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I'll bite. Worked at FB for a couple of years, until very recently. The HN groupthink on the company is quite strong, reaching conspiracy theory levels in some

I'll bite. Worked at FB for a couple of years, until very recently. The HN groupthink on the company is quite strong, reaching conspiracy theory levels in some cases. Thing is, 95% of users (which is like, half the world) either do not know or care about the latest controversy. Personally, I just do not buy into this "Facebook is evil" narrative, and even less so having worked there. Social media holds a mirror up to society, and we don't like what we see there. It's not our fault, it's Facebook's! So screams the press that is losing subscribers to new forms of media. Is FB sometimes incompetent? Sure (who isn't at that scale). Could they do things better? Of course. Are they trying to? Absolutely (the cynics would never admit this point, but it's true, e.g. the amount of resources and cross-company efforts thrown at improving privacy is incredible). From my perspective, Facebook (and WhatsApp, and Oculus) have added a lot more to my life than they have taken away. My family and friends are all on Facebook, so clearly they feel similarly. Internally, there are indeed plenty of smart, empowered people that also haven't bought into the doom and gloom of what, ultimately, is a loud minority. I fully recognize that my priorities might be different from those of others. Or perhaps they are impacted by the negatives differently. All opinions have their place, and I don't mean to speak for all employees either, just sharing my own point of view.

2pEXgD0fZ5cF 6y ago
> Social media holds a mirror up to society This would only really be the case without algorithmic influence on discoverability and what people get shown on Facebook. "Engagement" being one of the keyword here, which very much morphs this "reflection". Facebook might technically be a mirror, but if it is, it is one of those curved distorting ones you used to see at carnivals and fairs.
- throwawei369 6y ago
  Not in support of the above poster's views btw, but I think he gave the analogy in a broader sense. Your take on this mirror analogy is from a micro-level. I still think looking at FB from a birds-eye view, the society mirror assessment is fairly accurate.
- romanhn 6y ago
  That is a fair point, though in the sense of "mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all". People end up in bubbles because they're most receptive to particular type of content and that is what they end up engaging with. But yes, if it was up to me, I would kill the Share button and get an unfiltered view of my connections' updates, like in the early days.
  - bopbeepboop 6y ago
    This isn’t true: Facebook allows people to target the viewers with weaponized psychology to prime that feedback loop. Further, the loops are meant to steer emotions by reordering content — something no user asked for when FB conducted its human experiments on emotional manipulation. It’s simply not true that the algorithm “reflects” what users want or interact with — it purposefully injects FB’s biases via nudges and their customers biases via weaponized psychology inserts. I think it’s telling the people defending FB’s conduct can’t be honest about what that conduct is.
- ummonk 6y ago
  Exactly. Arguably the algorithms are optimized for engagement, but it’s like saying opioids hold a mirror to society because so many who try them keep seeking them out.
matkoniecz 6y ago
> Could they do things better? Of course. Are they trying to? Absolutely (the cynics would never admit this point, but it's true, e.g. the amount of resources and cross-company efforts thrown at improving privacy is incredible). What about things like lying that phone numbers for SMS authentication will not be used for other purposes? What about mental gymnastics to work around legal obligations that are privacy related. EU regulations require allowing users to get their data in readable form - what FB is doing? Claiming that data is too complex, impossible to provide in readable form and therefore they are legally forbidden from exporting most of it. FB listed targeted advertisements as their obligations, and claims that as result they do not need user consent to spy on them as it is their legal obligation. Maybe FB is mirror but they are busy mirroring nastiest - and the most profitable - parts. For me their supposed attempts seem to be rather a smokescreen to me.
- romanhn 6y ago
  Look, my goal here is not to be an apologist for Facebook, a company that I told in my exit interview that I would not consider joining them again (for entirely different reasons). Nor do I want to be convincing anyone that they're wrong. In fact, in some ways you are right. But at the same time, realize that Facebook is not some giant monolith. These are thousands of teams, working in a highly bottoms-up, impact-oriented culture. I read a comment earlier about engineering at scale and how it's a people problem - that's 100% it. People are not infallible, they make mistakes. What I did not see during my tenure there is any malicious intent, people genuinely wanted to build a valuable product and make broken stuff better. Again, my localized experience only. From what I recall (could be wrong here, not first-hand knowledge), the SMS thing was a decision made by a single team ages ago, before privacy was at the forefront. It was a bad decision, but ultimately a technical detail lost in a sea of other technical details. The solution being worked on presently is a systemic one, that ideally would prevent this sort of thing in the future (though the realist in me is skeptical).
  - teachingassist 6y ago
    > From what I recall (could be wrong here, not first-hand knowledge), the SMS thing was a decision made by a single team ages ago I have worked in a tiny charitable organisation, where it was easily understood that if we collected user telephone numbers, there would be constant pressure to use them for other purposes. And, therefore, that we didn't have the capacity to honestly and securely promise to users that we and our future replacements would use them only for one purpose. This is not a failure of one team "before privacy was at the forefront" (when?). It's a systemic failure of multiple teams and of Facebook's culture of constant privacy infringement and misdirection. That this implicit promise to users was made so lightly and not considered important enough to follow through on. As such, it's a breach of contract which I hope is picked up legally.
hrktb 6y ago
Over time I came to compare facebook with the car culture. It plays a central role to a ton of people’s lives, provides a widely needed service to communities and allows some lifestyle that wouldn’t be possible otherwise. But with a incredible amount of casualties and second/third order negative effects on the whole environment. The debate will always be “is it worth it ?”. As we dial back on car presence in a lot of situation and try to counterbalance all the lobbying and bullshit that has been thrown at us by the industry for several decades, I see us coming to the same point with ad based/attention based industries. It’s not “evil”, but needs a crazy amount of adjustment to come to a healthy point were the benefits are not drowned into societal pollution and casualties.
- bertil 6y ago
  Car companies have had many documented effort to kill control and mitigation efforts. Most debate are fairly straightforward and aligned: less pollution, less death from speed. And they have done very little in that direction. Facebook aggressively tries to mitigate issues, but struggles to get its critic to admit that they can’t ask for more interoperability in one sentence and more privacy in the next; for more freedom to say what you please and more control of unacceptable speech; for respect for local mores and universally understandable rules. Facebook employees are constantly trying to argue for nuance, offering solutions and getting downvoted and silenced because Facebook=Bad. Find me one employee of a car company willing to breath from a the exhaust of an ICE. Even suggesting you might rightfully gets you sent to a psych ward on suicide watch. But we can make cars non-polluting, they just chose not to; they refused so hard that electric cars, a technology that is a century old was presented as inconceivable until they started loosing sales to a weirdo a little too much fan of anime. What every employee of a traditional car company can easily conceive, and is very keen willing to excuse is a slimy tale of Union reps and executives paying prostitutes to convince Environment authorities to look the other way when they evade basic pollution control (seriously, the VW scandal is dark and human trafficking isn’t the bottom of it). Talk to your local oil & gas executive about “human rights violation as a cost of doing business in certain part of the world”. All that the cost of dozens of millionth of people dying of respiratory complications, and billions risking environmental disaster. How to have fewer than a million people killed in accidents every year? There’s many way, but a very easy one would be to prevent cars from driving faster than maximum speed limit on a highway. It’s an elementary tool. Find me one employee from a car company who wouldn’t laugh you out of the room for suggesting it. “Nobody would accept to not be able to repeatedly break the law if that meant we could save millions of lives.” There is nothing in common with that nightmare and the debate around the legibility of privacy controls, or the rate of false positive on automated translations used for violent content detection when dealing with non-Ascii language.
deleted 6y ago
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panic 6y ago
> Is FB sometimes incompetent? Sure (who isn't at that scale). Could they do things better? Of course. Are they trying to? Absolutely (the cynics would never admit this point, but it's true, e.g. the amount of resources and cross-company efforts thrown at improving privacy is incredible). This type of argument is made over and over on behalf of harmful institutions. The police sometimes screw up, but everyone makes mistakes. Cars (as a sibling comment points out) sometimes kill people, but that's just a fact of life, and car safety improves every year. In each case, the institution's responsibility for harm is deflected by the argument that the institution, in its current form, can't exist without doing some amount of harm. Not considered is the possibility that the institution could fundamentally change forms or stop existing entirely.
- HenryBemis 6y ago
  I will take this argument and transpose it in Banking. A heavily regulated industry. Are there TONS of data for an individual? Financial data, demographics (themselves and their family), tax-IDs, social security numbers, where they live, where they shop, how much they spend, do they have a subscription on "heterosexual-intercourse" website? do they have a subscription on "same-sex-intercourse" website? do they have a subscription on "donkey-sex-show" website? (think "Clerks"), Spotify, tickets to Metallica concerts vs Opera, Netflix, hotels, airtickets, restaurants, bars, you-name-it. A bank has this and so much more information through bank account transactions, card (credit/debit) transactions, mobile phone app data collection, KYC, etc. I don't remember a Bank losing the data that "Henry likes donkey sex shows". Perhaps there is a naughty admin stalking the current/ex partner misusing their work-related system account privileges but that admin won't leak the data of 100000 clients. Yes the bank doesn't have a photo of you in a political rally, but they see you spend £€$100 supporting XYZ politican or political party, or you bought a hotdog 1mile/km from that park where X politician had a speech. How come companies like FB keep making one mistake after another, on OUR expense and the excuse is "ooops I did it again" (they played with our data). At some point the excuses need to cease and they need to get their stuff in a right order, or be shut down. Edit: rewrote some words/phrases for clarity.
  - yeetman21 6y ago
halfmatthalfcat 6y ago
I completely agree, re: HN paranoia around FB. I feel like the engineers lose their minds (speaking as one) and need the FB boogieman to exist. Is there no room for the (very plausible) explanation that a group of people had benevolent intent yet the wheels fell off when they didn't understand the scale of what they were working with? This happens all the time at work for many of us, we underestimate scale and shit breaks. I don't know why the same logic can't be applied to Facebook, albeit taken to the extreme, being one of the biggest data hoarders on the planet.
tobr 6y ago
> Is FB sometimes incompetent? Sure (who isn't at that scale). Do you mean to imply that we should be more forgiving of Facebook because of the scale you operate at? I feel like it’s the exact opposite. You very aggressively sought to grow to that scale, it’s not something that just happened to you. With that should come an immense sense of responsibility, but instead Facebook has stepped up with reckless behavior, lies and manipulation. > the cynics would never admit this point, but it's true, e.g. the amount of resources and cross-company efforts thrown at improving privacy is incredible Sure, call me a cynic. But I imagine this is where your perspective as an employee might be distorted. From the inside it might look like there’s a lot of effort put into something like this, but from the outside it’s clear it’s nowhere near enough.
- panic 6y ago
  > From the inside it might look like there’s a lot of effort put into something like this, but from the outside it’s clear it’s nowhere near enough. I actually do believe it. The thing is, no matter how much work the privacy people put in, it will never be enough to solve Facebook's privacy problems. The problems are fundamental to the way Facebook works as a product. It's a pattern you see in many places: 1. Identify a fundamental problem your organization causes. 2. Form a team responsible for fixing this problem. 3. Make sure this team is organizationally separate from the teams actually doing the work. 4. Give this team lots of resources and have them share whatever progress they manage to make. What will happen is that this team will be able to make some improvements. Whenever someone criticizes you, you can point to these improvements and say (completely honestly) that the team is doing the best they can. Meanwhile, the core of your organization is protected. Any changes that would threaten the processes that sustain the organization itself can be written off as unrealistic. EDIT: I should add that this pattern can appear without any malicious intent -- it's natural (though perhaps naive) to think a "privacy team" is the right way to solve privacy problems in one's organization. But we owe it to ourselves to be honest about what is really happening. Not just for Facebook's sake, but also for the sake of any organization which models itself after Facebook. Without an understanding of how this stuff works, organizations will end up reproducing Facebook's fundamental problems (privacy and otherwise) while believing those problems have been solved.
mike00632 6y ago
Quick reminder that Facebook knowingly facilitated a genocide of the Rohingya people.
- disgruntledphd2 6y ago
  Did radio knowingly facilitate the Rwandan genocide?
  - mike00632 6y ago
    "Radio" is not a company that profited off the genocide and looked the other way when it happened.
    - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
      No, but it's the closest modern equivalent. A communication medium is used to facilitate bad activity, so clearly the correct thing to do is to blame the communication medium. I'm sure Myanmar was full of shiny happy people before Facebook got there, after all \s.
      - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
        > profited off the genocide Also, it's ludicrous to believe that FB actually make any money of Myanmar. They make money from serving ads to the developed world, not poor developing countries.
- bertil 6y ago
  No, that’s a lie. The local junta used Facebook like they would have used any convenient mode of communication. Facebook wasn’t able to detect it because of a complex issue involving automated translation of non-Ascii languages. They were concerning reports and the relevant team reached out to their contact in the country, the wife of a senior executive and _a Nobel prize recipient_ who both personally denied that anything wrong was happening. The company scrambled to get more context but didn’t have translators willing to tell them the truth because… well there’s an uncomfortable correlation between people speaking Burmese and people who thing Rohingya deserve respect. As soon as the reality was clear, the company acknowledged that they made a mistake in trusting local authorities, not investing more in non-standard software tools and piled on their investment on detecting such project. You can compare that to how much Toyota cares about their logo being at the back on the technical on every photo featuring genocidal warlords and terrorist groups.
BlueTemplar 6y ago
These days, one of the main - if not the main - cause of Facebook's (and other GAFAM's) evilness is simply that they have gotten too big.
FabHK 6y ago
> Social media holds a mirror up to society, and we don't like what we see there. Well yes, we humans have flaws. Now, there are some institutions, habits, and organisations that ameliorate these flaws and enable us to become better versions of ourselves ("better angels of our nature"). And then there are things that prey on our baser motives, pander to them, exacerbate them, and profit from it. And Facebook is surely among them. Is Facebook only possible because our flawed nature? Sure. Does that exculpate it? No.
jacquesm 6y ago
> Personally, I just do not buy into this "Facebook is evil" narrative, and even less so having worked there. Of course you don't. To buy in to the 'Facebook is evil' concept you'd have to see yourself as part of the problem and chances are that you would never do that. Personally, I think Facebook could be good, and probably is good for many people. But I also see the dark side and the downside (shadowprofiles, for instance, a large collection of dark patterns trying to rope people in and to keep them there, the walled garden that it tries to be). It's AOL reimaged, and when AOL went the way of the Dodo I was quite happy. If I had the choice between working on Facebook or on anything else I would pick the anything else option, because even if Facebook isn't even per-se I strongly believe that it is a net negative and its leadership disgusts me.
- bertil 6y ago
  There are no shadow profiles.
  - hobs 6y ago
    Just because zuck says it isnt real doesn't make it so. 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-... https://theconversation.com/shadow-profiles-facebook-knows-about-you-even-if-youre-not-on-facebook-94804 https://theconversation.com/shadow-profiles-facebook-knows-a... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_profile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_profile
    - bertil 6y ago
      I’m a direct source on that point. You are quoting indirect sources.
      - dtx1 6y ago
        saving, even in hashed form, my phone number or mail address to later be able to connect me to people i already know is a shadow profile even if it isn't a profile as facebook might define it. Anyone can easily verify this by adding themselves to facebook (or xing for that matter) and seeing suggestions that are obviously based on that. In essence, you are either ignorant of this or lying.
tencalls 6y ago
>Social media holds a mirror up to society People also say cocaine brings out the true self, but I wouldn’t know. > Facebook is not some giant monolith. Harboring this thought has no actionable constructive value. Assuming the best intent, people here aren’t disgusted at fb engineers because they think they are making day-to-day evil decisions. They’re disgusted because they think fb engineers would have to believe facebook is overall a force for good, or at least neutral, to be able to continue working at facebook. But rarely does an fb engineer here have the courage or the care to defend facebook in such a way. Often, they just point out that facebook is not a monolith. I remember reading about a collection of interviews with drug dealers. The interviewer said the most common refrain they often heard from them was, “if I didn’t do it, someone else would.” Even so, everyday I thank whoever took these specific FAANG decisions (off the top my head): …adding the “Add to Home Screen” button on iOS safari for web apps. …adding Firefox support for Google Meet (Microsoft teams and Zoom are still Chrome only I think) I say this despite knowing these decisions were most likely not taken with altruistic intent and probably came from the top, relatively speaking.
shubik22 6y ago
> Personally, I just do not buy into this "Facebook is evil" narrative, and even less so having worked there. How would you characterize a group of people who built a product used to incite a genocide?[1]. (That’s not hyperbole, that’s literally what happened!) Even if you attribute this to incompetence (is incompetence which leads to genocide excusable?), what is a reasonable reaction once you’ve discovered your product has been used in this way? Has this been Facebook’s reaction? In my eyes, clearly not, as it continues to be used in similar ways to this day. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/technology/myanmar-facebook.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/technology/myanmar-facebo...
- halfmatthalfcat 6y ago
  The New York Times printed articles and columns that were used as fact and evidence for the invasion of Iraq in the early 2000s. Should we cancel the New York Times? We live in a world of imperfect systems built by imperfect people. Everyone sitting in their glass houses just throwing stones without viewing things from the other side. Do I condemn genocide, of course. Most people condemn genocide. Yet I'm not going to blame Facebook for building a platform for _people_ and then turn around and blame Facebook when _people_ use the platform for nefarious purposes. Something about cake and eating it too. Even removing Facebook from the equation, the internet itself is ultimately responsible for genocide because it allows people to connect easier than ever before. Are you going to blame the very concept of the internet? Because if you're so up in arms about Facebook, you should be rallying for the destruction of the internet as well. Good riddance, have some perspective.
  - deleted 6y ago
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- NoPicklez 6y ago
  I think that's a odd perspective to take. It's like saying that Toyota enabled terrorist groups to move it's soldiers and weapons from point A to point B to incite terrorist acts because they manufactured cars. The difference is that Facebook did not create a product TO incite genocide (I think we can call agree on that). However, they did create a platform which brings people together AND bad actors used it as a platform to divide people. Did telecommunications companies and mobile phone manufacturers such as Apple build mobile phones to incide genocide, murder, child rape, drugs etc. No, because mobile communication is known to be used for good and for bad.
croutonwagon 6y ago
> Absolutely (the cynics would never admit this point, but it's true, e.g. the amount of resources and cross-company efforts thrown at improving privacy is incredible). I would have to disagree there. Their core ethos has been pretty bad on this front. I quit Facebook around the time edu addresses were first no longer required. Things like the wall were the major features. The main reason I quit though was because they were routinely reverting and NOT respecting my privacy options. It got to the point where I was taking screenshots of my privacy options to make sure it wasn’t just something I was missing. I reactivated about 2009 but quickly disabled against because of the same reasons. And rather than regularly combing through my options I chose to opt out entirely. Multiple people I have spoke with since, many of whom aren’t tech savvy have said the same over the years, even recently.
- romanhn 6y ago
  Not sure I understand the argument here. I'm clearly talking about current/ongoing efforts, not decisions made 15 years ago. Anecdotal evidence doesn't change the fact that I witnessed huge cross-cutting efforts to improve privacy. At Facebook's scale, it's not exactly an overnight process.
  - croutonwagon 6y ago
    Well in my defense your evidence is as anecdotal as mine here. The habit of making all options opt out and actively resetting past opt outs over the course of, to your point, decades isn’t exactly what I would call a focus on privacy. If they were still up to the same practices 15 years ago, 10 years ago and as recent as the last few years....and to your point at scale it doesn’t chnage over night...how are they exactly privacy conscious. The company since its inception is basically antithetical to the concept of privacy and ownership of the data you place on their service. Edit. To be clear. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with their model. Not a fan of their opt out style approach but that’s clearly not a major issue for most. I just wouldn’t categorize Facebook as privacy focused. At best they seem to respond in a minimalist way to these concerns. Which again is fine. But I wouldn’t say it’s a focus for them.

2pEXgD0fZ5cF 6y ago

> Social media holds a mirror up to society This would only really be the case without algorithmic influence on discoverability and what people get shown on Facebook. "Engagement" being one of the keyword here, which very much morphs this "reflection". Facebook might technically be a mirror, but if it is, it is one of those curved distorting ones you used to see at carnivals and fairs.

throwawei369 6y ago
Not in support of the above poster's views btw, but I think he gave the analogy in a broader sense. Your take on this mirror analogy is from a micro-level. I still think looking at FB from a birds-eye view, the society mirror assessment is fairly accurate.
romanhn 6y ago
That is a fair point, though in the sense of "mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all". People end up in bubbles because they're most receptive to particular type of content and that is what they end up engaging with. But yes, if it was up to me, I would kill the Share button and get an unfiltered view of my connections' updates, like in the early days.
- bopbeepboop 6y ago
  This isn’t true: Facebook allows people to target the viewers with weaponized psychology to prime that feedback loop. Further, the loops are meant to steer emotions by reordering content — something no user asked for when FB conducted its human experiments on emotional manipulation. It’s simply not true that the algorithm “reflects” what users want or interact with — it purposefully injects FB’s biases via nudges and their customers biases via weaponized psychology inserts. I think it’s telling the people defending FB’s conduct can’t be honest about what that conduct is.
ummonk 6y ago
Exactly. Arguably the algorithms are optimized for engagement, but it’s like saying opioids hold a mirror to society because so many who try them keep seeking them out.

matkoniecz 6y ago

> Could they do things better? Of course. Are they trying to? Absolutely (the cynics would never admit this point, but it's true, e.g. the amount of resources and cross-company efforts thrown at improving privacy is incredible). What about things like lying that phone numbers for SMS authentication will not be used for other purposes? What about mental gymnastics to work around legal obligations that are privacy related. EU regulations require allowing users to get their data in readable form - what FB is doing? Claiming that data is too complex, impossible to provide in readable form and therefore they are legally forbidden from exporting most of it. FB listed targeted advertisements as their obligations, and claims that as result they do not need user consent to spy on them as it is their legal obligation. Maybe FB is mirror but they are busy mirroring nastiest - and the most profitable - parts. For me their supposed attempts seem to be rather a smokescreen to me.

romanhn 6y ago
Look, my goal here is not to be an apologist for Facebook, a company that I told in my exit interview that I would not consider joining them again (for entirely different reasons). Nor do I want to be convincing anyone that they're wrong. In fact, in some ways you are right. But at the same time, realize that Facebook is not some giant monolith. These are thousands of teams, working in a highly bottoms-up, impact-oriented culture. I read a comment earlier about engineering at scale and how it's a people problem - that's 100% it. People are not infallible, they make mistakes. What I did not see during my tenure there is any malicious intent, people genuinely wanted to build a valuable product and make broken stuff better. Again, my localized experience only. From what I recall (could be wrong here, not first-hand knowledge), the SMS thing was a decision made by a single team ages ago, before privacy was at the forefront. It was a bad decision, but ultimately a technical detail lost in a sea of other technical details. The solution being worked on presently is a systemic one, that ideally would prevent this sort of thing in the future (though the realist in me is skeptical).
- teachingassist 6y ago
  > From what I recall (could be wrong here, not first-hand knowledge), the SMS thing was a decision made by a single team ages ago I have worked in a tiny charitable organisation, where it was easily understood that if we collected user telephone numbers, there would be constant pressure to use them for other purposes. And, therefore, that we didn't have the capacity to honestly and securely promise to users that we and our future replacements would use them only for one purpose. This is not a failure of one team "before privacy was at the forefront" (when?). It's a systemic failure of multiple teams and of Facebook's culture of constant privacy infringement and misdirection. That this implicit promise to users was made so lightly and not considered important enough to follow through on. As such, it's a breach of contract which I hope is picked up legally.

hrktb 6y ago

Over time I came to compare facebook with the car culture. It plays a central role to a ton of people’s lives, provides a widely needed service to communities and allows some lifestyle that wouldn’t be possible otherwise. But with a incredible amount of casualties and second/third order negative effects on the whole environment. The debate will always be “is it worth it ?”. As we dial back on car presence in a lot of situation and try to counterbalance all the lobbying and bullshit that has been thrown at us by the industry for several decades, I see us coming to the same point with ad based/attention based industries. It’s not “evil”, but needs a crazy amount of adjustment to come to a healthy point were the benefits are not drowned into societal pollution and casualties.

bertil 6y ago
Car companies have had many documented effort to kill control and mitigation efforts. Most debate are fairly straightforward and aligned: less pollution, less death from speed. And they have done very little in that direction. Facebook aggressively tries to mitigate issues, but struggles to get its critic to admit that they can’t ask for more interoperability in one sentence and more privacy in the next; for more freedom to say what you please and more control of unacceptable speech; for respect for local mores and universally understandable rules. Facebook employees are constantly trying to argue for nuance, offering solutions and getting downvoted and silenced because Facebook=Bad. Find me one employee of a car company willing to breath from a the exhaust of an ICE. Even suggesting you might rightfully gets you sent to a psych ward on suicide watch. But we can make cars non-polluting, they just chose not to; they refused so hard that electric cars, a technology that is a century old was presented as inconceivable until they started loosing sales to a weirdo a little too much fan of anime. What every employee of a traditional car company can easily conceive, and is very keen willing to excuse is a slimy tale of Union reps and executives paying prostitutes to convince Environment authorities to look the other way when they evade basic pollution control (seriously, the VW scandal is dark and human trafficking isn’t the bottom of it). Talk to your local oil & gas executive about “human rights violation as a cost of doing business in certain part of the world”. All that the cost of dozens of millionth of people dying of respiratory complications, and billions risking environmental disaster. How to have fewer than a million people killed in accidents every year? There’s many way, but a very easy one would be to prevent cars from driving faster than maximum speed limit on a highway. It’s an elementary tool. Find me one employee from a car company who wouldn’t laugh you out of the room for suggesting it. “Nobody would accept to not be able to repeatedly break the law if that meant we could save millions of lives.” There is nothing in common with that nightmare and the debate around the legibility of privacy controls, or the rate of false positive on automated translations used for violent content detection when dealing with non-Ascii language.

deleted 6y ago

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panic 6y ago

> Is FB sometimes incompetent? Sure (who isn't at that scale). Could they do things better? Of course. Are they trying to? Absolutely (the cynics would never admit this point, but it's true, e.g. the amount of resources and cross-company efforts thrown at improving privacy is incredible). This type of argument is made over and over on behalf of harmful institutions. The police sometimes screw up, but everyone makes mistakes. Cars (as a sibling comment points out) sometimes kill people, but that's just a fact of life, and car safety improves every year. In each case, the institution's responsibility for harm is deflected by the argument that the institution, in its current form, can't exist without doing some amount of harm. Not considered is the possibility that the institution could fundamentally change forms or stop existing entirely.

HenryBemis 6y ago
I will take this argument and transpose it in Banking. A heavily regulated industry. Are there TONS of data for an individual? Financial data, demographics (themselves and their family), tax-IDs, social security numbers, where they live, where they shop, how much they spend, do they have a subscription on "heterosexual-intercourse" website? do they have a subscription on "same-sex-intercourse" website? do they have a subscription on "donkey-sex-show" website? (think "Clerks"), Spotify, tickets to Metallica concerts vs Opera, Netflix, hotels, airtickets, restaurants, bars, you-name-it. A bank has this and so much more information through bank account transactions, card (credit/debit) transactions, mobile phone app data collection, KYC, etc. I don't remember a Bank losing the data that "Henry likes donkey sex shows". Perhaps there is a naughty admin stalking the current/ex partner misusing their work-related system account privileges but that admin won't leak the data of 100000 clients. Yes the bank doesn't have a photo of you in a political rally, but they see you spend £€$100 supporting XYZ politican or political party, or you bought a hotdog 1mile/km from that park where X politician had a speech. How come companies like FB keep making one mistake after another, on OUR expense and the excuse is "ooops I did it again" (they played with our data). At some point the excuses need to cease and they need to get their stuff in a right order, or be shut down. Edit: rewrote some words/phrases for clarity.
- yeetman21 6y ago

halfmatthalfcat 6y ago

I completely agree, re: HN paranoia around FB. I feel like the engineers lose their minds (speaking as one) and need the FB boogieman to exist. Is there no room for the (very plausible) explanation that a group of people had benevolent intent yet the wheels fell off when they didn't understand the scale of what they were working with? This happens all the time at work for many of us, we underestimate scale and shit breaks. I don't know why the same logic can't be applied to Facebook, albeit taken to the extreme, being one of the biggest data hoarders on the planet.

tobr 6y ago

> Is FB sometimes incompetent? Sure (who isn't at that scale). Do you mean to imply that we should be more forgiving of Facebook because of the scale you operate at? I feel like it’s the exact opposite. You very aggressively sought to grow to that scale, it’s not something that just happened to you. With that should come an immense sense of responsibility, but instead Facebook has stepped up with reckless behavior, lies and manipulation. > the cynics would never admit this point, but it's true, e.g. the amount of resources and cross-company efforts thrown at improving privacy is incredible Sure, call me a cynic. But I imagine this is where your perspective as an employee might be distorted. From the inside it might look like there’s a lot of effort put into something like this, but from the outside it’s clear it’s nowhere near enough.

panic 6y ago
> From the inside it might look like there’s a lot of effort put into something like this, but from the outside it’s clear it’s nowhere near enough. I actually do believe it. The thing is, no matter how much work the privacy people put in, it will never be enough to solve Facebook's privacy problems. The problems are fundamental to the way Facebook works as a product. It's a pattern you see in many places: 1. Identify a fundamental problem your organization causes. 2. Form a team responsible for fixing this problem. 3. Make sure this team is organizationally separate from the teams actually doing the work. 4. Give this team lots of resources and have them share whatever progress they manage to make. What will happen is that this team will be able to make some improvements. Whenever someone criticizes you, you can point to these improvements and say (completely honestly) that the team is doing the best they can. Meanwhile, the core of your organization is protected. Any changes that would threaten the processes that sustain the organization itself can be written off as unrealistic. EDIT: I should add that this pattern can appear without any malicious intent -- it's natural (though perhaps naive) to think a "privacy team" is the right way to solve privacy problems in one's organization. But we owe it to ourselves to be honest about what is really happening. Not just for Facebook's sake, but also for the sake of any organization which models itself after Facebook. Without an understanding of how this stuff works, organizations will end up reproducing Facebook's fundamental problems (privacy and otherwise) while believing those problems have been solved.

mike00632 6y ago

Quick reminder that Facebook knowingly facilitated a genocide of the Rohingya people.

disgruntledphd2 6y ago
Did radio knowingly facilitate the Rwandan genocide?
- mike00632 6y ago
  "Radio" is not a company that profited off the genocide and looked the other way when it happened.
  - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
    No, but it's the closest modern equivalent. A communication medium is used to facilitate bad activity, so clearly the correct thing to do is to blame the communication medium. I'm sure Myanmar was full of shiny happy people before Facebook got there, after all \s.
    - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
      > profited off the genocide Also, it's ludicrous to believe that FB actually make any money of Myanmar. They make money from serving ads to the developed world, not poor developing countries.
bertil 6y ago
No, that’s a lie. The local junta used Facebook like they would have used any convenient mode of communication. Facebook wasn’t able to detect it because of a complex issue involving automated translation of non-Ascii languages. They were concerning reports and the relevant team reached out to their contact in the country, the wife of a senior executive and _a Nobel prize recipient_ who both personally denied that anything wrong was happening. The company scrambled to get more context but didn’t have translators willing to tell them the truth because… well there’s an uncomfortable correlation between people speaking Burmese and people who thing Rohingya deserve respect. As soon as the reality was clear, the company acknowledged that they made a mistake in trusting local authorities, not investing more in non-standard software tools and piled on their investment on detecting such project. You can compare that to how much Toyota cares about their logo being at the back on the technical on every photo featuring genocidal warlords and terrorist groups.

BlueTemplar 6y ago

These days, one of the main - if not the main - cause of Facebook's (and other GAFAM's) evilness is simply that they have gotten too big.

FabHK 6y ago

> Social media holds a mirror up to society, and we don't like what we see there. Well yes, we humans have flaws. Now, there are some institutions, habits, and organisations that ameliorate these flaws and enable us to become better versions of ourselves ("better angels of our nature"). And then there are things that prey on our baser motives, pander to them, exacerbate them, and profit from it. And Facebook is surely among them. Is Facebook only possible because our flawed nature? Sure. Does that exculpate it? No.

jacquesm 6y ago

> Personally, I just do not buy into this "Facebook is evil" narrative, and even less so having worked there. Of course you don't. To buy in to the 'Facebook is evil' concept you'd have to see yourself as part of the problem and chances are that you would never do that. Personally, I think Facebook could be good, and probably is good for many people. But I also see the dark side and the downside (shadowprofiles, for instance, a large collection of dark patterns trying to rope people in and to keep them there, the walled garden that it tries to be). It's AOL reimaged, and when AOL went the way of the Dodo I was quite happy. If I had the choice between working on Facebook or on anything else I would pick the anything else option, because even if Facebook isn't even per-se I strongly believe that it is a net negative and its leadership disgusts me.

bertil 6y ago
There are no shadow profiles.
- hobs 6y ago
  Just because zuck says it isnt real doesn't make it so. 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-... https://theconversation.com/shadow-profiles-facebook-knows-about-you-even-if-youre-not-on-facebook-94804 https://theconversation.com/shadow-profiles-facebook-knows-a... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_profile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_profile
  - bertil 6y ago
    I’m a direct source on that point. You are quoting indirect sources.
    - dtx1 6y ago
      saving, even in hashed form, my phone number or mail address to later be able to connect me to people i already know is a shadow profile even if it isn't a profile as facebook might define it. Anyone can easily verify this by adding themselves to facebook (or xing for that matter) and seeing suggestions that are obviously based on that. In essence, you are either ignorant of this or lying.

tencalls 6y ago

>Social media holds a mirror up to society People also say cocaine brings out the true self, but I wouldn’t know. > Facebook is not some giant monolith. Harboring this thought has no actionable constructive value. Assuming the best intent, people here aren’t disgusted at fb engineers because they think they are making day-to-day evil decisions. They’re disgusted because they think fb engineers would have to believe facebook is overall a force for good, or at least neutral, to be able to continue working at facebook. But rarely does an fb engineer here have the courage or the care to defend facebook in such a way. Often, they just point out that facebook is not a monolith. I remember reading about a collection of interviews with drug dealers. The interviewer said the most common refrain they often heard from them was, “if I didn’t do it, someone else would.” Even so, everyday I thank whoever took these specific FAANG decisions (off the top my head): …adding the “Add to Home Screen” button on iOS safari for web apps. …adding Firefox support for Google Meet (Microsoft teams and Zoom are still Chrome only I think) I say this despite knowing these decisions were most likely not taken with altruistic intent and probably came from the top, relatively speaking.

shubik22 6y ago

> Personally, I just do not buy into this "Facebook is evil" narrative, and even less so having worked there. How would you characterize a group of people who built a product used to incite a genocide?[1]. (That’s not hyperbole, that’s literally what happened!) Even if you attribute this to incompetence (is incompetence which leads to genocide excusable?), what is a reasonable reaction once you’ve discovered your product has been used in this way? Has this been Facebook’s reaction? In my eyes, clearly not, as it continues to be used in similar ways to this day. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/technology/myanmar-facebook.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/technology/myanmar-facebo...

halfmatthalfcat 6y ago
The New York Times printed articles and columns that were used as fact and evidence for the invasion of Iraq in the early 2000s. Should we cancel the New York Times? We live in a world of imperfect systems built by imperfect people. Everyone sitting in their glass houses just throwing stones without viewing things from the other side. Do I condemn genocide, of course. Most people condemn genocide. Yet I'm not going to blame Facebook for building a platform for _people_ and then turn around and blame Facebook when _people_ use the platform for nefarious purposes. Something about cake and eating it too. Even removing Facebook from the equation, the internet itself is ultimately responsible for genocide because it allows people to connect easier than ever before. Are you going to blame the very concept of the internet? Because if you're so up in arms about Facebook, you should be rallying for the destruction of the internet as well. Good riddance, have some perspective.
- deleted 6y ago
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NoPicklez 6y ago
I think that's a odd perspective to take. It's like saying that Toyota enabled terrorist groups to move it's soldiers and weapons from point A to point B to incite terrorist acts because they manufactured cars. The difference is that Facebook did not create a product TO incite genocide (I think we can call agree on that). However, they did create a platform which brings people together AND bad actors used it as a platform to divide people. Did telecommunications companies and mobile phone manufacturers such as Apple build mobile phones to incide genocide, murder, child rape, drugs etc. No, because mobile communication is known to be used for good and for bad.

croutonwagon 6y ago

> Absolutely (the cynics would never admit this point, but it's true, e.g. the amount of resources and cross-company efforts thrown at improving privacy is incredible). I would have to disagree there. Their core ethos has been pretty bad on this front. I quit Facebook around the time edu addresses were first no longer required. Things like the wall were the major features. The main reason I quit though was because they were routinely reverting and NOT respecting my privacy options. It got to the point where I was taking screenshots of my privacy options to make sure it wasn’t just something I was missing. I reactivated about 2009 but quickly disabled against because of the same reasons. And rather than regularly combing through my options I chose to opt out entirely. Multiple people I have spoke with since, many of whom aren’t tech savvy have said the same over the years, even recently.

romanhn 6y ago
Not sure I understand the argument here. I'm clearly talking about current/ongoing efforts, not decisions made 15 years ago. Anecdotal evidence doesn't change the fact that I witnessed huge cross-cutting efforts to improve privacy. At Facebook's scale, it's not exactly an overnight process.
- croutonwagon 6y ago
  Well in my defense your evidence is as anecdotal as mine here. The habit of making all options opt out and actively resetting past opt outs over the course of, to your point, decades isn’t exactly what I would call a focus on privacy. If they were still up to the same practices 15 years ago, 10 years ago and as recent as the last few years....and to your point at scale it doesn’t chnage over night...how are they exactly privacy conscious. The company since its inception is basically antithetical to the concept of privacy and ownership of the data you place on their service. Edit. To be clear. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with their model. Not a fan of their opt out style approach but that’s clearly not a major issue for most. I just wouldn’t categorize Facebook as privacy focused. At best they seem to respond in a minimalist way to these concerns. Which again is fine. But I wouldn’t say it’s a focus for them.