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An Update on Our Plans to Restrict Data Access on Facebook

166 points by robtaylor 9y ago

mankash666 9y ago
Facebook can't seem to behave in a trustworthy manner. Initial findings about the improper sharing happened in 2015. How many years does the "move fast, break things" company need to accurately assess damage, or does it NOT want to accurately assess at all.
- TAForObvReasons 9y ago
  "Move fast and break things" explicitly lionizes a disregard for externalities, so it's no surprise that assessing the damage is not in the company's DNA
- jlmorton 9y ago
  > Facebook can't seem to behave in a trustworthy manner. My goodness, this is the same issue, not a new one. Facebook is behaving in a trustworthy manner right now, over-communicating the scope and details of this issue, yet here we are to attack them anew over it.
  - bamboozled 9y ago
    It sounds more more like they’ve kept the number disclosed for as long as they could get away with it.
  - SahAssar 9y ago
    "over-communicating" is good, but most of this info seems like it should have been revealed earlier, no? It's obvious that they knew.
  - ionised 9y ago
    Where is the trustworthiness in this that you are seeing? They are just telling people what they think they want to hear given how they have been caught out.
    - jlmorton 9y ago
      > They are just telling people what they think they want to hear given how they have been caught out. Wait a second, let's back up. They didn't get "caught" doing anything. They purposely, intentionally, and with everyone's explicit knowledge shared friend list data with an app developer. This is just a basic fact. No one, not even my mother, can realistically claim they did not know and understand Facebook was sharing graph data with app developers in 2012, or 2014. Not only was it crystal clear when you installed an app, even if you didn't, anyone that was on Facebook was inundated by messages from Farmville, and many other apps, letting them know what their friend's were doing. Later, by 2014, Facebook decided they needed to be more restrictive with this data. They shutdown app developers access to the social graph, essentially killing Facebook Platform, which everyone expected to be a primary driver of future revenues. They shutdown Graph Search, an extremely useful tool, because it made it too easy to collect personal data. But we need to be clear that Facebook was not "caught" doing anything at all. They did exactly what they said they would do, which was plain to everyone, even my technophobic mom. Separately, in 2014, an app developer shared personal data with Cambridge Analytica. Facebook contacted both parties and requested that they certify they deleted the data, which they did. The only reason people are upset now, is because: a) politics is involved, and b) they are retroactively applying current best practices with personal data, which were not common in 2014 and before. The incredible part about all of this is that so many other social networks (and other companies) continue to collect the exact same data, and many of them share it publicly. Almost all Twitter users have their friend list open to the public, for all to see, along with all of their tweets, because that's what the platform encourages. No one would say Twitter has been "caught" doing this. In fact, Facebook has been extremely up-front about the situation. They fixed the situation 4 years before it came to light. They have announced important and strong changes to further protect data in the future. They have publicly and and widely announced their detailed findings in this case, and they have promised investigations of similar unauthorized usages of personal data that may have occurred with other app developers. I mean, what more do you really want them to do?
      - ionised 9y ago
        To stop existing. They are a net-negative for society.
- gaius 9y ago
  A fish rots from the head down
- methodover 9y ago
  It's not your fault that you missed the reporting on it, but FB actually DID respond in 2015. They closed the friends-posts permission way back in 2015. They had plans to do so even before the story broke. What C.A. did hasn't been possible since 2015. They responded appropriately at the time. Of course judging by the anti-FB media frenzy you wouldn't know it.
  - frankzinger 9y ago
    Yes they reacted, but only after they got called out on it [1]. Before that, for years, they knew exactly what they were doing when they gave apps access to their users' friends. And it must've been obvious to them throughout how such abuse could be executed. Yet they didn't try very hard at all to prevent it. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/26/facebook-data-misuse-cambridge-analytica https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/26/facebo...
mankash666 9y ago
Facebook can't seem to behave in a trustworthy manner. Initial findings about the improper sharing happened in 2015. How many years does the "move fast, break things" company need to accurately assess damage, or does it NOT want to accurately assess at all.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- mtgx 9y ago
  Facebook's problem is that it has no incentive to fix these issues, which it sees as "features" for the most part. That's why it always seems to improve its privacy policy only as a result of regulations and scandals. Even then, it only does the minimum necessary that it believes will appease everyone for the time being and until the next scandal.
- mrlyc 9y ago
  Facebook is still moving fast and breaking things, just not their things. The morality of an organisation reflects that of its senior management. Zuckerberg doesn't care about breaching privacy so why should Facebook? He only cares that he was caught.
Finnucane 9y ago
How much was properly shared?
- garyfirestorm 9y ago
  What was shared would be an additional question. Edit: Or maybe what was not shared would be easier to answer.
post_break 9y ago
Anyone have an archive? I blocked them in my hosts file.
- gazsp 9y ago
  Me too :)
- samfriedman 9y ago
  Two weeks ago we promised to take a hard look at the information apps can use when you connect them to Facebook as well as other data practices. Today, we want to update you on the changes we’re making to better protect your Facebook information. We expect to make more changes over the coming months — and will keep you updated on our progress. Here are the details of the nine most important changes we are making. Events API: Until today, people could grant an app permission to get information about events they host or attend, including private events. This made it easy to add Facebook Events to calendar, ticketing or other apps. But Facebook Events have information about other people’s attendance as well as posts on the event wall, so it’s important that we ensure apps use their access appropriately. Starting today, apps using the API will no longer be able to access the guest list or posts on the event wall. And in the future, only apps we approve that agree to strict requirements will be allowed to use the Events API. Groups API: Currently apps need the permission of a group admin or member to access group content for closed groups, and the permission of an admin for secret groups. These apps help admins do things like easily post and respond to content in their groups. However, there is information about people and conversations in groups that we want to make sure is better protected. Going forward, all third-party apps using the Groups API will need approval from Facebook and an admin to ensure they benefit the group. Apps will no longer be able to access the member list of a group. And we’re also removing personal information, such as names and profile photos, attached to posts or comments that approved apps can access. Pages API: Until today, any app could use the Pages API to read posts or comments from any Page. This let developers create tools for Page owners to help them do things like schedule posts and reply to comments or messages. But it also let apps access more data than necessary. We want to make sure Page information is only available to apps providing useful services to our community. So starting today, all future access to the Pages API will need to be approved by Facebook. Facebook Login: Two weeks ago we announced important changes to Facebook Login. Starting today, Facebook will need to approve all apps that request access to information such as check-ins, likes, photos, posts, videos, events and groups. We started approving these permissions in 2014, but now we’re tightening our review process — requiring these apps to agree to strict requirements before they can access this data. We will also no longer allow apps to ask for access to personal information such as religious or political views, relationship status and details, custom friends lists, education and work history, fitness activity, book reading activity, music listening activity, news reading, video watch activity, and games activity. In the next week, we will remove a developer’s ability to request data people shared with them if it appears they have not used the app in the last 3 months. Instagram Platform API: We’re making the recently announced deprecation of the Instagram Platform API effective today. You can find more information here. Search and Account Recovery: Until today, people could enter another person’s phone number or email address into Facebook search to help find them. This has been especially useful for finding your friends in languages which take more effort to type out a full name, or where many people have the same name. In Bangladesh, for example, this feature makes up 7% of all searches. However, malicious actors have also abused these features to scrape public profile information by submitting phone numbers or email addresses they already have through search and account recovery. Given the scale and sophistication of the activity we’ve seen, we believe most people on Facebook could have had their public profile scraped in this way. So we have now disabled this feature. We’re also making changes to account recovery to reduce the risk of scraping as well. Call and Text History: Call and text history is part of an opt-in feature for people using Messenger or Facebook Lite on Android. This means we can surface the people you most frequently connect with at the top of your contact list. We’ve reviewed this feature to confirm that Facebook does not collect the content of messages — and will delete all logs older than one year. In the future, the client will only upload to our servers the information needed to offer this feature — not broader data such as the time of calls. Data Providers and Partner Categories: Last week we announced our plans to shut down Partner Categories, a product that lets third-party data providers offer their targeting directly on Facebook. App Controls: Finally, starting on Monday, April 9, we’ll show people a link at the top of their News Feed so they can see what apps they use — and the information they have shared with those apps. People will also be able to remove apps that they no longer want. As part of this process we will also tell people if their information may have been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica. In total, we believe the Facebook information of up to 87 million people — mostly in the US — may have been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica. Overall, we believe these changes will better protect people’s information while still enabling developers to create useful experiences. We know we have more work to do — and we’ll keep you updated as we make more changes. You can find more details on the platform changes in our Facebook Developer Blog.
jumelles 9y ago
What'll the number be up to by the time Zuckerberg is in front of Congress?
samfriedman 9y ago
The actual article title is "An Update on Our Plans to Restrict Data Access on Facebook". It details a list of new API restrictions for Facebook Apps, as well as planned notifications of users whose data was leaked to CA. These additional API restrictions may be closing the door after the horses have bolted, but they will also restrict more scraping and data mining. However, I'm sure the value of Facebook data that companies have already collected just shot up significantly... I also think that the step of planting an alert on affected users' News Feeds is a good one, and something that I didn't expect Facebook would go for. Curious to see what the report says when that feature goes live.
kareemm 9y ago
The optimist in me says these changes have been a long time coming. The skeptic in me says FB is doing this to avoid being regulated. Anybody with more insight care to comment?
- dssu 9y ago
  Well just take a look at the techcrunch article published today on how Facebook is not committing to GDPR standards for North American users. https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/04/facebook-gdpr-wont-be-universal/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/04/facebook-gdpr-wont-be-univ... It basically says they are going to do the minimal effort required to protect privacy while avoiding regulation.
  - rock_hard 9y ago
    The TC article is unfortunately misleading. As I posted elsewhere already. GDRP is more then just some rules around what you need to ask users for permission for. It's much bigger and very specific to the EU legal apparatus. It hence makes no sense to ship globally. What you want is for the underlying privacy controls to be available for everyone...which according to Reuters is what FB is doing!
- tomcooks 9y ago
  Remember when myspace became my`____` in an attempt to rebrand itself? That amount of cringe, and no regulations.
ballenf 9y ago
I've had facial recognition off forever on FB and every time I've logged in in the past few weeks the following is one of the first entries in my feed: https://imgur.com/a/pMhoL https://imgur.com/a/pMhoL It's a nag to turn on facial recognition. Feels like really bad form to be asking for such intrusive extra info with what they're going through right now.
- ghostly_s 9y ago
  I got that every time I used the site for years. It wasn't until I deleted my profile and created a new one where I never opted in to the recognition in the first place (or allowed any tags of myself for it to build the face profile, perhaps) that I was able to make it go away.
  - alonmower 9y ago
    Random thought: when you created the new account you accepted their right to do this in the ToS and so they didn't need to explicitly ask?
    - ghostly_s 9y ago
      Perhaps, but I believe I recall opting out of it. Also as I said, I never gave them any seed data under the new account to start with. My original account had plenty of old pictures that people had tagged me in (back when you had to do that manually!), and at some point I went through and deleted all those tags though I'm quite certain they still were cataloged.
    - givinguflac 9y ago
      This is very likely the case.
- paulie_a 9y ago
  Facebook also gives me a fake notification on messenger every time I use the app or website. Sorry Facebook I don't want to use your incredibly subpar message app.
maxxxxx 9y ago
I think we need a legal framework around sharing data. Even if Facebook did everything right some other companies will mess things up. In the end a person should always be notified when his/her information gets shared with another party and have the ability to approve. This will make the business model of many companies difficult but so be it. I don't see any other way.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
tomswartz07 9y ago
Assuming that they have the info on the accounts to make that number estimate, are they going to contact those who were affected? I mean to say, if- for example- my mom was one of the facebook users who had their information taken/used by CA, what should she expect?
- jey 9y ago
  Yes, they previously claimed that they will be reaching out to people affected by the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
helloworld 9y ago
I'm more concerned about fundamental privacy issues, such as so-called "data onboarding," in which Facebook (and others) helps marketers connect your online identity with your offline identity. That's where we need more transparency -- and perhaps more regulation.
smn1234 9y ago
I wish I could just pay a monthly fee to access Facebook but to be protected from advertising and from being the product. I also wish I could client-side encrypt all of my content, share the keys with my friends who I want to have the ability to view my content, and somehow have this all be friction-less and transparent from my and contacts' perspective.
- pmlnr 9y ago
  Secure Scuttlebutt. The problem is to get people on it.
  - tmikaeld 9y ago
    They can start with asking the users about it.
  - shocks 9y ago
    What a terrible name. :/
    - astura 9y ago
      "Scuttlebutt" is nautical term for a water fountain (which was originally a cask, not a fountain). Since sailors would congregate around the scuttlebutt and gossip, "scuttlebutt" also came to mean gossip as well. I guess I'd call it the nautical version of "water cooler talk." It's rather obscure term to use outside a nautical context, so I agree it's a bad name if targeting the general public. It would be a fine name if its target audience was only sailors.
      - shocks 9y ago
        That makes a lot of sense, when explained. I was thinking more from a branding perspective. :P "Hey non-technical friend, instead of Facebook you should use Secure Scuttlebutt; it's so much better!"
        9y ago
grysledman 9y ago
Are there any companies that rely on Facebook data that are going to face a rough patch (or cease to exist) because of the API changes?
- mountainplus 9y ago
  One site, your question made me remember was a third party app for events, Heyevent. http://heyevent.com/ http://heyevent.com/ Out of curiosity I just re-authorised them for access and was displayed the following message: "We're sad to announce that due to dwindling traffic, expensive hosting costs, and new limitations of the Facebook API, we've decided to close down Heyevent. We're sad to have to do this, but we unfortunatelu we see no other option. Since the launch of Heyevent, Facebook themselves has added more event recommendation. They're not as good as Heyevent's recommendations, yet. Hopefully they'll get better. Thanks for using the service!" I found it somewhat useful in the past to keep using facebook to a minimum, so I wish them the best. There must be some other areas of data based servicing that experience difficulties that but I can't think of any other right now.
jonbarker 9y ago
I find it ironic that they plan to let users know they've been compromised via the newsfeed. What about users who have either deleted or never log in? How will they find out? Is their likely defense 'ignorance is no excuse' really a great defense if the only way to avoid ignorance in this case to log into their platform?
- ictoan 9y ago
  It is not in the newsfeed... it is the News Room. I didn't login and I was able to read this.
  - jonbarker 9y ago
    Sorry, was reading multiple articles on this topic at once. Yes this is a newsroom post, however they plan to let individual users know via their newsfeeds: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-04/facebook-says-data-on-87-million-people-may-have-been-shared https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-04/facebook-... "Facebook says it will tell people, in a notice at the top of their news feeds starting April 9, if their information may have been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica."
    - djhartman 9y ago
      No, you were right, they mentioned the News Feed in this post too.
  - djhartman 9y ago
    > App Controls: Finally, starting on Monday, April 9, we’ll show people a link at the top of their News Feed so they can see what apps they use — and the information they have shared with those apps. People will also be able to remove apps that they no longer want. As part of this process we will also tell people if their information may have been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica.
    - paulie_a 9y ago
wfh 9y ago
Anyone else find the font being used on that page incredibly hard to read?
- darkstar999 9y ago
  Yes.
notananthem 9y ago
What is hilarious is they still hide privacy controls from people esp by limiting access from desktop. They're awful and people will be slow, but leave in droves, those who don't find a lot of use for it.
nemoniac 9y ago
"improperly shared"
feelin_googley 9y ago
"Facebook is asking users whether they think it's "good for the world" in a poll sent to an unspecified number of people." Source: https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/apps/a19671683/facebook-asking-users-if-they-think-its-good-for-the-world/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/apps/a19671683/f...
tomc1985 9y ago
Nobody attacks the data collection itself. Anyone who accepts this is a fool for letting Facebook continue to pull the wool over your eyes. This human centipede of data collection needs to die.
- methodover 9y ago
  I accept it. Facebook is probably one of the better companies out there when it comes to security. They haven't had a true breach; the scandals so far have been small, mostly because the mores of society have shifted before FB can roll out changes to match them (and they always do).
  - tomc1985 9y ago
    They haven't had security 'breaches' because nobody ever called it that, but FB has been leaking data out the back door for years. The amount of info that you used to be able to pull from Facebook's API was incredible, and most people didn't realize it. Even information as bland as friends and friends-of-friends is enough to build a useful social graph around a person. (Years ago I did just this, and it was amazing how the graph clustered all my different social groups)
not_that_noob 9y ago
None of these changes will do anything to fix the basic issue. All the following aspects were derived from watching the testimony Christopher Wylie gave before the UK House of Commons Select Committee. He's the CA whistleblower. It's a very illuminating watch - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5g6IJm7YJQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5g6IJm7YJQ The problem is the foll: [1] CA wrote a trojan FB app to derive psychographic user data for FB users. This let them determine for example how susceptible you were to misleading or fake news. [2] They then used FB targeting to target these specific people at scale, pushing extreme fake news such as "Obama moving troops to Texas to ensure 3rd term". This is military grade psyops applied at unprecedented scale. [3] These people, as they were susceptible to manipulation, would then convert at unusually high rates. He says 5% or higher conversion. Conversion was measured as an action like donating money or signing up for a mailing list. In this way, the entire democratic process was corrupted. The issue is not that there were dirty tricks in the 2016 election. The issue here is that the existence of FB's app platform allows the detailed psychological profiling of millions of people on scale, and then allows them to be targeted at scale using that profiling. This is a clear and present danger to democracy. Even with these changes, a rogue app such as CA's would be allowed on the FB platform. FB has no visibility into how app data can be used offline.
- randall 9y ago
  These would reduce the scale with which it would be able to operate. Someone would have to interact with the app directly, as opposed to their friends' friends' friend.
  - not_that_noob 9y ago
    Can you point to the particular new limitation that will have this effect? I can't find anything in the announced changes that do this. The key attraction of FB - viral marketing for an app - is something that FB wouldn't touch I think.
    - koko775 9y ago
      The friends-of-friends change happened in 2014. Cambridge Analytica's method stopped working back then as apps could no longer acquire permission to query friends of friends.
feelin_googley 9y ago
"Morgan Stanley cut its price target on Facebook shares to $200 from $230 on Wednesday, citing concerns about the social media company's ad sales because of its data scandal. ... "While we think FB's high advertising performance speaks to the value users get out of the ads served, general consumer dislike towards advertising and increased data scrutiny could cause more users to opt-out of sharing data with FB," he said." Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/04/morgan-stanley-lowers-facebook-price-target-on-fears-ad-revenue-will-take-hit.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/04/morgan-stanley-lowers-facebo...
sumoboy 9y ago
Doesn't beat Equifax who impacted 143 million Americans, jeopardizing consumer Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses and some driver’s license numbers. Just another day with no consequences for exposing what I'd label as highly personal information. FB can limit what it wants but someone will eventually find the means to buying the necessary data today and build what CA did going forward. IMO the 2020 election campaign costs will be the billion $ candidate that competes, so just buy the data you need.
- montag 9y ago
  Yes, the Equifax breach is orders of magnitude more outrageous than this Facebook business.
xendipity 9y ago
"Until today, people could enter another person’s phone number or email address into Facebook search to help find them. ... malicious actors have also abused these features to scrape public profile information by submitting phone numbers or email addresses they already have through search and account recovery. Given the scale and sophistication of the activity we’ve seen, we believe most people on Facebook could have had their public profile scraped in this way." Hm. This seems like an interesting tidbit, I would love to know more. It seems to imply that many profiles have already been scraped in this way. A phone number is a really strong cross-domain identifier as we use it across a bunch of different online services. Collate your Facebook scrape with a couple data brokers and you've got a real strong profile of someone.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
AndyMcConachie 9y ago
Define, "improperly".
- joselreyes 9y ago
  They mean in violation of their terms.
billysielu 9y ago
I am admin for a 'closed' facebook group. How can I find out which apps have accessed my group without admin permission?
aristocles 9y ago
This is propaganda put out by intelligence agencies. So what happened here? Facebook users who took a 'personality quiz' allowed the 'app' to access their information. It is extremely depressing that 87 million people are idiots. There are intrusive apps all over facebook and this is being released with a narrative that supports 'election interference'.
- eterm 9y ago
  No, 87 million people didn't take a quiz, the whole point is that previously if any of your friends took the test, your information was shared. That's how a few hundred thousand people taking a "personality quiz" gets turned into millions of user-data. And the term personality quiz is used loosely, an example of a "personality quiz" can be "Which Game of Thrones character are you? This isn't rigorous psycometrics.
  - aristocles 9y ago
    You are only partially correct. Social networks were extrapolated from friend data. Cambridge analytica was able to use social connections to profile people and who they know. That was the extent of it.
    - DonHopkins 9y ago
      You are only totally wrong. This isn't "propaganda put out by intelligence agencies", and there are not "37 million idiots" who "took a 'personality quiz' allowing the 'app' to access their information". But he already explained that to you quite clearly, something you should have already known if you were following the real news, and you still don't get it. But since you choose to subscribe to the conspiracy theory that this is just all deep state propaganda, and everyone whose privacy was compromised was an idiot who asked for it by doing something foolish and deserves what they got, then there's no use in discussing it with you. Because you're their ideal target and they've already successfully targeted you and influenced your mind, even though you didn't take a personality quiz yourself.
paulie_a 9y ago
This is reminiscent of the yahoo breach where they said "some" and eventually upgraded the warning to "all of them"
dralley 9y ago
Facebook: "We have no fucking clue how much data they took from us. We're not a company that specializes in data." (shamelessly stolen from reddit)
- f4rker 9y ago
  I met a Facebook "data scientist" a few years ago and we hung out for dinner for a few hours with friends. He was so far up his own ass it was unreal.
- bertil 9y ago
  The exact number requires to do operations that are non-trivial at scale: you have to check who accepted to share information with that version of the app (there were several) and take into account the accounts that have been deleted in the last four years; whether Facebook can access that particular information at all is unclear to me (I would believe not). Then you have to recreate a list of all their friends at the time (which is, again, not trivial with some friendships being deleted) and take care of duplicates -- doable, but not trivial at that scale. Whether people are American is also non-trivial: I’m not sure there was clear geographic entities to make that easy in 2013. People move and Facebook only has your location, not your passport. You then have people without a recognisable name, who forgot or who are too young to be in the voting registry. Do you count all the IDs, those who were still active in November 2016, those who match local registries? People who specialise in data (like people who code professionally) are precisely those who would have all those questions on the top of their mind and know that old, graph-based, editable datasets that need to be matched with another dataset are bad. Edit: I was a data scientist for Facebook and I can personally attest that most of those are genuinely hard, especially those that I intentionally overlooked.
not_that_noob 9y ago
What's not being said is that the Russians likely had the data too for use in the 2016 elections. See https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/21/facebook-row-i-am-being-used-as-scapegoat-says-academic-aleksandr-kogan-cambridge-analytica https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/21/facebook-row... and the testimony Christopher Wylie gave before the UK House of Commons Select Committee. He's the CA whistleblower. It's a very illuminating watch - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5g6IJm7YJQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5g6IJm7YJQ So to recap: [1] Kogan writes a FB app for CA to create psychographic profiles of users. This data allows people to be targeted by how naturally susceptible you are to rumors and fake news. [2] Kogan then accepts a position at St. Petersburg State University (so essentially Russian money) and moves there [3] Russians subsequently magically gain a new superpower they didn't have before - the ability to target users on FB who are susceptible to manipulation towards extreme viewpoints.
- streb-lo 9y ago
  Weaponized idiocy.
- TAForObvReasons 9y ago
  The interesting question, whose answer will likely have to be forced through some leak or investigative reporting, is whether FB and the execs knew about the potential connection to Russia in 2016. If it was brought to the attention of Zuckerberg and Sandberg, in light of their adamant denials back in 2016 and 2017, I don't see how the company or executives walk out of this unscathed.
  - not_that_noob 9y ago
    Yes, if they knew about it and didn't do anything, then that's willful negligence. They are not helping their image - the latest is a rejection of GDPR for non-European customers. Seriously? Way to demonstrate commitment to user data protection FB. This level of arrogance is a precursor to strict regulations. They are practically asking for it at this point.
skyland 9y ago
If I was Mark@Facebook I would take a strong defiant stance to the assaults and further bolden my brand. Facebook is a mass sharing community program and they are attacking its core, defend it!
- KasianFranks 9y ago
  It's poetic justice for company that started by 'scraping' MySpace text entry boxes and calling it their own. The DNA of facebook was bad from the start on many different levels from zuckerberg using a biz card that stated "I'm CEO bitch", calling his users dumb fu*cks, starting a platform by copying Friendster+MySpace to voyeuristically spy on users across college campuses and not doing something on an algorithmic level that was difficult to duplicate as opposed to what Google did. This is the difference between social media and Search, which is now made up of AI/ML/NLP.
- jraines 9y ago
  I half-seriously agree. People don't identify with the photo-ops-in-Iowa Zuck. I think they prefer the "you have part of my attention; you have the minimum amount" version. He's going to be vilified either way.
feelin_googley 9y ago
"Facebook, in fact, claims lofty goals, saying it seeks to "bring us closer together" and "build a global community." Those are indeed noble purposes that social media can serve. But if they were Facebook's true goals, we would not be here. The ideal competitor and successor to Facebook would be a platform that actually puts such goals first. To do so, however, it cannot be just another data-hoarder, like Google Plus. If we have learned anything over the last decade, it is that advertising and data-collection models are incompatible with a trustworthy social media network. ... When a company fails, as Facebook has, it is natural for the government to demand that it fix itself or face regulation. ... If today's privacy scandals lead us merely to install Facebook as a regulated monopolist, insulated from competition, we will have failed completely. The world does not need an established church of social media." Source: Tim Wu, law professor at Columbia University https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/03/opinion/facebook-fix-replace.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/03/opinion/facebook-fix-repl...
- malvosenior 9y ago
  The problem is that any company that starts with non-advertising goals can and probably will be acquired if they start to take off. The acquirer will most likely be ad based. The other problem is that social media isn’t novel or interesting in 2018 so I don’t see people rushing to a new platform that replicates the same old functionality.
  - bertil 9y ago
    Messenger was expected to come up with non-advertising based business models. The most credible rumour was to sell to large companies the ability to communicate with their customers and prospects over Messenger, a trusted and spam-free platform (email appears ineffective because of poorly targeted marketing). Having payments was a key step in that direction: you could not just change your flight over Messenger, but pay the extra to do so. Workplace (née Facebook at Work) is now considering payment options, too. That could actually bring quite a bit, especially if inter-company communications are worked out. The reason that ads remain on Facebook is that the senior team believes that they can make the ads genuinely improve the quality of the experience. I personally block a lot of ads on Facebook (about 80-90% of what I see) and actively look at my Ad preferences, and I get genuinely useful ads -- often new offers from competing business, which allow me to monitor them. I can imagine why many people don’t see it that way but I would love to know where are the limits of that model. I would more generally encourage people to treat targeting (on Facebook and elsewhere) as something that they need to be pro-active about, and trust at least some platforms to use that information to improve their experience. That way, we could learn more about how to connect brands and customers better.
thesausageking 9y ago
Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard Zuck: Just ask Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS [friend]: What? How'd you manage that one? Zuck: People just submitted it. Zuck: I don't know why. Zuck: They "trust me" Zuck: Dumb fucks
feelin_googley 9y ago
"In that way and depending on how your personal data is manipulated, Facebook Login could almost fall under the category of a dark pattern - a method for websites or apps to get you to give up more information than is required by playing on assumptions. ... But it's fair to say that Facebook should be less trusted today than it was nine years ago. ... Just like we should all be doing our part to detangle our lives from Facebook's web, app developers owe it to users to divest in their reliance on Facebook Login. ... It's one thing to offer Facebook Login as an alternative way to easily create an account, but to straight up not offer any other way to log in to an app or game is just lazy on the developers part, and speaks to the way Facebook has lulled us all into complacency." Source: https://www.androidcentral.com/its-time-app-developers-fall-out-love-facebook-login https://www.androidcentral.com/its-time-app-developers-fall-...
vitarilassata 9y ago
It seems that no one is addressing the problem of segmentation and microtargeting of ads, that’s key. how the distorted message is delivered. we will not be able to build as easily psycograph models (but data will be aquired in other ways) but is every day easier to target super precisely with ads...
diasp 9y ago
Since #deleteFacebook started to gather momentum the active users number rose by about 30% in The Federation https://the-federation.info/ https://the-federation.info/
pcunite 9y ago
Facebook, do no evil.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
feelin_googley 9y ago
"Today, however, the company [Facebook] announced sweeping changes to many of its most prominent APIs, restricting developer access in a number of crucial ways. Soon after, Tinder users started noting on Twitter that they had been kicked off the dating app and couldn't log back on, as those who used Facebook Login were caught in an infinite loop that appears to be related to an unknown bug. Since you need a Facebook account to log into Tinder, this bug has potentially affected Tinder's entire user base. ... Tinder has responded in a tweet, "A technical issue is preventing users from logging into Tinder. We apologize for the inconvenience and are working to have everyone swiping again soon." Source: https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/4/17200034/facebook-broke-tinder-down-privacy-api-fixes https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/4/17200034/facebook-broke-ti...
masto 9y ago
There's a sort of running gag at Google that "An Update On Foo" is how the company announces that they're canceling Foo. So my first read of this headline was.. different.
michaeljbishop 9y ago
The most important part: > In total, we believe the Facebook information of up to 87 million people — mostly in the US — may have been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica.
feelin_googley 9y ago
"In a statement today, the social-media giant estimated 622,161 Facebook users in Canada had their data improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica through apps used by themselves or their friends. Overall, Facebook says 87 million of its users were affected -- with nearly 82 per cent of them were believed to be located in the United States. ... Canada's acting minister for democratic institutions has also said he'd be open to strengthening federal privacy laws, which don't currently apply to political parties." Source: https://www.cp24.com/news/more-than-620-000-canadians-affected-by-facebook-data-breach-1.3871376 https://www.cp24.com/news/more-than-620-000-canadians-affect...
greggarious 9y ago
"We're really going to restrict it this time - pinky swear!"
EGreg 9y ago
“Events API: Until today, people could grant an app permission to get information about events they host or attend, including private events. This made it easy to add Facebook Events to calendar, ticketing or other apps. But Facebook Events have information about other people’s attendance as well as posts on the event wall, so it’s important that we ensure apps use their access appropriately. Starting today, apps using the API will no longer be able to access the guest list or posts on the event wall. And in the future, only apps we approve that agree to strict requirements will be allowed to use the Events API.” Does this mean we won’t be able to show FB events and rsvps in our app? https://qbix.com/calendar https://qbix.com/calendar
itakedrugs 9y ago
Were all those people democrats?
charlotte112 9y ago
This man assisted me in hacking my CHEATING HUSBAND Facebook account and he is a very good hacker for services like :WhatsApp, call logs, test messages etc. He delivers in 2hrs or less you can contact him via: Email: E N R I Q U E H A C K D E M O N 11 ( a t ) G M A I L d o t C O M. WhatsApp: + 1 ( 6 2 8 ) 2 0 3 - 7 0 0 5 Text/Call: + 1 ( 4 0 9 ) 9 9 9 - 3 4 7 7 .

166 points by robtaylor 9y ago

Facebook can't seem to behave in a trustworthy manner. Initial findings about the improper sharing happened in 2015. How many years does the "move fast, break things" company need to accurately assess damage, or does it NOT want to accurately assess at all.

TAForObvReasons 9y ago
"Move fast and break things" explicitly lionizes a disregard for externalities, so it's no surprise that assessing the damage is not in the company's DNA
jlmorton 9y ago
> Facebook can't seem to behave in a trustworthy manner. My goodness, this is the same issue, not a new one. Facebook is behaving in a trustworthy manner right now, over-communicating the scope and details of this issue, yet here we are to attack them anew over it.
- bamboozled 9y ago
  It sounds more more like they’ve kept the number disclosed for as long as they could get away with it.
- SahAssar 9y ago
  "over-communicating" is good, but most of this info seems like it should have been revealed earlier, no? It's obvious that they knew.
- ionised 9y ago
  Where is the trustworthiness in this that you are seeing? They are just telling people what they think they want to hear given how they have been caught out.
  - jlmorton 9y ago
    > They are just telling people what they think they want to hear given how they have been caught out. Wait a second, let's back up. They didn't get "caught" doing anything. They purposely, intentionally, and with everyone's explicit knowledge shared friend list data with an app developer. This is just a basic fact. No one, not even my mother, can realistically claim they did not know and understand Facebook was sharing graph data with app developers in 2012, or 2014. Not only was it crystal clear when you installed an app, even if you didn't, anyone that was on Facebook was inundated by messages from Farmville, and many other apps, letting them know what their friend's were doing. Later, by 2014, Facebook decided they needed to be more restrictive with this data. They shutdown app developers access to the social graph, essentially killing Facebook Platform, which everyone expected to be a primary driver of future revenues. They shutdown Graph Search, an extremely useful tool, because it made it too easy to collect personal data. But we need to be clear that Facebook was not "caught" doing anything at all. They did exactly what they said they would do, which was plain to everyone, even my technophobic mom. Separately, in 2014, an app developer shared personal data with Cambridge Analytica. Facebook contacted both parties and requested that they certify they deleted the data, which they did. The only reason people are upset now, is because: a) politics is involved, and b) they are retroactively applying current best practices with personal data, which were not common in 2014 and before. The incredible part about all of this is that so many other social networks (and other companies) continue to collect the exact same data, and many of them share it publicly. Almost all Twitter users have their friend list open to the public, for all to see, along with all of their tweets, because that's what the platform encourages. No one would say Twitter has been "caught" doing this. In fact, Facebook has been extremely up-front about the situation. They fixed the situation 4 years before it came to light. They have announced important and strong changes to further protect data in the future. They have publicly and and widely announced their detailed findings in this case, and they have promised investigations of similar unauthorized usages of personal data that may have occurred with other app developers. I mean, what more do you really want them to do?
    - ionised 9y ago
      To stop existing. They are a net-negative for society.
gaius 9y ago
A fish rots from the head down
methodover 9y ago
It's not your fault that you missed the reporting on it, but FB actually DID respond in 2015. They closed the friends-posts permission way back in 2015. They had plans to do so even before the story broke. What C.A. did hasn't been possible since 2015. They responded appropriately at the time. Of course judging by the anti-FB media frenzy you wouldn't know it.
- frankzinger 9y ago
  Yes they reacted, but only after they got called out on it [1]. Before that, for years, they knew exactly what they were doing when they gave apps access to their users' friends. And it must've been obvious to them throughout how such abuse could be executed. Yet they didn't try very hard at all to prevent it. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/26/facebook-data-misuse-cambridge-analytica https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/26/facebo...

mankash666 9y ago

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
mtgx 9y ago
Facebook's problem is that it has no incentive to fix these issues, which it sees as "features" for the most part. That's why it always seems to improve its privacy policy only as a result of regulations and scandals. Even then, it only does the minimum necessary that it believes will appease everyone for the time being and until the next scandal.
mrlyc 9y ago
Facebook is still moving fast and breaking things, just not their things. The morality of an organisation reflects that of its senior management. Zuckerberg doesn't care about breaching privacy so why should Facebook? He only cares that he was caught.

Finnucane 9y ago

How much was properly shared?

garyfirestorm 9y ago
What was shared would be an additional question. Edit: Or maybe what was not shared would be easier to answer.

post_break 9y ago

Anyone have an archive? I blocked them in my hosts file.

gazsp 9y ago
Me too :)
samfriedman 9y ago
Two weeks ago we promised to take a hard look at the information apps can use when you connect them to Facebook as well as other data practices. Today, we want to update you on the changes we’re making to better protect your Facebook information. We expect to make more changes over the coming months — and will keep you updated on our progress. Here are the details of the nine most important changes we are making. Events API: Until today, people could grant an app permission to get information about events they host or attend, including private events. This made it easy to add Facebook Events to calendar, ticketing or other apps. But Facebook Events have information about other people’s attendance as well as posts on the event wall, so it’s important that we ensure apps use their access appropriately. Starting today, apps using the API will no longer be able to access the guest list or posts on the event wall. And in the future, only apps we approve that agree to strict requirements will be allowed to use the Events API. Groups API: Currently apps need the permission of a group admin or member to access group content for closed groups, and the permission of an admin for secret groups. These apps help admins do things like easily post and respond to content in their groups. However, there is information about people and conversations in groups that we want to make sure is better protected. Going forward, all third-party apps using the Groups API will need approval from Facebook and an admin to ensure they benefit the group. Apps will no longer be able to access the member list of a group. And we’re also removing personal information, such as names and profile photos, attached to posts or comments that approved apps can access. Pages API: Until today, any app could use the Pages API to read posts or comments from any Page. This let developers create tools for Page owners to help them do things like schedule posts and reply to comments or messages. But it also let apps access more data than necessary. We want to make sure Page information is only available to apps providing useful services to our community. So starting today, all future access to the Pages API will need to be approved by Facebook. Facebook Login: Two weeks ago we announced important changes to Facebook Login. Starting today, Facebook will need to approve all apps that request access to information such as check-ins, likes, photos, posts, videos, events and groups. We started approving these permissions in 2014, but now we’re tightening our review process — requiring these apps to agree to strict requirements before they can access this data. We will also no longer allow apps to ask for access to personal information such as religious or political views, relationship status and details, custom friends lists, education and work history, fitness activity, book reading activity, music listening activity, news reading, video watch activity, and games activity. In the next week, we will remove a developer’s ability to request data people shared with them if it appears they have not used the app in the last 3 months. Instagram Platform API: We’re making the recently announced deprecation of the Instagram Platform API effective today. You can find more information here. Search and Account Recovery: Until today, people could enter another person’s phone number or email address into Facebook search to help find them. This has been especially useful for finding your friends in languages which take more effort to type out a full name, or where many people have the same name. In Bangladesh, for example, this feature makes up 7% of all searches. However, malicious actors have also abused these features to scrape public profile information by submitting phone numbers or email addresses they already have through search and account recovery. Given the scale and sophistication of the activity we’ve seen, we believe most people on Facebook could have had their public profile scraped in this way. So we have now disabled this feature. We’re also making changes to account recovery to reduce the risk of scraping as well. Call and Text History: Call and text history is part of an opt-in feature for people using Messenger or Facebook Lite on Android. This means we can surface the people you most frequently connect with at the top of your contact list. We’ve reviewed this feature to confirm that Facebook does not collect the content of messages — and will delete all logs older than one year. In the future, the client will only upload to our servers the information needed to offer this feature — not broader data such as the time of calls. Data Providers and Partner Categories: Last week we announced our plans to shut down Partner Categories, a product that lets third-party data providers offer their targeting directly on Facebook. App Controls: Finally, starting on Monday, April 9, we’ll show people a link at the top of their News Feed so they can see what apps they use — and the information they have shared with those apps. People will also be able to remove apps that they no longer want. As part of this process we will also tell people if their information may have been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica. In total, we believe the Facebook information of up to 87 million people — mostly in the US — may have been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica. Overall, we believe these changes will better protect people’s information while still enabling developers to create useful experiences. We know we have more work to do — and we’ll keep you updated as we make more changes. You can find more details on the platform changes in our Facebook Developer Blog.

jumelles 9y ago

What'll the number be up to by the time Zuckerberg is in front of Congress?

samfriedman 9y ago

The actual article title is "An Update on Our Plans to Restrict Data Access on Facebook". It details a list of new API restrictions for Facebook Apps, as well as planned notifications of users whose data was leaked to CA. These additional API restrictions may be closing the door after the horses have bolted, but they will also restrict more scraping and data mining. However, I'm sure the value of Facebook data that companies have already collected just shot up significantly... I also think that the step of planting an alert on affected users' News Feeds is a good one, and something that I didn't expect Facebook would go for. Curious to see what the report says when that feature goes live.

kareemm 9y ago

The optimist in me says these changes have been a long time coming. The skeptic in me says FB is doing this to avoid being regulated. Anybody with more insight care to comment?

dssu 9y ago
Well just take a look at the techcrunch article published today on how Facebook is not committing to GDPR standards for North American users. https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/04/facebook-gdpr-wont-be-universal/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/04/facebook-gdpr-wont-be-univ... It basically says they are going to do the minimal effort required to protect privacy while avoiding regulation.
- rock_hard 9y ago
  The TC article is unfortunately misleading. As I posted elsewhere already. GDRP is more then just some rules around what you need to ask users for permission for. It's much bigger and very specific to the EU legal apparatus. It hence makes no sense to ship globally. What you want is for the underlying privacy controls to be available for everyone...which according to Reuters is what FB is doing!
tomcooks 9y ago
Remember when myspace became my`____` in an attempt to rebrand itself? That amount of cringe, and no regulations.

ballenf 9y ago

I've had facial recognition off forever on FB and every time I've logged in in the past few weeks the following is one of the first entries in my feed: https://imgur.com/a/pMhoL https://imgur.com/a/pMhoL It's a nag to turn on facial recognition. Feels like really bad form to be asking for such intrusive extra info with what they're going through right now.

ghostly_s 9y ago
I got that every time I used the site for years. It wasn't until I deleted my profile and created a new one where I never opted in to the recognition in the first place (or allowed any tags of myself for it to build the face profile, perhaps) that I was able to make it go away.
- alonmower 9y ago
  Random thought: when you created the new account you accepted their right to do this in the ToS and so they didn't need to explicitly ask?
  - ghostly_s 9y ago
    Perhaps, but I believe I recall opting out of it. Also as I said, I never gave them any seed data under the new account to start with. My original account had plenty of old pictures that people had tagged me in (back when you had to do that manually!), and at some point I went through and deleted all those tags though I'm quite certain they still were cataloged.
  - givinguflac 9y ago
    This is very likely the case.
paulie_a 9y ago
Facebook also gives me a fake notification on messenger every time I use the app or website. Sorry Facebook I don't want to use your incredibly subpar message app.

maxxxxx 9y ago

I think we need a legal framework around sharing data. Even if Facebook did everything right some other companies will mess things up. In the end a person should always be notified when his/her information gets shared with another party and have the ability to approve. This will make the business model of many companies difficult but so be it. I don't see any other way.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

tomswartz07 9y ago

Assuming that they have the info on the accounts to make that number estimate, are they going to contact those who were affected? I mean to say, if- for example- my mom was one of the facebook users who had their information taken/used by CA, what should she expect?

jey 9y ago
Yes, they previously claimed that they will be reaching out to people affected by the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

helloworld 9y ago

I'm more concerned about fundamental privacy issues, such as so-called "data onboarding," in which Facebook (and others) helps marketers connect your online identity with your offline identity. That's where we need more transparency -- and perhaps more regulation.

smn1234 9y ago

I wish I could just pay a monthly fee to access Facebook but to be protected from advertising and from being the product. I also wish I could client-side encrypt all of my content, share the keys with my friends who I want to have the ability to view my content, and somehow have this all be friction-less and transparent from my and contacts' perspective.

pmlnr 9y ago
Secure Scuttlebutt. The problem is to get people on it.
- tmikaeld 9y ago
  They can start with asking the users about it.
- shocks 9y ago
  What a terrible name. :/
  - astura 9y ago
    "Scuttlebutt" is nautical term for a water fountain (which was originally a cask, not a fountain). Since sailors would congregate around the scuttlebutt and gossip, "scuttlebutt" also came to mean gossip as well. I guess I'd call it the nautical version of "water cooler talk." It's rather obscure term to use outside a nautical context, so I agree it's a bad name if targeting the general public. It would be a fine name if its target audience was only sailors.
    - shocks 9y ago
      That makes a lot of sense, when explained. I was thinking more from a branding perspective. :P "Hey non-technical friend, instead of Facebook you should use Secure Scuttlebutt; it's so much better!"
      - 9y ago

grysledman 9y ago

Are there any companies that rely on Facebook data that are going to face a rough patch (or cease to exist) because of the API changes?

mountainplus 9y ago
One site, your question made me remember was a third party app for events, Heyevent. http://heyevent.com/ http://heyevent.com/ Out of curiosity I just re-authorised them for access and was displayed the following message: "We're sad to announce that due to dwindling traffic, expensive hosting costs, and new limitations of the Facebook API, we've decided to close down Heyevent. We're sad to have to do this, but we unfortunatelu we see no other option. Since the launch of Heyevent, Facebook themselves has added more event recommendation. They're not as good as Heyevent's recommendations, yet. Hopefully they'll get better. Thanks for using the service!" I found it somewhat useful in the past to keep using facebook to a minimum, so I wish them the best. There must be some other areas of data based servicing that experience difficulties that but I can't think of any other right now.

jonbarker 9y ago

I find it ironic that they plan to let users know they've been compromised via the newsfeed. What about users who have either deleted or never log in? How will they find out? Is their likely defense 'ignorance is no excuse' really a great defense if the only way to avoid ignorance in this case to log into their platform?

ictoan 9y ago
It is not in the newsfeed... it is the News Room. I didn't login and I was able to read this.
- jonbarker 9y ago
  Sorry, was reading multiple articles on this topic at once. Yes this is a newsroom post, however they plan to let individual users know via their newsfeeds: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-04/facebook-says-data-on-87-million-people-may-have-been-shared https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-04/facebook-... "Facebook says it will tell people, in a notice at the top of their news feeds starting April 9, if their information may have been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica."
  - djhartman 9y ago
    No, you were right, they mentioned the News Feed in this post too.
- djhartman 9y ago
  > App Controls: Finally, starting on Monday, April 9, we’ll show people a link at the top of their News Feed so they can see what apps they use — and the information they have shared with those apps. People will also be able to remove apps that they no longer want. As part of this process we will also tell people if their information may have been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica.
  - paulie_a 9y ago

wfh 9y ago

Anyone else find the font being used on that page incredibly hard to read?

darkstar999 9y ago
Yes.

notananthem 9y ago

What is hilarious is they still hide privacy controls from people esp by limiting access from desktop. They're awful and people will be slow, but leave in droves, those who don't find a lot of use for it.

nemoniac 9y ago

"improperly shared"

feelin_googley 9y ago

"Facebook is asking users whether they think it's "good for the world" in a poll sent to an unspecified number of people." Source: https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/apps/a19671683/facebook-asking-users-if-they-think-its-good-for-the-world/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/apps/a19671683/f...

tomc1985 9y ago

Nobody attacks the data collection itself. Anyone who accepts this is a fool for letting Facebook continue to pull the wool over your eyes. This human centipede of data collection needs to die.

methodover 9y ago
I accept it. Facebook is probably one of the better companies out there when it comes to security. They haven't had a true breach; the scandals so far have been small, mostly because the mores of society have shifted before FB can roll out changes to match them (and they always do).
- tomc1985 9y ago
  They haven't had security 'breaches' because nobody ever called it that, but FB has been leaking data out the back door for years. The amount of info that you used to be able to pull from Facebook's API was incredible, and most people didn't realize it. Even information as bland as friends and friends-of-friends is enough to build a useful social graph around a person. (Years ago I did just this, and it was amazing how the graph clustered all my different social groups)

not_that_noob 9y ago

None of these changes will do anything to fix the basic issue. All the following aspects were derived from watching the testimony Christopher Wylie gave before the UK House of Commons Select Committee. He's the CA whistleblower. It's a very illuminating watch - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5g6IJm7YJQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5g6IJm7YJQ The problem is the foll: [1] CA wrote a trojan FB app to derive psychographic user data for FB users. This let them determine for example how susceptible you were to misleading or fake news. [2] They then used FB targeting to target these specific people at scale, pushing extreme fake news such as "Obama moving troops to Texas to ensure 3rd term". This is military grade psyops applied at unprecedented scale. [3] These people, as they were susceptible to manipulation, would then convert at unusually high rates. He says 5% or higher conversion. Conversion was measured as an action like donating money or signing up for a mailing list. In this way, the entire democratic process was corrupted. The issue is not that there were dirty tricks in the 2016 election. The issue here is that the existence of FB's app platform allows the detailed psychological profiling of millions of people on scale, and then allows them to be targeted at scale using that profiling. This is a clear and present danger to democracy. Even with these changes, a rogue app such as CA's would be allowed on the FB platform. FB has no visibility into how app data can be used offline.

randall 9y ago
These would reduce the scale with which it would be able to operate. Someone would have to interact with the app directly, as opposed to their friends' friends' friend.
- not_that_noob 9y ago
  Can you point to the particular new limitation that will have this effect? I can't find anything in the announced changes that do this. The key attraction of FB - viral marketing for an app - is something that FB wouldn't touch I think.
  - koko775 9y ago
    The friends-of-friends change happened in 2014. Cambridge Analytica's method stopped working back then as apps could no longer acquire permission to query friends of friends.

feelin_googley 9y ago

"Morgan Stanley cut its price target on Facebook shares to $200 from $230 on Wednesday, citing concerns about the social media company's ad sales because of its data scandal. ... "While we think FB's high advertising performance speaks to the value users get out of the ads served, general consumer dislike towards advertising and increased data scrutiny could cause more users to opt-out of sharing data with FB," he said." Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/04/morgan-stanley-lowers-facebook-price-target-on-fears-ad-revenue-will-take-hit.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/04/morgan-stanley-lowers-facebo...

sumoboy 9y ago

Doesn't beat Equifax who impacted 143 million Americans, jeopardizing consumer Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses and some driver’s license numbers. Just another day with no consequences for exposing what I'd label as highly personal information. FB can limit what it wants but someone will eventually find the means to buying the necessary data today and build what CA did going forward. IMO the 2020 election campaign costs will be the billion $ candidate that competes, so just buy the data you need.

montag 9y ago
Yes, the Equifax breach is orders of magnitude more outrageous than this Facebook business.

xendipity 9y ago

"Until today, people could enter another person’s phone number or email address into Facebook search to help find them. ... malicious actors have also abused these features to scrape public profile information by submitting phone numbers or email addresses they already have through search and account recovery. Given the scale and sophistication of the activity we’ve seen, we believe most people on Facebook could have had their public profile scraped in this way." Hm. This seems like an interesting tidbit, I would love to know more. It seems to imply that many profiles have already been scraped in this way. A phone number is a really strong cross-domain identifier as we use it across a bunch of different online services. Collate your Facebook scrape with a couple data brokers and you've got a real strong profile of someone.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

AndyMcConachie 9y ago

Define, "improperly".

joselreyes 9y ago
They mean in violation of their terms.

billysielu 9y ago

I am admin for a 'closed' facebook group. How can I find out which apps have accessed my group without admin permission?

aristocles 9y ago

This is propaganda put out by intelligence agencies. So what happened here? Facebook users who took a 'personality quiz' allowed the 'app' to access their information. It is extremely depressing that 87 million people are idiots. There are intrusive apps all over facebook and this is being released with a narrative that supports 'election interference'.

eterm 9y ago
No, 87 million people didn't take a quiz, the whole point is that previously if any of your friends took the test, your information was shared. That's how a few hundred thousand people taking a "personality quiz" gets turned into millions of user-data. And the term personality quiz is used loosely, an example of a "personality quiz" can be "Which Game of Thrones character are you? This isn't rigorous psycometrics.
- aristocles 9y ago
  You are only partially correct. Social networks were extrapolated from friend data. Cambridge analytica was able to use social connections to profile people and who they know. That was the extent of it.
  - DonHopkins 9y ago
    You are only totally wrong. This isn't "propaganda put out by intelligence agencies", and there are not "37 million idiots" who "took a 'personality quiz' allowing the 'app' to access their information". But he already explained that to you quite clearly, something you should have already known if you were following the real news, and you still don't get it. But since you choose to subscribe to the conspiracy theory that this is just all deep state propaganda, and everyone whose privacy was compromised was an idiot who asked for it by doing something foolish and deserves what they got, then there's no use in discussing it with you. Because you're their ideal target and they've already successfully targeted you and influenced your mind, even though you didn't take a personality quiz yourself.

paulie_a 9y ago

This is reminiscent of the yahoo breach where they said "some" and eventually upgraded the warning to "all of them"

dralley 9y ago

Facebook: "We have no fucking clue how much data they took from us. We're not a company that specializes in data." (shamelessly stolen from reddit)

f4rker 9y ago
I met a Facebook "data scientist" a few years ago and we hung out for dinner for a few hours with friends. He was so far up his own ass it was unreal.
bertil 9y ago
The exact number requires to do operations that are non-trivial at scale: you have to check who accepted to share information with that version of the app (there were several) and take into account the accounts that have been deleted in the last four years; whether Facebook can access that particular information at all is unclear to me (I would believe not). Then you have to recreate a list of all their friends at the time (which is, again, not trivial with some friendships being deleted) and take care of duplicates -- doable, but not trivial at that scale. Whether people are American is also non-trivial: I’m not sure there was clear geographic entities to make that easy in 2013. People move and Facebook only has your location, not your passport. You then have people without a recognisable name, who forgot or who are too young to be in the voting registry. Do you count all the IDs, those who were still active in November 2016, those who match local registries? People who specialise in data (like people who code professionally) are precisely those who would have all those questions on the top of their mind and know that old, graph-based, editable datasets that need to be matched with another dataset are bad. Edit: I was a data scientist for Facebook and I can personally attest that most of those are genuinely hard, especially those that I intentionally overlooked.

not_that_noob 9y ago

What's not being said is that the Russians likely had the data too for use in the 2016 elections. See https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/21/facebook-row-i-am-being-used-as-scapegoat-says-academic-aleksandr-kogan-cambridge-analytica https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/21/facebook-row... and the testimony Christopher Wylie gave before the UK House of Commons Select Committee. He's the CA whistleblower. It's a very illuminating watch - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5g6IJm7YJQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5g6IJm7YJQ So to recap: [1] Kogan writes a FB app for CA to create psychographic profiles of users. This data allows people to be targeted by how naturally susceptible you are to rumors and fake news. [2] Kogan then accepts a position at St. Petersburg State University (so essentially Russian money) and moves there [3] Russians subsequently magically gain a new superpower they didn't have before - the ability to target users on FB who are susceptible to manipulation towards extreme viewpoints.

streb-lo 9y ago
Weaponized idiocy.
TAForObvReasons 9y ago
The interesting question, whose answer will likely have to be forced through some leak or investigative reporting, is whether FB and the execs knew about the potential connection to Russia in 2016. If it was brought to the attention of Zuckerberg and Sandberg, in light of their adamant denials back in 2016 and 2017, I don't see how the company or executives walk out of this unscathed.
- not_that_noob 9y ago
  Yes, if they knew about it and didn't do anything, then that's willful negligence. They are not helping their image - the latest is a rejection of GDPR for non-European customers. Seriously? Way to demonstrate commitment to user data protection FB. This level of arrogance is a precursor to strict regulations. They are practically asking for it at this point.

skyland 9y ago

If I was Mark@Facebook I would take a strong defiant stance to the assaults and further bolden my brand. Facebook is a mass sharing community program and they are attacking its core, defend it!

KasianFranks 9y ago
It's poetic justice for company that started by 'scraping' MySpace text entry boxes and calling it their own. The DNA of facebook was bad from the start on many different levels from zuckerberg using a biz card that stated "I'm CEO bitch", calling his users dumb fu*cks, starting a platform by copying Friendster+MySpace to voyeuristically spy on users across college campuses and not doing something on an algorithmic level that was difficult to duplicate as opposed to what Google did. This is the difference between social media and Search, which is now made up of AI/ML/NLP.
jraines 9y ago
I half-seriously agree. People don't identify with the photo-ops-in-Iowa Zuck. I think they prefer the "you have part of my attention; you have the minimum amount" version. He's going to be vilified either way.

feelin_googley 9y ago

"Facebook, in fact, claims lofty goals, saying it seeks to "bring us closer together" and "build a global community." Those are indeed noble purposes that social media can serve. But if they were Facebook's true goals, we would not be here. The ideal competitor and successor to Facebook would be a platform that actually puts such goals first. To do so, however, it cannot be just another data-hoarder, like Google Plus. If we have learned anything over the last decade, it is that advertising and data-collection models are incompatible with a trustworthy social media network. ... When a company fails, as Facebook has, it is natural for the government to demand that it fix itself or face regulation. ... If today's privacy scandals lead us merely to install Facebook as a regulated monopolist, insulated from competition, we will have failed completely. The world does not need an established church of social media." Source: Tim Wu, law professor at Columbia University https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/03/opinion/facebook-fix-replace.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/03/opinion/facebook-fix-repl...

malvosenior 9y ago
The problem is that any company that starts with non-advertising goals can and probably will be acquired if they start to take off. The acquirer will most likely be ad based. The other problem is that social media isn’t novel or interesting in 2018 so I don’t see people rushing to a new platform that replicates the same old functionality.
- bertil 9y ago
  Messenger was expected to come up with non-advertising based business models. The most credible rumour was to sell to large companies the ability to communicate with their customers and prospects over Messenger, a trusted and spam-free platform (email appears ineffective because of poorly targeted marketing). Having payments was a key step in that direction: you could not just change your flight over Messenger, but pay the extra to do so. Workplace (née Facebook at Work) is now considering payment options, too. That could actually bring quite a bit, especially if inter-company communications are worked out. The reason that ads remain on Facebook is that the senior team believes that they can make the ads genuinely improve the quality of the experience. I personally block a lot of ads on Facebook (about 80-90% of what I see) and actively look at my Ad preferences, and I get genuinely useful ads -- often new offers from competing business, which allow me to monitor them. I can imagine why many people don’t see it that way but I would love to know where are the limits of that model. I would more generally encourage people to treat targeting (on Facebook and elsewhere) as something that they need to be pro-active about, and trust at least some platforms to use that information to improve their experience. That way, we could learn more about how to connect brands and customers better.

thesausageking 9y ago

Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard Zuck: Just ask Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS [friend]: What? How'd you manage that one? Zuck: People just submitted it. Zuck: I don't know why. Zuck: They "trust me" Zuck: Dumb fucks

feelin_googley 9y ago

"In that way and depending on how your personal data is manipulated, Facebook Login could almost fall under the category of a dark pattern - a method for websites or apps to get you to give up more information than is required by playing on assumptions. ... But it's fair to say that Facebook should be less trusted today than it was nine years ago. ... Just like we should all be doing our part to detangle our lives from Facebook's web, app developers owe it to users to divest in their reliance on Facebook Login. ... It's one thing to offer Facebook Login as an alternative way to easily create an account, but to straight up not offer any other way to log in to an app or game is just lazy on the developers part, and speaks to the way Facebook has lulled us all into complacency." Source: https://www.androidcentral.com/its-time-app-developers-fall-out-love-facebook-login https://www.androidcentral.com/its-time-app-developers-fall-...

vitarilassata 9y ago

It seems that no one is addressing the problem of segmentation and microtargeting of ads, that’s key. how the distorted message is delivered. we will not be able to build as easily psycograph models (but data will be aquired in other ways) but is every day easier to target super precisely with ads...

diasp 9y ago

Since #deleteFacebook started to gather momentum the active users number rose by about 30% in The Federation https://the-federation.info/ https://the-federation.info/

pcunite 9y ago

Facebook, do no evil.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

feelin_googley 9y ago

"Today, however, the company [Facebook] announced sweeping changes to many of its most prominent APIs, restricting developer access in a number of crucial ways. Soon after, Tinder users started noting on Twitter that they had been kicked off the dating app and couldn't log back on, as those who used Facebook Login were caught in an infinite loop that appears to be related to an unknown bug. Since you need a Facebook account to log into Tinder, this bug has potentially affected Tinder's entire user base. ... Tinder has responded in a tweet, "A technical issue is preventing users from logging into Tinder. We apologize for the inconvenience and are working to have everyone swiping again soon." Source: https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/4/17200034/facebook-broke-tinder-down-privacy-api-fixes https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/4/17200034/facebook-broke-ti...

masto 9y ago

There's a sort of running gag at Google that "An Update On Foo" is how the company announces that they're canceling Foo. So my first read of this headline was.. different.

michaeljbishop 9y ago

The most important part: > In total, we believe the Facebook information of up to 87 million people — mostly in the US — may have been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica.

feelin_googley 9y ago

"In a statement today, the social-media giant estimated 622,161 Facebook users in Canada had their data improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica through apps used by themselves or their friends. Overall, Facebook says 87 million of its users were affected -- with nearly 82 per cent of them were believed to be located in the United States. ... Canada's acting minister for democratic institutions has also said he'd be open to strengthening federal privacy laws, which don't currently apply to political parties." Source: https://www.cp24.com/news/more-than-620-000-canadians-affected-by-facebook-data-breach-1.3871376 https://www.cp24.com/news/more-than-620-000-canadians-affect...

greggarious 9y ago

"We're really going to restrict it this time - pinky swear!"

EGreg 9y ago

“Events API: Until today, people could grant an app permission to get information about events they host or attend, including private events. This made it easy to add Facebook Events to calendar, ticketing or other apps. But Facebook Events have information about other people’s attendance as well as posts on the event wall, so it’s important that we ensure apps use their access appropriately. Starting today, apps using the API will no longer be able to access the guest list or posts on the event wall. And in the future, only apps we approve that agree to strict requirements will be allowed to use the Events API.” Does this mean we won’t be able to show FB events and rsvps in our app? https://qbix.com/calendar https://qbix.com/calendar

itakedrugs 9y ago

Were all those people democrats?

charlotte112 9y ago

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