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Facebook Gave Some Companies Access to Additional Data About Users’ Friends
- radicaldreamer 8y agoText-only: https://pastebin.com/t4hBTAig https://pastebin.com/t4hBTAig
- somerandomness 8y agoWow, in particular, "The whitelist deals, with companies including RBC Capital Markets and Nissan Motor Co. , were struck with advertisers or Facebook partners that were valuable for other reasons, according to some of the people familiar with the matter."
- gmueckl 8y agoSo how comes that all these revelations come in such a quick succession after years of relative silence? What changed?
- ribosometronome 8y agoFinancial companies need a distraction from their massive leaks of data that you didn't voluntarily hand over to them?
- vegetablepotpie 8y agoI think you make an important point. The media got into a frenzy over Facebook and Cambridge Analytica and we continue to get reports on it, yet I haven't seen many follow ups on Equifax. This is despite that having your SSN, DOB, Address and Drivers License stolen has higher consequences for you than a political campaign having your Facebook data. Priorities are misaligned.
- bertil 8y agoOh, it’s even more compelling than that: Cambridge Analytica didn’t rely on Facebook data, but Axciom, Experian and Infogroup to target US voters.
- SmirkingRevenge 8y agoThis is a great point - one I wish the media, drunk on the prospect of shiny silicon valley companies falling from grace, would pay more attention too.
- mtgx 8y agoOne reason could be that the media companies saw there is high interest from the readership on this issue = they put more journalists to investigate all the shady stuff Facebook may be doing.
- nonbel 8y agoIt says right in this article: >"The revelations come as Facebook is dealing with the fallout in March related to the use of personal data by Cambridge Analytica, a political analytics firm that aided President Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign" For some reason they thought spying on everyone would only help the democratic party I guess. Seems pretty blind to me...
- IncRnd 8y agoThe parenthetical is not a reason but just something added by the writer or editor.
- 1024core 8y agoMaybe some internal employees are leaking the information? If you're an employee with information about this project, and you see your CEO (say) pinky-swearing that they didn't share data at all, then you might be motivated to leak this information to a newspaper.
- bertil 8y agoI suspect from details in the article that the leak is from the external parties, probably former employees of the external parties: - Facebook employees would not call that number “friend link”: it has another name internally; “friend link” sounds like how you’d explain it to someone who’s not familiar with graph theory; - the WSJ is anything but exacting, but the article is oddly vague on when the program was terminated. That sounds out-of-character, unless the source left since, and couldn’t confirm if the program was maintained.
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago> What changed? It's in the zeitgeist. The Cambridge Analytica scandal gave the public a tangible threat in Facebook's data promiscuity. At that point, the entire system is incentivized to dig deeper. Whistleblowers who previously wouldn't have thought of leaking start getting inquiries; legal teams ask for contracts to be re-assessed; Congressional staffers make calls; NGOs mobilize to start court cases, et cetera. Similar to what happened post-Snowden in the E2E space.
- jessaustin 8y agoI'm sort of hoping there is more of an effect this time around than there was from Snowden... what does "E2E" mean in this context?
- ahakki 8y agoAfter Snowden E2E encryption turned from an implementation detail into a feature. see whatsapp et al.
- maxbond 8y ago"End to end", encryption that is opaque to intermediate parties (ie email without GPG is not end to end because your mailserver can read your messages, even if the channel between you and your mailserver is encrypted).
- ahartmetz 8y agoI think traditional media companies were afraid of Facebook, now they aren't anymore. They are natural enemies. When they fight, there can be only winners from the customer POV.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- IncRnd 8y agoThings are being revealed, because people are now looking at Facebook's actions.
- supercanuck 8y agoDonald Trump got elected with the help of a foreign government utilizing Facebook and is now openly helping that government and spurning Western allies. Up until that point Facebook was a place people could share cat videos and connect with okd friends, now that it has been revealed it can influence a democracy, it is getting more scrutiny.
- jimjimjim 8y agoTrue Getting diaper ads because your profile says you fit the category that might have a baby is slightly creepy but ok. But Providing a platform for interfering in the governance of another country and denying it is infuriating.
- kerng 8y agoThe Groupthink and Normalization of Deviance that all of this is okay got broken out off - there will be more I'd say.
- jaytaylor 8y agoIt seems like the waves of bad press began after FB refused Billionaire Media Mogul Rupert Murdoch's demands to share ad revenue. Murdoch began complaining of financial struggles in November [0] and has been leading the charge against FB ever since they rejected his proposal [1] [2]. M.A.D. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/nov/16/rupert-murdoch-newspapers-struggling-digital-age https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/nov/16/rupert-murdoch... [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/01/23/facebook-should-run-like-your-cable-company-rupert-murdoch-says-how-would-that-even-work/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/01/23... [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-01/murdoch-s-ceo-waxes-lyrical-in-crusade-for-facebook-payments https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-01/murdoch-s...
- cpmouter 8y agoReally bored of the "Facebook is bad" articles, I thought that fad was over?
- dgzl 8y agoYou consider people's disgust with Facebook's mishandling of sensitive data a 'fad'? I hope this fad continues and grows.
- cpmouter 8y agoWhat people's disgust? 0.00001% of their userbase? This is completely useless, why don't we move on?
- braythwayt 8y agoThey used to say that exact thing about the struggle for civil rights. How many men cared about women having the vote? How many American citizens cared about freeing the slaves? How many people cared about the rights of black Americans in the 1950s? How many people care about kneeling during the anthem now? --- It's always "Nobody except for a few ideologues and some virtue signalling leftists..." Until it isn't. Meanwhile, some people just keep plugging away at it. Perseverance, aided and abetted by other social factors, aided and abetted by a few unpredictable notorious events, over time... That's what creates change.
- cpmouter 8y agoDon't kid yourself, all those historical events happened because they helped business by increasing the number of potential customers. A very recent example is how the media pushes women to work, and LGBT issues so hard: those demographics are the ones that consume the most, so they need to make them work and appeal to them. How is killing Facebook going to help business?
- pwinnski 8y ago
- 1024core 8y agoArchive link: http://archive.is/jiO8k http://archive.is/jiO8k
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- justicezyx 8y ago"Let's kill the contract with Chinese companies, and make it a headline"... While behind scene do all kinds of money-making contracts with anyone with enough price...
- sbhn 8y agoHN leaks my data, just press my user name, look at all the comments I made, see which other users I’ve interacted with, and have similar interests, also see my submissions. I looked at all your usernames already.
- pwinnski 8y agoFalse equivalence. HN makes no claims, explicit nor implied, that any of that information is in any way private. They never have. The same is not true of FB, not at all.
- lostlogin 8y agoI see that you’re posting under a pseudonym - in line with Facebook, HN doesn’t allow that unless it’s the nickname you use in meatspace. Please correct and add location data, psychological profiling and demographics so that your data is worth a bit more when sold/leaked. /s obviously.
- Bucephalus355 8y agoWow, this says the data sharing was after 2015. This directly contradicts Zuckerberg’s congressional testimony does it not? 5 days ago the magazine The Baffler made the argument that Zuckerberg, at his core, is a nice guy. It’s just that he isn’t that intelligent. As the American Studies professor being interviewed says in the article: >“And he continues to use words like “community,” a word he does not understand in the least. This is what I mean when I say he’s uneducated. Because he keeps using terms like community, which are complex, fraught concepts, and he doesn’t stop to think what that means. He doesn’t stop to think about the dynamics of a community, the effects of a community, the limitations of a community, and even the very definition of a community. You know, if someone’s going to use community as the core goal of a multi-billion-dollar company, maybe a couple of days of reading would help.” https://thebaffler.com/latest/the-zuckerberg-follies-denison https://thebaffler.com/latest/the-zuckerberg-follies-denison
- whatshisface 8y agoAs much as that American Studies professor might wish for PR groups to go to them for consulting, the word Community was meant to be received by people who are not American Studies professors (the public, maybe, and also Facebook employees if it's internal-speak). The warm fuzziness of the word choice has already been precisely calibrated. Zuckerberg's ideal press conference would be some brief tonal warbling that made everybody support Facebook. In lieu of that existing, he talks about community.
- gowld 8y agoThe Baffler is a great name for a website that hosts thinkpieces written by people who have no idea what they are talking about.
- lostlogin 8y agoHave you got a rebuttal for that quotes section?
- anotherDumpster 8y ago
- anigbrowl 8y agoI'm starting to feel like the only person out there who didn't have access to this data.
- kerng 8y agoI guess now its official that Zuckerberg lied at the hearing. What are ramifications of such lies?
- vuln 8y agoEh. Probably none.
- colejohnson66 8y agoNone. IIRC, he wasn’t under oath.
- bencollier49 8y agoBut you don't have to have been under oath to be held accountable for lying to Congress. https://edition.cnn.com/2017/07/24/politics/penalty-for-lying-to-congress/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2017/07/24/politics/penalty-for-lyin...
- craftyguy 8y ago$5 says they won't prosecute him. The only example the article gives of someone going to prison for this is Reagan's national security advisor, not some billionaire.
- dawnerd 8y agoThey’ll just say he wasn’t aware of the deals or the specifics in whatever business agreements they had. He’s got good lawyers, they’ll find an out.
- jimjimjim 8y agoThey really are that terrible. Back when Facebook started and people worried that they were giving info to Facebook, most thought the worst that could happen is that Facebook would be the one using that info. Not this dystopian scenario where they give it to everyone else to exploit.
- AlexandrB 8y agoThis was inevitable. Even if Facebook didn’t share this info intentionally, no human system is perfect and sooner or later there would be a leak. The only way to keep info safe in the internet age is dead trees or just not collecting it in the first place.
- alexmorse 8y agoWhy are we giving such a pass that it took till 2015 to even start walling off that information? Prior to 2015 any facebook app developer could make an app that had a vague one-prompt ask for permissions that gave them nearly everything, and a ton of information on friends.
- lord_ring_11 8y agoProbably because some employee could not justify “impact” on this. If anything it will lower some key metric that was getting measured, because not giving all friend info will lower app adoption growth numbers. Most levels at facebook is filled with metric obsessed robots (because of how incentives are aligned).
- resu_nimda 8y agoProbably because it was done in plain sight and anybody could have worked through the implications then but nobody cared? "I didn't realize that one day the media would convince me that this was a really bad thing" is not Facebook's fault. Most people actually don't care if apps get their "data" and their friend list. But the media worked up a frenzy by vaguely connecting it to the Trump campaign (reminder that nobody blinked when Facebook openly gave everything to the Obama campaign), and now everyone has "realized" that Facebook is to blame for their problems.
- taneq 8y agoWhy are people acting shocked? THIS IS THEIR BUSINESS MODEL. It's in their privacy policy! "Your data may be shared with ... our affiliates" or words to that effect.
- newscracker 8y agoThe chant, from Facebook and even some commenters on HN and elsewhere, was always "Facebook doesn't sell user data, that would be stupid. Facebook guards user data very well and uses it to target ads." With this and previous revelations, we now know that those claims are completely false. The reasoning, as to why Facebook did it, doesn't matter. The fact is that they sold user data. Even if they gave it at no monetary cost, it was given to benefit the company, and hence the data was sold. I suppose now we just have to wait for another report on how Facebook sold all its user data to data brokers around the world.
- Panini_Jones 8y ago> With this and previous revelations, we now know that those claims are completely false. I don't see how Facebook is selling data. What do you mean?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- craftyguy 8y agohttps://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-gave-some-companies-access-to-additional-data-about-users-friends-1528490406 https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-gave-some-companies-ac...
- mtgx 8y agoFacebook didn't sell data to data brokers - they bartered it. I believe Zuckerberg himself admitted to it in the hearings or in a blog post around that time. Facebook gave their data to the brokers, the brokers gave their data to Facebook.
- JackCh 8y ago>a (1) : to give up (property) to another for something of value (such as money) https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sell https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sell Such as but not necessarily limited to.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- andrzejsz 8y agoWhat a shame