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This seems like a political attack on Facebook. Willful ignorance of technical reality on HN... no wonder lawmakers are claiming Zuckerberg lies. Facebook func

by zaroth 8y ago

This seems like a political attack on Facebook. Willful ignorance of technical reality on HN... no wonder lawmakers are claiming Zuckerberg lies. Facebook functionality ran on a phone using source code not written by Facebook. Anyone who equates that with Cambridge Analytica simply has an axe to grind with FB. If a device manufacturer wants to betray the trust of their users and siphon data off the phone, they can surely do that in any case, and it’s not even hard to do seeing as how they own the network stack. Can you think of any other codebase which is used to provide Facebook functionality on our devices using special APIs? Chrome. Mozilla. Safari. If we can’t distinguish between a user agent and a 3rd party app having access to a Facebook API then I don’t see how this is debating in good faith. We are taking about the device manufacturers embedding social functionality into the operating system. They also write the rest of the OS you know, if you don’t trust them to render your friend feed then I have bad news for you about your SMS, call history, location data, not to mention you’re carrying around a microphone they can access at any time...

jmcqk6 8y ago
You're trying to argue technicalities that most people not only don't understand, but don't care about. The key question is: Did facebook give information about you to other people without your control? You're basically arguing that yes they did, but it's okay because of the way they did it. Facebook is responsible for communicating that nuance, and they failed to do so. They offered an absolute, and whether they were lying or not, what Zuck said was not accurate.
- zaroth 8y ago
  In this instance it’s quite clear to me that Facebook did not give information about anyone to anyone except to the user who was viewing their own feed. Would you claim that Facebook is giving information about me to my monitor manufacturer because their pixels are being used to display the information to my eyes? Would you claim Facebook is giving my information the the people who wrote the code to implement the TLS stack? Would you claim Facebook is giving my information to Apple because they developed iOS? Or to Chrome because they wrote my browser? The fundamental archichture of our computing devices is not a technicality. If you equate the fact that our software works using abstraction layers to achieve desired effects with Facebook leaking your information to every layer of software that lives below it, it can only be because you are either grossly misinformed about how software actually works or you are blinded by hatred of Facebook. You know what, here’s another good analogy. The software which powers the voice calls I make on my iPhone is written by Apple, and one layer below that, Qualcomm. The voice call is only made possible by special APIs provided by my service provider (AT&T) codified through 3GPP. This is like claiming AT&T should be liable for improperly sharing my voice comms with Apple and Qualcomm simply because they helped write the software which allows the call to be made. Could Apple and Qualcomm be taping my calls? Surely they could be. And if they were, I sure as hell would be angry, but not at AT&T. And if AT&T testified that they had not given my call data to Apple and Qualcomm, they would not have been lying. The NYT took a Facebook user agent rendering a friend feed, intercepted the network messages, and then gasped, “Look, see, Facebook is sending all your friend information to Blackberry,” as if this was some great conspiracy. Good grief.
wu-ikkyu 8y ago
>They also write the rest of the OS you know, if you don’t trust them to render your friend feed then I have bad news for you about your SMS, call history, location data, not to mention you’re carrying around a microphone they can access at any time This bad news is what people need to hear, but most importantly understand. How much death/destruction did it take for people to realize it's very important to wear restraints while driving the automobile? How much death/destruction will it take for users to understand the risks of centrally aggregating the most detailed psychological profiles in history on 2,000,000,000+ people?

by zaroth 8y ago

jmcqk6 8y ago

You're trying to argue technicalities that most people not only don't understand, but don't care about. The key question is: Did facebook give information about you to other people without your control? You're basically arguing that yes they did, but it's okay because of the way they did it. Facebook is responsible for communicating that nuance, and they failed to do so. They offered an absolute, and whether they were lying or not, what Zuck said was not accurate.

zaroth 8y ago
In this instance it’s quite clear to me that Facebook did not give information about anyone to anyone except to the user who was viewing their own feed. Would you claim that Facebook is giving information about me to my monitor manufacturer because their pixels are being used to display the information to my eyes? Would you claim Facebook is giving my information the the people who wrote the code to implement the TLS stack? Would you claim Facebook is giving my information to Apple because they developed iOS? Or to Chrome because they wrote my browser? The fundamental archichture of our computing devices is not a technicality. If you equate the fact that our software works using abstraction layers to achieve desired effects with Facebook leaking your information to every layer of software that lives below it, it can only be because you are either grossly misinformed about how software actually works or you are blinded by hatred of Facebook. You know what, here’s another good analogy. The software which powers the voice calls I make on my iPhone is written by Apple, and one layer below that, Qualcomm. The voice call is only made possible by special APIs provided by my service provider (AT&T) codified through 3GPP. This is like claiming AT&T should be liable for improperly sharing my voice comms with Apple and Qualcomm simply because they helped write the software which allows the call to be made. Could Apple and Qualcomm be taping my calls? Surely they could be. And if they were, I sure as hell would be angry, but not at AT&T. And if AT&T testified that they had not given my call data to Apple and Qualcomm, they would not have been lying. The NYT took a Facebook user agent rendering a friend feed, intercepted the network messages, and then gasped, “Look, see, Facebook is sending all your friend information to Blackberry,” as if this was some great conspiracy. Good grief.

wu-ikkyu 8y ago

>They also write the rest of the OS you know, if you don’t trust them to render your friend feed then I have bad news for you about your SMS, call history, location data, not to mention you’re carrying around a microphone they can access at any time This bad news is what people need to hear, but most importantly understand. How much death/destruction did it take for people to realize it's very important to wear restraints while driving the automobile? How much death/destruction will it take for users to understand the risks of centrally aggregating the most detailed psychological profiles in history on 2,000,000,000+ people?