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I was personally involved in a leadership role in one of these key strategic deals while at a major handset maker. To be clear, we built the 'Facebook experien

I was personally involved in a leadership role in one of these key strategic deals while at a major handset maker. To be clear, we built the 'Facebook experience' for our device because only we really could. During this era, APIs were a disaster of a mess, moreover, the special API that made the device so special was not available to the public. Ironically it was our internal APIs that were making the special sauce! For this purpose, Facebook provided users of the app we designed access to their own profiles. Obviously, this is a fairly wide API and it had to be made available specially for users of our app. At no time did we ever have access to FB users private information. At no time did anyone even remotely suggest anything inappropriate or nefarious. There were simply no moral or legal discussions on this front because it was moot. The situation, net, was akin to Facebook having hired a 3rd party to design an app for them, giving that app the internal FB API necessary to function, and then distributing the app. This isn't an issue of 'times have changed' or 'looking back we'd have done something different' rather - I can affirm that there was simply no bad acting, no breach of individuals accounts, and no undue risk to individuals accounts. Obviously this situation is very specific, and that conditions will have varied. If FB was truly giving Bing special access without people's consent - this is a big problem. The Cambridge issue - well - this is a tricky one because Cambridge merely took advantage of the API's the entire world had access to. There was little if any discussion of the inherent problems with those APIs, and when it looked like maybe they were being abused, Facebook did the right thing and closed them. They even went ahead and investigated Cambridge to ensure the data was gone, and Cambridge presented them with evidence that it had been deleted. I think in this case Facebook was a responsible actor. Clearly there are more situations to consider, but we should be thoughtful in terms of how we approach newly released information and not get caught up with the mob. Personally, I loathe the koolaid mob that built Facebook up, but I'm equally loathe the hate mob wanting to take them down.

artificial 8y ago
As far as the responsibility goes I’ll raise you a Zygna, and especially the Obama campaign which was lauded by the media and facilitated by the platform because after they noticed the abuse “they’re on the same side”. I doubt this would be such a pernicious issue if another candidate won.
corebit 8y ago
I'm so glad you wrote this. It's mind-bogglingly stupid what people are saying about the nefarious purposes this stuff was put to when that's obviously so far from the case and EVERYBODY involved in working on this stuff 10 years ago understands it.
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  I should add that it's possible there were some loose ends in some other scenarios. I don't think we deeply considered our situation, to the point wherein there might have been some loopholes with caches etc.. At the time, nobody considered the issue to be hugely problematic, it was 'info on a site' and we treated it responsibly, but not like top secret data. Also, we had no reason to want user data. Today, companies may or may not be able to use such data, but they all seem to be in the game of collecting user information as a systematic impetus. I think this will evolve.

artificial 8y ago

As far as the responsibility goes I’ll raise you a Zygna, and especially the Obama campaign which was lauded by the media and facilitated by the platform because after they noticed the abuse “they’re on the same side”. I doubt this would be such a pernicious issue if another candidate won.

corebit 8y ago

I'm so glad you wrote this. It's mind-bogglingly stupid what people are saying about the nefarious purposes this stuff was put to when that's obviously so far from the case and EVERYBODY involved in working on this stuff 10 years ago understands it.

sonnyblarney 8y ago
I should add that it's possible there were some loose ends in some other scenarios. I don't think we deeply considered our situation, to the point wherein there might have been some loopholes with caches etc.. At the time, nobody considered the issue to be hugely problematic, it was 'info on a site' and we treated it responsibly, but not like top secret data. Also, we had no reason to want user data. Today, companies may or may not be able to use such data, but they all seem to be in the game of collecting user information as a systematic impetus. I think this will evolve.