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FB seals off some internal message boards to prevent leaking, immediately leaked
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- newaccount2021 5y agothese whistleblowers are going to turn every company into a surveillance operation every company will soon adopt mandatory spyware, bossware, keyboard logging etc etc just to prevent the next Haugen hope it was worth it
- burnished 5y agoNo, the people that design, implement, or purchase spyware are going to turn companies into surveillance organizations. It's weird to blame whistleblowers here.
- scrollaway 5y agoHow is that the whistleblower’s fault? “Damn these pedestrians dying to drunk drivers forcing governments to make drunk driving illegal” what?
- gorgoiler 5y agoIt’s their fault if the alleged behaviour isn’t illegal enough. No one’s going to blame a whistleblower who uncovers someone harming children. It becomes much more of a gray area if the whistleblower uncovers someone trying to find out what effects, positive and negative if any kind, harmful, long-term, short-term or otherwise, that their product might be having. Is a leak worthy if no one is arrested or taken to court, and all we get to do is tut-tut a little more sanctimoniously?
- eropple 5y ago> No one’s going to blame a whistleblower who uncovers someone harming children. Of course they are. The idea that "no one", even in the vernacular sense of the term, will blame a whistleblower for literally anything is naive; there are too many people who are terminally incapable of faulting a C corporation for acting against the body politic. > It becomes much more of a gray area if the whistleblower uncovers someone trying to find out what effects, positive and negative if any kind, harmful, long-term, short-term or otherwise, that their product might be having. Not when those people doing that investigation find something they don't like and bury it because it's inconvenient for their bottom line. Which Facebook did. It's not a gray area at all. Not in the slightest. > Is a leak worthy if no one is arrested or taken to court, and all we get to do is tut-tut a little more sanctimoniously? Yes, it is an unmistakable good to have the operations of megacorporations with more effective power than many governments as transparent as possible. People matter more than companies, and the behaviors of those companies are fundamentally relevant to the behavior of people in their polities. A company at Facebook's scale (or Apple's, etc.) should have no secrets not directly related to user or employee privacy. If they don't want to have eyes on them, don't be megacorporations. We've seen far too many diseconomies of scale with regards to fundamental and foundational morality to assume anything else.
- notacrapceo 5y agoNot every company. I would never run my company with sociopath-ware and will proudly tell every candidate that we actually trust them, unlike FB, Google, Apple... This will have the effect of weakening these paranoid, power-tripping companies, as high end employees flee to companies that respect them and their time.
- wang_li 5y agoCan you think of anything that can't be misused? E.g. if a kid eats enough salad they're going to get fat. Does that mean we should "blow the whistle" on lettuce producers and implement dramatic regulations? Or should we expect parents to be parents and monitor and regulate their child's eating habits? Or in this case, monitor and regulate their child's facebook/instagram use? (Also, we should try and recognize that not agreeing with someone and leaking their internal communications about something that is fully legal, is not whistleblowing.)
- notacrapceo 5y agoThis seems like a non-sequitur to my comment. I'm saying that companies that don't spy on their employees will win the best employees. That being said, FB and salad have nothing to do with each other. One is a spyware/adware company, the other is a healthy meal. I applaud the whistleblower.
- JAlexoid 5y agoIt's in Facebook's interest to increase engagement, even if it destroys people's lives. A morbidly obese depressed kid is much more valuable to Facebook, than an active and mentally stable kid. We should realize that and stop pretending that Facebook is anything but a leech on our mental health. I realized that a while ago and had to literally tell Facebook recruiters to GF themselves.
- lovecg 5y agoThat’s pretty common in the industry already. Don’t assume you have any privacy when using company’s devices.
- tacobelllover99 5y agolmao believing Haugen is a real whistleblower.
- jwalton 5y agoAh yes, the time honoured tradition of improving your integrity department by removing transparency.
- piva00 5y agoGiven that their Chief Integrity Officer is Guy Rosen, someone known for running Onavo which was basically spyware... I question a lot the cognitive dissonance that FB employees might go through to believe there is any kind of integrity taken seriously in that fucking company.
- jaywalk 5y agoTheir work is just so objectively good and correct that allowing insight into what they're doing can only harm the work they're doing.
- cosmojg 5y agoFor those without a sense of humor, this is sarcasm.
- whambampow 5y agoReally? Thanks!
- rvbissell 5y agoI think it transcends sarcasm, circling back to how they actually feel.
- the-dude 5y agoFull title : Facebook told staff it would seal off some internal message boards to prevent leaking. The change was immediately leaked.
- pjmorris 5y agoThe Streisand effect? [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- q1w2 5y agoIf leaking internal news/information, it should seem like a trivial exercise to disseminate an email with subtle unique identifiers in it and fire leakers.
- JadeNB 5y agoSurely that only works if the leaker supplies exact text, and the leakee publishes exact text; if either step in the chain summarises, then subtle unique identifiers will be lost.
- ceejayoz 5y agoThe Intercept probably got Reality Winner nabbed this way; they sent the files to the NSA for comment. Whoops. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_Winner#Role_of_The_Intercept https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_Winner#Role_of_The_Int...
- yuliyp 5y agoIt sounded like the set of documents was what was used in that case (look for all people who have accessed every single document in the leak, then investigate those people more thoroughly)
- ceejayoz 5y ago"Both journalists and security experts have suggested that The Intercept's handling of the reporting, which included publishing the documents unredacted and including the printer tracking dots, was used to identify Winner as the leaker."
- yuliyp 5y agoYeah it's possible that was it, but also "Through an internal audit, the NSA determined that Winner was one of six workers who had accessed the particular documents on its classified system". The lesson to take away is that metadata of all kinds is powerful. Even if The Intercept had just provided paraphrases to the NSA it might have still given away Reality Winner's identity.
- bebuzzy 5y ago“Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement following Haugen's testimony that the company's work had been "taken out of context and used to construct a false narrative."” Funny how Zuck blames a whistleblower for doing the exact same thing his company does to make billions.
- akudha 5y agoIt is not funny, it is just boring at this point. Every single response from the mega corps to anything (leaks, whistleblowers, fines, hacks...whatever) is predictable, soulless, boring, useless. Or some combination of those. Not one of the responses is constructive, useful or accepting responsibility. They don't even say something might be wrong and that they will work on it, they don't even pretend to care, even that is too much these days
- btheshoe 5y agoZuckerberg is ... kind of right though, and fb's response to the whole scandal seems mostly reasonable. Fb internal research was 1) of poor quality and 2) selectively presented. Scientific literature on the whole is divided wrt impact of social media use on mental health.
- abandonliberty 5y agoThis might just be the japanophile in me, but I get the impression they handle things very differently. From executives taking ownership & consequences for failure, first DDG example: https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/why-japan-s-businesses-are-so-good-at-surviving-crises https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/why-japan-s-businesses-are-so-goo... to longer term thinking: "a lot of Japanese companies think about 100 or 200 years from now and envision the kind of future they want to create. During the tsunami disaster, the key mindset of executives was: We have to empathize with others. And companies ought to do the same thing now, during the current crisis, empathizing with those who are suffering and trying to figure out how to help.” https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/why-japan-s-businesses-are-so-good-at-surviving-crises https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/why-japan-s-businesses-are-so-goo...
- mjburgess 5y ago
- driverdan 5y agoOriginal source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/13/technology/facebook-workplace-transparency-leaks.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/13/technology/facebook-workp...
- whywhywhywhy 5y ago> protecting elections Why is a private company involved in this? Shouldn't this be the responsibility of a government agency? If I make a company as large as FB can I start getting involved in controlling elections?
- Jabbles 5y agoPerhaps the argument you would like best is that it's a form of self-regulation designed to prevent the need for actual regulation via laws that would be more expensive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry_self-regulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry_self-regulation
- squidlogic 5y agoBut hasn't Zuckerberg asked to be regulated? I think Facebook would like to be have regulations put up on the social media industry to further entrench their position and create a regulatory moat against new entrants. Network effects are good, but even better when coupled with regulatory burdens.
- duncan-donuts 5y agoI think the answer at this point is a resounding yes.
- dragonwriter 5y ago> Why is a private company involved in this? Because capitalism. > Shouldn't this be the responsibility of a government agency? If it was the responsibility of a government agency in the US, private companies would still be involved, both in executing the government functions and in compliance. See literally every other government responsibility for examples. And government agencies are involved in the U.S., though given the social harms Facebook has historically been used for, that it might now engage in prevention beyond what it is compelled to by government action is, in and of itself, not a bad thing.
- scohesc 5y agoProtecting your currency against fraudulent activities was the responsibility of the government too, until they put the responsibility onto the credit card/processor companies. So many things that should be ran by a government agency are being ran by companies themselves now. It's only a few more decades until governments are supplanted by corporations.
- gorgoiler 5y agoIf you’ll permit the analogy, the headline makes it sound like that they installed a fireproof safe and the safe immediately caught fire. Stupid Facebook! Except it’s more like they installed a fireproof safe and hours later the fire alarm went off. These too things are quite different :)
- AlbertCory 5y agoHere's a shorthand way of knowing when a bad actor got caught: They say "taken out of context, leading to our work being mischaracterized" or words very similar.
- squidlogic 5y agoThis statement seems overly broad. I suspect you would object if someone took your words out of context, for example. Would that therefore mean you are a bad actor?
- mjburgess 5y agoAlbertCory said recently, regarding a piece on Zuckerberg, [He] was a "bad actor" who "got caught".
- JAlexoid 5y agoIt's funny that trying to mischaractarize you managed to express the exact thing that Albert said. Thus proving his point
- AlbertCory 5y agoWhen someone says that a story "took that out of context", we should always ask "what 'context' would lead us to view that differently?" Or is it just that they don't like the story?
- hutzlibu 5y agoSalute the simple wisdom. Only that todays media indeed likes clickbaity missquotes taken out of context.
- dqpb 5y agoBut good actors can also have words/actions taken out of context, no?
- AlbertCory 5y ago
- tc313 5y agoThe title suggests an irony that isn't present. The change in policy was immediately leaked, but the policy was designed to keep the discussions on those boards from leaking (rather than the policy itself).
- tacobelllover99 5y agoWhoever is in favoring of FB or any other social media platform suppressing ideas? Group thing is a horrible thing.
- outside1234 5y agoSuch a bummer - was really enjoying the "Subvert Democracy" and "Russian Propaganda Ad Sales" message boards. :(
- axiosgunnar 5y agoDear Facebook, remember when you said only criminals have something to hide? But thanks for the argument! Now, whenever I have to explain why privacy matters to someone I will say that I don't want facts about me taken „out of context“ because my life is „complex“ and that „might decrease morale“.
- Kilenaitor 5y agoWhen did Facebook say only criminals have something to hide?
- outside1234 5y agoYeah, I think that was Google and Eric Schmidt. Facebook doesn't believe anyone should have anything to hide.
- at-fates-hands 5y agoConfirmed, it was Eric Schmidt (2009): If you're concerned about Google retaining your personal data, then you must be doing something you shouldn't be doing. At least that's the word from Google CEO Eric Schmidt. "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place," Schmidt tells CNBC. . ." https://www.theregister.com/2009/12/07/schmidt_on_privacy/ https://www.theregister.com/2009/12/07/schmidt_on_privacy/
- ashtonkem 5y agoI don’t think I’ve ever seen executives do something to prevent “decreased morale” that hasn’t immediately resulted in morale falling right off a cliff.
- novok 5y agoI remember another meme where govt says "you don't have anything to hide" and then the other side saying "then you don't mind me publishing all of this secret government info then?" and then getting very angry at the other person.
- Apocryphon 5y agoThere’s a difference between surveillance and sousveillance. Powerful entities should be subject to the latter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance