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I'm no fan of Facebook and deleted my account years ago, but the flood of articles like these that are barely embarrassing since the major Cambridge Analytic em
by everdev 9y ago
I'm no fan of Facebook and deleted my account years ago, but the flood of articles like these that are barely embarrassing since the major Cambridge Analytic embarrassment feels more like an agenda or piling on than newsworthy items.
There are many reasons to reduce or eliminate your time on FB, but this isn't one of them.
- throwaway84742 9y agoThat’s because you misunderstand the intent of this pile-on. The intent is to ensure full compliance in 2020 elections.
- haydenlee 9y agoUsing bad arguments is rarely an effective way to get what you want.
- sunir 9y agoIn business. In politics it works.
- saagarjha 9y ago> The intent is to ensure full compliance in 2020 elections. I don't see how these actions help Facebook be compliant in any way.
- rdl 9y agoI think he means "towing the (establishment/party) line", not "complying with regulations".
- throwaway84742 9y agoThat’s exactly right.
- JumpCrisscross 9y agoThe behaviour described in this article implies a culture willing to look one way for users and another way for themselves. That’s pertinent less to users and more to lawyers and lawmakers.
- haydenlee 9y agoI dislike FB as much as the next dev here, but surely it's a widely accepted (and beneficial) practice that employees have special privileges in the apps they build. Imagine using this argument to say that Facebook couldn't shut down a page/group/account.
- vages 9y agoYes, it is technically the same abilities being used. The reaction comes because of how they're used: to indiscriminately delete old messages that may potentially be harmful to themselves while not offering the same options to its users.
- musage 9y ago> surely it's a widely accepted (and beneficial) practice that employees have special privileges in the apps they build But it's more specific than that. Imagine using this technique to respond to someone who points out that you have toilet paper stuck to your shoe that it's agreed upon that the existence of toilet paper is a good thing, and that surely they wouldn't prefer the alternative.
- CodeMage 9y agoOn the contrary, everyone's willingness to accept this kind of behavior as normal indicates how far the Overton window has moved when it comes to the trustworthiness of our digital services. We need a collective effort to shift things back where they belong.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- jerkstate 9y agoI disagree, privacy-conscious people have been warning that Facebook has been doing these things since forever, so people (especially here on HN) can't claim that they didn't know these things were going on. This is just the same old story: people being upset about the consequences of what they were warned about many many times.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago> privacy-conscious people have been warning Saying. And what was said was obviously not heard. Tangibility helps any pitch. We shouldn’t fault people for agreeing later versus sooner; at the end of the day, agreement trumps the alternative.
- _jal 9y agoI, too, wish for a better quality of collective decision-making on the part of humanity, but this seems to be how "we" do these things. "What, me worry?" is probably the central recurring theme of history, if you're inclined to look at things a certain way.
- flukus 9y agoWe also used to accept that negative reinforcement was part of this learning process, but now it's called victim blaming.
- donkeyd 8y agoI feel like you're both right though. We can't claim we didn't know, but the fact that we accept this en masse is concerning.
- chris_wot 9y agoHardly, if we cannot retract our messages from Facebook, neither should they!
- cm2187 9y agoI disagree, this shows a strong pattern of "do as I say, not as I do" in term of privacy. And this is a prime example.