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>not until GDPR is in place, next month. FB isn't going to comply with it in places where it isn't law. they prefer to spy on people. it’s their business model
by cryoshon 9y ago
>not until GDPR is in place, next month.
FB isn't going to comply with it in places where it isn't law. they prefer to spy on people. it’s their business model.
> I was flabbergasted by the spin that Facebook could be “deleting evidence”
none of this justifies barging into their office.
enforcing a contract is calling your lawyer, not barging into an office.
there is nothing "hostile" about media coverage sounding an alarm that FB people hit up CA before a warrant could be written. it is an alarming incident because it is outside the law.
> but I think that the foaming-at-the-mouth hatred that so many people display here is unhelpful and actually helping the company evade necessary challenges.
as we can see, strong criticisms repeated often tend to stick around, especially when they're substantiated. if the company doesn't deal with them, the burden is not on the critics to ease up. Characterizing exhaustively documented legitimate criticism as “foaming at the mouth” is a bit misplaced.
Sure, I’m foaming. But I’m always foaming, and the evidence speaks for itself without hyperbole.
Anyhow, your comments avoiding the problem of surveilling non-users are disappointing and pretty irrelevant tbh.
It really is not that complicated: don’t surveil people who have not consented. It doesn’t matter if other companies do the wrong thing too.
> I don’t think you want Facebook to act as if they are above the law and refuse to obey a judge?
Your company issues a report on the number of government information requests it handles. It has happened for years already. This goes way beyond just law enforcement. They obey judges, but also offer much, much more without any warrants. https://www.yahoo.com/news/google-facebook-cooperated-nsa-prism-145643099.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/google-facebook-cooperated-nsa-pr...
>I don’t think the harm in that context was large: it was, literally, barely enough to be measured
The size of the effect is utterly irrelevant.
It is not ethical to experiment on people’s emotions without their consent.
your other comments are also not relevant to the issue of FB experimenting with manipulating people’s emotional states without their consent.
I can’t underline this enough: FB harmed their users directly.
This was not getting people to click ads. It was not an A/B test to optimize conversion. This was emotional manipulation for the very purpose of seeing whether it was possible to inflict emotional manipulation on unsuspecting people. this is completely and utterly inexcusable under any kind of study consent dynamic. If this were a psychology study performed with an institutional review board it would have NEVER been approved.
And you’re okay with that so long as you work there – and in fact, y
ou’re willing to defend it. You’re defending non-consensual experimentation on people. which harms them. Think about that for a minute.
>That’s speculative.
No, it isn’t. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/22/technology/facebook-censorship-tool-china.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/22/technology/facebook-censo.... There are other sources for that same story. The intent was to do evil. If you take issue with the language there, think for a minute about what they were really volunteering to do.
>this is open science and I find that very interesting –
current understanding is that using FB is bad for your emotions. This understanding gains weight every day.
>Evidence doesn’t come into Galaxy and, like anyone reasonable, I know that new technology and new service have positive and negative sides and I work on separating them to keep the best.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_ylo=2014&q=facebook+emotion+study&hl=en&as_sdt=0,22 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_ylo=2014&q=facebook+em...
there’s more than 10 pages of scholarly papers. The ones relating to emotion are exclusively unfavorable.
>comments dismissing the sourced instances of facebook censoring various groups
I guess you’re saying that “it can’t be proven” but the whole point of the sources that I linked is that it’s all proven. FB cooperates with the Turkish govt to suppress the kurds, same with the pakis, etc.
Here is the thing: complicity in censorship is utterly unacceptable.
It is totally unethical. There is no weaseling away from it: facebook is helping to suppress minorities in these countries. It’s wrong.
>Facebook is now a meaningful player in the political arena.
Yes, much to our detriment, as is obliteratingly self-evident.
>If you think about them strongly and want the right to tell to Mark, to his face and repeatedly that he’s wrong and misinformed, my recommendation is that you join the company. Disent is not very helpful without the full context, but you absolutely can influence and make things better from the inside.
I don’t even know what to say to this.
Here is a proposition: pay me, and I’ll do my best to destroy the company from within should it confirm my prejudices once I have the “full context”.
Does that work for you guys?
>and I’ve worked for pretty much any type of (civilian) “bad” company you can think of: Exxon Mobile, TelCos, etc
hey, it’s bad to work for unethical companies.
>There often is a greater good to defend.
What, you mean like the shareholders?
>They just choose to shut up about it because of people like you, who will attack them rabidly even if they tried to save children’s lives.
This isn’t how PR works, especially for big companies. Their horn is getting tooted at every opportunity, always. Lack of tooting means lack of favorable things for the public to hear. No company plays the unsung hero because it isn’t profitable.
> try to ask people who defend Facebook, including pretty much every employee
I’ve cited extensive amounts of evidence; you have cited none.
The problem with asking employees about what they do is that they only do one small thing. They’re just one tiny cog in the machine. They don’t accept responsibility for the machine’s smooth functioning because they know it could work without them.
But they’re still complicit, just like all the other cogs. And people love to rationalize, especially when their paycheck depends on it. It’s only human to be self-deceptive – but that does not mean that you have to abide by it when other people are doing it.
Indoctrinated people respond to a few things, in my experience.
The most effective thing is being hit with the sledgehammer of facts until they break – it’s academic and obnoxious, but most people can’t fight reality for long.
- bertil 9y agoI’ve already addressed which of those I think are legitimate criticism and which miss the point. It’s increasingly clear that you are not willing to understand why intelligent, moral people are willing to defend (and criticise) Facebook. Whether you are wrong on part or the whole, you fiercely refuse to see a contradicting argument. You openly prefer to demonise: the only way someone could disagree with you is if they are either delusional, stupid of deprived of ethics. That’s also why you won’t acknowledge that I did agree with you on several points. You are welcome to think that I’m morally repugnant. We both know that insulting people is a bad way to convince them, so you won’t be surprised that --sledgehammer of opinion pieces from the Guardian or not-- you have not really told me anything to move me. Most critics are like you, actually. My take is that, if you write the way you did, you will come of as dangerous and misinformed to anyone who is able to and trying to address the problem. A majority of them work for or used to work for the company; few people are in academia; I can name a couple of elected officials but not many more. I regret that it’s so unbalanced. I believe that you are making your cause seem worst off, because you can’t separate your prejudice from issues that have a solution. I’m very sorry that I couldn’t help you. What will happen (what has already started) is that Facebook will leverage some of that anger to actually consolidate its power. One examples: with the CA scandal, the first reaction from the company was “Partner apps could abuse our users’ data, we have not exerted enough control -- very sorry.” justifying invasive audits. Good if it prevents another CA scandal, but that doesn’t make Facebook any less influential. The more you go after Facebook for making the wrong political decisions, the more the company will gain legitimacy in making those calls, against empowering democratic or international institutions. Facebook might lend that legitimacy to some democratic or civil groups, like they did with Snopes, Wikipedia and CJI on false news, but, with every additional complaint, they will keep the authority to pick and choose it and only ever let it go for so long. If you think the people at the helm are morally bankrupt, that should terrify you; I hope that you see how this is judo-ing your own anger. I think that Mark & his team are trying to do well, but that they are increasingly in over their heads and need informed support and more intelligent control -- neither of which they are getting in enough supply, so they learn as they go. I think they are doing well, not repeating many mistakes, acting fast, being increasingly careful and considerate. But the end result is scary in a different way.