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If someone from Facebook PR reads your response, they’d very much prefer me to not engage with you. I’m assuming that’s obvious but happy to explain why. Becaus
by bertil 6y ago
If someone from Facebook PR reads your response, they’d very much prefer me to not engage with you. I’m assuming that’s obvious but happy to explain why. Because they have more authority over communications, the more you write like that, the more they’ll have elements to make the case for "Less is more" and even stricter rules about speaking about the company publicly. You’ll get a message that ignores your specific points. That’s who you trust to draft public statements: they’ll say as little as possible — because that’s the wolf that you chose to feed.
People who you trust with your data are privacy specialists, literally every single of of the best that money can buy. The company is very large and full of people who care about it deeply and the internal culture means that you can’t get away with bad design. Every hacker in the world, starting by the people Snowden worked with, are trying; preventing them from winning motivates a lot of smart people.
You might not like the disjoint between what you hear in the press and the idea that some of the most sophisticate activist are working on making Facebook the safest service out there. That’s because, as I pointed out many times, most of the coverage, including most of the things you raise, is misleading or plain false.
A common pattern is around settings: a piece of information can be visible or used in different context. Someone makes that information open; screen-captures the information being shared. They then change their settings; screen-capture that and then claim that the settings were abused. It sounds too big to be true, so no one will believe they can get away with it, but they do, often. That article is guaranteed to trend; any denial will be buried, or more likely used against the company. Previous scandal will be re-hashed, especially similarly made-up ones.
Some people like me will be outraged. They’ll try to explain that what happened, that truth is the exact opposite of what was reported: "Facebook didn’t commit that, they _prevented_ it. They were the only one who did anything!" We’ll write “I _worked_ on that project personally” “I’m a primary source for this” and that comment will get downvoted and ignored. My comment history is full of those. I don’t think you want me to explain individually why every scandal you raised isn’t something I’d be worried about, but… I’m not. Some decisions were poorly explained (see my first paragraph for why) but the actual, internal motivation was sound. If there’s anyone that worries you particularly, happy to answer specifically.
I understand that I’m asking you to trust a pseudonym on the internet, against literally the entirety of the press and most of the content of social media. Trust me: I know how confusing things are when so many people are trying to gaslight you _about your own job_. It gets weirder because they are some real, bigger issues (that oddly no one cares about). I started early (with my PhD in 2005-2008) so I got into that gradually; I think that has made me able to handle that better than most. But the weight of that constant unfounded hostility is heavy.
I’m simply trying to answer the original question: Why people stay in spite of all the scandals? Because they are genuinely making things better from the inside. Because it’s easy (necessary) to ignore all the noise when, for those that you have more context about, it’s mostly lies.
Many people leave, me included, but that’s generally a far more complicated problem, related to the fatigue that this dichotomy carries, and internal priorities.
- danShumway 6y ago> People who you trust with your data are privacy specialists, literally every single of of the best that money can buy. The best privacy specialists that money can buy are working in an organization that has decided it doesn't have to proactively notify its users about data breaches. That is the wrong decision, regardless of the internal reasoning that brought the organization to that conclusion. There might be a really engaging, interesting, reasonable set of events that led Facebook to make that decision, but it's still the wrong one. So the picture you end up painting in these comments is of a highly motivated, talented group of individuals with good intentions fighting tooth and nail against an organization that doesn't seem to be listening to them. And honestly, sure, whatever. I can buy that there are experts in Facebook working to make the system better. But clearly they aren't winning. So we go back to my original point, which is that when I make a Facebook account and when I hear from Facebook's PR team about how asking users for consent to track them is "killing small businesses", I don't get to choose to only trust or listen to the privacy-conscious amazing people who are fighting to fix problems. I also have to trust my data to and get my information from the giant organization of marketers, PR people, advertisers, and managers who make up the rest of Facebook and who seem to have a lot more power than people like you do. > but the actual, internal motivation was sound. To expand on the above point about internal motivation, and to address your claim that all of this controversy is just bad faith reporting: I do not believe you if you say there's a good reason to link Oculus accounts to Facebook accounts and to tear down the data silos between those products. I do not believe you if you tell me that it's OK for Facebook's marketing team to spread FUD about Apple's privacy settings. I do not believe you if you try to play off those issues as misreporting or the media lying to me. They are real things that have happened. Or if you want to dig in even deeper to things that can't be described as one-off mistakes or miscommunication, you are never going to convince me while actively using a pseudonym online that Facebook's current real-name policy is a good idea. It's a policy that is still problematic to this day, even after Facebook promised to try and make it better. I understand why Facebook has that policy, I understand that there must have been a lot of nuanced conversation internally that led to it, I understand that Facebook has a point of view that makes the organization think the policy is logical. But it's still not a good policy, and we can look at the effects and see that it didn't turn out well. I can believe you that there were long, complicated, reasonable internal processes that lead to these problems. I can believe you that people didn't wake up in the morning and decide to be evil. But the end results are still bad for privacy -- not because the media tells me they are, but because I'm a functioning human being who is capable of looking at the outcomes of those decisions and reasoning about the world. Heck, we can even go a step further. You've tried to play off Facebook's API decisions as being about privacy instead of monopolistic behavior. We started this conversation with me pushing back at the idea that people needed to choose between privacy and and interoperability. But your opinion on that is not reflected by Facebook's internal chain of managers, and I'm not basing my opinion on secondary sources. I read the internal emails that were exchanged about its competitor's API access -- not snippets from news sources, I read through the actual leak. You can't play that stuff off as if there's a hidden world that would change everything if only I could see it. Because I personally got to look into that hidden world and see the reasoning that managers were using in their own words, and it was all pretty bad. It's not media bias that's causing that perception.