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Facebook’s disingenuous explanations call for more questions and even less trust
- olivermarks 9y agoNot sure about 'surprise' the Corbett Report is pointing out it covered all this in detail a year ago https://youtu.be/w7n9FI6C5vw https://youtu.be/w7n9FI6C5vw along with lots of other similar commentary online over the last couple of years...
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago> Not sure about 'surprise' That this was possible and happening was well known in Silicon Valley. What has changed is (a) Cambridge Analytica and the 2016 election made the issue relatable and (b) Zuckerberg et al are dissembling and attempting what appears to be an incompetently-executed public cover-up.
- aylmao 9y ago> Zuckerberg et al are dissembling and attempting what appears to be an incompetently-executed public cover-up I agree that execs probably took too long to make a statement, but out of curiosity, do you have any thoughts on what execs should've done instead, or are you of the opinion that there's really nothing they could've done differently?
- Yetanfou 9y agoReally? It is not so much what they should have done but what they should not have done: they should not have made the decisions which led to their companies ending up in this quagmire. They should have behaved ethically, something which is sure to have been mentioned - even if only in passing - at the Ivy League schools they attended.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- dictum 9y agoWould they even get to a 100B, let alone a half trillion, market cap by always doing the right thing? (Because this is ripe to be picked by the "wow, look at the HN dudebros" crowd: this is not an apology of their practices, it's a real question about corporations and powerful institutions.)
- manjushri 9y ago>They should have behaved ethically, something which is sure to have been mentioned - even if only in passing - at the Ivy League schools they attended FB was founded on ethics violations.
- sah2ed 9y agoFacebook did not lack sound advice from competent executives, they just didn't have the spine to do the right thing, because money. One central tension at Facebook has been that of the legal and policy teams versus the security team. The security team generally pushed for more disclosure about how nation states had misused the site, but the legal and policy teams have prioritized business imperatives, said the people briefed on the matter. “The people whose job is to protect the user always are fighting an uphill battle against the people whose job is to make money for the company,” said Sandy Parakilas, who worked at Facebook enforcing privacy and other rules until 2012 and now advises a nonprofit organization called the Center for Humane Technology, which is looking at the effect of technology on people. Alex Stamos, CSO is the one who led the internal tension for better disclosures and the need for Facebook to be more transparent. Of course, it is part of why he was forced to leave, as reported by the NYT [0]. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/technology/facebook-alex-stamos.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/technology/facebook-alex-...
- obmelvin 9y agoThey could have made a genuine effort to ensure the data was actually deleted. The idea that a legal certification would be enough from a company that conducted itself in such a manner is laughable.
- cabalamat 9y ago> Zuckerberg et al are dissembling They can hardly tell the truth: "Our business model is to collect as much data about you as we can, then use that to manipulate you." The only difference with Cambridge Analytica over what they usually do is it's manipulating people into voting rather than buying stuff.
- braderhart 9y agoThe only real solutions are open source federated decentralized services.
- prolikewhoa 9y ago"Facebook thinks we're idiots" To be honest, about this issue of privacy and security, most of the world really doesn't care. The people who do care are not a majority and not even a significant statistic. Providing an apology is enough for most people, since they don't understand the depth and scope of the problem at hand. Shareholders know this. Mark will receive a slap on the wrist, and business will continue as usual as this fades out over the next 1-2 months.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago> The people who do care are not a majority and not even a significant statistic I hear this from my friends in technology. It is not supported by the data: Facebook’s net favourability is down 28 points [1]. > Shareholders know this Facebook trades 20% down from its highs and lower, to trend, than its peers [2]. [1] https://www.axios.com/exclusive-poll-facebook-favorability-plunges-1522057235-b1fa31db-e646-4413-a273-95d3387da4f2.html https://www.axios.com/exclusive-poll-facebook-favorability-p... [2] https://m.nasdaq.com/symbol/fb/real-time https://m.nasdaq.com/symbol/fb/real-time
- downandout 9y agoBut I’ll bet usage statistics are right in line with their norms. It’s true that the deluge of headlines from liberal media sites this week has hurt their public image, and it at least cracks open the door to a competitor possibly having some success in attracting users. I’m not sure what that competitor would look like, but it would have to be vastly different than today’s concept of a social network. But the point is that if usage stays normal, this hasn’t affected anything at all other than the fact that people don’t feel as warm and fuzzy toward Facebook as they once did.
- dragonwriter 9y ago> I hear this from my friends in technology. It is not supported by the data: Facebook’s net favourability is down 28 points [1]. The question is whether that is durable, or just something that hangs around while this is in the headlines with a focus on FB.
- meri_dian 9y agoCan someone explain to me what the problem is with data availability? As other comments have noted, most people don't care. How would you make someone who doesn't care, care?
- delecti 9y agoYour question brings to mind the (possibly apocryphal) story about (IIRC) Target, who through the use of a customer's purchase history deduced that she was pregnant before she had informed her family. They sent targeted mailers to her house, leaving her father wondering why she was getting advertising for diapers and the like. I think the general public would care more if they got a better sense of what having a large volume of their seemingly innocuous data lets companies figure out about them.
- BookmarkSaver 9y agoWell a decent part of the most recent furor is that it affects people the do care. The Cambridge Analytica data was scraped from customers that had enabled it, but extended into their own friend networks, including those that had not chosen to make their data accessible. I am sorta of the opinion that nothing on FB should be considered private, but even with that noted, and the fact that I don't particularly care what personal FB info on me is scraped, I'm a bit annoyed that any random friend could expose data that I have marked as private by allowing some random BS app to access to their own account. According to FB, this was solved years ago (but the data already scraped from the previous state was never successfully recalled), but I hardly trust them to give a shit about this or other issues popping up in the future, barring another mass outrage.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- woodandsteel 9y agoThe question is how to solve this problem. I don't think governmental regulations will do it, through they may help. That's because data collection and sharing is Facebook's whole business model, and ditto thousands of other companies, large and small. So they will all just figure out ways of skirting around the law and continuing what they have been doing. The only solution that could work is a new financial model that combines decentralization with some way of paying content producers and other expenses. Fortunately there is a lot of tech for that in development, though I don't know if anything is fully ready yet.
- craftyguy 9y agoHow about something like HIPPA (in the US)? There are strict penalties for violations, but it hasn't prevented small companies from thriving, provided they comply with the act..
- dfee 9y agoWhy do you think the small guys comply? The calculation that I’ve heard made is that by being a tiny fish you won’t be pursued. Even better question, why do you think the big companies comply? I’ve seen some egregious compliance snafus at that level, too.
- woodandsteel 9y agoCompanies comply because they are in the health care business, that is how they make money, and HIPPA doesn't stop them from doing that. But Facebook is in the data collection business. If it complied with a strong data privacy law, it would go out of business, so it wouldn't.
- manjushri 9y agoBefore we start talking about solutions we should defind the problem. How would you define the problem at a high level?
- woodandsteel 9y ago
- nkkollaw 9y agoTitle seems to be "Mark Zuckerberg Thinks We’re Idiots"..?
- dredmorbius 9y agoHN routinely de-fang headlines, particularly on hot-button topics, in the interest of more informed discussion.
- newscracker 9y agoI don't think this is a good idea — changing the title completely from what the author of the content put up, without retaining even a part of it. The current title for this article is horrendously long and quite frankly, boring. While we're on the topic of Facebook, misinformation, etc., this title change could also be classified as misinformation by HN, though the claimed purpose is for good instead of for evil. Why? Because most people decide to read articles based on the titles, and many people also derive conclusions on what the article is about from the title. It doesn't matter much if some sentence was lifted off the article and used. This should be as the author of the post intended. But HN is a private site, and can do whatever it wants on content shared here. I'll just voice my strong disagreement on this title change, especially on the topic of Facebook and recent revelations. I don't need more justifications.
- nkkollaw 9y agoI thought the rule was to not editorialize titles..?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- caro_douglos 9y agoThey had a good run. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPY6Pp4kmxQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPY6Pp4kmxQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXuBnz6vtuI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXuBnz6vtuI
- duxup 9y agoI'd like to know if Mark's and other executive's Facebook data were available as readily as everyone else.
- wdr1 9y agoIt was. You needed to be his FB friend, which at the time was limited to 500 (if I remember right). But if you were, the Graph API gave the same access as it did to others. Honestly, it would be almost better if that wasn't true. That would mean they knew something was wrong. The problem is they think "I'm fine with this, so everyone else must be too."
- untangle 9y ago> Persphinctery statements... I don't know what these are but they sound evil.
- waterhouse 9y agoMy first guess was that it was meant to be "ass-covering". A "sphincter" is a generic type of "circular muscle that normally maintains constriction of a natural body passage or orifice", of which there are "over 60 types in the human body" (Wiki), but there's only one sphincter people usually talk about (outside scientific literature). Looking more closely at the definition of the "per-" prefix, I get "through"[1], in which case a "persphinctery" statement is most directly defined as one that "came out of someone's ass". [1] http://membean.com/wrotds/per-through http://membean.com/wrotds/per-through
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- itronitron 9y ago"that’s rightfully a big issue and deserves to be a big uproar" << I can't wait to use this in my own life
- throwaway_111 9y agoI am more shocked by what Facebook hasn't revealed. For ex, FB tracks most viewed profile by user and this data is accessible to employees who work on munging data. Not revealed in any Facebook dataset that you could request and download from the site.
- eisvogel 9y agoRight next door to a company where I was recently working was a successful startup whose entire business model consisted of using Facebook's commercial API for the analysis of the psychological profiles of its base product (the users), to detect potential terrorists. This outfit's only real customer is Australian law enforcement, and everyone who uses Facebook is attributed some non-zero terrorist score. I have told this to people who have continued to use Facebook. It's just crap and it can't die fast enough.
- etherealG 9y agoBut not using Facebook gives a +80% score too right? I mean, only a terrorist cares about his privacy. I have nothing to hide. :|
- scotty79 9y agoI feel this author could write an article about purest, most selfless people, actions or concept on the planet and make them sound dirty and evil.
- itronitron 9y agomaybe we can suggest they write about Mother Teresa >> https://www.huffingtonpost.com/krithika-varagur/mother-teresa-was-no-saint_b_9470988.html https://www.huffingtonpost.com/krithika-varagur/mother-teres...