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I was too young to really keep abreast of the Microsoft anti-trust lawsuit, but I've never seen a technology company come under so much sustained pressure than

I was too young to really keep abreast of the Microsoft anti-trust lawsuit, but I've never seen a technology company come under so much sustained pressure than Facebook over the past 18 months. The New York Times in particular has definitely made it a mission to air out all of Facebook's dirty laundry. Overall, I don't think that this will result in users becoming more concerned about privacy (although their governments may) but it does seem like Facebook from a product perspective is vulnerable, even considering the amazing backstops that are Instagram and WhatsApp.

ImaCake 8y ago
My anecdata is that I have been reading the news about facebook and have started using it less. I also only run it inside a firefox container.
notacoward 8y ago
> The New York Times in particular has definitely made it a mission to air out all of Facebook's dirty laundry. There are two thoughts here that people here assume are mutually exclusive, but they're really not. (1) What NYT has reported is true, and highlights some serious issues that Facebook needs to address. (2) NYT also, without saying anything untrue, takes negative news about Facebook out of context and gives it more prominence/repetition than is appropriate. Both of these are possible simultaneously. I happen to believe both are true. The "providing a platform" argument was much more relevant at the time most of these actions occurred, even if that doesn't fully excuse them. And even if this significant news, that might not justify burying other important stories (e.g. imminent government shutdown) so that it can be top of the news multiple times in the next week. As it surely will, even if there are no new revelations. As for the substance of the OP or the NYT story to which it responds: no comment. Facebook PR is going to have to do this one without me. >:-(
- jaabe 8y ago
  What? Facebook has so far admitted to everything, or in other words, the gross mishandling of privacy of a billion people for a decade and an unwillingness to improve. Is your point that we shouldn’t worry about Facebook being an evil company because there are worse things out there? Why can’t we worry about multiple things at once? Even if we go down the road of whataboutism, don’t you think Facebook has earned its place in the spotlight? Facebook has shown itself to be an existential threat to liberal democracy and truth in recent years, it’s hard to imagine a bigger threat than that. I mean, if it wasn’t for a gazillion fake accounts gaming interest groups on Facebook, a lot less people would think things like climate change was fake. Which means that at its very worst, Facebook is being used to kill the planet. Don’t get me wrong, I still think Facebook can be really good, at its best, and that’s exactly why I think the focus on their missteps is welcome. We need to tell them where the line is, so we can get more good and less bad.
  - notacoward 8y ago
    > Why can’t we worry about multiple things at once? That was exactly my point. Is it somehow a bad thing to acknowledge criticism of both parties, largely in support of 40acres's point? Is it somehow better to use criticism of one as an excuse to ignore the other, as a pseudo-refutation of my own point? That's the truly noxious kind of whataboutism.
  - chillacy 8y ago
    Mass communication is a threat to democracy? That somehow only more censorship (fake news screening or whatever people want to call it) can fix? This is such a profoundly anti-democratic position, with extra overtones of “these voters didn’t know any better”.
    - rchaud 8y ago
      > Mass communication is a threat to democracy? Why did you think that strawman would work on HN of all places? FB didn't invent email, chatrooms, message boards, or the internet, things that actually support mass communication.
      - chillacy 8y ago
        Curious how you can call that a strawman without knowing OP's actual position. I mean to be fair I likely misrepresented his ideas but to do otherwise requires a lot of back and forth questions to really understand the positions at hand. I hope we don't have a long internet argument about what "mass communication" is, that would be a great waste of time. I just suspect that if facebook didn't exist, message boards and chatrooms would have launched Trump into the white house just the same, and we'd be casting them as a "threat to democracy".
        rchaud 8y ago
        > I hope we don't have a long internet argument about what "mass communication" is, that would be a great waste of time. 100% agree. That is why I don't bother reading the comments where the discussion veers into the semantics of the label used ("socialism" and "market forces" related stories being the worst offenders).Usually the story isn't about that at all, but people seem to love rehashing their college-era debates that ended nowhere. > I just suspect that if facebook didn't exist, message boards and chatrooms would have launched Trump into the white house just the same I partially disagree. Without FB, Twitter could still have spread mass misinformation and divisive propaganda. Either way, the scale of either isn't comparable to message boards of yore. Those allowed for total anonymity. You weren't mandated to provide a real name. You weren't encouraged to share details of your personal life (relationship status, alma mater, location). Message boards also didn't have ad networks built into it that incentivized data gathering on a mass scale. Finally, message boards were not built around "sharing". That's what got fake news posts outside of your crazy uncle's FB circle and into local news website comments page, etc, giving it visibility it wouldn't have otherwise. What were the biggest message boards back in the day? Something Awful? Digg? 4chan? A few million members max. FB has 2 billion + on a single network. A single point of entry where the network gives you (as an advertiser/bad actor) near-unprecedented targeting ability for promoted posts and ads. If you popped into your local phpBB baseball forum and dropped off a meme showing Clinton with the Star of David with no additional context, you'd get booted by a moderator for being off-topic and thread would be locked. No way to spread it to the outside world. Not so on social networks.
seem_2211 8y ago
Mike Isaac is on the Facebook beat - he seems to break a ton of news (he was covering Uber last year).
artificial 8y ago
My hunch is that the goal is to spur regulation. Old and new media are battling it out and I'm curious how this will pan out for 2020.
paganel 8y ago
It seems like NYT was right on this one as FB themselves acknowledged that they gave 3rd party access to their users’ private messages (and apparently they still don’t see this as a big no-no ?!?). There are also quite privacy-aware users on this very website who say that they don’t remember being explicitly asked by FB about granting Spotify access to their private messages, and there’s also a link to an old screenshot from around 2013 showing that the FB confirmation screen was indeed very vague, there was no explicit mention of the user giving a 3rd party access to his/her private messages, just to his/her “data”, a very general term which is not generally correlated to private messages. As such I’d say that articles like the one recently published by the NYT are spot on, and I also hope that FB will pay the price for what it has done (I’m personally in favor of a forced break-up).

ImaCake 8y ago

My anecdata is that I have been reading the news about facebook and have started using it less. I also only run it inside a firefox container.

notacoward 8y ago

> The New York Times in particular has definitely made it a mission to air out all of Facebook's dirty laundry. There are two thoughts here that people here assume are mutually exclusive, but they're really not. (1) What NYT has reported is true, and highlights some serious issues that Facebook needs to address. (2) NYT also, without saying anything untrue, takes negative news about Facebook out of context and gives it more prominence/repetition than is appropriate. Both of these are possible simultaneously. I happen to believe both are true. The "providing a platform" argument was much more relevant at the time most of these actions occurred, even if that doesn't fully excuse them. And even if this significant news, that might not justify burying other important stories (e.g. imminent government shutdown) so that it can be top of the news multiple times in the next week. As it surely will, even if there are no new revelations. As for the substance of the OP or the NYT story to which it responds: no comment. Facebook PR is going to have to do this one without me. >:-(

jaabe 8y ago
What? Facebook has so far admitted to everything, or in other words, the gross mishandling of privacy of a billion people for a decade and an unwillingness to improve. Is your point that we shouldn’t worry about Facebook being an evil company because there are worse things out there? Why can’t we worry about multiple things at once? Even if we go down the road of whataboutism, don’t you think Facebook has earned its place in the spotlight? Facebook has shown itself to be an existential threat to liberal democracy and truth in recent years, it’s hard to imagine a bigger threat than that. I mean, if it wasn’t for a gazillion fake accounts gaming interest groups on Facebook, a lot less people would think things like climate change was fake. Which means that at its very worst, Facebook is being used to kill the planet. Don’t get me wrong, I still think Facebook can be really good, at its best, and that’s exactly why I think the focus on their missteps is welcome. We need to tell them where the line is, so we can get more good and less bad.
- notacoward 8y ago
  > Why can’t we worry about multiple things at once? That was exactly my point. Is it somehow a bad thing to acknowledge criticism of both parties, largely in support of 40acres's point? Is it somehow better to use criticism of one as an excuse to ignore the other, as a pseudo-refutation of my own point? That's the truly noxious kind of whataboutism.
- chillacy 8y ago
  Mass communication is a threat to democracy? That somehow only more censorship (fake news screening or whatever people want to call it) can fix? This is such a profoundly anti-democratic position, with extra overtones of “these voters didn’t know any better”.
  - rchaud 8y ago
    > Mass communication is a threat to democracy? Why did you think that strawman would work on HN of all places? FB didn't invent email, chatrooms, message boards, or the internet, things that actually support mass communication.
    - chillacy 8y ago
      Curious how you can call that a strawman without knowing OP's actual position. I mean to be fair I likely misrepresented his ideas but to do otherwise requires a lot of back and forth questions to really understand the positions at hand. I hope we don't have a long internet argument about what "mass communication" is, that would be a great waste of time. I just suspect that if facebook didn't exist, message boards and chatrooms would have launched Trump into the white house just the same, and we'd be casting them as a "threat to democracy".
      - rchaud 8y ago
        > I hope we don't have a long internet argument about what "mass communication" is, that would be a great waste of time. 100% agree. That is why I don't bother reading the comments where the discussion veers into the semantics of the label used ("socialism" and "market forces" related stories being the worst offenders).Usually the story isn't about that at all, but people seem to love rehashing their college-era debates that ended nowhere. > I just suspect that if facebook didn't exist, message boards and chatrooms would have launched Trump into the white house just the same I partially disagree. Without FB, Twitter could still have spread mass misinformation and divisive propaganda. Either way, the scale of either isn't comparable to message boards of yore. Those allowed for total anonymity. You weren't mandated to provide a real name. You weren't encouraged to share details of your personal life (relationship status, alma mater, location). Message boards also didn't have ad networks built into it that incentivized data gathering on a mass scale. Finally, message boards were not built around "sharing". That's what got fake news posts outside of your crazy uncle's FB circle and into local news website comments page, etc, giving it visibility it wouldn't have otherwise. What were the biggest message boards back in the day? Something Awful? Digg? 4chan? A few million members max. FB has 2 billion + on a single network. A single point of entry where the network gives you (as an advertiser/bad actor) near-unprecedented targeting ability for promoted posts and ads. If you popped into your local phpBB baseball forum and dropped off a meme showing Clinton with the Star of David with no additional context, you'd get booted by a moderator for being off-topic and thread would be locked. No way to spread it to the outside world. Not so on social networks.

seem_2211 8y ago

Mike Isaac is on the Facebook beat - he seems to break a ton of news (he was covering Uber last year).

artificial 8y ago

My hunch is that the goal is to spur regulation. Old and new media are battling it out and I'm curious how this will pan out for 2020.

paganel 8y ago

It seems like NYT was right on this one as FB themselves acknowledged that they gave 3rd party access to their users’ private messages (and apparently they still don’t see this as a big no-no ?!?). There are also quite privacy-aware users on this very website who say that they don’t remember being explicitly asked by FB about granting Spotify access to their private messages, and there’s also a link to an old screenshot from around 2013 showing that the FB confirmation screen was indeed very vague, there was no explicit mention of the user giving a 3rd party access to his/her private messages, just to his/her “data”, a very general term which is not generally correlated to private messages. As such I’d say that articles like the one recently published by the NYT are spot on, and I also hope that FB will pay the price for what it has done (I’m personally in favor of a forced break-up).