5 ms·

Zuckerberg set up fraudulent scheme to 'weaponise' data, court case alleges

221 points by Malarkey73 8y ago

jasode 8y ago
In this particular article, "weaponise" doesn't mean private data as a weapon against the users (like Richard Stallman critiques of Facebook[1]). Instead, the journalists and the lawsuit are talking about desirable user data as a weapon against the API developers. The article has interwoven 2 themes in a disjointed way and I had to read it several times to separate the components of the dispute. The 1st theme is that the company Six4Three wrote an app to find photos of friends in bikinis using Facebook's platform API. Facebook later pulled the rug out from under them. In this sense, this is similar to other stories about platforms changing the terms/accessiblity of API usage (e.g. Facebook demoting Zynga games, or Twitter closing off 3rd-party clients, etc). If a platform entices programmers to use an API and then later restricts it (or kicks programmers off it), the claim is being made that it is "fraud". Facebook's counterclaim is that blocking programmers from using its API is exercising its editorial control and therefore "free speech". The 2nd theme that's mentioned in passing is the Six4Three bikini API dispute as a forensic discovery into how the Cambridge Analytica abuse was deliberately engineered into the platform in 2011 and was approved by Facebook senior management. I think this is the more interesting angle that the Guardian writers should have focused more text on. [1] https://stallman.org/facebook.html https://stallman.org/facebook.html
- _jal 8y ago
  "Editorial control" as justification for selective access is interesting, and seems in tension with their need to remain considered a "platform" instead of a publication. (They aren't a platform; utility surplus from user participation doesn't flow to the users.) > wrote an app to find photos of friends in bikinis [....] Facebook later pulled the rug out from under them In this case, I think I'm just rooting for injuries.
  - jonbarker 8y ago
    I agree with Bill Gates' description of platforms as companies which provide tools which are used by other entities to generate more economic value than the value of the owners of those tools. How you measure said economic value is another story and one I am grappling with. And I think social media companies are ultimately aggregators, not platforms. What I think should come out of any regulation is an obligation for aggregators at a certain scale to 1) stop calling themselves neutral platforms, because that's not accurate, 2) be required to disclose in verifiable, auditable detail how they are prioritizing content from an algorithmic perspective, how they are compensating generators of both paid and organic content from a both monetary and "in app currency" perspective (likes, etc), and 3) when they do exercise their editorial judgment and kick 3rd party apps off their APIs, explain how and why they came to such a judgment, not in a storytelling kind of way, but in a parametric (they hit this number, so we took action) kind of way. And if there is a human in the loop, that human needs to have certain competencies, which would resemble professionalism like that of lawyers and doctors. These three requirements would have to be agreed upon like international standards of a sort. Now, I am aware that everything I am requesting is also likely to be infected by 'bureacracy' and that is something I'm not sure I have a way to solve for.
- vignesh_m 8y ago
  Yeah, that article was all over the place. The only thing I could get from a first reading was that Facebook did something wrong - just using the anti-facebook sentiment I guess
- deadelvis 8y ago
  Agree that the ability to access a user's friend's data (without said friend's permission) through the API, was a deliberate feature (not an abuse as it has been portraied) and is the interesting bit about this. Facebook deliberately abused user's privacy by deciding to monetize that feature. Only later decided to roll it back.
- kinsomo 8y ago
  > The 2nd theme that's mentioned in passing is the Six4Three bikini API dispute as a forensic discovery into how the Cambridge Analytica abuse was deliberately engineered into the platform in 2011 and was approved by Facebook senior management. I think this is the more interesting angle that the Guardian writers should have focused more text on. Is that intentional aspect of the lawsuit or just a side-effect? It would be interesting if a privacy advocate gained control of a defunct entity with standing to sue Facebook over data-related dispute like this, and used discovery to dig into Facebook's privacy practices.
makomk 8y ago
"Six4Three lodged its original case in 2015 shortly after Facebook removed developers’ access to friends’ data. The company said it had invested $250,000 in developing an app called Pikinis that filtered users’ friends photos to find any of them in swimwear. Its launch was met with controversy." So basically this company tried to do something creepy and invasive with users' data, were stopped by Facebook, and now they're taking advantage of the fact that the press is pissed off at Facebook and will uncritically regurgitate any negative claim about them in headlines as leverage in their court case against them, likely in the expectation that it'll be cheaper for Facebook to settle than deal with the PR fallout.
- aje403 8y ago
  Stop, you're making a comment that is not unequivocally anti-Facebook, therefore it is incorrect
  - dang 8y ago
    We've banned this account for repeatedly posting unsubstantive comments and ignoring our requests to stop.
    - aje403 8y ago
      Suck it Trebec
- tzahola 8y ago
  250k????? I bet their engineer to manager ratio was quite low.
  - lallysingh 8y ago
    That's < 1 yrs worth of an SV engineer's rate (after overhead). Roughly half.
  - gowld 8y ago
    2 manager and 4 devs for 1 month to make an app.
jakelazaroff 8y ago
Only tangentially related, but the second image in the article [1] — the one with all the cameras right in Zuckerberg's face — is crazy. What a strange and surreal experience that must be. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/may/24/mark-zuckerberg-set-up-fraudulent-scheme-weaponise-data-facebook-court-case-alleges#img-2 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/may/24/mark-zuck...
- eridius 8y ago
  It's almost like a physical representation of how Facebook tries to capture every nuance of your activity online.
platz 8y ago
Statistics: Weaponized pattern recognition. Gothic High Tech: Consciously weaponized bullshit. Gollumization: The impoverishment of a system through ephmeralization and weaponized attention. Bullshit: 1. Data (often a firehose) produced by someone who is indifferent to the truth or falsity of what is being said. 2. Data that appears to contain more information than it actually does. 3. Noise randomly tagged with truth-values to give it apparent legibility. 4. Non-requisite variety. Legibility: the apparent absence of noise in data. Data: Any collection of information, bullshit and noise. Information: Data that has been judged to be true or false through comparison with observed reality at a given point in time.
bertil 8y ago
I have read it three times. It doesn’t make sense. I have no idea what is being alleged.
- tomtimtall 8y ago
  Facebook abused their position against developers. Kind of like if Apple gave developers full access to all details of every iPhone owner to convince them to develop iPhone apps, then when they get developers onboard they start cutting access randomly to devs, and offer some devs lowball offers to sell with the implied threat of “or we’ll cut you off entirely”.
  - bertil 8y ago
    I can’t imagine that “randomly” makes sense, or that they have proof of anything like that. “Arbitrarily” means that Facebook gets to decide how much of a creep is too much. It’s very confusing to have the same talk about an offer to sell their company: creeps are the last thing Facebook wants on their payroll.
binnesjohn 8y ago
Liar, liar, liar .. thats facebook and suckedberg
Verdex_3 8y ago
The first half of this title sounds terrible ... until you see the second half. "Court Case Alleges" Well, this is the COURT we're talking about, so maybe this is legitimate information. Until you realize that this actually reduces to: "Some guy says (because he think it will get him money)".
textmode 8y ago
This article is a bit short on details. Back in December 2016, Six4Three ("643") created a website https://www.facebooksappeconomy.com https://www.facebooksappeconomy.com to raise awareness about Facebook's business practices. "... Facebook started threatening to shut off friend data to companies in late 2012 unless they made extravagant, unrelated purchases in Facebook's new mobile ads product. Zuckerberg did this in order to keep Facebook's advertising business from collapsing because it had been built exclusively for desktop computers." It has more details on what 643 is hoping to accomplish with the help of other app developers, including a timeline as well as a documentary video. When 643 contacted Facebook to let them know about this website, Facebook threatened 643 with trademark infringement.1 1. http://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2339&context=historical http://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...
binnesjohn 8y ago
Suck a berg is liar

221 points by Malarkey73 8y ago

In this particular article, "weaponise" doesn't mean private data as a weapon against the users (like Richard Stallman critiques of Facebook[1]). Instead, the journalists and the lawsuit are talking about desirable user data as a weapon against the API developers. The article has interwoven 2 themes in a disjointed way and I had to read it several times to separate the components of the dispute. The 1st theme is that the company Six4Three wrote an app to find photos of friends in bikinis using Facebook's platform API. Facebook later pulled the rug out from under them. In this sense, this is similar to other stories about platforms changing the terms/accessiblity of API usage (e.g. Facebook demoting Zynga games, or Twitter closing off 3rd-party clients, etc). If a platform entices programmers to use an API and then later restricts it (or kicks programmers off it), the claim is being made that it is "fraud". Facebook's counterclaim is that blocking programmers from using its API is exercising its editorial control and therefore "free speech". The 2nd theme that's mentioned in passing is the Six4Three bikini API dispute as a forensic discovery into how the Cambridge Analytica abuse was deliberately engineered into the platform in 2011 and was approved by Facebook senior management. I think this is the more interesting angle that the Guardian writers should have focused more text on. [1] https://stallman.org/facebook.html https://stallman.org/facebook.html

_jal 8y ago
"Editorial control" as justification for selective access is interesting, and seems in tension with their need to remain considered a "platform" instead of a publication. (They aren't a platform; utility surplus from user participation doesn't flow to the users.) > wrote an app to find photos of friends in bikinis [....] Facebook later pulled the rug out from under them In this case, I think I'm just rooting for injuries.
- jonbarker 8y ago
  I agree with Bill Gates' description of platforms as companies which provide tools which are used by other entities to generate more economic value than the value of the owners of those tools. How you measure said economic value is another story and one I am grappling with. And I think social media companies are ultimately aggregators, not platforms. What I think should come out of any regulation is an obligation for aggregators at a certain scale to 1) stop calling themselves neutral platforms, because that's not accurate, 2) be required to disclose in verifiable, auditable detail how they are prioritizing content from an algorithmic perspective, how they are compensating generators of both paid and organic content from a both monetary and "in app currency" perspective (likes, etc), and 3) when they do exercise their editorial judgment and kick 3rd party apps off their APIs, explain how and why they came to such a judgment, not in a storytelling kind of way, but in a parametric (they hit this number, so we took action) kind of way. And if there is a human in the loop, that human needs to have certain competencies, which would resemble professionalism like that of lawyers and doctors. These three requirements would have to be agreed upon like international standards of a sort. Now, I am aware that everything I am requesting is also likely to be infected by 'bureacracy' and that is something I'm not sure I have a way to solve for.
vignesh_m 8y ago
Yeah, that article was all over the place. The only thing I could get from a first reading was that Facebook did something wrong - just using the anti-facebook sentiment I guess
deadelvis 8y ago
Agree that the ability to access a user's friend's data (without said friend's permission) through the API, was a deliberate feature (not an abuse as it has been portraied) and is the interesting bit about this. Facebook deliberately abused user's privacy by deciding to monetize that feature. Only later decided to roll it back.
kinsomo 8y ago
> The 2nd theme that's mentioned in passing is the Six4Three bikini API dispute as a forensic discovery into how the Cambridge Analytica abuse was deliberately engineered into the platform in 2011 and was approved by Facebook senior management. I think this is the more interesting angle that the Guardian writers should have focused more text on. Is that intentional aspect of the lawsuit or just a side-effect? It would be interesting if a privacy advocate gained control of a defunct entity with standing to sue Facebook over data-related dispute like this, and used discovery to dig into Facebook's privacy practices.

makomk 8y ago

"Six4Three lodged its original case in 2015 shortly after Facebook removed developers’ access to friends’ data. The company said it had invested $250,000 in developing an app called Pikinis that filtered users’ friends photos to find any of them in swimwear. Its launch was met with controversy." So basically this company tried to do something creepy and invasive with users' data, were stopped by Facebook, and now they're taking advantage of the fact that the press is pissed off at Facebook and will uncritically regurgitate any negative claim about them in headlines as leverage in their court case against them, likely in the expectation that it'll be cheaper for Facebook to settle than deal with the PR fallout.

aje403 8y ago
Stop, you're making a comment that is not unequivocally anti-Facebook, therefore it is incorrect
- dang 8y ago
  We've banned this account for repeatedly posting unsubstantive comments and ignoring our requests to stop.
  - aje403 8y ago
    Suck it Trebec
tzahola 8y ago
250k????? I bet their engineer to manager ratio was quite low.
- lallysingh 8y ago
  That's < 1 yrs worth of an SV engineer's rate (after overhead). Roughly half.
- gowld 8y ago
  2 manager and 4 devs for 1 month to make an app.

jakelazaroff 8y ago

Only tangentially related, but the second image in the article [1] — the one with all the cameras right in Zuckerberg's face — is crazy. What a strange and surreal experience that must be. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/may/24/mark-zuckerberg-set-up-fraudulent-scheme-weaponise-data-facebook-court-case-alleges#img-2 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/may/24/mark-zuck...

eridius 8y ago
It's almost like a physical representation of how Facebook tries to capture every nuance of your activity online.

platz 8y ago

Statistics: Weaponized pattern recognition. Gothic High Tech: Consciously weaponized bullshit. Gollumization: The impoverishment of a system through ephmeralization and weaponized attention. Bullshit: 1. Data (often a firehose) produced by someone who is indifferent to the truth or falsity of what is being said. 2. Data that appears to contain more information than it actually does. 3. Noise randomly tagged with truth-values to give it apparent legibility. 4. Non-requisite variety. Legibility: the apparent absence of noise in data. Data: Any collection of information, bullshit and noise. Information: Data that has been judged to be true or false through comparison with observed reality at a given point in time.

bertil 8y ago

I have read it three times. It doesn’t make sense. I have no idea what is being alleged.

tomtimtall 8y ago
Facebook abused their position against developers. Kind of like if Apple gave developers full access to all details of every iPhone owner to convince them to develop iPhone apps, then when they get developers onboard they start cutting access randomly to devs, and offer some devs lowball offers to sell with the implied threat of “or we’ll cut you off entirely”.
- bertil 8y ago
  I can’t imagine that “randomly” makes sense, or that they have proof of anything like that. “Arbitrarily” means that Facebook gets to decide how much of a creep is too much. It’s very confusing to have the same talk about an offer to sell their company: creeps are the last thing Facebook wants on their payroll.

binnesjohn 8y ago

Liar, liar, liar .. thats facebook and suckedberg

Verdex_3 8y ago

The first half of this title sounds terrible ... until you see the second half. "Court Case Alleges" Well, this is the COURT we're talking about, so maybe this is legitimate information. Until you realize that this actually reduces to: "Some guy says (because he think it will get him money)".

textmode 8y ago

This article is a bit short on details. Back in December 2016, Six4Three ("643") created a website https://www.facebooksappeconomy.com https://www.facebooksappeconomy.com to raise awareness about Facebook's business practices. "... Facebook started threatening to shut off friend data to companies in late 2012 unless they made extravagant, unrelated purchases in Facebook's new mobile ads product. Zuckerberg did this in order to keep Facebook's advertising business from collapsing because it had been built exclusively for desktop computers." It has more details on what 643 is hoping to accomplish with the help of other app developers, including a timeline as well as a documentary video. When 643 contacted Facebook to let them know about this website, Facebook threatened 643 with trademark infringement.1 1. http://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2339&context=historical http://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...

binnesjohn 8y ago

Suck a berg is liar