences of this are not being conveyed to the user. The user might think, "ah they want my location for the weather recommendations and event suggestions in my neighbourhood". They do not realise how something so "innocuous" as location information could be weaponised against them. I used location data as an example because you could infer almost everything about a person just from that. You could know their social circle, their approximate tax bracket, which banks they use, who is their lawyer, their accountant and their wealth manager, their familiar situation, how healthy they eat, how healthy they are, whether they are chronically ill, and what type of chronic diseases they might have, what activities they engage in, what are their political leanings, I could go on, I do not think this is anywhere near an exhaustive list... The user does not know that Facebook it going to tip off the insurance provider about the user's unhealthy eating habits or his chronic medical condition. Or maybe tip off his bank that he has substantial wealth elsewhere.
- mtgx 9y agoIndeed. Collecting a "type of data" tells you almost nothing about what the company collecting it could do or is going to do with that data. I think regulation around this idea may be most effective. Companies should have limits on what they can do with the data by default. If they want to use it for more, then they should not only offer a much greater degree of transparency but they should have to abide by much higher standards, too, similarly to how medical companies have to abide by much higher standards when collecting your information. So if a company asks for location data just to use it for weather information, that could be obtained with a single click from the user. If the company intends to use that location data to allow advertisers to target you, then it should be made very clear to the user that this is what the purpose of collecting the data is. And they should need to do more than just click once on a button. If the same company intends to give the data to electoral campaigns, then higher standards still should be imposed on that company. The point is we need to start regulation the use of data, and not just what type of data can be collected.
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- bitxbit 9y agoI think people are forgetting how much easier it is to scale and build a network these days. The moat is the network for facebook but it can be replaced in a relatively short period of time if the right competition enters the market. Facebook has invested a lot of technology toward selling ads and the core product for the users has not changed much (for the better) in the past decade. Classic monopolistic behavior.
- _tulpa 9y agoSure, the technical barrier isn't that high anymore. Social and economic barriers though... By subsidising otherwise prohibitively expensive mobile data connections for Facebook traffic only, Facebook has become the internet in many countries. Facebook have their app preinstalled by pretty much every Android vendor. As a system app that you can't remove. Other services require you to have a Facebook account to login, there aren't many services that devs trust for this. Competing with something this deeply entrenched would be difficult, and doing that with ethical limitations that they don't have is damn near impossible.
- Lionsion 9y ago> By subsidising otherwise prohibitively expensive mobile data connections for Facebook traffic only, Facebook has become the internet in many countries. I like to see how much revenue Facebook gets from those countries vs. the US and Western Europe. > Competing with something this deeply entrenched would be difficult I don't think anything you listed makes FB so entrenched that's it's invulnerable. Facebook's big strengths are network effects and its pile of cash, but its weakness is that it's a leisure item in a somewhat trend-driven market. All the money in the world can't keep something fashionable forever.
- _tulpa 9y ago> I like to see how much revenue Facebook gets from those countries vs. the US and Western Europe. That's not even the point, even if they're loosing money at the moment it's almost certainly worth it to capture those new users. > All the money in the world can't keep something fashionable forever. Facebook isn't fashionable or trendy, myspace et al took that angle which is why they're gone now, and also that's missing the point again. Facebook is a social utility that a crapload of people can't live without. I have friends who I can't even contact without using facebook/messenger/whatsapp, and this is in a country where mobile data is cheap and SMS/phone calls are basically free. Go to a place where facebook-subsidised connections are the only option that people can actually afford and your only alternative is basically social suicide. I don't think many people truly grasp the scale and pervasiveness of Facebook and how there just isn't anything that is even remotely close to competing.
- collinf 9y ago> Like the FTC on Facebook (link is external) Really got me there, lol.
- jyriand 9y agoI'm just seeing blank page right now.
- politician 9y agoI'm really amazed that all of this is coming to light less than 2 months before the GDPR comes into effect. I would've thought that companies, especially social media companies, would be trying to keep their heads down and avoid drawing attention from the EU on Day 1. Everything that Facebook is saying to its American audience, it's also saying to the European GDPR regulators. They need to walk a very fine line here and right now I don't think they're doing a particularly good job of it.
- gesman 9y agoThis article is an invoice to FB of approximately: ~$1e+10 ... $1e+11
- fogzen 9y agoHow were any of you damaged by Facebook ads, exactly? Why the outrage now and not before, when Obama (and everyone else) used targeted advertising? This whole outrage over privacy is disingenuous. It’s painfully obvious the outrage is about Donald Trump being elected president, not personal information used to target ads.
- proofbygazing 9y agoI think it's awkward how obvious this is, and how comfortable the media is with that being the case. From Wired's article a week ago: > The crisis was familiar in a way: Facebook has burned its fingers on issues of data privacy frequently in its 14 year history. But this time it was different. The data leakage hadn’t helped Unilever sell mayonnaise. It appeared to have helped Donald Trump sell a political vision of division and antipathy. So a guy you didn't like got elected and now this is a problem. The same journalists could barely keep it in their pants when Obama was squeezing every mile he could out of data in 2008 and 2012.
- lambda_lover 9y agoWhile I definitely believe that the motivation behind this latest media surge is suspect, do you really think people aren't justified in being upset about Facebook's abuse? Maybe the outrage is simply because Facebook was new and people weren't aware of the dangers in 2008 and 2012? People don't have to be "damaged" by something to object to it. How do human rights abuses in third world countries "damage" you, exactly? Just because there isn't a direct link doesn't mean that there's nothing bad going on. I myself don't care that this data was used to help Donald Trump ascend to the presidency -- besides, I bet that Hilary's campaign did similar sketchy things with private data. The issue is that our private data is being abused by a company that misled us about data use -- and for folks who don't even have a Facebook account, whose information has been harvested via shadow profiles sourced from our less-privacy-conscious friends, data compilation occurred entirely without consent. This reeks of whataboutism to me. Why are you trying to imply that we shouldn't be concerned about privacy?
- smokeyj 9y ago
- myth_buster 9y ago> [FTC] has an open non-public investigation into these practices Not familiar with open non-public legalese but it sounds like an oxymoron.
- random_rr 9y agoOpen - the status of the case is "open", meaning it is under active investigation. Non-public - you already know this :)
- myth_buster 9y agoGotcha, thanks.
- samlevine 9y agoThere are a number of ways of paying for a social network. Among them: - Ads - Subscriptions - Loss leader for another product - Microtransactions Facebook does ads. Subscriptions hurt network effects. Google+ ran into a brick wall of network effects. Nobody uses Flattr, and it's hard to imagine people paying a buck for video filters or other premium features. It'd be great to solve the problem without building another Facebook, but my best guess is that if Facebook goes down someone else builds another system basically identical to Facebook and we all have this conversation again 10 years in the future.
- dfee 9y agoThere is an interesting anthropological conversation in here: some segment of the population might be willing to pay for services that protect their privacy, but due to network effects, an integrated society will tend towards the lowest common “customer profile” denominator. Hmm. Maybe that’s not right. Maybe the lowest quality content will be on the most common denominator platform - maybe that’s what we’re seeing. And maybe that’s why I’ve effectively left Facebook - the folks I want to share and connect with aren’t there.
- soheil 9y ago> like FTC on Facebook the irony
- _eqet 9y agoI find it pretty hilarious that they're also promoting their Facebook page at the bottom... "Like the FTC on Facebook"