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Facebook documents show plans to sell access to user data discussed for years

402 points by uptown 8y ago

thepangolino 8y ago
Glad to see this out in the open.
- seattle_spring 8y ago
  Definitely! I've never seen a post on HN expose FB until now. This one post, just today. Right now.
rahuldottech 8y ago
At this point, literally nothing about this is surprising
HenryBemis 8y ago
News: Zuckerberg is a thieving lying snake. Facebook is cancer. As long as these snakes don't go to prison, this will not stop/end.
- javagram 8y ago
  According to one of the first paragraphs of the article > The company has not been accused of breaking the law. So there doesn’t seem to be any reason Zuckerberg would be going to prison.
- threeseed 8y ago
  Can we please stop with the hyperbole ? Facebook absolutely deserves to be regulated but right now nothing they or Zuckerberg has done is remotely illegal.
  - cjslep 8y ago
    Don't confuse legality with morality.
    - threeseed 8y ago
      And people should only go to prison when they commit a crime. The rule of law does not centre around who is nice or not.
      - cjslep 8y ago
        That's exactly what OP is saying: since they're not going to prison because the law lets them continue, it won't stop.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - fargo 8y ago
    Why is this downvoted?
    - nihonde 8y ago
      It’s a false conclusion. The OP is making a moral/ethical statement, and says that prison time is the only way to motivate the wrongdoers to conform. That’s different than asserting that a crime under current laws has taken place.
- dang 8y ago
  This sort of personal vitriol will get you banned on HN regardless of whom you're attacking. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, follow the rules, and make your points without stooping to that, regardless of how right you are or feel. You may not owe better to Zuckerberg or Facebook, but you owe much better to this community if you want to keep posting here.
HillRat 8y ago
I do appreciate how their “Director of Platform Partnerships” was also apparently in charge of killing platforms FB thought had become too popular. Great folks to do business with, I’m sure.
- jfk13 8y ago
  It's just how we do business in the Land of the Free, don't you know? Capitalism, markets, growth - these are the gods before whom we all must bow.
dannykwells 8y ago
Zuck literally is becoming a charicature. What a joke. Except that world democracy is at stake. Can we regulate these goons yet or what?
- chillacy 8y ago
  The Facebook killing democracy meme is flattering for technologists but imo too simplistic. In America there are a number of “democracy killers” or “this is why we have trump” in the mainstream narrative: Russia, Racism, FBI, Facebook, electoral college, etc. Let’s not forget people tilt towards economic or cultural nationalism for a reason, and it’s in our power to address those reasons directly, not chase band aid solutions.
  - umeshunni 8y ago
    "The this is why we have Trump" blame keeps shifting as long as Liberals are unable to acknowledge their own lack of empathy for their compatriots and their own failures to provide solutions that work for what ails their country.
  - netsharc 8y ago
    A quip I read says: "Of course it's totally Putin's fault that Trump won, because actually everyone in the USA loves neoliberalism deep at heart!". But Facebook became an effective tool for a "voter hacking", if you believe the coverage about Cambridge Analytica: data-mine the Facebook profiles to determine the targets (apparently as little as several thousand people in the swing states), and then use FB's targeted advertising to influence these people with videos you know will get them emotionally. Boom. Hacking elections/voting machines is illegal, but no one ever said anything about hacking the voters, right?
    - chillacy 8y ago
      Maybe, but unlike hacking voting machines (which remove voters) this scheme relies on rallying real people to go and vote. It would have been achievable with traditional campaigning methods, just more expensively. But why aren't we addressing the underlying issue of why these several thousand people in swing states thought to vote in this way? How come the mainstream response is to say "gee I wish those people hadn't voted"? I think addressing the underlying concerns would be more effective. I get that politics can be zero-sum at times but campaigning in swing states and targeting issues that those voters find important should be part of every campaign.
Grustaf 8y ago
Absolute shocker.
mgoia 8y ago
I've got Facebook smearing fatigue. I couldn't care less.
danso 8y ago
Some of these documents have been made public before late last year. All of them seem to still be related to the Six4Three lawsuit: > The documents stem from a California court case between the social network and the little-known startup Six4Three, which sued Facebook in 2015 after the company announced plans to cut off access to some types of user data. Six4Three’s app, Pikinis, which soft-launched in 2013, relied on that data to allow users to easily find photos of their friends in bathing suits.
- bryan_w 8y ago
  They noticed that there wasn't a negative Facebook story in the news cycle so they played a rerun
neves 8y ago
Please read this. This isn't just another routine news that Zuck lied and Facebook is evil. They had access to more than 4.000 previously unreleased documents. Democracy is at stake. Facebook and its subsidiaries are destroying our societies. The problem is global. Not because it is happening in a far away country you shouldn't care. You can already see the increase in Amazon deforestation due to Bolsonaro election in Brazil.
- threeseed 8y ago
  You can't blame Facebook for the rise of right wing leaders. It's been happening in US, Italy, Israel, Poland, Hungary, Phillipines and now Brazil and the trend will continue whilst those leaders offer strength, populism and can point to immigrants as the cause of society's problems.
  - whatshisface 8y ago
    Yes, and a corrupt left-wing leader could use the exact same techniques. Like the guns they put on the back of Toyota trucks in third world countries, this tracking stuff has no particular allegiance.
    - cageface 8y ago
      Promoting negative emotions is a lot easier than promoting positive emotions. To a very large degree the platform of the right is currently heavily weighted toward provoking fear and anger, negative emotions easy to stoke in people. This might change and we may have an ascendant party on the left with a primarily negative message eventually. And I'm not saying the current left never does this. But at the moment the right's playbook fits existing social media better.
      - whatshisface 8y ago
        I hope to avoid a political debate, but the left has plenty of negative messages too. The rich are too rich and don't have to pay taxes, the poor are too poor, racism never completely went away, the corporate world is unfair to women, and so on. I doubt there has ever been a political movement without any negative messages. I should add in support of your point about social media having a propensity to negativity, these negative left-leaning messages tend to spread faster than the positive ones, just like on the right wing.
duxup 8y ago
It doesn't seem there really are any rules or limits at Facebook.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
black_puppydog 8y ago
If someone from the media is reading along here: it would be nice to mention every now and again that the "grumpy old progress hating nerds" have a pretty good track record at condemning fb/google. This entire branch of news that I would maybe call "dystopia gawking" just provokes a huge "told you so" in parts of the tech community, and that would be a good thing to keep in mind during the next gold rush.
- AlexandrB 8y ago
  I wonder why people were so unwilling to accept Zuckerberg's own sentiment ("dumb fucks") about their data for years. It seems like that's basically the attitude at Facebook from the top down. Everything else is PR spin.
  - dymk 8y ago
    “Dumb fucks” is more overplayed than “Google is going to shut down <service>”. It’s FUD. Zuckerberg said that when his tiny website was open to his classmates and a few others, and hasn’t been representative of how the company functions. I seriously cant believe that it’s still a meme people use to justify their hate for Facebook.
    - AlexandrB 8y ago
      > Zuckerberg said that when his tiny website was open to his classmates and a few others, and hasn’t been representative of how the company functions. How can you claim that in the context of the revelations from this article? Seems like the company functions exactly like we're all "dumb fucks". And why do you think his attitude would change to be more egalitarian as his success and power increased? Edit: > I seriously cant believe that it’s still a meme people use to justify their hate for Facebook. It's not a meme. It's the founder and CEO of a company that holds the private data of >2B users telling us exactly how he feels about his users' expectations of privacy. Since then Facebook has only experienced growth and success. What event in Mark Zuckerberg's professional life could have significantly challenged this attitude do you think? It's been all positive feedback loops until recently.
AlexandrB 8y ago
> “As we’ve said many times, Six4Three — creators of the Pikinis app — cherry picked these documents from years ago as part of a lawsuit to force Facebook to share information on friends of the app's users,” Paul Grewal, vice president and deputy general counsel at Facebook, said in a statement released by the company. > “The set of documents, by design, tells only one side of the story and omits important context. ...” Seems like an easy problem to solve. Release the documents that provide the "important context". Unless they're even more damning or don't exist...
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- SpicyLemonZest 8y ago
  They've already made it clear that (they claim) the overall framing was user privacy. Maybe they're lying, but if they aren't I don't know what further context they could provide.
  - JohnFen 8y ago
    There has been so much lying on these topics (not only from Facebook) that what the companies claim means little unless they can support the claim with evidence.
mariushn 8y ago
How many of the commenters here still use WhatsApp? Did you try switching you & friends to Signal?
- y-c-o-m-b 8y ago
  I use it. Yes I've tried. They don't want to switch :/
  - thekyle 8y ago
    Same with me, apparently being able to change the background of chats is an "essential feature".
    - asark 8y ago
      Certain People in One's Life may be incapable of correctly addressing their messages without this feature, so yeah, it's pretty important.
    - monetus 8y ago
      You joke, but, if a user can't spend time making something pretty then complaints are probably inbound. I think its a silly tradeoff for privacy. People associate emotion with everything though, and a communication app seems like a logical place people would want to set the mood.
  - dmlittle 8y ago
    Wire has a much better experience than Signal but then it's yet another switch... :/
- chaosite 8y ago
  I had more success switching them over to Telegram. I'd prefer Signal, obviously, but I'll take what I can.
- CharlesColeman 8y ago
  > How many of the commenters here still use WhatsApp? Did you try switching you & friends to Signal? I no longer use WhatsApp, and I have switched most of the people I text with over to Signal. I don't know if they use it with others, but they certainly use it with me.
hackinthebochs 8y ago
>Facebook gave Amazon extended access to user data because it was... partnering with the social network on the launch of its Fire smartphone. So is this yet another case of the media being incapable of distinguishing between transferring of data to third parties and displaying data on devices as an agent of the user, i.e. for the purpose of providing an integrated facebook experience? Until the media shows itself to be capable of making that distinction, I can't take these articles seriously.
- b_tterc_p 8y ago
  You’re quote doesn’t really prove that it was just giving access to amazon devices. Could go either way, no?
  - SpicyLemonZest 8y ago
    Every other time the issue has come up, it's turned out that "access to user data" meant that the third party was allowed to ask the user for access to their data. In principle this could be the first time Facebook actually just tossed database dumps at Amazon, and in principle Amazon might have abused the access to steal user data for themselves. But neither of those possibilities seem likely or are supported by the described evidence.
    - basch 8y ago
      The only real one I can remember off the top of my head, where facebook giving access to data didnt turn out to be userbase hands over data on themselves and friend, was the Netflix and some others getting access to private messages. And even there, it wasnt nefarious, it was facebook trying to extend people features, like being able to send their friends spotify songs. https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/18/18147616/facebook-user-data-giveaway-nyt-apple-amazon-spotify-netflix https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/18/18147616/facebook-user-d...
    - mancerayder 8y ago
      Every other time the issue has come up, it's turned out that "access to user data" meant that the third party was allowed to ask the user for access to their data. Allowed to ask the user? Can you unwrap that for us?
socrates1998 8y ago
Zuck is a massive liar and a corrupt businessman. The guy had to pay millions and millions of dollars because he stole Facebook's original idea. And he tried to screw the co-founder out of the hundreds of millions of dollars. When you found a company on fraud and lies, there is no way it's ever going to be a non-evil company. It's surprising to me how people haven't known this since he lost his first lawsuit.
socialhack3r 8y ago
Folks should check out this article that explains how Facebook intentionally did not pass along privacy metadata to developers. Shows how a lot of the so called "breaches" happened. Hint: they weren't breaches, it was privacy violation by design. https://medium.com/@six4three/deceit-by-design-zucks-dirty-secret-he-doesn-t-want-you-to-know-67dcc94e2b5d https://medium.com/@six4three/deceit-by-design-zucks-dirty-s...
lifehacked 8y ago
They should arrest Zuckerberger, I'd like to see RICO applied within the ranks of a single corporation, epic trial.
- Balgair 8y ago
  I'll let Popehat handle this one: https://www.popehat.com/2016/06/14/lawsplainer-its-not-rico-dammit/ https://www.popehat.com/2016/06/14/lawsplainer-its-not-rico-...
sonnyblarney 8y ago
There is a world of difference between literally selling user data to whoever for money, and providing API access so that users of other platforms can chose to share their own data with that platform. The journalists lately are doing us all a huge disservice by conflating the two. I haven't seen any evidence at all that FB was selling user data. I've posted here a couple times on this issue, having been personally involved on the other side of the table in one of these 'deals' - and it was only ever a matter of getting our app integrated into FB so that our users could access their own data. We didn't use any of the data, though some 3rd parties would then have access to that data and do whatever with it, but only with it with the permission of the users. The article doesn't provide specifics, but from what I can gather, this really is about 'special API access', and shouldn't be frame as 'FB sharing user data'. This is simply unfair to FB however we might think of them because it misrepresents the issue. In short: FB has publicly available APIs which 3rd parties can use to allow their users to do some integration. Some of those APIs provide quite a bit of access, and so there's reasonable discussion about 'who' they should give access to. It's also perfectly reasonable that FB wanted to sell access to such APIs, or to have some kind of reciprocity. VISA, Mastercard and AMEX are out there selling your data (on the aggregate, down to the zip code) to whoever wants to buy it, which is far worse and in many cases may theoretically compromise your identity. FB has a lot to answer for, surely, but the information needs to be more clearly communicated. Sometimes, I'm not even sure if the journalists understand what is going on.
- chillacy 8y ago
  Law of headlines: if it bleeds it leads... To get crisp, selling data is selling the keys to the kingdom, it would remove FB's need to exist. There are strong economic motivations to not go out of business.
OrgNet 8y ago
The current title of the article is: Mark Zuckerberg leveraged Facebook user data to fight rivals and help friends, leaked documents show
3xblah 8y ago
"The facts are clear: we've never sold people's data." - Paul Grewal, VP and Assoc. Gen. Counsel, Facebook Yeah, but that is not what is being alleged. What is being alleged is that you sell access to people's data. This constant recitation of "We do not sell users' data" is like being in late stage litigation where each party's lawyers have chosen their respective arguments. They will cling to them no matter what happens, repeating them ad nauseum until the end. Facebook's argument is "We do not sell people's data". The issue however is not selling people's data. As such, this is not an argument. It is just misdirection. The issue is selling access to people's data. Maybe we could call this "licensing"? Maybe it is more desirable for Facebook to license access to people's data than to sell it. "People's data" might be their friends list, or whatever they have uploaded or contributed to Zuckerberg's website. Facebook's lawyers will not address the issue of selling access to people's data. The reason is clear: they do not have a winning argument. Then we have the matter of metadata. Facebook will let a user download their data, but not their metadata. All that data on her usage patterns on facebook.com and across the web that Facebook collects 24/7/365, e.g. via "Like" beacons and "Sign-In with Facebook". If a user downloads her data from Facebook it does not tell her anything she didn't already know. It is simply the data she submitted to Zuckerberg. But of course he has much more data about her that she is not allowed to see. The question is, "Why not?"
- smallgovt 8y ago
  I agree Facebook is playing word games, but I think that misses the larger point. That is, Facebook is not selling access to people's data as understood by the lay person. The average person interprets "Facebook sells access to your data" as meaning that someone can pay Facebook to access your individual data. e.g. What sites did 3xblah, specifically, visit last week? This isn't how Facebook's ecosystem works. Advertisers can only target users in large groups. And, there's no way for advertisers to query Facebook's servers for the personal data of a specific user. If you explain exactly what Facebook is doing to the average person they simply don't care (even if you explain all the potential risks to their personal security).
  - averageperson 8y ago
musicale 8y ago
The whole point of Facebook's social graph API is to get access to user data. Usually without permission or consent.

402 points by uptown 8y ago

thepangolino 8y ago

Glad to see this out in the open.

seattle_spring 8y ago
Definitely! I've never seen a post on HN expose FB until now. This one post, just today. Right now.

rahuldottech 8y ago

At this point, literally nothing about this is surprising

HenryBemis 8y ago

News: Zuckerberg is a thieving lying snake. Facebook is cancer. As long as these snakes don't go to prison, this will not stop/end.

javagram 8y ago
According to one of the first paragraphs of the article > The company has not been accused of breaking the law. So there doesn’t seem to be any reason Zuckerberg would be going to prison.
threeseed 8y ago
Can we please stop with the hyperbole ? Facebook absolutely deserves to be regulated but right now nothing they or Zuckerberg has done is remotely illegal.
- cjslep 8y ago
  Don't confuse legality with morality.
  - threeseed 8y ago
    And people should only go to prison when they commit a crime. The rule of law does not centre around who is nice or not.
    - cjslep 8y ago
      That's exactly what OP is saying: since they're not going to prison because the law lets them continue, it won't stop.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- fargo 8y ago
  Why is this downvoted?
  - nihonde 8y ago
    It’s a false conclusion. The OP is making a moral/ethical statement, and says that prison time is the only way to motivate the wrongdoers to conform. That’s different than asserting that a crime under current laws has taken place.
dang 8y ago
This sort of personal vitriol will get you banned on HN regardless of whom you're attacking. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, follow the rules, and make your points without stooping to that, regardless of how right you are or feel. You may not owe better to Zuckerberg or Facebook, but you owe much better to this community if you want to keep posting here.

HillRat 8y ago

I do appreciate how their “Director of Platform Partnerships” was also apparently in charge of killing platforms FB thought had become too popular. Great folks to do business with, I’m sure.

jfk13 8y ago
It's just how we do business in the Land of the Free, don't you know? Capitalism, markets, growth - these are the gods before whom we all must bow.

dannykwells 8y ago

Zuck literally is becoming a charicature. What a joke. Except that world democracy is at stake. Can we regulate these goons yet or what?

chillacy 8y ago
The Facebook killing democracy meme is flattering for technologists but imo too simplistic. In America there are a number of “democracy killers” or “this is why we have trump” in the mainstream narrative: Russia, Racism, FBI, Facebook, electoral college, etc. Let’s not forget people tilt towards economic or cultural nationalism for a reason, and it’s in our power to address those reasons directly, not chase band aid solutions.
- umeshunni 8y ago
  "The this is why we have Trump" blame keeps shifting as long as Liberals are unable to acknowledge their own lack of empathy for their compatriots and their own failures to provide solutions that work for what ails their country.
- netsharc 8y ago
  A quip I read says: "Of course it's totally Putin's fault that Trump won, because actually everyone in the USA loves neoliberalism deep at heart!". But Facebook became an effective tool for a "voter hacking", if you believe the coverage about Cambridge Analytica: data-mine the Facebook profiles to determine the targets (apparently as little as several thousand people in the swing states), and then use FB's targeted advertising to influence these people with videos you know will get them emotionally. Boom. Hacking elections/voting machines is illegal, but no one ever said anything about hacking the voters, right?
  - chillacy 8y ago
    Maybe, but unlike hacking voting machines (which remove voters) this scheme relies on rallying real people to go and vote. It would have been achievable with traditional campaigning methods, just more expensively. But why aren't we addressing the underlying issue of why these several thousand people in swing states thought to vote in this way? How come the mainstream response is to say "gee I wish those people hadn't voted"? I think addressing the underlying concerns would be more effective. I get that politics can be zero-sum at times but campaigning in swing states and targeting issues that those voters find important should be part of every campaign.

Grustaf 8y ago

Absolute shocker.

mgoia 8y ago

I've got Facebook smearing fatigue. I couldn't care less.

danso 8y ago

Some of these documents have been made public before late last year. All of them seem to still be related to the Six4Three lawsuit: > The documents stem from a California court case between the social network and the little-known startup Six4Three, which sued Facebook in 2015 after the company announced plans to cut off access to some types of user data. Six4Three’s app, Pikinis, which soft-launched in 2013, relied on that data to allow users to easily find photos of their friends in bathing suits.

bryan_w 8y ago
They noticed that there wasn't a negative Facebook story in the news cycle so they played a rerun

neves 8y ago

Please read this. This isn't just another routine news that Zuck lied and Facebook is evil. They had access to more than 4.000 previously unreleased documents. Democracy is at stake. Facebook and its subsidiaries are destroying our societies. The problem is global. Not because it is happening in a far away country you shouldn't care. You can already see the increase in Amazon deforestation due to Bolsonaro election in Brazil.

threeseed 8y ago
You can't blame Facebook for the rise of right wing leaders. It's been happening in US, Italy, Israel, Poland, Hungary, Phillipines and now Brazil and the trend will continue whilst those leaders offer strength, populism and can point to immigrants as the cause of society's problems.
- whatshisface 8y ago
  Yes, and a corrupt left-wing leader could use the exact same techniques. Like the guns they put on the back of Toyota trucks in third world countries, this tracking stuff has no particular allegiance.
  - cageface 8y ago
    Promoting negative emotions is a lot easier than promoting positive emotions. To a very large degree the platform of the right is currently heavily weighted toward provoking fear and anger, negative emotions easy to stoke in people. This might change and we may have an ascendant party on the left with a primarily negative message eventually. And I'm not saying the current left never does this. But at the moment the right's playbook fits existing social media better.
    - whatshisface 8y ago
      I hope to avoid a political debate, but the left has plenty of negative messages too. The rich are too rich and don't have to pay taxes, the poor are too poor, racism never completely went away, the corporate world is unfair to women, and so on. I doubt there has ever been a political movement without any negative messages. I should add in support of your point about social media having a propensity to negativity, these negative left-leaning messages tend to spread faster than the positive ones, just like on the right wing.

duxup 8y ago

It doesn't seem there really are any rules or limits at Facebook.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

black_puppydog 8y ago

If someone from the media is reading along here: it would be nice to mention every now and again that the "grumpy old progress hating nerds" have a pretty good track record at condemning fb/google. This entire branch of news that I would maybe call "dystopia gawking" just provokes a huge "told you so" in parts of the tech community, and that would be a good thing to keep in mind during the next gold rush.

AlexandrB 8y ago
I wonder why people were so unwilling to accept Zuckerberg's own sentiment ("dumb fucks") about their data for years. It seems like that's basically the attitude at Facebook from the top down. Everything else is PR spin.
- dymk 8y ago
  “Dumb fucks” is more overplayed than “Google is going to shut down <service>”. It’s FUD. Zuckerberg said that when his tiny website was open to his classmates and a few others, and hasn’t been representative of how the company functions. I seriously cant believe that it’s still a meme people use to justify their hate for Facebook.
  - AlexandrB 8y ago
    > Zuckerberg said that when his tiny website was open to his classmates and a few others, and hasn’t been representative of how the company functions. How can you claim that in the context of the revelations from this article? Seems like the company functions exactly like we're all "dumb fucks". And why do you think his attitude would change to be more egalitarian as his success and power increased? Edit: > I seriously cant believe that it’s still a meme people use to justify their hate for Facebook. It's not a meme. It's the founder and CEO of a company that holds the private data of >2B users telling us exactly how he feels about his users' expectations of privacy. Since then Facebook has only experienced growth and success. What event in Mark Zuckerberg's professional life could have significantly challenged this attitude do you think? It's been all positive feedback loops until recently.

AlexandrB 8y ago

> “As we’ve said many times, Six4Three — creators of the Pikinis app — cherry picked these documents from years ago as part of a lawsuit to force Facebook to share information on friends of the app's users,” Paul Grewal, vice president and deputy general counsel at Facebook, said in a statement released by the company. > “The set of documents, by design, tells only one side of the story and omits important context. ...” Seems like an easy problem to solve. Release the documents that provide the "important context". Unless they're even more damning or don't exist...

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
SpicyLemonZest 8y ago
They've already made it clear that (they claim) the overall framing was user privacy. Maybe they're lying, but if they aren't I don't know what further context they could provide.
- JohnFen 8y ago
  There has been so much lying on these topics (not only from Facebook) that what the companies claim means little unless they can support the claim with evidence.

mariushn 8y ago

How many of the commenters here still use WhatsApp? Did you try switching you & friends to Signal?

y-c-o-m-b 8y ago
I use it. Yes I've tried. They don't want to switch :/
- thekyle 8y ago
  Same with me, apparently being able to change the background of chats is an "essential feature".
  - asark 8y ago
    Certain People in One's Life may be incapable of correctly addressing their messages without this feature, so yeah, it's pretty important.
  - monetus 8y ago
    You joke, but, if a user can't spend time making something pretty then complaints are probably inbound. I think its a silly tradeoff for privacy. People associate emotion with everything though, and a communication app seems like a logical place people would want to set the mood.
- dmlittle 8y ago
  Wire has a much better experience than Signal but then it's yet another switch... :/
chaosite 8y ago
I had more success switching them over to Telegram. I'd prefer Signal, obviously, but I'll take what I can.
CharlesColeman 8y ago
> How many of the commenters here still use WhatsApp? Did you try switching you & friends to Signal? I no longer use WhatsApp, and I have switched most of the people I text with over to Signal. I don't know if they use it with others, but they certainly use it with me.

hackinthebochs 8y ago

>Facebook gave Amazon extended access to user data because it was... partnering with the social network on the launch of its Fire smartphone. So is this yet another case of the media being incapable of distinguishing between transferring of data to third parties and displaying data on devices as an agent of the user, i.e. for the purpose of providing an integrated facebook experience? Until the media shows itself to be capable of making that distinction, I can't take these articles seriously.

b_tterc_p 8y ago
You’re quote doesn’t really prove that it was just giving access to amazon devices. Could go either way, no?
- SpicyLemonZest 8y ago
  Every other time the issue has come up, it's turned out that "access to user data" meant that the third party was allowed to ask the user for access to their data. In principle this could be the first time Facebook actually just tossed database dumps at Amazon, and in principle Amazon might have abused the access to steal user data for themselves. But neither of those possibilities seem likely or are supported by the described evidence.
  - basch 8y ago
    The only real one I can remember off the top of my head, where facebook giving access to data didnt turn out to be userbase hands over data on themselves and friend, was the Netflix and some others getting access to private messages. And even there, it wasnt nefarious, it was facebook trying to extend people features, like being able to send their friends spotify songs. https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/18/18147616/facebook-user-data-giveaway-nyt-apple-amazon-spotify-netflix https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/18/18147616/facebook-user-d...
  - mancerayder 8y ago
    Every other time the issue has come up, it's turned out that "access to user data" meant that the third party was allowed to ask the user for access to their data. Allowed to ask the user? Can you unwrap that for us?

socrates1998 8y ago

Zuck is a massive liar and a corrupt businessman. The guy had to pay millions and millions of dollars because he stole Facebook's original idea. And he tried to screw the co-founder out of the hundreds of millions of dollars. When you found a company on fraud and lies, there is no way it's ever going to be a non-evil company. It's surprising to me how people haven't known this since he lost his first lawsuit.

socialhack3r 8y ago

Folks should check out this article that explains how Facebook intentionally did not pass along privacy metadata to developers. Shows how a lot of the so called "breaches" happened. Hint: they weren't breaches, it was privacy violation by design. https://medium.com/@six4three/deceit-by-design-zucks-dirty-secret-he-doesn-t-want-you-to-know-67dcc94e2b5d https://medium.com/@six4three/deceit-by-design-zucks-dirty-s...

lifehacked 8y ago

They should arrest Zuckerberger, I'd like to see RICO applied within the ranks of a single corporation, epic trial.

Balgair 8y ago
I'll let Popehat handle this one: https://www.popehat.com/2016/06/14/lawsplainer-its-not-rico-dammit/ https://www.popehat.com/2016/06/14/lawsplainer-its-not-rico-...

sonnyblarney 8y ago

There is a world of difference between literally selling user data to whoever for money, and providing API access so that users of other platforms can chose to share their own data with that platform. The journalists lately are doing us all a huge disservice by conflating the two. I haven't seen any evidence at all that FB was selling user data. I've posted here a couple times on this issue, having been personally involved on the other side of the table in one of these 'deals' - and it was only ever a matter of getting our app integrated into FB so that our users could access their own data. We didn't use any of the data, though some 3rd parties would then have access to that data and do whatever with it, but only with it with the permission of the users. The article doesn't provide specifics, but from what I can gather, this really is about 'special API access', and shouldn't be frame as 'FB sharing user data'. This is simply unfair to FB however we might think of them because it misrepresents the issue. In short: FB has publicly available APIs which 3rd parties can use to allow their users to do some integration. Some of those APIs provide quite a bit of access, and so there's reasonable discussion about 'who' they should give access to. It's also perfectly reasonable that FB wanted to sell access to such APIs, or to have some kind of reciprocity. VISA, Mastercard and AMEX are out there selling your data (on the aggregate, down to the zip code) to whoever wants to buy it, which is far worse and in many cases may theoretically compromise your identity. FB has a lot to answer for, surely, but the information needs to be more clearly communicated. Sometimes, I'm not even sure if the journalists understand what is going on.

chillacy 8y ago
Law of headlines: if it bleeds it leads... To get crisp, selling data is selling the keys to the kingdom, it would remove FB's need to exist. There are strong economic motivations to not go out of business.

OrgNet 8y ago

The current title of the article is: Mark Zuckerberg leveraged Facebook user data to fight rivals and help friends, leaked documents show

3xblah 8y ago

"The facts are clear: we've never sold people's data." - Paul Grewal, VP and Assoc. Gen. Counsel, Facebook Yeah, but that is not what is being alleged. What is being alleged is that you sell access to people's data. This constant recitation of "We do not sell users' data" is like being in late stage litigation where each party's lawyers have chosen their respective arguments. They will cling to them no matter what happens, repeating them ad nauseum until the end. Facebook's argument is "We do not sell people's data". The issue however is not selling people's data. As such, this is not an argument. It is just misdirection. The issue is selling access to people's data. Maybe we could call this "licensing"? Maybe it is more desirable for Facebook to license access to people's data than to sell it. "People's data" might be their friends list, or whatever they have uploaded or contributed to Zuckerberg's website. Facebook's lawyers will not address the issue of selling access to people's data. The reason is clear: they do not have a winning argument. Then we have the matter of metadata. Facebook will let a user download their data, but not their metadata. All that data on her usage patterns on facebook.com and across the web that Facebook collects 24/7/365, e.g. via "Like" beacons and "Sign-In with Facebook". If a user downloads her data from Facebook it does not tell her anything she didn't already know. It is simply the data she submitted to Zuckerberg. But of course he has much more data about her that she is not allowed to see. The question is, "Why not?"

smallgovt 8y ago
I agree Facebook is playing word games, but I think that misses the larger point. That is, Facebook is not selling access to people's data as understood by the lay person. The average person interprets "Facebook sells access to your data" as meaning that someone can pay Facebook to access your individual data. e.g. What sites did 3xblah, specifically, visit last week? This isn't how Facebook's ecosystem works. Advertisers can only target users in large groups. And, there's no way for advertisers to query Facebook's servers for the personal data of a specific user. If you explain exactly what Facebook is doing to the average person they simply don't care (even if you explain all the potential risks to their personal security).
- averageperson 8y ago

musicale 8y ago

The whole point of Facebook's social graph API is to get access to user data. Usually without permission or consent.