6 ms·

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 a

• 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.
  • danShumway 6y ago
    > 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 This is a conflict that is not nearly as fundamental as Facebook likes to pretend. In a lot of ways, the Cambridge Analytica controversy was a godsend to Facebook, because ever since then the company has been repeating the same tired line that APIs, data standards, and personal control of information are fundamentally at odds with privacy. For the most part, they're not. A lot of what Facebook gets criticized for on the privacy front has nothing to do with interoperability. It's only a conflict because Facebook has a particular lens of privacy that revolves around Facebook owning as much information as possible and being the single steward of how that information is shared and accessed. And I'll be the first to say that Cambridge Analytica was poorly reported. I'll even be the first to say that some privacy "advocates" don't have a good grasp on these issues. But my goodness if Facebook isn't engaged in exactly the same kind of propaganda, constantly encouraging the exact same confusion between scraping and leaking, between consenusual data-sharing and hacking, whenever it fits their purposes and whenever it gives them an excuse to tighten the moat around their product. This most recent leak (I'm sorry, "scrape") is a perfect example of Facebook trying to explain away a poorly designed feature with a massive security hole around authentication and validation as if the real problem is interoperability and APIs.
    • bertil 6y ago
      > repeating the same tired line that APIs, data standards, and personal control of information are fundamentally at odds with privacy. It’s not in general but it is if you share information with your relatives and they don’t understand the consequence of their actions. That unique property of social data is something that creates that contradiction and something that privacy advocate keep missing. > But my goodness if Facebook isn't engaged in exactly the same kind of propaganda, constantly encouraging the exact same confusion between scraping and leaking, between consenusual data-sharing and hacking, whenever it fits their purposes and whenever it gives them an excuse to tighten the moat around their product. There’s a lot of people at Facebook, me first, who would love to have a different communication, but we know from experience that we’ll get pummelled if we try to introduce nuances like that in the public debate. I always find that frustrating until someone reminded me the trope about having two wolves inside of you. The story is corny but it explains the problem with coverage of Facebook really well: the misguided critics make it so that only spin-doctors manage are the only ones who can have a positive impact on the company’s image.