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Car companies have had many documented effort to kill control and mitigation efforts. Most debate are fairly straightforward and aligned: less pollution, less d

by 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.
  - danShumway 6y ago
    > and something that privacy advocate keep missing. The majority of privacy advocates understand that distinction, it's just that our criticisms of Facebook go beyond that distinction to a bunch of other issues. If you want to talk about nuance, then tackle those issues. Tell me why Facebook is choosing not to notify users about this breach. It's really, really convenient that a supposed lack of nuance is an excuse to avoid talking about privacy breaches and bad policies across the board. I mean, to be blunt, it sometimes just feels kind of insulting. I'm supposed to believe that Facebook would love to talk about what went wrong here and why an authentication issue and a clear vulnerability in their API is being labeled as a "scrape" instead of hack, but instead they have to be silent about the entire thing because nobody on Hackernews would understand their "nuance." Come on. And I really do believe that the majority of complaints that most people have about Facebook are not related to API access. It's ridiculous crud like misusing phone numbers that were intended for authentication. It's this leak that we're talking about right now. It's the propaganda and fearmongering from official accounts and press releases that's being spread about iOS's new privacy changes. It's tying unrelated products like Oculus into Facebook accounts after customers were assured that wouldn't happen. It's not just accepting information about me from other people, but aggressively targeting those people to get that information. It's everything that happened with Instagram and Snapchat. I am perfectly willing to talk about nuance in the very narrow case of Cambridge Analytica, and in the very narrow instances where "who owns information about me" is actually relevant to what Facebook is doing. But I don't think Facebook is desperate for nuance and just can't get anyone to have a productive conversation, I think Facebook is using nuance as an excuse to avoid talking about the litany of issues it has in other areas. > There’s a lot of people at Facebook This is a weird point, because it plays both sides of the issue. I'm supposed to excuse a lot of bad messaging coming out of Facebook because the people saying it might not represent the full company, but I'm also supposed to ultimately say that Facebook as an entity is trying to do the right thing. I'm supposed to trust "Facebook" with my data, not an individual team. So it doesn't make me feel better to label Facebook's messaging teams as un-unified, it just makes it harder for me to trust anything that comes out of their mouths because nobody seems to be willing to say "this is what Facebook believes as an organization." This is one of the most powerful social media companies in the world. At what point does it become reasonable to ask the company to get its crap together and present some unified messaging? Or, alternatively, if Facebook is so gigantic that it contains multitudes of different teams that have different motivations and messaging and its impossible to think of it as a single entity, at what point does it become reasonable to ask Facebook to stop representing itself as a unified entity and to stop pulling products like Instagram, Oculus, and WhatsApp closer and closer to its main services where upper management and other teams can interfere with their operations? The argument you're making about a disjointed company is a really strong case for having some good data silos, and based on your other comments it seems to me that you're saying data silos have gotten considerably worse since 2016 because the company wants teams to more easily integrate and collaborate with each other. I guess what I'm saying here is, when I sign up for a Facebook account who am I trusting? Am I trusting a specific team? Can I get to choose which teams I trust with my data? When a press release comes out from Facebook, will all the authors and chain of management behind it be identified? Because if Facebook wants me to treat it like a unified entity, then I'm going to do what it wants and treat it that way. It can't have it both ways.
hrktb 6y ago
To me Facebook’s main issue is having a revenue model dependent on advertising boosted by engagement. This is the main reason we end up with filtering bubbles, contents that needs to be consumed fast and push people to react, relying more and more on anger over most other emotions, with no need for veracity or depth, or bringing anything lasting to the user; the other side of the coin being the privacy debacles coming from monetizing that engagement. I don’t see facebook doing any effort to mitigate these effects on their users. On the contrary we had many reports of research to increase engagement, direct the users emotions and test the different algorithmic strategies.
- bertil 6y ago
  > Facebook’s main issue is having a revenue model dependent on advertising Good news, that changed last year.

by bertil 6y ago

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.
- danShumway 6y ago
  > and something that privacy advocate keep missing. The majority of privacy advocates understand that distinction, it's just that our criticisms of Facebook go beyond that distinction to a bunch of other issues. If you want to talk about nuance, then tackle those issues. Tell me why Facebook is choosing not to notify users about this breach. It's really, really convenient that a supposed lack of nuance is an excuse to avoid talking about privacy breaches and bad policies across the board. I mean, to be blunt, it sometimes just feels kind of insulting. I'm supposed to believe that Facebook would love to talk about what went wrong here and why an authentication issue and a clear vulnerability in their API is being labeled as a "scrape" instead of hack, but instead they have to be silent about the entire thing because nobody on Hackernews would understand their "nuance." Come on. And I really do believe that the majority of complaints that most people have about Facebook are not related to API access. It's ridiculous crud like misusing phone numbers that were intended for authentication. It's this leak that we're talking about right now. It's the propaganda and fearmongering from official accounts and press releases that's being spread about iOS's new privacy changes. It's tying unrelated products like Oculus into Facebook accounts after customers were assured that wouldn't happen. It's not just accepting information about me from other people, but aggressively targeting those people to get that information. It's everything that happened with Instagram and Snapchat. I am perfectly willing to talk about nuance in the very narrow case of Cambridge Analytica, and in the very narrow instances where "who owns information about me" is actually relevant to what Facebook is doing. But I don't think Facebook is desperate for nuance and just can't get anyone to have a productive conversation, I think Facebook is using nuance as an excuse to avoid talking about the litany of issues it has in other areas. > There’s a lot of people at Facebook This is a weird point, because it plays both sides of the issue. I'm supposed to excuse a lot of bad messaging coming out of Facebook because the people saying it might not represent the full company, but I'm also supposed to ultimately say that Facebook as an entity is trying to do the right thing. I'm supposed to trust "Facebook" with my data, not an individual team. So it doesn't make me feel better to label Facebook's messaging teams as un-unified, it just makes it harder for me to trust anything that comes out of their mouths because nobody seems to be willing to say "this is what Facebook believes as an organization." This is one of the most powerful social media companies in the world. At what point does it become reasonable to ask the company to get its crap together and present some unified messaging? Or, alternatively, if Facebook is so gigantic that it contains multitudes of different teams that have different motivations and messaging and its impossible to think of it as a single entity, at what point does it become reasonable to ask Facebook to stop representing itself as a unified entity and to stop pulling products like Instagram, Oculus, and WhatsApp closer and closer to its main services where upper management and other teams can interfere with their operations? The argument you're making about a disjointed company is a really strong case for having some good data silos, and based on your other comments it seems to me that you're saying data silos have gotten considerably worse since 2016 because the company wants teams to more easily integrate and collaborate with each other. I guess what I'm saying here is, when I sign up for a Facebook account who am I trusting? Am I trusting a specific team? Can I get to choose which teams I trust with my data? When a press release comes out from Facebook, will all the authors and chain of management behind it be identified? Because if Facebook wants me to treat it like a unified entity, then I'm going to do what it wants and treat it that way. It can't have it both ways.

hrktb 6y ago

To me Facebook’s main issue is having a revenue model dependent on advertising boosted by engagement. This is the main reason we end up with filtering bubbles, contents that needs to be consumed fast and push people to react, relying more and more on anger over most other emotions, with no need for veracity or depth, or bringing anything lasting to the user; the other side of the coin being the privacy debacles coming from monetizing that engagement. I don’t see facebook doing any effort to mitigate these effects on their users. On the contrary we had many reports of research to increase engagement, direct the users emotions and test the different algorithmic strategies.

bertil 6y ago
> Facebook’s main issue is having a revenue model dependent on advertising Good news, that changed last year.