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Facebook's seized files published by MPs
- hkt 8y agoSometimes, even amidst the Brexit madness, I love our Parliament. Publishing and seizing documents like this is a move that proves politicians have the spine to look after people's interests. Time to get serious, act on this, and break up Facebook forever.
- spiderPig 8y agoIndeed, kudos to them having the gall to do such a thing. Heavily lobbied congressmen would never do such a thing or even implement something like GDPR here.
- NeedMoreTea 8y agoThis is our committee system working as intended. I wish it still applied to other areas of governance like local government funding, lobbying, MPs in government and so on. Late Edit: I must add to that list admission of ministerial responsibility. The last resignation with honour, rather than for political point scoring, was Lord Carrington resigning as Foreign Secretary in 1982. Since then it's a dead concept.
- hkt 8y agoYeah, it is a joy to behold. I hope it becomes even more powerful than it is already.
- Mahn 8y agoI think this sets an awful precedent and it's astonishing that an action like this would be applauded. But you do you.
- amaccuish 8y agoAnd what precedent is that? The idea that companies aren't above the law? That's a precedent I wish was more enforced. I'm proud of my parliament today (and it's not often I can say that), even if in other parts they're tearing themselves apart.
- Mahn 8y agoWhat laws did Facebook break that warranted seizing and publishing internal documents?
- sangnoir 8y agoParliament is not into enforcing laws - it writes them. Parliamentary sovereignty means it can publish internal documents[1] if they decide it's in the public interest, if not, the MP will be appropriately censured by their peers. 1. In the US, the president (executive) can declassify any classified information, the DOJ or judiciary may publicize (discovered) internal documents for trials/indictments before guilt is established (note: IANAL). In the UK, Parliament is supreme to the executive and judiciary.
- rlucas 8y agoIn the US, Congress enjoys the Speech and Debate privilege, meaning pretty much the same. It's even in our (written, unlike the UK) Constitution.
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago> What laws did Facebook break that warranted seizing and publishing internal documents? Parliament is sovereign. Facebook ignored Parliament. That is tantamount to blowing off an American court order. More pointedly, Facebook has broken their agreements on keeping WhatsApp and Facebook data separate. These e-mails further show Onavo and Facebook conspiring to hide their intent around data collection users, which likely breaks British privacy and honest trade law.
- rhizome 8y agoThe law against not screwing your users and not being anti-competitive. The latter is actual law, the former is the kind of thing that leads to street justice.
- hkt 8y agoIt set a pretty awful precedent when Facebook spread misinformation so effectively that my country voted to cripple itself. We are going to have justice: no foreign intervention or dark money will stop us. I rarely feel pride like I did today, because for all their faults it is clear to me that the current crop of Parliamentarians will hunt down those responsible for weaponising disinformation in our politics.
- ryanwaggoner 8y agoSeizing documents for a valid inquiry is one thing. But does that follow that publishing them is OK too? From the outside, it looks like these politicians are frustrated that a foreign CEO ignored their demand to appear before them (because he has no legal obligation to do so), and have decided to retaliate by releasing embarrassing private internal documents obtained during an investigation in the hopes that Facebook will be politically and financially damaged. I get that people hate Facebook, but does that justify any level of bad behavior as long as it harms them?
- zimpenfish 8y ago> I get that people hate Facebook, but does that justify any level of bad behavior as long as it harms them? Personally, given the level of harm Facebook has helped to inflict on the world these last 2-3 years, yeah, I reckon I'm perfectly happy with people inflicting harm on the corporation, probably even to the point of ruination.
- ryanwaggoner 8y agoSeems like a pretty dangerous road to go down, personally. Looking at some of our politicians in the US, I don't really want them to have unfettered power to misuse the law and their elected position to destroy any person or organization who raises their ire. Even if I don't like that person or organization and want to see them destroyed.
- stordoff 8y agoFWIW, the UK Parliament already has unfettered power , so we're already well down that road.
- arethuza 8y agoI believe Parliament has decided to limit its own powers - the Human Rights Act, membership of the EU, devolution of powers to Welsh and Scottish parliaments etc. Of course these can be changed by Parliament... ;-)
- SheinhardtWigCo 8y agoI don't think this move achieved much of anything, other than to encourage business executives to use ephemeral messaging for their confidential internal communications.
- eitland 8y agoWikiLeaks or someone has said that part of their purpose is to make sure the fear of leaks cripples the internal processes of certain organisations. If Facebook were forced to mostly use ephemeral communication that would be somewhat crippling. Also I think there exist regulation as to what kind of documentation must be archived and how (SOX?).
- Trill-I-Am 8y agoHere is a direct link to the files themselves: https://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons-committees/culture-media-and-sport/Note-by-Chair-and-selected-documents-ordered-from-Six4Three.pdf https://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons-committees/cultu...
- tpush 8y agoReally interesting stuff in there. > Facebook email 24 January 2013 > Justin Osofsky – ‘Twitter launched Vine today which lets you shoot multiple short video segments to make one single, 6-second video. As part of their NUX, you can find friends via FB. Unless anyone raises objections, we will shut down their friends API access today. We’ve prepared reactive PR, and I will let Jana know our decision. > MZ – ‘Yup, go for it.’
- evilzuku 8y agoNothing says evil more than preparing reactive PR to bury your competitors. And the nonchalant way his response sends chills down my spine. These people will suffocate innovation just to win.
- gk1 8y ago> And the nonchalant way his response sends chills down my spine. CEOs of massive companies don't have time to write long and explanatory emails. They put people in charge that they trust, so they can just say one word or sentence and know that it'll get handled.
- gammateam 8y agoSometimes I write some half ass objection before green lighting it just in case the convo gets leaked idgaf though
- e40 8y ago> These people will suffocate innovation just to win. I don't like Zuck, but come on, you just described every CEO in America, that when they have a choice they will do this.
- nakedrobot2 8y agoGood for them, thank you! The sooner facebook is controlled and broken up into pieces, the better. They are a massive net negative on civilization. Do you work at Facebook? Shame on you.
- Jyaif 8y agoI think this is not going far enough. Do you work in the evil tech industry? You should die.
- twtw 8y agoCan't tell if you're serious, so I'll ask on the off chance you are. What does "evil" mean? Or are you just saying that the entire tech industry is evil?
- na85 8y agoGet ready for down votes and/or moderator action. Lots of people here believe that technology is inherently good, and in so doing offshore their ethical considerations. They want their money and don't want to think too hard about the impact of their work. Interrupting the circle jerk is a big no-no.
- chrisseaton 8y ago> Do you work at Facebook? Shame on you. Everyone needs to work somewhere, you know, and not everyone has much of a choice about where. No shame in putting food on the table for your family.
- na85 8y agoThis attitude is very problematic. If you're putting food on the table by actively harming society, there is something wrong with that.
- mooneater 8y agoI totally get this POV. But honestly, if you work at FB, you definitely have options. So no, this POV does not really apply to people at FB.
- whatshisface 8y agoThe documents[0] contain market research done by Onavo[1]. This data may have been bought from them, and if so it was probably bought under a non-disclose agreement, as is typical for those arrangements (the reasoning being that Onavo can't sell the data more than once if it is released publicly). This could pose a problem for Facebook if Onavo decides that another release like this is likely to happen again. I'd be interested if anyone can weigh in on what the think the liability situation will be here. [0]https://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons-committees/culture-media-and-sport/Note-by-Chair-and-selected-documents-ordered-from-Six4Three.pdf https://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons-committees/cultu... [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onavo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onavo
- CGamesPlay 8y ago> This could pose a problem for Facebook if Onavo decides that another release like this is likely to happen again. Facebook owns Onavo.
- whatshisface 8y agoOops. Well then I guess the liability situation will be very simple. ;)
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- makomk 8y agoThe bigger problem is that, as I understand it, all of these documents were obtained from someone suing Facebook who had access to them as part of a lawsuit against Facebook under a court order that required them to be kept confidential.
- amerine 8y agoThe law was followed to get access to these files. What are you talking about? Regardless of your agreement with the manner of procurement, nothing nefarious was done here. This is what happens when CEOs ignore governments.
- paganel 8y ago> Facebook used data provided by the Israeli analytics firm Onavo to determine which other mobile apps were being downloaded and used by the public. It then used this knowledge to decide which apps to acquire or otherwise treat as a threat > there was evidence that Facebook's refusal to share data with some apps caused them to fail Stuff like this should trigger the EU Commissioner for Competition to withdraw the authorization that “allowed” FB to acquire Whatsapp and should force a split between the two entities. A fine (no matter how big) will be seen by FB and its investors just as “cost of doing business”. Facebook in its current form needs to be split up back again.
- danarmak 8y agoHow do you force a split when one part (Whatsapp) may not have enough revenue to sustain itself?
- M2Ys4U 8y agoLet it fail?
- zaarn 8y agoYou split and one part dies. If the commission involved put up rules on the merger and FB broke the rules, this is what happens.
- iddqd 8y agoI'll happily chip in a dollar a year or so.
- soziawa 8y agoSeize it and then sell it in an auction. WhatsApp is so insanely popular that it will for sure find a buyer.
- cmsonger 8y agoI've long held a theory that many of the "basic infrastructure" pieces of technology would best be put forward by non-profits. The profit imperative can be an insidious corrosive influence.
- bechrissed 8y agoI'm very interested in what will be in these documents. Twitter is hyped about them
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- roboyoshi 8y agoas mentioned somewhere else in this thread, here is the direct link: https://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons-committees/culture-media-and-sport/Note-by-Chair-and-selected-documents-ordered-from-Six4Three.pdf https://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons-committees/cultu...
- sbhn 8y agoThx for link. Everytime i read the word ‘whitelist’, i think, havn’t they caught up with the times, thats racist, whitelist. Why does white suggest good?
- breischl 8y agoI've wondered that too. My inexpert, unresearched guess is that people are scared of darkness, because we don't see too well. Hence black is a scary/bad color, and blacklists are the things to avoid. Brightness is good - you can see, it's usually warm, etc. Hence whitelist. But like I said, total off-the-cuff guess, take it for what it's worth.
- sbhn 8y agoGood response, i thought it was left over terminology from segregation times. You may be right
- umeshunni 8y agoThere was English before America, FYI
- jannes 8y agoI am pretty sure the continent existed before English.
- aaaaaaaaaab 8y agoI want this to be satire
- SlowRobotAhead 8y ago>Thx for link. Everytime i read the word ‘whitelist’, i think, havn’t they caught up with the times, thats racist, whitelist. Why does white suggest good? I can’t tell if this is satire. Which means it’s either really good, or sad times we’re living in.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- throwaway572091 8y agohttps://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons-committees/culture-media-and-sport/Note-by-Chair-and-selected-documents-ordered-from-Six4Three.pdf https://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons-committees/cultu... Exhibit 79 – linking data access spending on advertising at Facebook Email from Konstantinos Papamiltidas [FB] to Ime Archibong [FB] 18 September 2013 – 10.06am From email about slides prepared for talk to DevOps at 11am on 19 September 2013 'Key points: 1/ Find out what other apps like Refresh are out that we don't want to share data with and figure out if they spend on NEKO. Communicate in one-go to all apps that don't spend that those permission will be revoked. Communicate to the rest that they need to spend on NEKO $250k a year to maintain access to the data.'
- throwaway572091 8y agohttps://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons-committees/culture-media-and-sport/Note-by-Chair-and-selected-documents-ordered-from-Six4Three.pdf https://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons-committees/cultu... Exhibit 170 – Mark Zuckerberg discussing linking data to revenue Mark Zuckerberg email – dated 7 October 2012 'I've been thinking about platform business model a lot this weekend…if we make it so devs can generate revenue for us in different ways, then it makes it more acceptable for us to charge them quite a bit more for using platform. The basic idea is that any other revenue you generate for us earns you a credit towards whatever fees you own us for using plaform. For most developers this would probably cover cost completely. So instead of every paying us directly, they'd just use our payments or ads products. A basic model could be: Login with Facebook is always free Pushing content to Facebook is always free Reading anything, including friends, costs a lot of money. Perhaps on the order of $0.10/user each year. For the money that you owe, you can cover it in any of the following ways: Buys ads from us in neko or another system Run our ads in your app or website (canvas apps already do this) Use our payments Sell your items in our Karma store. Or if the revenue we get from those doesn't add up to more that the fees you owe us, then you just pay us the fee directly.'
- ryanwaggoner 8y agoSeems pretty reasonable to me? Especially in the context of tossing ideas around. Note that I don't read this as "let's get devs on board and then yank the rug out from under them later". Rather, it seems like they're trying to find a way to make it win/win, where devs can either pay for the platform directly, or use it for free if they can do so with a business model that helps Facebook make money elsewhere.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- PavlovsCat 8y ago> devs can generate revenue for us in different ways, then it makes it more acceptable for us to charge them quite a bit more Generate revenue for us, so we can charge them quite a bit more. > The basic idea is that any other revenue you generate for us earns you a credit towards whatever fees you own us for using plaform. For most developers this would probably cover cost completely. So devs can get credit (they can't convert to money I guess?), and Facebook gets more money. That's just win/win if you don't consider the audience FB "generates revenue" from, and then it also would depend on how much you would care to save, say $10 while generating $50 for FB, or saving $10 to generate $500, and what those figures would be. Money isn't "made", it's always shifted around. Value can be generated, not money. So making money for Facebook means taking it from somewhere.
- dmak 8y agoWhat does MP stand for?
- anonymousDan 8y agoMember of Parliament.
- dmak 8y agoThank you!
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- gadders 8y agoMember of Parliament in the UK House of Commons.
- chrisseaton 8y agoEquivalent of a member of the US House of Representatives.
- stuaxo 8y agoMember of Parliament - I guess equivalent to congress man/woman.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- mscasts 8y agoHoly cow, I feel very lucky I dont have facebook now :O
- kodablah 8y agoSo, FB gave some companies preferential access after removing it for devs, they surreptitiously collected phone data after given permission to, used cross-business analytics for M&A or competition info, was choosy and chatty about who got what data and its value. I agree there are clear immoralities at play, especially with collecting phone call info, but not sure that it is worthy of a government inquiry of such size. Much of this is standard business and worthy of being decried as other immoral business acts might. Would we expect such an inquiry for any other company or are there politics at play? I feel the Cambridge Analytica issue is more which hunt than a real-harm-exacted issue. How would one quantify the harm? Is this vengeance for Brexit, Trump, and/or Zuck no-show? All I've learned is to be cautious when having email conversations on sensitive subjects (no paper trail) and to be cautious when flying execs to the UK and to be cautious having any real business there for fear of having confidential information raided and published. Obviously it's not standard practice but, as with other government-imposed internet tactics of late, as a business owner it just marks an increase on my "riskometer" that I use to evaluate where to do business.
- steve_gh 8y agoWRT doing business in the UK. You need to understand that this is a highly unusual situation. Part of the UK Parliamentary system is that there are "Select Committees"on MPs, whose job is to review and hold to account the performance of government bodies and departments. They may also review areas of national interest within their remit, and invite witnesses to give evidence to them. For example, there have been significant problems with a rail timetable change recently, and the Transport Select Committee invited the heads of various rail companies to give evidence. You don't not turn up - an invitation from a select committee to give evidence has the same sort of weight as a court summons to give evidence. So Zuck was invited to give evidence to the Digital Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee (DCMS), investigating the impact of Fake News on politics. Twice (at least). Both times he sent a minion. DCMS then set up a Grand Committee hearing, with parliamentarians from a bunch of other countries (Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, France, Ireland, Latvia, Singapore and UK), and invited Zuck. Again, no show. So basically, since Zuck gave a whole bunch of governments the finger, the Uk government used its powers to collect relevant evidence. I would suggest that unless you are a) the CEO of a Unicorn, or b) Currently suing a Unicorn and c) that Unicorn is giving the finger to a government You need have no fear of doing business in the UK
- _salmon 8y ago> "But the facts are clear: we've never sold people's data." What
- 5trokerac3 8y agoIt's 100% true. They never sold people's data. They sold access to people's data. Slimy, corporate lawyerese 101.
- casefields 8y agoJust because you didn’t kill someone yourself, doesn’t mean you can’t be charged and convicted of murder: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felony_murder_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felony_murder_rule
- PavlovsCat 8y agoWow, that seems crazy even for lawyerese.. I mean, if I have an "all you can eat" restaurant, do I sell food, or do I just sell access to food? What about a buffet where a person can fill their plate once, but can pick among many things?
- patejam 8y agoNot really. It's like buying a space on the wall to advertise inside the all you can eat restaurant. The restaurant isn't telling you who goes into the restaurant. They're just selling you access to those people through that ad. ----- The other problem, the Cambridge Analytica problem, is a bit different. It's like saying that the restaurant requires you to tell them your name and other personal information in order to eat at the restaurant. Maybe it's to send flyers or deals, doesn't matter. The problem happens when the restaurant also asks for your friends personal information, and you give it to them without asking your friends. That's basically what Facebook is under fire about. Allowing your friends to very easily give your information out without you knowing.
- PavlovsCat 8y ago
- dreamdu5t 8y agoIt’s terrifying that people want to use the government to regulate a free website that nobody even has to use and which has not actually caused anyone harm. GDPR tyrants: get a life and stop using Facebook. Seriously.
- rdruxn 8y agoPerhaps it has not directly caused harm, but Facebook has certainly facilitated it.
- beart 8y ago> which has not actually caused anyone harm. This is not a statement you can just throw out there. For example https://www.wired.com/story/how-facebooks-rise-fueled-chaos-and-confusion-in-myanmar/ https://www.wired.com/story/how-facebooks-rise-fueled-chaos-...
- dreamdu5t 8y agoAgain. Hyperbole. We’re adults here. Who are you trying to convince with that crap? No, Facebook is a website. They aren’t involved in genocide. They aren’t why Trump is president.
- soared 8y agoBy that logic, any website that hosts cp isn't involved. Any website where you can buy slaves isn't complicit.
- spunker540 8y agoThat means that any site that allows two people to communicate can be complicit -- be it forums, discussion boards or chat/messages. Criminals can easily adopt code words, or encrypt their plaintext communications in ways that a website would be unable to police. How about email? Are email providers also required to detect all criminal activity occurring in their emails? Ultimately it's a massive burden placed on companies if they are required to read and sort through all communication occurring on their platform and it also necessarily removes any and all privacy from every communication platform. Do we do the same thing for cell phone manufacturers or telecom providers? What about monitors that display the messages or keyboards that let people type the messages soliciting illegal activity?
- dreamdu5t 8y agoJust a reminder to all the children here: You don’t have to use Facebook. Really.
- sctb 8y agoWould you please stop breaking the guidelines with uncivil, unsubstantive, and/or schoolyard comments? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- natch 8y agoJust to underline the obvious point the lawmaker is making, perhaps if Zuckerberg would show up to hearings that lawmakers invite him to, then he would be able to provide the context that Facebook says is missing.
- ryanwaggoner 8y agoTranslation: if you turn down our "invitation", we'll misuse our legal power to seize your internal documents and then publish them to embarrass you. Accurate? To be clear, I'm not saying that they can't seize and investigate or even punish if the law was broken. That's the job of government. But this just seems like a petty attempt to embarrass. However, I'm American and haven't been following the story closely, so I may be missing context.
- bagacrap 8y agoIs it misuse, or does it serve their ultimate purpose, which is to act in the best interest of their constituents? You could easily take the stance that parliament was being generous to give fb the opportunity to become part of the dialog beforehand (provide that context that was supposedly lacking), and that zuck was foolish to turn them down.
- sangnoir 8y ago> I'm American [...] I may be missing context. You are missing context: look up "Parliamentary Privilege" and "Parliamentary Sovereignty" which do not have US equivalents. The "invitation" was effectively a subpoena.
- kazen44 8y agoDidn't the fact that is not a UK citizen also basically safe him from being dragged to Parliament by the police? Im pretty sure, if you are an UK citizen and they summon you, they will eventually just grab you and put yourself in front of Parliament.
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- SirensOfTitan 8y agoI worked at Facebook for 5 years on Workplace and Internal Tools. I am typically very critical of the company nowadays, but even so find the discussion here difficult to digest. People are complex. They are more complex than an action, or even a group of actions. To take a person and alias them into being "good" or "bad" based on an action or a series of actions is to explicitly dehumanize them for the sake of making the world simpler. It is a poor model, and in a Dale-Carnegie-way it leads to poor outcomes, as you close the dialog with that person that allows you to change opinions and outcomes. It is the same with groups or companies: some parts of groups do good from some vantage point, some do bad. I found myself inspired by a lot of what Facebook did. I loved working inside Infrastructure there, I was amazed by what people were innovating on every day. Projects like charitable causes have raised a lot for charity. I've seen the Are you Safe feature reduce so much stress during disasters. I keep meaningful dialogs going with friends I don't get to see often on FB and Instagram. It makes me really happy to see my friends thriving. One of Napoleon's great gifts was in compartmentalizing pieces of his life. His tumultuous and frankly soul-crushing personal life (which affected him deeply) with Josephine never got in the way of his military victories. I wonder if that's a good model, up-to-a-point for people and groups. With people, by compartmentalizing some unsavory perspective someone has, you have the ability to change it later on through discussion. ... in groups: if everyone good leaves organizations because they're "bad," well, those organizations will just be filled with the worst of us soon enough.
- decebalus1 8y ago> People are complex. They are more complex than an action, or even a group of actions. To take a person and alias them into being "good" or "bad" based on an action or a series of actions is to explicitly dehumanize them for the sake of making the world simpler. Correct. But we're not talking about people here, we're talking about a corporate entity as a whole. It's a bit more complex than a person. It has an incentive model and a set of norms (culture) which enables people to do good/bad based on the situation to maximize their personal gains (whichever those are - personal, material, spiritual, you name it). If this consistently enables people to do what is perceived externally as unethical, we have a problem. Nice spin on it, but Facebook is still a bad actor (despite what you say). I held this opinion since the beginning, before all the leaks and all the scandals but nobody believed me. Very smart people were incentivized to join using the entourage (come work with other smart people) and money, then slightly brain-washed in a cult-like manner (us vs them, wartimes, etc..). This enabled them to ignore blatant unethical behavior. I've seen all of these first-hand and it's bad. Bad bad bad.
- noarchy 8y agoI think Facebook is terrible. So I don't use it. I have a choice. These same MPs would likely howl in fury if their secret communications were stolen and published by an entity like Wikileaks (for example). Be careful what you wish for. Of course the difference here is that one is "legal".
- rchaud 8y agoLet them howl. When they've been involved in shady stuff that's against the public interest, I will have no sympathy for them, just as I don't when FB is the "victim". I am glad they didn't decide to sit on it because of any fears about "I don't want this happening to me, so I won't snitch". By the way, these emails were not obtained via hacking/phishing, so the Wikileaks comparison doesn't make any sense.
- samstave 8y agoHow many of these MPs show up in Panama/Paradise Papers? This was a valid question. When talking about them getting and publishing the FB files etc.. and asking if they would want their dirty laundry aired - asking if they show up in those releases is both relevant and obvious.
- sixothree 8y agoI don't think your choice to not use Facebook alters by very much the amount of data they collect about you. I think other steps are needed if that is your goal.
- mindgam3 8y agoHere's Zuckerberg's response in which he "shares some more context around the decisions we made": https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10105559172610321 https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10105559172610321 Quick textual analysis: in a pithy 623-word statement, Zuck manages to mention "shady", "sketchy" or "abusive apps" no less than 7 times. 8 times, if you include the time he mentioned Cambridge Analytica without using a sketchy adjective. Notice the spin as Facebook the White Knight protecting the public from the evils of sketchy apps. Unclear how this will play out given public losing trust in Facebook itself. [Reference] 1. "some developers built shady apps that abused people's data" 2. "to prevent abusive apps" 3. "a lot of sketchy apps -- like the quiz app that sold data to Cambridge Analytica" 4. "Some of the developers whose sketchy apps were kicked off our platform sued us" 5. "we were focusing on preventing abusive apps" 6. "mentioned above that we blocked a lot of sketchy apps" 7. "We've focused on preventing abusive apps for years" 8. "this was the change required to prevent the situation with Cambridge Analytica"
- misiti3780 8y agocan you attach the text for people that have black listed all FB IPs ?
- mindgam3 8y agoHow about this? https://web.archive.org/web/20181205191905/https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10105559172610321 https://web.archive.org/web/20181205191905/https://www.faceb...
- carapace 8y agoNo pull quotes from the documents that Parliament made public to illustrate the "context".
- dgzl 8y ago> "As you know all the growth team is planning on shipping a permissions update on Android at the end of this month. They are going to include the 'read call log' permission... This is a pretty high-risk thing to do from a PR perspective but it appears that the growth team will charge ahead and do it." Meanwhile, at the Growth Team™ office: "I think implanting these chips into our customer's brain is high risk, but we're going to charge ahead anyway".
- rhizome 8y ago"Truth serum in the water supply? Don't mind if I do!"
- mandevil 8y agoFacebook has released a statement[1] that accuses Six4Three of "cherrypicked" document dump, that is mostly just denials with no supporting evidence. If only they hadn't undermined their own trustworthiness by, a few weeks ago, denying that senior executives were culpable in their relationship with Definers and then doing a news dump right before a major US holiday admitting that they had lied in their first response, then people might believe their unsupported assertions. [1]: https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/12/response-to-six4three-documents/ https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/12/response-to-six4three-d...
- PaulHoule 8y agoHell yeah. I have been involved with companies that have wanted to do things with Facebook non-personal data (eg. pages) and could never get anybody to talk. Some of these were little companies in the "flyover" states, one of these was pretty good sized in L.A. When you see them playing favorites you see another thing that S.V. will struggle with for years. One reason NYC is so important for finance is that people go have lunch and trade insider information without leaving a paper trail. In the same way S.V. companies circle jerk each other giving each other special privileges, staging fake acquisitions so sons of investment bankers can make it look like they were successful startup founders, etc. Sometimes they even get a stooge to come in from a place like Saudi Arabia or Japan to buy them out so they can tell the people who put money in their fund that they made money. Those folks will lose a lot of their A.U.M. but they probably get paid off in some other way. S.V. doesn't have any problems that wouldn't be solved by opening offices in the flyover states. But there are two things about those people. They don't listen They won't listen
- IronWolve 8y agoI worked for a company that was bought by blackberry and then split up. A large portion of our developers and engineers went to Facebook in Ireland and Seattle/California. This is my personal experience, so I don't know how widespread this is, but I suspect its common. I stayed friendly with many ex-coworkers on Facebook for awhile, and saw some attitudes move towards a harsh alt-leftist view and some went extremely violent. Anti-Isreal statements started popping up and some Jewish facebook engineers started to self-censor and talk in personal messages instead of posting, commenting to me if I was also seeing this attitude in posts. Could just be how divided facebook made people, amplifying echo-chambers and enforcing views that "their side" is correct, but many of my old co-workers show a large political divide and a few just are wildly hardcore political in very violent tones. How this bleeds into their job, only time will tell. I finally had to make facebook just for family and close friends and removed the app from my phone, and only use it in a web browser. I'm guilty of enjoying a good meme or political cartoon, but things are definitely more divided now. I would not doubt the documents reflect more political views seeping into their products.
- tareqak 8y agoFacebook's response: Response to Six4Three Documents - https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/12/response-to-six4three-documents/ https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/12/response-to-six4three-d... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18611492 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18611492
- ilrwbwrkhv 8y agoI asked this in another Facebook related post but was flagged... think would make more sense here: why do we keep using facebook stuff if they steal our data?
- dschuetz 8y agoWhoever is still investing in Facebook are complicit in aiding criminal activity, e.g. aiding unfair competition.
- rajacombinator 8y agoKeep in mind this is all punishment by tptb for Facebook execs getting out of line and thinking they had a seat at the table. Not enough dues paid yet.