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It reads like a long defensive argument, "how else did you expect us to make huge sums of money"? It is exactly as tone-deaf and legalese as you would expect. T

It reads like a long defensive argument, "how else did you expect us to make huge sums of money"? It is exactly as tone-deaf and legalese as you would expect. There is no new information here; Facebook says legal contracts actually protect your data so it can't go anywhere, "just trust us", etc. > These partners signed agreements that prevented people’s Facebook information from being used for any other purpose than to recreate Facebook-like experiences. That sentence does not make any sense. Signed agreements do not prevent your information from being used in other ways. That's insane, literally. > Contrary to claims by the New York Times, friends’ information, like photos, was only accessible on devices when people made a decision to share their information with those friends. In the past, Facebook Legal has stated that once a Facebook user has signed up, they consent to having psychological experiments performed on them with no further notice or direct consent. Facebook has acted on this and intentionally made hundreds of thousands of people fall into a depression, just to see if they could, and then they bragged about it. The sentence quoted above actually means "friends’ information, like photos, was only accessible [whenever and however we wanted to]" as Facebook considers those people to have already "made a decision to share their information with those friends" when they signed up.

TAForObvReasons 8y ago
... and thus begins a new series of regulations designed to pierce the plausible deniability of "terms of service". People complain about GDPR and other regulations, but they are created to close loopholes that were abused by companies like Facebook.
- frockington 8y ago
  There's probably nothing FB wants more than to be regulated into a monopoly
  - jessaustin 8y ago
    So long as we don't have to log onto to FB to file our taxes or something, how much harm can the regulator really inflict on the general public? Assume it ends up being a regulator that's really talented at harming the general public, like FCC...
    - cjhopman 8y ago
      > how much harm can the regulator really inflict on the general public? They can make regulations on social networks that are infeasible to comply with for any company not making 10s of billions of dollars a year, effectively cementing facebook as the only legal social network. Whether you consider that a harm or not is up to you.
      - s73v3r_ 8y ago
        I think that's an insane stretch of what's really happening.
        cjhopman 8y ago
        Sure. It was a reply to a (dismissive) question asking what's the worst a regulator could do... it wasn't necessarily meant to be a reflection of what's really happening.
        jessaustin 8y ago
        The harm of (captured-)regulated monopolies is real, but we ought to save this argument for important targets like the Daughters Bell. I offered an admittedly far-fetched example of a possible harm from regulating FB, in the hopes that you could come up with a more plausible one. No such luck!
- atomic77 8y ago
  It seems like we're seeing how scalable the mantra of "ask for forgiveness, not permission" really is. Not Facebook scale, apparently.
  - mcguire 8y ago
    Been fine so far.
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago
  > People complain about GDPR and other regulations, but they are created to close loopholes that were abused by companies like Facebook I complain about GDPR because it buttressed Facebook's position [1]. [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-europes-new-privacy-rules-favor-google-and-facebook-1524536324 https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-europes-new-privacy-rules-f...
_jal 8y ago
> from being used for any other purpose than to recreate Facebook-like experiences > they consent to having psychological experiments performed on them with no further notice Sounds like the third parties delivered! The difference between Facebook and a casino is more about the physical limitations of their storefronts than business models.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
patja 8y ago
Similar to how they "prevented" apps from abusing their API through policy, while simultaneously doing nothing with their construction of the API to prevent apps from breaking the policy. Apps are prohibited from filling in content that (by policy) must come only from the user, but oh we're going to give you all the tools and capabilities required to march right on ahead and do what we agreed you wouldn't do. Then proceed to inconsistently and incompletely enforce policy only when complaints are registered.
- JorgeGT 8y ago
  Regulations forbid us from letting you access the filing cabinet but I can tell you, all of us will be out having a beer between 6 and 8 PM. Oh, and the key is under the flowerpot. Wink wink.
  - albertgoeswoof 8y ago
    But that analogy is letting someone access the filing cabinet, and not taking reasonable precautions not to. Which would be a direct violation. Which may or may not be the case here.
    - musage 8y ago
      The claim is that it is the case here, as in > "prevented" apps from abusing their API through policy, while simultaneously doing nothing with their construction of the API to prevent apps from breaking the policy
  - DonHopkins 8y ago
    “But the terms of service were on display...” “On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.” “That’s the display department.” “With a flashlight.” “Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.” “So had the stairs.” “But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?” “Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'.”
knodi 8y ago
Sadly what FB is doing is using contracts to defer the blame in-case of legal action. Shitty but standard practice.
dominotw 8y ago
> Signed agreements do not prevent your information from being used in other ways. Why is this, though? How is it different from any other legal agreements?
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago
  > How is it different from any other legal agreements? Suppose I tell you a secret. You promise only to share it with others who will keep it a secret. You share my secret with Bob. Bob promises he won't share my secret. Bob shares my secret. You broke your promise. You tried not to break it. But break it you did.
  - oprah2018 8y ago
    None of this changes the fact that I want Likes on my vacation photos, kid photos, and pics of my food, all of which are of better quality than yours.
    - oprah2018 8y ago
      This was a satire by the way
  - dominotw 8y ago
    > You broke your promise. Then you face the legal consequences for doing so. Thats what prevents people from breaking them in first place. Unless you are arguing that all legal contracts are useless because they can be broken. I am not asking about the logistics of leaking. Yes ofcourse its physically possible, I am asking why the consequences of breaking a contract don't matter in this specific case.
    - Slartie 8y ago
      Contracts are not "useless", but they are also not "preventing" someone from doing something just because they impose a penalty. If you want to see proof: visit a court! Contracts motivate you to adhere to some previously-agreed-upon behavior, and the degree to which they motivate you depends on how much the penalty actually penalizes you. In the case of large corporations, seemingly big penalties are often actually negligible in comparison, with the resulting motivation to adhere to the contract being negligible as well. That is one important reason why it is deliberately misleading to use the word "preventing" in the context in which Facebook uses it here. The other one is simply that it's factually wrong, even regardless of the size of the penalty.
_red 8y ago
>Signed agreements do not prevent your information from being used in other ways. That's insane, literally. The real insanity is with the users. FB did the most obvious thing. The user-base somehow magically thought they were providing all those free services because they were nice guys. It was obvious to anyone since the beginning that FB was a clearinghouse for private data trading. How else could the model remotely work?
- pas 8y ago
  You target audiences (segments), and FB gets ad revenue. The problem is that via apps you get the user info directly. And their friends' info too. That's how Tinder can show how many mutual friends you and the profile you're looking at have. That sounds nice, but as the data left FB's servers, there's no way that users can control what happens with it.
- asciimo 8y ago
  Obvious to some. When consumers receive a valuable service or product for free, with no obvious strings attached, they consume it. I don't think most people would preoccupy themselves with the provider or manufacturer's business model. You are savvy, and that's good. But others deserve consideration and protection.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - CaptainZapp 8y ago
    It's rather simple: If something's too good to be true it's practically always neither good nor true.
- untog 8y ago
  > It was obvious to anyone since the beginning that FB was a clearinghouse for private data trading. I tire of this argument that users should obviously know they are trading their personal information in return for access to a service. They don't know this. It's obvious in a conversation with any (even lightly) tech-illiterate person that nothing about how the modern internet economy works is obvious. Think back to the emergence of the web as a truly popular medium. There was no Google Analytics, no FB tracking buttons that follow you around on every web site you visit (that one is particularly egregious - FB users are tracked even when they aren't on facebook.com, and we expect users to just know this?), just advertisers buying a banner ad slot from the owner of a web site. Back then social networking was, what, AIM? That was free and they didn't harvest user info for it. The change has been gradual, and the idea that users should have kept up with every development that led us to where we are today is preposterous. When this has happened in the past the answer has been clear: knowledgable people come together to pass laws that benefit individual citizens who have neither the knowledge nor time to learn.
sideshowb 8y ago
> Facebook has acted on this and intentionally made hundreds of thousands of people fall into a depression, just to see if they could, and then they bragged about it. That's interesting. Do you have a link to source?
- jacobsheehy 8y ago
  I was banned from HN some time after I made that post (for something else) and should not be posting any more (sorry mods, I'll stop). This will be my final post. Here's a news article about it (probably). https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/oct/02/facebook-sorry-secret-psychological-experiment-users https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/oct/02/facebook-...
- kmonsen 8y ago
  https://www.google.com/search?q=facebook+psychological+experiment https://www.google.com/search?q=facebook+psychological+exper...
- fakescience 8y ago
  Likely referring to this article [1]. However, the claim that they made "hundreds of thousands of people fall into a depression" is pretty exaggerated - FB demonstrated it could influence the mood of users via changes to the algorithm, but the overall effect size was small (Cohen's d = 0.001). I am very critical of FB and this type of research, but don't know if anyone became depressed over the experiment. It's possible, but wasn't demonstrated. [1] http://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.full http://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.full
  - RodgerTheGreat 8y ago
    Staging an experiment of this nature without informed consent of the participants is unethical, irrespective of whether the technique proved to be effective.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
braindongle 8y ago
> Facebook has acted on this and intentionally made hundreds of thousands of people fall into a depression, just to see if they could, and then they bragged about it. No, they did not. They adjusted the proportion of positive emotional expressions and negative emotional expressions in users' news feeds in order to test for an association between that proportion and emotional expressions in users' posts. There are serious problems with what they did, but "intentionally made hundreds of thousands of people fall into a depression" is late-Slashdot style trolling. http://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/111/24/8788.full.pdf http://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/111/24/8788.full.pdf
- zzzeek 8y ago
  unethical science does not deserve to be wrapped in its journalistic language in an effort to detach it from the harm it caused, it deserves to be called out for what it actually is, in this case intentional psychological manipulation of people's moods without their knowledge or consent. One does not grasp the true harm caused by unethical experiments by reading only the documented (published or non-published) scientific results. Two extreme examples which I am by no means comparing to that of Facebook, but rather as canonical examples of unethical science, include the Tuskegee experiments and Nazi experimentation. Reading only the published results of these experiments does not convey the horrific harm that actually occurred. The same principle applies to referring towards Facebook's scientific data as an argument that these experiements were not unethical. The scientific results only serve to shroud and conceal the actual activity which occurred in the production of these results. (edited for clarity)
  - smallnamespace 8y ago
    How do you distinguish between unethical science and A/B testing, or even just 'We changed our product, then didn't like the results, and changed it back?'
    - zzzeek 8y ago
      I would assume a core tenet of ethics and deciding if something is unethical is if it has the potential to harm people. Inducing depression to indiscriminate masses is pretty high on the list. It's not valid to compare the emotional impact of Facebook on millions of its addicted users to something like the color of a box of laundry detergent.
oconnor663 8y ago
> Signed agreements do not prevent your information from being used in other ways. That's insane, literally. Yes but just two sentences later in the post... > And our partnership and engineering teams approved the Facebook experiences these companies built. They're saying they inspected these apps. You jumped to "literally insane" so fast there.
- PunchTornado 8y ago
  Nope, you know that once the data leaves your server it is out of your control. These companies could have fooled fb representatives quite easily if they wanted.
  - cjhopman 8y ago
    If you're not as up in arms about the access that web browsers have to user's facebook data, then I'll assume your response to this issue is just another instance of hn's fb derangement syndrome.
  - Pyxl101 8y ago
    This is not an accurate way to view the situation. Here's the situation. The user has purchased a device (such as a smart phone) from a device manufacturer (such as Apple). The device runs an operating system (iOS) and a whole boatload of software, including telecommunications equipment necessary to operate cellular radios, the higher level OS, then user-installed applications and such. If you don't trust the device manufacturer, then that's the ball game. If you assume that the device manufacturer is untrustworthy, then you should assume that it can steal the user's data just as easily from a web browser (when the user visits facebook.com) as it can from a native application. When the user decides to sign into Facebook (or any website or application) from their device - the manufacturer-supplied device - the user is trusting the manufacturer with their data. Whether the application is delivered through a web browser, or is a so-called 'native' app installed through an app store, doesn't substantially change the trust relationship between Facebook and the manufacturer. If you believe the manufacturer is doing nefarious things, then you should assume the manufacturer will install a spyware web browser that siphons data out of every web page that you visit. Partnering with the device manufacturer to allow them to distribute a Facebook-branded mobile app does not substantially grant them more trust than they would have already.
adrianmonk 8y ago
> Signed agreements do not prevent your information from being used in other ways. Breach of contract opens you up to civil liability. Having this agreement creates disincentives that wouldn't otherwise exist. "Prevent" doesn't mean to make something physically impossible or remove the ability to choose. Police can prevent drunken driving by announcing they will have DUI checkpoints on New Year's Eve. It doesn't make it physically impossible to drink and drive, but if people choose not to because they want to avoid the consequences, some drunk driving has been prevented.
- kolpa 8y ago
  Who is liable to whom when user A use a free service B based on an ambiguous agreement, and that service makes an ambiguous agreement with another service C, and C does something that is arguable a violation of one of those agreements? How much restitution am I entitled to for an ambiguous violation of an amorphous concept like privacy? And how much is Facebook entitled to from a partner who (might have) violated that agreement, causing non-measurable harm to me?
  - jethro_tell 8y ago
    That's pretty straight and forward, facebook has an obligation to hold up their end of the contract including the partners that license the data. If I have a contract with them, they should be liable for that, if they want to turn around and take it out of the 3rd party's hide with a breach of contract litigation they should do that but it's not the uses responsibility. It's very strange that you'd throw your hands up and say, 'well FACEBOOK didn't do it so you're out of luck.' Facebook did do it by not regulating there third party agreements.
  - sonnyblarney 8y ago
    I worked at an F50 corp that built a special FB app for our platform. I worked on the project itself. This is getting a little conspiratorial: contracts are very real, and though I didn't see ours and was not privy to any special user data we might have received, we are very careful about that kind of stuff and liability is a huge, huge deal. A contract stipulating that data has to be protected in a certain manner is a reasonable protection, depending on the sensitivity of the data.
gist 8y ago
> how else did you expect us to make huge sums of money Your tone is as if to imply that nobody but the company benefits from making 'huge sums of money'. There are employees, vendors (selling goods and services), stockholders (retirees?), governments (taxes) and so on. Why the idea that earning money is somehow not the purpose of a company? It is at the core.
- s73v3r_ 8y ago
  But none of us care if they make huge sums of money or not. I fail to see why I should accept them being shitty because "they created shareholder value."
pkghost 8y ago
> That's insane, literally. Metaphor is literally dead.

TAForObvReasons 8y ago

... and thus begins a new series of regulations designed to pierce the plausible deniability of "terms of service". People complain about GDPR and other regulations, but they are created to close loopholes that were abused by companies like Facebook.

frockington 8y ago
There's probably nothing FB wants more than to be regulated into a monopoly
- jessaustin 8y ago
  So long as we don't have to log onto to FB to file our taxes or something, how much harm can the regulator really inflict on the general public? Assume it ends up being a regulator that's really talented at harming the general public, like FCC...
  - cjhopman 8y ago
    > how much harm can the regulator really inflict on the general public? They can make regulations on social networks that are infeasible to comply with for any company not making 10s of billions of dollars a year, effectively cementing facebook as the only legal social network. Whether you consider that a harm or not is up to you.
    - s73v3r_ 8y ago
      I think that's an insane stretch of what's really happening.
      - cjhopman 8y ago
        Sure. It was a reply to a (dismissive) question asking what's the worst a regulator could do... it wasn't necessarily meant to be a reflection of what's really happening.
        jessaustin 8y ago
        The harm of (captured-)regulated monopolies is real, but we ought to save this argument for important targets like the Daughters Bell. I offered an admittedly far-fetched example of a possible harm from regulating FB, in the hopes that you could come up with a more plausible one. No such luck!
atomic77 8y ago
It seems like we're seeing how scalable the mantra of "ask for forgiveness, not permission" really is. Not Facebook scale, apparently.
- mcguire 8y ago
  Been fine so far.
JumpCrisscross 8y ago
> People complain about GDPR and other regulations, but they are created to close loopholes that were abused by companies like Facebook I complain about GDPR because it buttressed Facebook's position [1]. [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-europes-new-privacy-rules-favor-google-and-facebook-1524536324 https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-europes-new-privacy-rules-f...

_jal 8y ago

> from being used for any other purpose than to recreate Facebook-like experiences > they consent to having psychological experiments performed on them with no further notice Sounds like the third parties delivered! The difference between Facebook and a casino is more about the physical limitations of their storefronts than business models.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

patja 8y ago

Similar to how they "prevented" apps from abusing their API through policy, while simultaneously doing nothing with their construction of the API to prevent apps from breaking the policy. Apps are prohibited from filling in content that (by policy) must come only from the user, but oh we're going to give you all the tools and capabilities required to march right on ahead and do what we agreed you wouldn't do. Then proceed to inconsistently and incompletely enforce policy only when complaints are registered.

JorgeGT 8y ago
Regulations forbid us from letting you access the filing cabinet but I can tell you, all of us will be out having a beer between 6 and 8 PM. Oh, and the key is under the flowerpot. Wink wink.
- albertgoeswoof 8y ago
  But that analogy is letting someone access the filing cabinet, and not taking reasonable precautions not to. Which would be a direct violation. Which may or may not be the case here.
  - musage 8y ago
    The claim is that it is the case here, as in > "prevented" apps from abusing their API through policy, while simultaneously doing nothing with their construction of the API to prevent apps from breaking the policy
- DonHopkins 8y ago
  “But the terms of service were on display...” “On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.” “That’s the display department.” “With a flashlight.” “Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.” “So had the stairs.” “But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?” “Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'.”

knodi 8y ago

Sadly what FB is doing is using contracts to defer the blame in-case of legal action. Shitty but standard practice.

dominotw 8y ago

> Signed agreements do not prevent your information from being used in other ways. Why is this, though? How is it different from any other legal agreements?

JumpCrisscross 8y ago
> How is it different from any other legal agreements? Suppose I tell you a secret. You promise only to share it with others who will keep it a secret. You share my secret with Bob. Bob promises he won't share my secret. Bob shares my secret. You broke your promise. You tried not to break it. But break it you did.
- oprah2018 8y ago
  None of this changes the fact that I want Likes on my vacation photos, kid photos, and pics of my food, all of which are of better quality than yours.
  - oprah2018 8y ago
    This was a satire by the way
- dominotw 8y ago
  > You broke your promise. Then you face the legal consequences for doing so. Thats what prevents people from breaking them in first place. Unless you are arguing that all legal contracts are useless because they can be broken. I am not asking about the logistics of leaking. Yes ofcourse its physically possible, I am asking why the consequences of breaking a contract don't matter in this specific case.
  - Slartie 8y ago
    Contracts are not "useless", but they are also not "preventing" someone from doing something just because they impose a penalty. If you want to see proof: visit a court! Contracts motivate you to adhere to some previously-agreed-upon behavior, and the degree to which they motivate you depends on how much the penalty actually penalizes you. In the case of large corporations, seemingly big penalties are often actually negligible in comparison, with the resulting motivation to adhere to the contract being negligible as well. That is one important reason why it is deliberately misleading to use the word "preventing" in the context in which Facebook uses it here. The other one is simply that it's factually wrong, even regardless of the size of the penalty.

_red 8y ago

>Signed agreements do not prevent your information from being used in other ways. That's insane, literally. The real insanity is with the users. FB did the most obvious thing. The user-base somehow magically thought they were providing all those free services because they were nice guys. It was obvious to anyone since the beginning that FB was a clearinghouse for private data trading. How else could the model remotely work?

pas 8y ago
You target audiences (segments), and FB gets ad revenue. The problem is that via apps you get the user info directly. And their friends' info too. That's how Tinder can show how many mutual friends you and the profile you're looking at have. That sounds nice, but as the data left FB's servers, there's no way that users can control what happens with it.
asciimo 8y ago
Obvious to some. When consumers receive a valuable service or product for free, with no obvious strings attached, they consume it. I don't think most people would preoccupy themselves with the provider or manufacturer's business model. You are savvy, and that's good. But others deserve consideration and protection.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- CaptainZapp 8y ago
  It's rather simple: If something's too good to be true it's practically always neither good nor true.
untog 8y ago
> It was obvious to anyone since the beginning that FB was a clearinghouse for private data trading. I tire of this argument that users should obviously know they are trading their personal information in return for access to a service. They don't know this. It's obvious in a conversation with any (even lightly) tech-illiterate person that nothing about how the modern internet economy works is obvious. Think back to the emergence of the web as a truly popular medium. There was no Google Analytics, no FB tracking buttons that follow you around on every web site you visit (that one is particularly egregious - FB users are tracked even when they aren't on facebook.com, and we expect users to just know this?), just advertisers buying a banner ad slot from the owner of a web site. Back then social networking was, what, AIM? That was free and they didn't harvest user info for it. The change has been gradual, and the idea that users should have kept up with every development that led us to where we are today is preposterous. When this has happened in the past the answer has been clear: knowledgable people come together to pass laws that benefit individual citizens who have neither the knowledge nor time to learn.

sideshowb 8y ago

> Facebook has acted on this and intentionally made hundreds of thousands of people fall into a depression, just to see if they could, and then they bragged about it. That's interesting. Do you have a link to source?

jacobsheehy 8y ago
I was banned from HN some time after I made that post (for something else) and should not be posting any more (sorry mods, I'll stop). This will be my final post. Here's a news article about it (probably). https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/oct/02/facebook-sorry-secret-psychological-experiment-users https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/oct/02/facebook-...
kmonsen 8y ago
https://www.google.com/search?q=facebook+psychological+experiment https://www.google.com/search?q=facebook+psychological+exper...
fakescience 8y ago
Likely referring to this article [1]. However, the claim that they made "hundreds of thousands of people fall into a depression" is pretty exaggerated - FB demonstrated it could influence the mood of users via changes to the algorithm, but the overall effect size was small (Cohen's d = 0.001). I am very critical of FB and this type of research, but don't know if anyone became depressed over the experiment. It's possible, but wasn't demonstrated. [1] http://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.full http://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.full
- RodgerTheGreat 8y ago
  Staging an experiment of this nature without informed consent of the participants is unethical, irrespective of whether the technique proved to be effective.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]

braindongle 8y ago

> Facebook has acted on this and intentionally made hundreds of thousands of people fall into a depression, just to see if they could, and then they bragged about it. No, they did not. They adjusted the proportion of positive emotional expressions and negative emotional expressions in users' news feeds in order to test for an association between that proportion and emotional expressions in users' posts. There are serious problems with what they did, but "intentionally made hundreds of thousands of people fall into a depression" is late-Slashdot style trolling. http://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/111/24/8788.full.pdf http://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/111/24/8788.full.pdf

zzzeek 8y ago
unethical science does not deserve to be wrapped in its journalistic language in an effort to detach it from the harm it caused, it deserves to be called out for what it actually is, in this case intentional psychological manipulation of people's moods without their knowledge or consent. One does not grasp the true harm caused by unethical experiments by reading only the documented (published or non-published) scientific results. Two extreme examples which I am by no means comparing to that of Facebook, but rather as canonical examples of unethical science, include the Tuskegee experiments and Nazi experimentation. Reading only the published results of these experiments does not convey the horrific harm that actually occurred. The same principle applies to referring towards Facebook's scientific data as an argument that these experiements were not unethical. The scientific results only serve to shroud and conceal the actual activity which occurred in the production of these results. (edited for clarity)
- smallnamespace 8y ago
  How do you distinguish between unethical science and A/B testing, or even just 'We changed our product, then didn't like the results, and changed it back?'
  - zzzeek 8y ago
    I would assume a core tenet of ethics and deciding if something is unethical is if it has the potential to harm people. Inducing depression to indiscriminate masses is pretty high on the list. It's not valid to compare the emotional impact of Facebook on millions of its addicted users to something like the color of a box of laundry detergent.

oconnor663 8y ago

> Signed agreements do not prevent your information from being used in other ways. That's insane, literally. Yes but just two sentences later in the post... > And our partnership and engineering teams approved the Facebook experiences these companies built. They're saying they inspected these apps. You jumped to "literally insane" so fast there.

PunchTornado 8y ago
Nope, you know that once the data leaves your server it is out of your control. These companies could have fooled fb representatives quite easily if they wanted.
- cjhopman 8y ago
  If you're not as up in arms about the access that web browsers have to user's facebook data, then I'll assume your response to this issue is just another instance of hn's fb derangement syndrome.
- Pyxl101 8y ago
  This is not an accurate way to view the situation. Here's the situation. The user has purchased a device (such as a smart phone) from a device manufacturer (such as Apple). The device runs an operating system (iOS) and a whole boatload of software, including telecommunications equipment necessary to operate cellular radios, the higher level OS, then user-installed applications and such. If you don't trust the device manufacturer, then that's the ball game. If you assume that the device manufacturer is untrustworthy, then you should assume that it can steal the user's data just as easily from a web browser (when the user visits facebook.com) as it can from a native application. When the user decides to sign into Facebook (or any website or application) from their device - the manufacturer-supplied device - the user is trusting the manufacturer with their data. Whether the application is delivered through a web browser, or is a so-called 'native' app installed through an app store, doesn't substantially change the trust relationship between Facebook and the manufacturer. If you believe the manufacturer is doing nefarious things, then you should assume the manufacturer will install a spyware web browser that siphons data out of every web page that you visit. Partnering with the device manufacturer to allow them to distribute a Facebook-branded mobile app does not substantially grant them more trust than they would have already.

adrianmonk 8y ago

> Signed agreements do not prevent your information from being used in other ways. Breach of contract opens you up to civil liability. Having this agreement creates disincentives that wouldn't otherwise exist. "Prevent" doesn't mean to make something physically impossible or remove the ability to choose. Police can prevent drunken driving by announcing they will have DUI checkpoints on New Year's Eve. It doesn't make it physically impossible to drink and drive, but if people choose not to because they want to avoid the consequences, some drunk driving has been prevented.

kolpa 8y ago
Who is liable to whom when user A use a free service B based on an ambiguous agreement, and that service makes an ambiguous agreement with another service C, and C does something that is arguable a violation of one of those agreements? How much restitution am I entitled to for an ambiguous violation of an amorphous concept like privacy? And how much is Facebook entitled to from a partner who (might have) violated that agreement, causing non-measurable harm to me?
- jethro_tell 8y ago
  That's pretty straight and forward, facebook has an obligation to hold up their end of the contract including the partners that license the data. If I have a contract with them, they should be liable for that, if they want to turn around and take it out of the 3rd party's hide with a breach of contract litigation they should do that but it's not the uses responsibility. It's very strange that you'd throw your hands up and say, 'well FACEBOOK didn't do it so you're out of luck.' Facebook did do it by not regulating there third party agreements.
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  I worked at an F50 corp that built a special FB app for our platform. I worked on the project itself. This is getting a little conspiratorial: contracts are very real, and though I didn't see ours and was not privy to any special user data we might have received, we are very careful about that kind of stuff and liability is a huge, huge deal. A contract stipulating that data has to be protected in a certain manner is a reasonable protection, depending on the sensitivity of the data.

gist 8y ago

> how else did you expect us to make huge sums of money Your tone is as if to imply that nobody but the company benefits from making 'huge sums of money'. There are employees, vendors (selling goods and services), stockholders (retirees?), governments (taxes) and so on. Why the idea that earning money is somehow not the purpose of a company? It is at the core.

s73v3r_ 8y ago
But none of us care if they make huge sums of money or not. I fail to see why I should accept them being shitty because "they created shareholder value."

pkghost 8y ago

> That's insane, literally. Metaphor is literally dead.