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The four points being: * harmful content * election integrity * privacy * data portability I think Zuckerberg's intent is to dilute the real issue (privacy) w

The four points being: * harmful content * election integrity * privacy * data portability I think Zuckerberg's intent is to dilute the real issue (privacy) with these other three points. FB has a bad record when it comes to privacy and they are actively taking measures against it. For example, they lobby against privacy laws [1]. They create shadow profiles and they make it difficult or impossible to delete your account. Harmful content is a tough one because you either have free speech or you don't. Judging content is a slippery slope that every generation before us has warned us about. Election integrity is a media hysteria. Nobody is forcing anyone to vote in a particular way. Data portability is always good for the consumers I don't think anyone would argue against that. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/mar/02/facebook-global-lobbying-campaign-against-data-privacy-laws-investment https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/mar/02/facebook-... [2] https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/11/17225482/facebook-shadow-profiles-zuckerberg-congress-data-privacy https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/11/17225482/facebook-shadow-...

_rpd 8y ago
> data portability Making the friend/family graph portable would allow others to compete with Facebook. What's the state of the discussion on how to do this sensibly?
- RandomInteger4 8y ago
  Technically the data is already portable. It just requires a motivated developer to create a program to parse the files that Facebook let's you download with all your Facebook information. That's not difficult.
  - megous 8y ago
    No. Last time I checked years ago, the data was incomplete, lacked all kind of context, IDs, names, your comments, was structured idiotically, even as a HTML, etc.
- pacala 8y ago
  I can write a personal data graph crawler in a weekend. I can’t release it because Facebook army of lawyers. Maybe zuckermort should look into the mirror sometime to find the bad faith actors ruining the internet.
- rocqua 8y ago
  Obviously, that data is not your data. You can pull out your own posts, photos, maybe replies. Because you made that, but al that context isn't yours, so FB won't let you take it out. Heck, it might even be a copyright violation. The fact that this defends FBs position is just a coincidence...
- Shish2k 8y ago
  > Making the friend/family graph portable would allow others to compete with Facebook It's also the exact feature that allowed Cambridge Analytica to happen ("Push this button to share your address book with this third-party company") - seems like people are vocally against allowing that to happen just as strongly as they are vocally in favour of implementing all the features which allow it to happen, somehow not connecting the two...
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
morley 8y ago
I think HN in particular is too focused on "loss of privacy" as an issue. It seems to me that loss of privacy, while concerning, hasn't caused a fraction of the tangible, measurable problems in the west that misinformation and echo chambers have caused. Loss of privacy hasn't caused anti-immigrant fear-mongering, or conspiracy theorists harassing school shooting victims, or people not vaccinating their children. In areas of the world where loss of privacy _has_ caused citizen harm, it's usually as a result of a despotic regime (thinking specifically of Venezuela).
- fromMars 8y ago
  I agree. I am not sure that any substantial "loss of privacy" has even occurred. Just to posit an example, Banks and Credit Bureaus have long tracked extensive information about us including where we have lived, worked, and what we have purchased. Should we be able to have our credit history erased from Credit Bureau and Banks in the name of privacy?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - XaoDaoCaoCao 8y ago
    Yes because the process of credit evaluation is non-transparent and punishes people who choose not to take on debt and indirectly punishes people who dared not to be born in the top 2% and couldn't rebound from a personal emergency in a timely enough manner for a stratified class of creditors.
  - asciident 8y ago
    Seriously. If people actually cared about privacy, let's do something about credit bureaus and insurance companies. Because I can do something about it if I don't want Facebook to know I'm friends with someone or bought something on Amazon. But I can barely do anything about credit or insurance. They literally ruin lives, cost people thousands of dollars, target the poor, have terrible security, literally sell your data, and yet everyone is all up in arms about the permissions on their photos that they voluntarily posted on Facebook.
austincheney 8y ago
The problem is even more simple than that. Simply, is the web public or private? The answer in practice is that the web is what ever the service provider needs it to be, which is a shitty answer and why these kinds of problems are present in the first place. The answer to these problems is also simple, but likely more aggressive than Facebook would prefer.
- lstodd 8y ago
  The web in practice is public. All of it. Always was, will be forever. You need your private web - build it. Yourself. To rely on fb to provide you with a private web - are you nuts?
  - sixothree 8y ago
    "The web" is not public. Most companies are dedicated to tying your public and private lives. If this weren't true, then why would facebook pay for your private information.
- intended 8y ago
  Bingo. This is fundamentally an issue of what rules apply to modern spaces where the masses congregate and interact.
humanrebar 8y ago
> Election integrity is a media hysteria. Nobody is forcing anyone to vote in a particular way. And, importantly, all the 'solutions' I've seen amount to either public or private censorship with little direct accountability to the public and insufficient due process (1). That doesn't seem like a clear improvement over the status quo. (1) Yes, even private governance needs due process protections.
Angostura 8y ago
> Election integrity is a media hysteria. Nobody is forcing anyone to vote in a particular way. I think transparency is a real issue - knowing who is funding those adverts and campaigns and putting controls on campaign spending is important. Sure, no-one is forcing you to vote a particular way. But if they can control what you see, here and know about an issue, they don't need to force you - do they?
- marcrosoft 8y ago
  > knowing who is funding those adverts and campaigns and putting controls on campaign spending is important. If I understand you correctly, you are advocating for anti-privacy by _forcing_ advertisers into "transparency"? > putting controls on campaign spending is important That sounds dangerous. How would you feel if we put some campaign spending controls on campaigns you _agree_ with and promote? Controlling campaign spending is a ridiculous notion anyways because there is (fortunately) no global law. Even if there was, you can bet there would be a black market.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 8y ago
    Campaign spending limits and requiring the publication of some political donations is settled law in many countries. In fact, this is true to at least some degree in the US, too. These are not new ideas and the debate about whether they are worth implementing has already been won. The problem is that online advertising can get past existing laws.
  - killjoywashere 8y ago
    Look, the issue is there's a pretty steep gradient here. There's the unwashed masses making just enough to survive, and a small group of millionaires and billionaires making calculated use of millions to secure policies that will print them billions in the future. Pretty sure some quick look-ups will show there are working definitions for this disparity in election literature. So, while I appreciate your "Americans aren't poor, they're just temporarily embarrassed millionaires" version of equality for the farce it is, I'd appreciate it if you tried mangling the truth somewhere else.
  - 8y ago
reaperducer 8y ago
harmful content, election integrity, privacy, data portability Shut down Facebook as a company and three of those four problems are solved.
- cjhopman 8y ago
  It's incredibly naive to believe that nothing similar would fill that void.
jamesrcole 8y ago
> Election integrity is a media hysteria. Nobody is forcing anyone to vote in a particular way. It's not about forcing people to do something. No ads, about any topic, can force anyone to do anything. Yet billions of dollars are spent every year on ads. This money is spent not because it can force people to do things, but because it can influence people. This influence leads to real, concrete effects. Coca Cola isn't forcing anyone to buy Coke, but they can influence people, and on a population level their ads can lead to more people buying Coke. The key to understanding this is to not consider the matter in terms of any one individual, but in terms of a population of people, and thinking of the influence as a statistical nudge in a particular direction.
C14L 8y ago
> data portability This is the important part. And it has to be in real time. So you could just switch from one "Social Network Access Provider" to another. Fb would just be one of them. They screw up privacy? People can just go somewhere else. Too many radical bs shows up on your timeline? Move to a provider that gives you a event stream you like. Real competition.
- DougN7 8y ago
  How does that work if your social graph doesn’t move with you? This reminds me of the 90’s when we had so many messenger apps - you needed different apps to talk to different people. Data portability doesn’t help that. I suppose Zuck is well aware of that.
zelon88 8y ago
Spend 10 minutes in some of the FB comment threads for a major news article and just look at all the toolbags citing Breitbart and/or Mother Jones as journalism and then come back and tell me that election integrity is media hysteria. Facebook is the only place some of these people get their "news" and Facebook does nothing to distinguish an opinion blog from an actual journalist. We have millions of people flocking to Alex Jones for information and calling into question the authenticity of Reuters. That and it's 2019 and we don't even have a secure MEANS of voting. We can make Facebook, which is probably a billion LOC with hardly any security flaws yet our voting machines have default credentials of admin/admin and run on decade old technology that has never been peer reviewed.

_rpd 8y ago

> data portability Making the friend/family graph portable would allow others to compete with Facebook. What's the state of the discussion on how to do this sensibly?

RandomInteger4 8y ago
Technically the data is already portable. It just requires a motivated developer to create a program to parse the files that Facebook let's you download with all your Facebook information. That's not difficult.
- megous 8y ago
  No. Last time I checked years ago, the data was incomplete, lacked all kind of context, IDs, names, your comments, was structured idiotically, even as a HTML, etc.
pacala 8y ago
I can write a personal data graph crawler in a weekend. I can’t release it because Facebook army of lawyers. Maybe zuckermort should look into the mirror sometime to find the bad faith actors ruining the internet.
rocqua 8y ago
Obviously, that data is not your data. You can pull out your own posts, photos, maybe replies. Because you made that, but al that context isn't yours, so FB won't let you take it out. Heck, it might even be a copyright violation. The fact that this defends FBs position is just a coincidence...
Shish2k 8y ago
> Making the friend/family graph portable would allow others to compete with Facebook It's also the exact feature that allowed Cambridge Analytica to happen ("Push this button to share your address book with this third-party company") - seems like people are vocally against allowing that to happen just as strongly as they are vocally in favour of implementing all the features which allow it to happen, somehow not connecting the two...

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

morley 8y ago

I think HN in particular is too focused on "loss of privacy" as an issue. It seems to me that loss of privacy, while concerning, hasn't caused a fraction of the tangible, measurable problems in the west that misinformation and echo chambers have caused. Loss of privacy hasn't caused anti-immigrant fear-mongering, or conspiracy theorists harassing school shooting victims, or people not vaccinating their children. In areas of the world where loss of privacy _has_ caused citizen harm, it's usually as a result of a despotic regime (thinking specifically of Venezuela).

fromMars 8y ago
I agree. I am not sure that any substantial "loss of privacy" has even occurred. Just to posit an example, Banks and Credit Bureaus have long tracked extensive information about us including where we have lived, worked, and what we have purchased. Should we be able to have our credit history erased from Credit Bureau and Banks in the name of privacy?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- XaoDaoCaoCao 8y ago
  Yes because the process of credit evaluation is non-transparent and punishes people who choose not to take on debt and indirectly punishes people who dared not to be born in the top 2% and couldn't rebound from a personal emergency in a timely enough manner for a stratified class of creditors.
- asciident 8y ago
  Seriously. If people actually cared about privacy, let's do something about credit bureaus and insurance companies. Because I can do something about it if I don't want Facebook to know I'm friends with someone or bought something on Amazon. But I can barely do anything about credit or insurance. They literally ruin lives, cost people thousands of dollars, target the poor, have terrible security, literally sell your data, and yet everyone is all up in arms about the permissions on their photos that they voluntarily posted on Facebook.

austincheney 8y ago

The problem is even more simple than that. Simply, is the web public or private? The answer in practice is that the web is what ever the service provider needs it to be, which is a shitty answer and why these kinds of problems are present in the first place. The answer to these problems is also simple, but likely more aggressive than Facebook would prefer.

lstodd 8y ago
The web in practice is public. All of it. Always was, will be forever. You need your private web - build it. Yourself. To rely on fb to provide you with a private web - are you nuts?
- sixothree 8y ago
  "The web" is not public. Most companies are dedicated to tying your public and private lives. If this weren't true, then why would facebook pay for your private information.
intended 8y ago
Bingo. This is fundamentally an issue of what rules apply to modern spaces where the masses congregate and interact.

humanrebar 8y ago

> Election integrity is a media hysteria. Nobody is forcing anyone to vote in a particular way. And, importantly, all the 'solutions' I've seen amount to either public or private censorship with little direct accountability to the public and insufficient due process (1). That doesn't seem like a clear improvement over the status quo. (1) Yes, even private governance needs due process protections.

Angostura 8y ago

> Election integrity is a media hysteria. Nobody is forcing anyone to vote in a particular way. I think transparency is a real issue - knowing who is funding those adverts and campaigns and putting controls on campaign spending is important. Sure, no-one is forcing you to vote a particular way. But if they can control what you see, here and know about an issue, they don't need to force you - do they?

marcrosoft 8y ago
> knowing who is funding those adverts and campaigns and putting controls on campaign spending is important. If I understand you correctly, you are advocating for anti-privacy by _forcing_ advertisers into "transparency"? > putting controls on campaign spending is important That sounds dangerous. How would you feel if we put some campaign spending controls on campaigns you _agree_ with and promote? Controlling campaign spending is a ridiculous notion anyways because there is (fortunately) no global law. Even if there was, you can bet there would be a black market.
- TazeTSchnitzel 8y ago
  Campaign spending limits and requiring the publication of some political donations is settled law in many countries. In fact, this is true to at least some degree in the US, too. These are not new ideas and the debate about whether they are worth implementing has already been won. The problem is that online advertising can get past existing laws.
- killjoywashere 8y ago
  Look, the issue is there's a pretty steep gradient here. There's the unwashed masses making just enough to survive, and a small group of millionaires and billionaires making calculated use of millions to secure policies that will print them billions in the future. Pretty sure some quick look-ups will show there are working definitions for this disparity in election literature. So, while I appreciate your "Americans aren't poor, they're just temporarily embarrassed millionaires" version of equality for the farce it is, I'd appreciate it if you tried mangling the truth somewhere else.
- 8y ago

reaperducer 8y ago

harmful content, election integrity, privacy, data portability Shut down Facebook as a company and three of those four problems are solved.

cjhopman 8y ago
It's incredibly naive to believe that nothing similar would fill that void.

jamesrcole 8y ago

> Election integrity is a media hysteria. Nobody is forcing anyone to vote in a particular way. It's not about forcing people to do something. No ads, about any topic, can force anyone to do anything. Yet billions of dollars are spent every year on ads. This money is spent not because it can force people to do things, but because it can influence people. This influence leads to real, concrete effects. Coca Cola isn't forcing anyone to buy Coke, but they can influence people, and on a population level their ads can lead to more people buying Coke. The key to understanding this is to not consider the matter in terms of any one individual, but in terms of a population of people, and thinking of the influence as a statistical nudge in a particular direction.

C14L 8y ago

> data portability This is the important part. And it has to be in real time. So you could just switch from one "Social Network Access Provider" to another. Fb would just be one of them. They screw up privacy? People can just go somewhere else. Too many radical bs shows up on your timeline? Move to a provider that gives you a event stream you like. Real competition.

DougN7 8y ago
How does that work if your social graph doesn’t move with you? This reminds me of the 90’s when we had so many messenger apps - you needed different apps to talk to different people. Data portability doesn’t help that. I suppose Zuck is well aware of that.

zelon88 8y ago

Spend 10 minutes in some of the FB comment threads for a major news article and just look at all the toolbags citing Breitbart and/or Mother Jones as journalism and then come back and tell me that election integrity is media hysteria. Facebook is the only place some of these people get their "news" and Facebook does nothing to distinguish an opinion blog from an actual journalist. We have millions of people flocking to Alex Jones for information and calling into question the authenticity of Reuters. That and it's 2019 and we don't even have a secure MEANS of voting. We can make Facebook, which is probably a billion LOC with hardly any security flaws yet our voting machines have default credentials of admin/admin and run on decade old technology that has never been peer reviewed.