19 ms·

My interview with Steven Levy re. leaking of my Facebook Goodbye post

228 points by amadeuspagel 5y ago

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
As cited in this article, Frances Haugen is arguing against allowing Facebook to use end-to-end encryption because she suggests Facebook should have more surveillance of private communications: https://twitter.com/AlecMuffett/status/1452309133928054799?s=20 https://twitter.com/AlecMuffett/status/1452309133928054799?s... A lot of people jumped to the defense of the Facebook leaker because the media so successfully framed it as a “whistleblower” situation, but that’s not really what’s happening here. She’s very much an activist, and some of her suggestions really do not align with what the tech community wants at all. Any time someone goes in front of the government and insists on less encryption and more government control of tech companies, we should be worried and proceed with extreme caution. No matter how much you dislike Facebook, this situation is no exception.
- md2020 5y ago
  As much as some on HN like to criticize Moxie/Signal for their decisions (Intel SGX debacle), seeing these kinds of sentiments get cheered on in the media makes me really glad they exist. Same for the Tor Project, Matrix.org Foundation, EFF, etc. Can’t be easy being in their positions ever, but especially right now.
- abrahamepton 5y ago
  I don’t understand why it matters what Haugen believes - whether in “no encryption” or space fairies or whatever - instead of what she proved, which is the profoundly amoral and dishonest nature of the company.
  - vintermann 5y ago
    It matters because she's using the one to promote the other. We should be able to say that the leaks themselves are good, but also that they are making a transparent political play for control over Facebook (more than reining in their amorality and dishonesty). Whistleblowers do not usually have the support of a top tier lobbying firm (Bryson Gillette) paid for by a rival tech billionaire (Pierre Omidyar). I say take the leaks, but say no thanks to the "advice" it comes with.
  - WillPostForFood 5y ago
    She isn’t just a neutral presenter of data, she is a spokesperson and advocate. She is positioning herself to be a decision maker, or help decision makers.
    - dls2016 5y ago
      Isn’t a whistleblower by definition not neutral? I’m not even sure what a neutral whistleblower would look like. Should her motivations be questioned? Absolutely! But if you don’t like her stance, just say so instead labelling her an “activist” or “advocate” like there’s something inherently bad about those things.
      - WillPostForFood 5y ago
        I didn't intent to imply anything bad about being labeled an activist or an advocate. Whistleblower carries something of a neutral veneer. A whistleblower are often seen as exposing something objectively wrong, a broken law or crime. That's not really what is happening here (though it wouldn't be surprising to see laws have been broken). The main thrust here is Facebook is bad for society, which, IMO is more activism than whistleblowing. No objective answer here! Just how I read the nuance of the language.
- yodsanklai 5y ago
  HN is a bit schizophrenic on this topic. On one hand, it seems everybody wants more freedom and less surveillance, but they give FB a hard time for not monitoring content better. Hopefully these aren't the same people expressing these contradictory points of view. I'd be curious to know what both side think the ideal social network should look like.
  - thereddaikon 5y ago
    HN isn't one person with a single set of ideals and opinions. Its a website, with many people who's worldview ranges quite drastically. Tech, like anything else in the world, is going to have a cross section of humanity in it. You have libertarians, anarcho-capitalists, traditional GOP and Dems, European Socialists and full on communists here. You can't expect such a diverse group to have a homogenous view.
    - boringg 5y ago
      Exactly - every community has a diverse set of opinions (whether its discernible to the average person or not is a different question) and rarely do you find a homogenous group of individuals without a very strictly enforced control mechanism which suppress differences from being seen then creating a homogenous community.
  - lowkey_ 5y ago
    > On one hand, it seems everybody wants more freedom and less surveillance, but they give FB a hard time for not monitoring content better. I don't think these are conflicting views: (1) Less monitoring on private messages (2) More monitoring on public posts
    - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
      > 1) Less monitoring on private messages The Facebook leaker is explicitly arguing against this though. She cites Facebook’s push for end-to-end encryption of private messages as a problem.
- arthur_sav 5y ago
  There's no rational discussion around these e-mob hate trains. It boils down to "You're either with us or against us". I guess we're focusing on hating facebook this year.
- Closi 5y ago
  I also don't see anything too 'whistle-blower' worthy in the goodbye post. It just seems to be a vague message that although social media sometimes have a positive impact, it also sometimes has a negative impact, and that Facebook has employed strategies to help it grow. Hardly shocking findings!
- capableweb 5y ago
  > some of her suggestions really do not align with what the tech community wants at all I agree in general with your comment, but what I don't like is anyone (Haugen, you or anyone else) speaking for "the tech community". We all have different opinions, and you can't generalize with that. For example, plenty of people I know including myself would be strongly against less encryption, but strongly for more government control of tech companies (not via less encryption but via other means). It's really hard to generalize, and in this case we gain nothing by generalizing so let's do it less, not more.
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    > For example, plenty of people I know including myself would be strongly against less encryption, but strongly for more government control of tech companies (not via less encryption but via other means). But that’s not what Haughen is lobbying for. She’s explicitly saying that end-to-end encryption is bad because it doesn’t allow Facebook to monitor private communications enough. I’d be surprised if you could find more than a tiny minority in the tech communicate who agree with this.
    - capableweb 5y ago
      I understand that, that's why I expressed that I don't like them expressing it as something the "tech community" wants...
- nojito 5y ago
  This is a very common deflection tactic by corporations. Try and discredit the leaker over the information that was leaked. We saw it with Wikileaks and now we will see as more and more tech employees start sharing what goes on behind the curtains.
  - vintermann 5y ago
    The leak is more important than the leaker. That I support and value the Snowden leaks doesn't mean I always have to agree with Snowden (I think he's terrible on macroeconomics and crypto, for instance). No whistleblower has ever received such a red carpet as Frances Haugen. In itself, it's good that she's aggressively defended by the political establishment rather than facing reprisals and jail. But it should make you question what's going on here, quite apart from the contents of the leak itself. One of the things Haugen proposes, repealing section 230 protection, is even supported by Facebook itself and strongly opposed by antimonopolists (who argue that it will be far easier to comply for Facebook than any would be competitor).
- bostonsre 5y ago
  > her suggestions really do not align with what the tech community wants at all. I feel like we as a tech community should take a step back and consider whether or not we should not be the only ones that decide what should or should not be done. It is a massive country with many opposing viewpoints. We have massive conflicts of interest and some tech companies have shown over and over that greed trumps morals in many cases. We are humans and we are not a group of enlightened arbiters that know what is best for the world. We have done a shit job so far of managing ourselves. Sure in lots of cases we have made the world a better place but I think we need to be honest with ourselves and acknowledge that greed has crept in and supplanted that "making the world a better place" mission.
  - sanedigital 5y ago
    In my opinion, domain experts have a moral obligation to speak up regarding policy that involves their area of expertise. On the topic of encryption, we're the only community with an understanding of what "breaking encryption" means. There are no skeleton keys, only vulnerabilities. We have a moral and ethical duty to fight for encryption, privacy, and security, not against it.
    - bostonsre 5y ago
      Yes, I agree that we should absolutely provide advice on our area of expertise for topics in our domain but I don't think we should be the ones that make the decision. The other side of the debate aren't idiots, they have some valid view points, else this encryption debate would have been settled long ago. Encryption was not the only point brought up by the OP, they were also against government regulation. My main point is that we are tech workers that have conflicts of interest and that we should look hard at our viewpoints and ask ourselves if they are better for us or better for everyone. We are humans and like other industries, greed has crept in and we don't always make great decisions when left on our own.
      - LastMuel 5y ago
        > We are humans and like other industries, greed has crept in and we don't always make great decisions when left on our own. I feel strange having to point out that Governments are made up of people too. If it's not people that are making the good decisions, whom do we turn to?
- watwut 5y ago
  Whistleblower and activist are not mutually exclusive. Most are both, like Snowden was both. Reality Winner too. And whether I agree with someone views is really not relevant toward whether they are whistleblower.
  - dls2016 5y ago
    I’d go one step further and say a whistleblower is by definition an activist. The entire point of leaking is to instigate change.
- masswerk 5y ago
  I think, two entirely different topics became mixed up here: the privacy of point to point messages and the impact of algorithmic enhancement of public messages. To my best abilities, I fail to see a connection. (That is, you may suggest that the latter may lead to an increase of "problematic" calls to action in private messages, but, then, you've already messed up in the first place, by enhancing the impact of public messages.)
- newaccount2021 5y ago
  Haugen is Tipper Gore for the web era...the "enlightened intellectual" who will save us from ourselves Frances Haugen is really just bothered by the fact that some stubborn betas refuse to conform to her worldview...but like Tipper Gore, she'll have to settle for the equivalent of a Parental Advisory warning
- swalsh 5y ago
  Web 3.0 offers the best solution to this. Web 2.0 companies, and the people that control them are just going to continue reaching for more control of the data we create, and give them for free. It's a problem that a small group of elite engineers have so much power.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  Frances Haugen's own motives are not the defining factor regarding the public utility of leaking this material. Her motives are her own, and once her information is out in the open it isn't up to her to decide what we all do about it. I'm not about to dismiss what was revealed just because I disagree with some of her opinions about that material.
  - nanis 5y ago
    > Frances Haugen's own motives Motives aside, whether she is acting as a mole for intelligence agencies to gather support for enabling more 'round the clock surveillance of wrong-think under the guise of "blowing the whistle" is a defining factor.
    - ineedasername 5y ago
      If you have evidence of her working as a secret intelligence agency undercover operative, then I'll be incorporate that into views on this issue. However, I think I'd still be glad that the information she leaked is now public, just like I'd be glad if a plot by intelligence agencies to systematically censor social media was made public, just like I've been glad when prior abuses by the government have been made public. Get it all out in the open.
  - adolph 5y ago
    > motives are not the defining factor regarding the public utility of leaking this material An evaluation of likely motives is incorporated into the evaluation of the evidence. There are a lot of things that can't be known: How much is true? How much made up? How much is true but not representative of the totality?
- berkes 5y ago
  "what the tech community wants" is pluriform and broad. However, what we clearly see here, is how one company can almost dictate "what all of us get". If Facebook decides to have e2e, that is what we have. If it decides to have "less encryption" that is what we get. The real issue is not what governments, tech communities or whistleblowers want. The real issue is that it matters very little, because in the end we get "what facebook wants" regardless. And that, according to those leaks, is entirely driven by profit.
- wavefunction 5y ago
  > her suggestions really do not align with what the tech community wants at all. Speak for yourself. Facebook has become a threat to my country's democracy and stability and has enabled all sorts of horrific violence. If Facebook could be trusted to do the right thing I would feel differently but they've shown time and again they don't have the capacity or will to do so. "Move fast and break things" apparently applies to everything Facebook touches and so they should be regulated and controlled like a toddler.
- jmull 5y ago
  There isn't any reason someone can't be both a whistleblower and an activist. > and some of her suggestions really do not align with what the tech community wants at all For what it's worth, she says her views on E2E encryption have been misrepresented. Also, where is this single "tech community" with cohesive views on all this? I've never seen it. I'm pretty skeptical of anyone claiming to speak for the tech community.
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    > For what it's worth, she says her views on E2E encryption have been misrepresented. My link above has direct quotes from Haughen regarding E2E encryption. I don’t understand why people are so eager to project something different on to what she’s directly saying.
    - jmull 5y ago
      I'll just note, I'm not projecting anything. Do you really think those tweeted screen shots sum it all up accurately, though? Considering that she says her views are being mispreresented, couldn't those two quotes be cherry-picked? You know the reputation of the Telegraph, right? A guy tweeted that someone said (unattributed, but I assume the Telegraph) that she said.... It's just not solid. If you're going to accept that uncritically, I think you're essentially believing what you want to believe.
- dmix 5y ago
  > against allowing Facebook to use end-to-end encryption Apparently three of her lawyers are connected to the US intel agencies. This is entirely US-gov friendly whistleblowing and they know which horses to back.
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  One can believe that the whistleblower is correct in their identification of the problem and believe that the whistleblower is wrong about the best solution. This is not an inconsistent position.
- gadders 5y ago
  One other interesting thing to note is that the whole Facebook whisteblower campaign is being funded by Pierre Omidyar https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/20/22737042/facebook-whistleblower-frances-haugen-pierre-omidyar https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/20/22737042/facebook-whistl...
- lmc 5y ago
  He's quoting a Telegraph article which misrepresented Haugen's view. She's for end-to-end encryption but concerned Facebook's implementation of it will be closed-source and not open to scrutiny. It's about 2h15 into yesterday's UK Online Safety Bill Committee testimony: https://www.parliamentlive.tv/Event/Index/cddf75b6-4279-43db-9ac9-9146ef5fe03f https://www.parliamentlive.tv/Event/Index/cddf75b6-4279-43db...
- CarelessExpert 5y ago
  > As cited in this article, Frances Haugen is arguing against allowing Facebook to use end-to-end encryption because she suggests Facebook should have more surveillance of private communications: https://twitter.com/AlecMuffett/status/1452309133928054799?s https://twitter.com/AlecMuffett/status/1452309133928054799?s... That's because encryption is incredibly problematic. And I say that as a huge fan of digital privacy and an avid user of Signal. I'm not so blind as to think that perfect encryption is an unalloyed good, and in that screenshot (which, I'll point out, excludes any broader context for her remarks) Haugen touches on just one of many very legitimate problems with the technology. Now, in the end, I think (though I'm not certain) I believe the upsides outweigh the downsides. But don't pretend as though she doesn't raise a valid concern, even if you don't agree with her conclusion. > A lot of people jumped to the defense of the Facebook leaker because the media so successfully framed it as a “whistleblower” situation, but that’s not really what’s happening here. She’s very much an activist All whistleblowers are activists. Do you really think Snowden didn't have an agenda? Of course he did! His act was specifically and explicitly political. Hell, Wikileaks has proven itself to be nakedly political. The only reason I'm betting you don't see it that way is you happen to agree with their politics. > some of her suggestions really do not align with what the tech community wants at all. Don't deign to speak for me. There is no unified "tech community" on this topic, even if your echo chamber leads to to believe otherwise.
- madrox 5y ago
  I haven't been able to find a clip of it, but Biden recently brought up that democracies are having a hard time keeping up socially with the pace of innovation, and that autocracies are reacting quicker. He wasn't advocating for autocracy; merely pointing out that democracy is struggling on this point. I've been thinking about this a lot whenever government oversight is brought up. I'm not convinced the war against misinformation is any more winnable than the war on drugs in a free, self-determining society. The best we can hope for is to curb the worst consequences by slowing virality.
- rst 5y ago
  That's not the position that Haugen took testifying before Parliament in the UK -- where she expressed strong support for e2e encryption. She said her views had been misreported earlier -- that she'd questioned whether Facebook could be trusted to implement e2e properly, and that the reporters had garbled it. See, e.g., https://twitter.com/sleepdefic1t/status/1452724217393434636 https://twitter.com/sleepdefic1t/status/1452724217393434636
- macshaggy 5y ago
  Based on what. The twitter link is just a picture but there is zero source attribution. He uses his own twitter status for his article. So, he's the source of his own article. At this point the entire blog post, twitter post, and the credibility of the author I find lacking. I'm not defending anything that Frances Haugen did do, or say, but I find it disturbing that anyone can take the author seriously if he can't find support for his argument that doesn't come from himself than he has no argument and linking to other "sources" means nothing he writes is verifiable beyond the actual documents he does link to.
54b4b54 5y ago
"feel weird, in a “Frances Haugen may have messed-up my legacy” kind of way." Should have blown the whistle then. All engineers in tech have a certain level of ethical responsibility they have completely failed to maintain. An internal good bye letter you hope never gets leaked because it might ruin your chances with other companies later in life sounds like quite the opposite of that ethical responsibility. Fuck your career, be a better human. Every FB employee knows what they are signing up for.
- ootsootsoots 5y ago
  Frankly at this point every technologist should be held accountable. The entire online business community is built around privacy invasion. Fuck YOUR career 54b4b54; we engineers have enough power to stop this by not opening our laptops tomorrow. It’s easier to sit online and deflect, project, and carry on like a coward.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
fareesh 5y ago
On the popularity of Haugen: I find it amusing how your government treats a whistleblower who is promoting government control over social media, vs the way your government treats a whistleblower who leaks evidence of government spying and abuse. The fact that Edward Snowden and Julian Assange are treated the way they are (and the earlier treatment of Manning) gives the US government zero credibility on press freedom, social media legislation or anything remotely related to privacy. EDIT: Furthermore according to the FBI it's ok for Hillary Clinton to keep government communication explicitly marked classified in her basement server because no harm is intended, whereas others have been prosecuted in the absence of intended harm. The optics are absolutely terrible on these issues. If I can speak for some of the folks in the rest of the world, we're laughing and shaking our heads.
- aero-glide2 5y ago
  I cannot trust the media anymore, they are crazy and they are making me go crazy.
- AlexB138 5y ago
  > I find it amusing how your government treats a whistleblower who is promoting government control over social media, vs the way your government treats a whistleblower who leaks evidence of government spying and abuse. That is because e.g. Snowden is actually a whistleblower, warning the people against the powers that be, and Haugen is an activist pushing for an agenda which aligns with what the powers that be want, making her a useful political pawn.
  - fareesh 5y ago
    Yes pretty much this. It's transparent and laughable.
  - rhcom2 5y ago
    Snowden is an activist pushing for an agenda too. Sure, one we agree with and seems ethical but it's still an agenda. Side note, when did "activist" become a dirty word?
OldHand2018 5y ago
> I do not believe that there are other solutions which would scale. If you can see a viable liberal means to keep people safe other than “the status quo, only moreso” then do please let me know. Hello Alec, if you are reading this. This is what it looks like when you choose profit over safety. Facebook chose to enter a market with a business model that depended on "doing things at scale" but it, in fact, could not do safety at scale. You and Facebook knew that you could not do safety at scale. The business model is flawed. Facebook should not be in that market. But profit dictates that Facebook stay.
splatzone 5y ago
I wonder what the mood is like at Facebook at the moment. It must be pretty demoralising to see revelations about your company's behaviour in the press, especially if you believe in the mission. Yet I wonder if there's a different narrative that employees internally are believing in. I've been freelance my entire life and never worked for a large corp, so I don't know what it's like. But I'd be fascinated to be a fly on the wall in Facebook's offices this month
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- oconnor663 5y ago
  Speaking from personal experience as a former FB employee (but 8 years ago at this point): It was pretty easy to put all the bad press out of mind, because so much of it was obviously mistaken and uninformed. Media coverage of Facebook is overwhelmingly written by people who don't know how websites or tech companies work, and who don't know how to evaluate or even acknowledge the tradeoffs involved in the subjects they write about. To be fair, this is how media coverage of most things works. High quality criticism is rare, and you have to seek it out. Thoughtful people do seek it out. But as a matter of personal experience, the fact that most criticism is low quality makes it easy to ignore without losing any sleep. On the other hand, maybe the press is much more negative now, and the situation is different? Could be. I've been out for too long to know.
adventured 5y ago
> Facebook whistleblower warns ‘dangerous’ encryption will aid espionage by hostile nations So another reason the politicians in DC are so abnormally happy about Haugen. She's providing a security/safety theater argument against encryption, one that is so convoluted it's bound to confuse the general public in a we have to deny your rights to protect your rights sort of way.
- bogwog 5y ago
  She seems more like a lobbyist than a whistleblower.
  - cudgy 5y ago
    Perhaps she works for the CIA?
    - wakiza33 5y ago
      It's all little too perfect isn't it. I think the CIA connection scenario is certainly worth keeping in back of mind.
      - bogwog 5y ago
        This kind of paranoia is how you get another insurrection. If you're finding it difficult to ignore thoughts like that, maybe it's a sign that you need to take a break from social media.
        _bfhp 5y ago
        A deranged conspiracy theory, just like all the wackos that believed the NSA was spying on everyone or that COVID leaked from a medical lab
        cudgy 5y ago
        Keeping a thought in the back of one’s mind is not paranoia.
deleted 5y ago
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pfraze 5y ago
Just saying, at this stage, if I were Facebook and I wanted to take the pressure off, I’d be putting out little stories that make the story about the whistleblower instead of about Facebook. I’d also focus on stories that will make us disagree with her over various particulars rather than with Facebook. Facebook has a pretty simple problem: they pissed off too many people, either by taking too much of the winnings for themselves or by inserting themselves into divisive governing tasks or just by ruining what earlier users liked about the product. Lately I even think the anger towards them is because they represent the Internet, and the whole Internet seems to suck lately. So does Facebook deserve every bit of this bad press? Maybe not. Maybe it’s not all fair. But it’s all coming from somewhere- they’ve just made too many people mad. I don’t think you can insert yourself this directly into monopolizing control of information and the enormous winnings of the Internet without this happening.
- wakiza33 5y ago
  That's a fair perspective. The part of it though that is nefarious is that the main segment they have angered is the media. Simply put, the advertising dollars that used to go to newspapers now go to Facebook and Google (because you can reach the same audience far more efficiently). Unfortunately, it's pretty clear the media 'has it out for' facebook, ultimately, for monetary reasons. Particularly the big institutions believe that if Facebook were out that a lot of those dollars would flow back. It's the heart of all of the facebook attacks.
  - pfraze 5y ago
    I think that's true to an extent; angering all of the media at once is sure to have some bad consequences. But I think the other grievances I mentioned are fairly specific and not just engineered via repeated bad press. Again, the core of their problem is that they inserted themselves into the middle layer of everything. In doing so, they adopted all the negatives along with the positives. It seems like an untenable position in the long run; you just can't monopolize computing like this.
  - wnissen 5y ago
    Given that the newspapers watched Facebook first co-opt their content, and then their revenue, and continually jerked them around with misleading or even fraudulent metrics ("pivot to video!"), I think they have been remarkably restrained. And that's leaving aside the damage of email, community forums, and democracy that don't directly affect the media.
muglug 5y ago
> I built a great team, built the product, and unlike the current crop of whistleblowers I submitted my resignation and fostered strong relationships with my soon-to-be-ex-colleagues, because there is a lot more impact to be had through constructive engagement than in rage-quitting. This has a bit of a holier-than-thou approach. He was in a radically-different position than some of the whistleblowers — he was an engineer working on features that would clearly appeal to FB’s user base. A lot of the people saddled with the hard work of civic integrity & election integrity are well-paid but severely under-resourced by the company. Facebook only cares enough to put out PR fires, and not prevent real-life ones resulting from its work.
- jahnu 5y ago
  Agreed! And this: > journalists are nothing but exploitative Talk about sweeping generalisations!
- Ozzie_osman 5y ago
  > I don’t think Facebook is “good” or “evil” — I think it’s a corporation. Sure. You could say this about any company or any country. Or even a person. We're all just a collection of thoughts and actions.
ineedasername 5y ago
The impact of speech is still not the same as that of sticks and stones, and guns, knives, or fists must still be wielded by people, not Youtube videos. That somewhat sidesteps the fact that it's speech that can get people riled up enough to invite violence. Acknowledging this fact is not advocacy for censorship. It's recognizing that there are plenty of things short of "yelling 'fire' in a crowded theatre" that can be the cause of quite a bit of harm, and we should try to avoid and discourage that. How we go about that task is another matter. I don't like or want censorship, and similar to Muffet I don't see a whole lot of options on the table. But we certainly can't blind ourselves on the issue by not acknowledging that plenty of awful things are enabled & possible because of speech. Otherwise his sentiment amounts to "guns don't kill people, people kill people". Which is trivially true while ignoring the significant role that both have in an act of violence. Not much different than saying "guns don't kill people, bullets kill people." It's all a single system and there are multiple essential components.
Gunax 5y ago
> 1. regional censorship will be applied at a network level — e.g. upon “Indian IP Addresses” or “Indian Phone Numbers” — which is not a good solution because the Internet does not respect national boundaries, nor does it work that way: e.g. VPNs exist and are already used to bypass these approaches. 2. regional censorship will be applied at a human level — e.g. upon “Indian Users” — which is not a good solution because it assumes that (a) online anonymity should and can be effectively stopped, (b) national identity is straightforwardly applicable to humans (how about “dual nationals?”) and (c) platforms must know the nationality of their users merely to function, e.g. to send cat pictures. 3. global censorship will be applied blindly as the union of regional censorships — so people in the USA will not be able to critically discuss Indian politics, and absolutely nobody would be able to discuss China. This would be highly illiberal and destructive of public discourse. It's going to be neither of these, but close to #3. Users will be able to discuss anything (withing their nationality's rules) but they would be not visible to user outside their own--or atleast not available to the citizens/users of the place is question. The seeds have all ready been planted with this Russian propaganda/disinformation/whatever campaign (not trying to argue about the veracity of it, but it's interesting that the public apparently cares more about who said it than what was actually said). Even in the USA, supposed home of the free, we are seeing that free speech doesn't seem to apply if you are not a citizen. Can't have weak American minds exposed to wrongthink from abroad.
numair 5y ago
There’s no honor among thieves. What this guy, and the whistleblower, and Mark Zuckerberg, and Roger McNamee, and everyone else are doing is simple — they’re all turning on each other. Don’t try to figure out who is “right” or “wrong” or whatever, or if it’s the government going after them, blah blah blah. It’s just a bunch of dirty people pointing fingers at others, trying to wash their karma. Somewhere in the vaults of the FBI are recordings of my final conversations with Sean Parker. One of the things I keep repeating to that unrepentant sexual predator is, “in the end, all of you will turn on each other.” And that’s exactly what is slowly happening, and will continue happening. Especially as all of these formerly-young millennials turn into old people who will be desperate to sell their kids and grandkids on a “I was one of the good guys” narrative. Like rats on a sinking ship, I tell ya. And don’t @ me with a reference to the stock price — the labor market determines the future of the giants in our field, because they’re labor constrained, not capital constrained. If Facebook can’t hire the best talent to build the best apps for iOS 22 or whatever, all of the money in the world won’t make them relevant again.
- will4274 5y ago
  > unrepentant sexual predator What is this? I don't have any context.
  - jjulius 5y ago
    The user you're responding to reported Parker to the FBI alleging he witnessed him rape a 16 year-old. He's also got some prior history involving FB and how they treated an app he developed years back. Here are a few links related to this that I discovered by Googling "numair sean parker" just now. His Twitter feed also alludes to many other people being involved with underage boys. https://mobile.twitter.com/numair/status/1408055869481254912?lang=en https://mobile.twitter.com/numair/status/1408055869481254912... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26725402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26725402 https://numair.medium.com/15-years-is-enough-time-silicon-valleys-rape-problem-ee1a022a079f https://numair.medium.com/15-years-is-enough-time-silicon-va... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2134289 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2134289 ----- Edit: It's worth pointing out that this post of his from 2006 aged like milk, given his current views of Parker and (as I've read in other threads lately) Zuckerberg/FB. https://web.archive.org/web/20070107220225/http://www.numair.com/2006/11/sean-parker-as-jim-clark-2.html https://web.archive.org/web/20070107220225/http://www.numair...
gverrilla 5y ago
“make the world more open and connected” only means "scale fast and get as much products as you can to later sell to advertisers". being connected or open won't end slavery, homelessness, crime or ignorance.
- loeg 5y ago
  > being connected or open won't end slavery, homelessness, crime or ignorance. Is any other corporation (Visa, Saudi Aramco, Apple, ...) expected to solve slavery, homelessness, crime, and ignorance? This is an absurd criticism.
  - gverrilla 5y ago
    Was just stating facts, didn't say they were expected to solve slavery. But maybe they should be, now you mention it: we're talking about the richest org's/individuals in the planet, afterall. It was also an indirect criticism to this tech-startup-bullshit-lingo, full of lies and hypocrisy.
Tainnor 5y ago
The author is presenting a false dilemma viz. their three reported options (1. IP level restrictions, 2. Citizenship based restrictions, 3. Union of legal systems): - We can't just ignore the fact that the internet is a global technology but jurisdictions are regionally restricted. This is a tension, of course, but to just throw up the hands in the air and conclude that, therefore, the internet should be a wholly unregulated space is not an option and not a single nation will allow that eventually. - It is not necessary that the whole of the internet abide by one of these mechanisms, different things can be regulated in different ways, and "mixtures" of the systems are conceivable. - The fact that proposed regulations have edge cases is not something that makes regulation impossible. That seems to be a very engineer-like mindset, but in truth, the law is quite good when it comes to integrating competing interests and principles or do decide that at some point, something is "good enough". Otherwise no laws would ever be written. - IP based restrictions do not become ineffective automatically because VPNs exist. This is proven by the fact that geoblocking works reasonably well on streaming services etc. VPNs are often blocked and, even when not, many people are not technically competent enough to set one up. Of course, it depends on what we want to use IP based restrictions for. If we're targeting criminals (or dissidents), that's probably not a viable solution, but if it's about blocking certain content to certain users then it should work reasonably well. NB: I'm not arguing in favour of geoblocking, it's a stupid thing that should disappear, but the point is solely that it works reasonably well for lots of users. - Finding some sort of common ground between different jurisdictions is something that is necessary in many areas of life which is why trade agreements etc. exist. If the EU pushing GDPR means that Facebook et al. need to adopt better practices wrt. privacy across the globe (because it's too difficult to determine whether a user is EU-based or not), then I guess that's gonna be the price they have to pay to operate in the EU. If the price for operating in China is, nobody is able to talk critically about China anymore, then the response should be "well I guess we won't be operating in China, then" (or, failing that, this should become something that would make western users abandon the network, or even better, something that other countries would take issue with, forcing the service to actually have to take a stand on this).
dleslie 5y ago
I take issue with the final off-hand comment he made about Tik Tok[0] on one of the linked twitter threads: > Also: the tiktok algorithm has decided that I am a "foodie"; it's pretty much correct about that. Why should I suffer a more mediocre & less valuable experience? Because "democracy is at stake" because of bunch of people never learnt how to identify conspiracy theories at school? Well, it's not so great. The ability to discover preferences and adapt content could also be used by a malicious actor to discover targets; ie, for a totalitarian regime to discover dissenters. Such a regime needn't have an agreement with the social network, either; they need only use the tools made available to users and advertisers upon that network to harvest information about dissenters. It's as simple as creating a honey pot. Moreover, if an agreement exists with the social network, then the curation itself can omit undesirable content in the general case, and keep it available in the explicit case; not censoring it, per se, but ensuring that it does not receive an equitable platform. That's what many are clamoring for, isn't it? A way to selectively weed out voices and people that are undesirable. I feel like the problem is two fold: 1. That there's this assumption that somehow the tools used to harm some won't be used to harm others. 2. That the feed is necessarily worth saving. (2) is most interesting to consider, I think. Perhaps it's not. Perhaps algorithmic social media feeds aren't worth saving. 0: https://twitter.com/AlecMuffett/status/1451997185478963211 https://twitter.com/AlecMuffett/status/1451997185478963211
tablespoon 5y ago
> The world is a far less bad place than people credit. The impact of speech is still not the same as that of sticks and stones, and guns, knives, or fists must still be wielded by people, not Youtube videos. Generations have been wrongly certain that children needed legislation to keep them safe from the evils of crystal-set radios, comic books, video nasties, satanism, “dungeons & dragons”, and Kate Moss’ “heroin chic” — let alone Instagram. This guy underestimates the power of speech, and seems to get there by cherry-picking his examples. I'm generally supportive of privacy and opposed to censorship, but there are some pretty serious and legitimate problems that exist nowadays that challenge that view (some are new, some are amplified versions of perennial problems). Hand wavy dismissals of those problems don't make a compelling argument. Personally, my sense is the democratization of industrial-scale broadcasting technology might have made some bad tradeoffs, compared to the previous system where that technology was controlled by well-educated elites subject to social regulation by peers. That previous system certainly had its flaws, but it did slow many things down and tended to be more restrained (on average), and that was probably better. So you might be able to avoid the need for censorship by making wide-scale broadcasting technology as hard as it used to be (or at least harder than it is now).
- burnished 5y ago
  Yeah. Invoking sticks and stones and the satanic panic but seemingly not addressing genocide enabled by the platform seems.. bad.
pbalau 5y ago
This [0] is related to the topic at hand. 0. https://twitter.com/AlecMuffett/status/1452725377332297734 https://twitter.com/AlecMuffett/status/1452725377332297734
alex_young 5y ago
There’s a genuine moral dilemma here isn’t there? Imagine for a moment that we are debating what a company should do with a chalkboard in a public square. People keep writing things on it organizing racially motivated killings, etc. The company has implemented a technology which allows people to write things on it without anyone being able to see who posted what or when. If the company does nothing it will surely lead to the government rightly removing access to the board, but perhaps some similar thing would go on in people's own private spaces anyway. Seems like a lose lose problem to try to solve.
- tayistay 5y ago
  Bad analogy. Facebook has an algorithm which promotes posts that drive engagement, which is often extremist stuff. Just regulating that (as Haugen suggests) would improve things.
  - alex_young 5y ago
    Context is the discussion about e2e encryption. Sorry if that wasn't clear.
tayistay 5y ago
> I built a great team, built the product, and unlike the current crop of whistleblowers I submitted my resignation and fostered strong relationships with my soon-to-be-ex-colleagues, because there is a lot more impact to be had through constructive engagement than in rage-quitting. Nonsense, and smug. Nobody would have heard of this guy were it not for "the current crop of whistleblowers." And we've all seen that Facebook isn't going to fix itself.
- loeg 5y ago
  > Nobody would have heard of this guy were it not for "the current crop of whistleblowers." You might not have heard of him, and that's fine, but Alec Muffet has had a Wikipedia article dating back to 2013. He's been a public figure since long before this crop of "whistleblowers."
  - tayistay 5y ago
    Despite his short wikipedia page, nobody outside of tech has heard of him, and his holier-than-thou stuff about not rage quitting (a straw man anyway, Haugen didn't rage quit) sure did a whole lot of good.
CarelessExpert 5y ago
Man, there is a profound lack of self-awareness when you cite 1984 in an article defending Facebook, when Facebook is complicit in the creation of modern surveillance capitalism and the slow but inexorable shift to the digital panopticon...
mensetmanusman 5y ago
“ AM: I believe that the pushback we are seeing from Governments against Facebook for pursuing this goal, is substantial and aimed squarely at making an example of FB to discourage further adoption of end-to-end encryption.” Who to trust…
tqi 5y ago
The nuanced tone / takeaway from the actual interview transcript feel very different from the final article: https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-papers-badge-posts-former-employees/ https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-papers-badge-posts-form... Reading both, and seeing how disengaged the interviewer actually was with the interviewee, it really feels like Levy came into the interaction with a pre-constructed narrative in mind.
etc-hosts 5y ago
The only whistleblowers you should trust are ones the government is attempting to completely ruin.

228 points by amadeuspagel 5y ago

As cited in this article, Frances Haugen is arguing against allowing Facebook to use end-to-end encryption because she suggests Facebook should have more surveillance of private communications: https://twitter.com/AlecMuffett/status/1452309133928054799?s=20 https://twitter.com/AlecMuffett/status/1452309133928054799?s... A lot of people jumped to the defense of the Facebook leaker because the media so successfully framed it as a “whistleblower” situation, but that’s not really what’s happening here. She’s very much an activist, and some of her suggestions really do not align with what the tech community wants at all. Any time someone goes in front of the government and insists on less encryption and more government control of tech companies, we should be worried and proceed with extreme caution. No matter how much you dislike Facebook, this situation is no exception.

md2020 5y ago
As much as some on HN like to criticize Moxie/Signal for their decisions (Intel SGX debacle), seeing these kinds of sentiments get cheered on in the media makes me really glad they exist. Same for the Tor Project, Matrix.org Foundation, EFF, etc. Can’t be easy being in their positions ever, but especially right now.
abrahamepton 5y ago
I don’t understand why it matters what Haugen believes - whether in “no encryption” or space fairies or whatever - instead of what she proved, which is the profoundly amoral and dishonest nature of the company.
- vintermann 5y ago
  It matters because she's using the one to promote the other. We should be able to say that the leaks themselves are good, but also that they are making a transparent political play for control over Facebook (more than reining in their amorality and dishonesty). Whistleblowers do not usually have the support of a top tier lobbying firm (Bryson Gillette) paid for by a rival tech billionaire (Pierre Omidyar). I say take the leaks, but say no thanks to the "advice" it comes with.
- WillPostForFood 5y ago
  She isn’t just a neutral presenter of data, she is a spokesperson and advocate. She is positioning herself to be a decision maker, or help decision makers.
  - dls2016 5y ago
    Isn’t a whistleblower by definition not neutral? I’m not even sure what a neutral whistleblower would look like. Should her motivations be questioned? Absolutely! But if you don’t like her stance, just say so instead labelling her an “activist” or “advocate” like there’s something inherently bad about those things.
    - WillPostForFood 5y ago
      I didn't intent to imply anything bad about being labeled an activist or an advocate. Whistleblower carries something of a neutral veneer. A whistleblower are often seen as exposing something objectively wrong, a broken law or crime. That's not really what is happening here (though it wouldn't be surprising to see laws have been broken). The main thrust here is Facebook is bad for society, which, IMO is more activism than whistleblowing. No objective answer here! Just how I read the nuance of the language.
yodsanklai 5y ago
HN is a bit schizophrenic on this topic. On one hand, it seems everybody wants more freedom and less surveillance, but they give FB a hard time for not monitoring content better. Hopefully these aren't the same people expressing these contradictory points of view. I'd be curious to know what both side think the ideal social network should look like.
- thereddaikon 5y ago
  HN isn't one person with a single set of ideals and opinions. Its a website, with many people who's worldview ranges quite drastically. Tech, like anything else in the world, is going to have a cross section of humanity in it. You have libertarians, anarcho-capitalists, traditional GOP and Dems, European Socialists and full on communists here. You can't expect such a diverse group to have a homogenous view.
  - boringg 5y ago
    Exactly - every community has a diverse set of opinions (whether its discernible to the average person or not is a different question) and rarely do you find a homogenous group of individuals without a very strictly enforced control mechanism which suppress differences from being seen then creating a homogenous community.
- lowkey_ 5y ago
  > On one hand, it seems everybody wants more freedom and less surveillance, but they give FB a hard time for not monitoring content better. I don't think these are conflicting views: (1) Less monitoring on private messages (2) More monitoring on public posts
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    > 1) Less monitoring on private messages The Facebook leaker is explicitly arguing against this though. She cites Facebook’s push for end-to-end encryption of private messages as a problem.
arthur_sav 5y ago
There's no rational discussion around these e-mob hate trains. It boils down to "You're either with us or against us". I guess we're focusing on hating facebook this year.
Closi 5y ago
I also don't see anything too 'whistle-blower' worthy in the goodbye post. It just seems to be a vague message that although social media sometimes have a positive impact, it also sometimes has a negative impact, and that Facebook has employed strategies to help it grow. Hardly shocking findings!
capableweb 5y ago
> some of her suggestions really do not align with what the tech community wants at all I agree in general with your comment, but what I don't like is anyone (Haugen, you or anyone else) speaking for "the tech community". We all have different opinions, and you can't generalize with that. For example, plenty of people I know including myself would be strongly against less encryption, but strongly for more government control of tech companies (not via less encryption but via other means). It's really hard to generalize, and in this case we gain nothing by generalizing so let's do it less, not more.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > For example, plenty of people I know including myself would be strongly against less encryption, but strongly for more government control of tech companies (not via less encryption but via other means). But that’s not what Haughen is lobbying for. She’s explicitly saying that end-to-end encryption is bad because it doesn’t allow Facebook to monitor private communications enough. I’d be surprised if you could find more than a tiny minority in the tech communicate who agree with this.
  - capableweb 5y ago
    I understand that, that's why I expressed that I don't like them expressing it as something the "tech community" wants...
nojito 5y ago
This is a very common deflection tactic by corporations. Try and discredit the leaker over the information that was leaked. We saw it with Wikileaks and now we will see as more and more tech employees start sharing what goes on behind the curtains.
- vintermann 5y ago
  The leak is more important than the leaker. That I support and value the Snowden leaks doesn't mean I always have to agree with Snowden (I think he's terrible on macroeconomics and crypto, for instance). No whistleblower has ever received such a red carpet as Frances Haugen. In itself, it's good that she's aggressively defended by the political establishment rather than facing reprisals and jail. But it should make you question what's going on here, quite apart from the contents of the leak itself. One of the things Haugen proposes, repealing section 230 protection, is even supported by Facebook itself and strongly opposed by antimonopolists (who argue that it will be far easier to comply for Facebook than any would be competitor).
bostonsre 5y ago
> her suggestions really do not align with what the tech community wants at all. I feel like we as a tech community should take a step back and consider whether or not we should not be the only ones that decide what should or should not be done. It is a massive country with many opposing viewpoints. We have massive conflicts of interest and some tech companies have shown over and over that greed trumps morals in many cases. We are humans and we are not a group of enlightened arbiters that know what is best for the world. We have done a shit job so far of managing ourselves. Sure in lots of cases we have made the world a better place but I think we need to be honest with ourselves and acknowledge that greed has crept in and supplanted that "making the world a better place" mission.
- sanedigital 5y ago
  In my opinion, domain experts have a moral obligation to speak up regarding policy that involves their area of expertise. On the topic of encryption, we're the only community with an understanding of what "breaking encryption" means. There are no skeleton keys, only vulnerabilities. We have a moral and ethical duty to fight for encryption, privacy, and security, not against it.
  - bostonsre 5y ago
    Yes, I agree that we should absolutely provide advice on our area of expertise for topics in our domain but I don't think we should be the ones that make the decision. The other side of the debate aren't idiots, they have some valid view points, else this encryption debate would have been settled long ago. Encryption was not the only point brought up by the OP, they were also against government regulation. My main point is that we are tech workers that have conflicts of interest and that we should look hard at our viewpoints and ask ourselves if they are better for us or better for everyone. We are humans and like other industries, greed has crept in and we don't always make great decisions when left on our own.
    - LastMuel 5y ago
      > We are humans and like other industries, greed has crept in and we don't always make great decisions when left on our own. I feel strange having to point out that Governments are made up of people too. If it's not people that are making the good decisions, whom do we turn to?
watwut 5y ago
Whistleblower and activist are not mutually exclusive. Most are both, like Snowden was both. Reality Winner too. And whether I agree with someone views is really not relevant toward whether they are whistleblower.
- dls2016 5y ago
  I’d go one step further and say a whistleblower is by definition an activist. The entire point of leaking is to instigate change.
masswerk 5y ago
I think, two entirely different topics became mixed up here: the privacy of point to point messages and the impact of algorithmic enhancement of public messages. To my best abilities, I fail to see a connection. (That is, you may suggest that the latter may lead to an increase of "problematic" calls to action in private messages, but, then, you've already messed up in the first place, by enhancing the impact of public messages.)
newaccount2021 5y ago
Haugen is Tipper Gore for the web era...the "enlightened intellectual" who will save us from ourselves Frances Haugen is really just bothered by the fact that some stubborn betas refuse to conform to her worldview...but like Tipper Gore, she'll have to settle for the equivalent of a Parental Advisory warning
swalsh 5y ago
Web 3.0 offers the best solution to this. Web 2.0 companies, and the people that control them are just going to continue reaching for more control of the data we create, and give them for free. It's a problem that a small group of elite engineers have so much power.
ineedasername 5y ago
Frances Haugen's own motives are not the defining factor regarding the public utility of leaking this material. Her motives are her own, and once her information is out in the open it isn't up to her to decide what we all do about it. I'm not about to dismiss what was revealed just because I disagree with some of her opinions about that material.
- nanis 5y ago
  > Frances Haugen's own motives Motives aside, whether she is acting as a mole for intelligence agencies to gather support for enabling more 'round the clock surveillance of wrong-think under the guise of "blowing the whistle" is a defining factor.
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    If you have evidence of her working as a secret intelligence agency undercover operative, then I'll be incorporate that into views on this issue. However, I think I'd still be glad that the information she leaked is now public, just like I'd be glad if a plot by intelligence agencies to systematically censor social media was made public, just like I've been glad when prior abuses by the government have been made public. Get it all out in the open.
- adolph 5y ago
  > motives are not the defining factor regarding the public utility of leaking this material An evaluation of likely motives is incorporated into the evaluation of the evidence. There are a lot of things that can't be known: How much is true? How much made up? How much is true but not representative of the totality?
berkes 5y ago
"what the tech community wants" is pluriform and broad. However, what we clearly see here, is how one company can almost dictate "what all of us get". If Facebook decides to have e2e, that is what we have. If it decides to have "less encryption" that is what we get. The real issue is not what governments, tech communities or whistleblowers want. The real issue is that it matters very little, because in the end we get "what facebook wants" regardless. And that, according to those leaks, is entirely driven by profit.
wavefunction 5y ago
> her suggestions really do not align with what the tech community wants at all. Speak for yourself. Facebook has become a threat to my country's democracy and stability and has enabled all sorts of horrific violence. If Facebook could be trusted to do the right thing I would feel differently but they've shown time and again they don't have the capacity or will to do so. "Move fast and break things" apparently applies to everything Facebook touches and so they should be regulated and controlled like a toddler.
jmull 5y ago
There isn't any reason someone can't be both a whistleblower and an activist. > and some of her suggestions really do not align with what the tech community wants at all For what it's worth, she says her views on E2E encryption have been misrepresented. Also, where is this single "tech community" with cohesive views on all this? I've never seen it. I'm pretty skeptical of anyone claiming to speak for the tech community.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > For what it's worth, she says her views on E2E encryption have been misrepresented. My link above has direct quotes from Haughen regarding E2E encryption. I don’t understand why people are so eager to project something different on to what she’s directly saying.
  - jmull 5y ago
    I'll just note, I'm not projecting anything. Do you really think those tweeted screen shots sum it all up accurately, though? Considering that she says her views are being mispreresented, couldn't those two quotes be cherry-picked? You know the reputation of the Telegraph, right? A guy tweeted that someone said (unattributed, but I assume the Telegraph) that she said.... It's just not solid. If you're going to accept that uncritically, I think you're essentially believing what you want to believe.
dmix 5y ago
> against allowing Facebook to use end-to-end encryption Apparently three of her lawyers are connected to the US intel agencies. This is entirely US-gov friendly whistleblowing and they know which horses to back.
ashtonkem 5y ago
One can believe that the whistleblower is correct in their identification of the problem and believe that the whistleblower is wrong about the best solution. This is not an inconsistent position.
gadders 5y ago
One other interesting thing to note is that the whole Facebook whisteblower campaign is being funded by Pierre Omidyar https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/20/22737042/facebook-whistleblower-frances-haugen-pierre-omidyar https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/20/22737042/facebook-whistl...
lmc 5y ago
He's quoting a Telegraph article which misrepresented Haugen's view. She's for end-to-end encryption but concerned Facebook's implementation of it will be closed-source and not open to scrutiny. It's about 2h15 into yesterday's UK Online Safety Bill Committee testimony: https://www.parliamentlive.tv/Event/Index/cddf75b6-4279-43db-9ac9-9146ef5fe03f https://www.parliamentlive.tv/Event/Index/cddf75b6-4279-43db...
CarelessExpert 5y ago
> As cited in this article, Frances Haugen is arguing against allowing Facebook to use end-to-end encryption because she suggests Facebook should have more surveillance of private communications: https://twitter.com/AlecMuffett/status/1452309133928054799?s https://twitter.com/AlecMuffett/status/1452309133928054799?s... That's because encryption is incredibly problematic. And I say that as a huge fan of digital privacy and an avid user of Signal. I'm not so blind as to think that perfect encryption is an unalloyed good, and in that screenshot (which, I'll point out, excludes any broader context for her remarks) Haugen touches on just one of many very legitimate problems with the technology. Now, in the end, I think (though I'm not certain) I believe the upsides outweigh the downsides. But don't pretend as though she doesn't raise a valid concern, even if you don't agree with her conclusion. > A lot of people jumped to the defense of the Facebook leaker because the media so successfully framed it as a “whistleblower” situation, but that’s not really what’s happening here. She’s very much an activist All whistleblowers are activists. Do you really think Snowden didn't have an agenda? Of course he did! His act was specifically and explicitly political. Hell, Wikileaks has proven itself to be nakedly political. The only reason I'm betting you don't see it that way is you happen to agree with their politics. > some of her suggestions really do not align with what the tech community wants at all. Don't deign to speak for me. There is no unified "tech community" on this topic, even if your echo chamber leads to to believe otherwise.
madrox 5y ago
I haven't been able to find a clip of it, but Biden recently brought up that democracies are having a hard time keeping up socially with the pace of innovation, and that autocracies are reacting quicker. He wasn't advocating for autocracy; merely pointing out that democracy is struggling on this point. I've been thinking about this a lot whenever government oversight is brought up. I'm not convinced the war against misinformation is any more winnable than the war on drugs in a free, self-determining society. The best we can hope for is to curb the worst consequences by slowing virality.
rst 5y ago
That's not the position that Haugen took testifying before Parliament in the UK -- where she expressed strong support for e2e encryption. She said her views had been misreported earlier -- that she'd questioned whether Facebook could be trusted to implement e2e properly, and that the reporters had garbled it. See, e.g., https://twitter.com/sleepdefic1t/status/1452724217393434636 https://twitter.com/sleepdefic1t/status/1452724217393434636
macshaggy 5y ago
Based on what. The twitter link is just a picture but there is zero source attribution. He uses his own twitter status for his article. So, he's the source of his own article. At this point the entire blog post, twitter post, and the credibility of the author I find lacking. I'm not defending anything that Frances Haugen did do, or say, but I find it disturbing that anyone can take the author seriously if he can't find support for his argument that doesn't come from himself than he has no argument and linking to other "sources" means nothing he writes is verifiable beyond the actual documents he does link to.

54b4b54 5y ago

"feel weird, in a “Frances Haugen may have messed-up my legacy” kind of way." Should have blown the whistle then. All engineers in tech have a certain level of ethical responsibility they have completely failed to maintain. An internal good bye letter you hope never gets leaked because it might ruin your chances with other companies later in life sounds like quite the opposite of that ethical responsibility. Fuck your career, be a better human. Every FB employee knows what they are signing up for.

ootsootsoots 5y ago
Frankly at this point every technologist should be held accountable. The entire online business community is built around privacy invasion. Fuck YOUR career 54b4b54; we engineers have enough power to stop this by not opening our laptops tomorrow. It’s easier to sit online and deflect, project, and carry on like a coward.
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fareesh 5y ago

On the popularity of Haugen: I find it amusing how your government treats a whistleblower who is promoting government control over social media, vs the way your government treats a whistleblower who leaks evidence of government spying and abuse. The fact that Edward Snowden and Julian Assange are treated the way they are (and the earlier treatment of Manning) gives the US government zero credibility on press freedom, social media legislation or anything remotely related to privacy. EDIT: Furthermore according to the FBI it's ok for Hillary Clinton to keep government communication explicitly marked classified in her basement server because no harm is intended, whereas others have been prosecuted in the absence of intended harm. The optics are absolutely terrible on these issues. If I can speak for some of the folks in the rest of the world, we're laughing and shaking our heads.

aero-glide2 5y ago
I cannot trust the media anymore, they are crazy and they are making me go crazy.
AlexB138 5y ago
> I find it amusing how your government treats a whistleblower who is promoting government control over social media, vs the way your government treats a whistleblower who leaks evidence of government spying and abuse. That is because e.g. Snowden is actually a whistleblower, warning the people against the powers that be, and Haugen is an activist pushing for an agenda which aligns with what the powers that be want, making her a useful political pawn.
- fareesh 5y ago
  Yes pretty much this. It's transparent and laughable.
- rhcom2 5y ago
  Snowden is an activist pushing for an agenda too. Sure, one we agree with and seems ethical but it's still an agenda. Side note, when did "activist" become a dirty word?

OldHand2018 5y ago

> I do not believe that there are other solutions which would scale. If you can see a viable liberal means to keep people safe other than “the status quo, only moreso” then do please let me know. Hello Alec, if you are reading this. This is what it looks like when you choose profit over safety. Facebook chose to enter a market with a business model that depended on "doing things at scale" but it, in fact, could not do safety at scale. You and Facebook knew that you could not do safety at scale. The business model is flawed. Facebook should not be in that market. But profit dictates that Facebook stay.

splatzone 5y ago

I wonder what the mood is like at Facebook at the moment. It must be pretty demoralising to see revelations about your company's behaviour in the press, especially if you believe in the mission. Yet I wonder if there's a different narrative that employees internally are believing in. I've been freelance my entire life and never worked for a large corp, so I don't know what it's like. But I'd be fascinated to be a fly on the wall in Facebook's offices this month

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oconnor663 5y ago
Speaking from personal experience as a former FB employee (but 8 years ago at this point): It was pretty easy to put all the bad press out of mind, because so much of it was obviously mistaken and uninformed. Media coverage of Facebook is overwhelmingly written by people who don't know how websites or tech companies work, and who don't know how to evaluate or even acknowledge the tradeoffs involved in the subjects they write about. To be fair, this is how media coverage of most things works. High quality criticism is rare, and you have to seek it out. Thoughtful people do seek it out. But as a matter of personal experience, the fact that most criticism is low quality makes it easy to ignore without losing any sleep. On the other hand, maybe the press is much more negative now, and the situation is different? Could be. I've been out for too long to know.

adventured 5y ago

> Facebook whistleblower warns ‘dangerous’ encryption will aid espionage by hostile nations So another reason the politicians in DC are so abnormally happy about Haugen. She's providing a security/safety theater argument against encryption, one that is so convoluted it's bound to confuse the general public in a we have to deny your rights to protect your rights sort of way.

bogwog 5y ago
She seems more like a lobbyist than a whistleblower.
- cudgy 5y ago
  Perhaps she works for the CIA?
  - wakiza33 5y ago
    It's all little too perfect isn't it. I think the CIA connection scenario is certainly worth keeping in back of mind.
    - bogwog 5y ago
      This kind of paranoia is how you get another insurrection. If you're finding it difficult to ignore thoughts like that, maybe it's a sign that you need to take a break from social media.
      - _bfhp 5y ago
        A deranged conspiracy theory, just like all the wackos that believed the NSA was spying on everyone or that COVID leaked from a medical lab
      - cudgy 5y ago
        Keeping a thought in the back of one’s mind is not paranoia.

deleted 5y ago

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pfraze 5y ago

Just saying, at this stage, if I were Facebook and I wanted to take the pressure off, I’d be putting out little stories that make the story about the whistleblower instead of about Facebook. I’d also focus on stories that will make us disagree with her over various particulars rather than with Facebook. Facebook has a pretty simple problem: they pissed off too many people, either by taking too much of the winnings for themselves or by inserting themselves into divisive governing tasks or just by ruining what earlier users liked about the product. Lately I even think the anger towards them is because they represent the Internet, and the whole Internet seems to suck lately. So does Facebook deserve every bit of this bad press? Maybe not. Maybe it’s not all fair. But it’s all coming from somewhere- they’ve just made too many people mad. I don’t think you can insert yourself this directly into monopolizing control of information and the enormous winnings of the Internet without this happening.

wakiza33 5y ago
That's a fair perspective. The part of it though that is nefarious is that the main segment they have angered is the media. Simply put, the advertising dollars that used to go to newspapers now go to Facebook and Google (because you can reach the same audience far more efficiently). Unfortunately, it's pretty clear the media 'has it out for' facebook, ultimately, for monetary reasons. Particularly the big institutions believe that if Facebook were out that a lot of those dollars would flow back. It's the heart of all of the facebook attacks.
- pfraze 5y ago
  I think that's true to an extent; angering all of the media at once is sure to have some bad consequences. But I think the other grievances I mentioned are fairly specific and not just engineered via repeated bad press. Again, the core of their problem is that they inserted themselves into the middle layer of everything. In doing so, they adopted all the negatives along with the positives. It seems like an untenable position in the long run; you just can't monopolize computing like this.
- wnissen 5y ago
  Given that the newspapers watched Facebook first co-opt their content, and then their revenue, and continually jerked them around with misleading or even fraudulent metrics ("pivot to video!"), I think they have been remarkably restrained. And that's leaving aside the damage of email, community forums, and democracy that don't directly affect the media.

muglug 5y ago

> I built a great team, built the product, and unlike the current crop of whistleblowers I submitted my resignation and fostered strong relationships with my soon-to-be-ex-colleagues, because there is a lot more impact to be had through constructive engagement than in rage-quitting. This has a bit of a holier-than-thou approach. He was in a radically-different position than some of the whistleblowers — he was an engineer working on features that would clearly appeal to FB’s user base. A lot of the people saddled with the hard work of civic integrity & election integrity are well-paid but severely under-resourced by the company. Facebook only cares enough to put out PR fires, and not prevent real-life ones resulting from its work.

jahnu 5y ago
Agreed! And this: > journalists are nothing but exploitative Talk about sweeping generalisations!
Ozzie_osman 5y ago
> I don’t think Facebook is “good” or “evil” — I think it’s a corporation. Sure. You could say this about any company or any country. Or even a person. We're all just a collection of thoughts and actions.

ineedasername 5y ago

The impact of speech is still not the same as that of sticks and stones, and guns, knives, or fists must still be wielded by people, not Youtube videos. That somewhat sidesteps the fact that it's speech that can get people riled up enough to invite violence. Acknowledging this fact is not advocacy for censorship. It's recognizing that there are plenty of things short of "yelling 'fire' in a crowded theatre" that can be the cause of quite a bit of harm, and we should try to avoid and discourage that. How we go about that task is another matter. I don't like or want censorship, and similar to Muffet I don't see a whole lot of options on the table. But we certainly can't blind ourselves on the issue by not acknowledging that plenty of awful things are enabled & possible because of speech. Otherwise his sentiment amounts to "guns don't kill people, people kill people". Which is trivially true while ignoring the significant role that both have in an act of violence. Not much different than saying "guns don't kill people, bullets kill people." It's all a single system and there are multiple essential components.

Gunax 5y ago

> 1. regional censorship will be applied at a network level — e.g. upon “Indian IP Addresses” or “Indian Phone Numbers” — which is not a good solution because the Internet does not respect national boundaries, nor does it work that way: e.g. VPNs exist and are already used to bypass these approaches. 2. regional censorship will be applied at a human level — e.g. upon “Indian Users” — which is not a good solution because it assumes that (a) online anonymity should and can be effectively stopped, (b) national identity is straightforwardly applicable to humans (how about “dual nationals?”) and (c) platforms must know the nationality of their users merely to function, e.g. to send cat pictures. 3. global censorship will be applied blindly as the union of regional censorships — so people in the USA will not be able to critically discuss Indian politics, and absolutely nobody would be able to discuss China. This would be highly illiberal and destructive of public discourse. It's going to be neither of these, but close to #3. Users will be able to discuss anything (withing their nationality's rules) but they would be not visible to user outside their own--or atleast not available to the citizens/users of the place is question. The seeds have all ready been planted with this Russian propaganda/disinformation/whatever campaign (not trying to argue about the veracity of it, but it's interesting that the public apparently cares more about who said it than what was actually said). Even in the USA, supposed home of the free, we are seeing that free speech doesn't seem to apply if you are not a citizen. Can't have weak American minds exposed to wrongthink from abroad.

numair 5y ago

There’s no honor among thieves. What this guy, and the whistleblower, and Mark Zuckerberg, and Roger McNamee, and everyone else are doing is simple — they’re all turning on each other. Don’t try to figure out who is “right” or “wrong” or whatever, or if it’s the government going after them, blah blah blah. It’s just a bunch of dirty people pointing fingers at others, trying to wash their karma. Somewhere in the vaults of the FBI are recordings of my final conversations with Sean Parker. One of the things I keep repeating to that unrepentant sexual predator is, “in the end, all of you will turn on each other.” And that’s exactly what is slowly happening, and will continue happening. Especially as all of these formerly-young millennials turn into old people who will be desperate to sell their kids and grandkids on a “I was one of the good guys” narrative. Like rats on a sinking ship, I tell ya. And don’t @ me with a reference to the stock price — the labor market determines the future of the giants in our field, because they’re labor constrained, not capital constrained. If Facebook can’t hire the best talent to build the best apps for iOS 22 or whatever, all of the money in the world won’t make them relevant again.

will4274 5y ago
> unrepentant sexual predator What is this? I don't have any context.
- jjulius 5y ago
  The user you're responding to reported Parker to the FBI alleging he witnessed him rape a 16 year-old. He's also got some prior history involving FB and how they treated an app he developed years back. Here are a few links related to this that I discovered by Googling "numair sean parker" just now. His Twitter feed also alludes to many other people being involved with underage boys. https://mobile.twitter.com/numair/status/1408055869481254912?lang=en https://mobile.twitter.com/numair/status/1408055869481254912... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26725402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26725402 https://numair.medium.com/15-years-is-enough-time-silicon-valleys-rape-problem-ee1a022a079f https://numair.medium.com/15-years-is-enough-time-silicon-va... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2134289 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2134289 ----- Edit: It's worth pointing out that this post of his from 2006 aged like milk, given his current views of Parker and (as I've read in other threads lately) Zuckerberg/FB. https://web.archive.org/web/20070107220225/http://www.numair.com/2006/11/sean-parker-as-jim-clark-2.html https://web.archive.org/web/20070107220225/http://www.numair...

gverrilla 5y ago

“make the world more open and connected” only means "scale fast and get as much products as you can to later sell to advertisers". being connected or open won't end slavery, homelessness, crime or ignorance.

loeg 5y ago
> being connected or open won't end slavery, homelessness, crime or ignorance. Is any other corporation (Visa, Saudi Aramco, Apple, ...) expected to solve slavery, homelessness, crime, and ignorance? This is an absurd criticism.
- gverrilla 5y ago
  Was just stating facts, didn't say they were expected to solve slavery. But maybe they should be, now you mention it: we're talking about the richest org's/individuals in the planet, afterall. It was also an indirect criticism to this tech-startup-bullshit-lingo, full of lies and hypocrisy.

Tainnor 5y ago

The author is presenting a false dilemma viz. their three reported options (1. IP level restrictions, 2. Citizenship based restrictions, 3. Union of legal systems): - We can't just ignore the fact that the internet is a global technology but jurisdictions are regionally restricted. This is a tension, of course, but to just throw up the hands in the air and conclude that, therefore, the internet should be a wholly unregulated space is not an option and not a single nation will allow that eventually. - It is not necessary that the whole of the internet abide by one of these mechanisms, different things can be regulated in different ways, and "mixtures" of the systems are conceivable. - The fact that proposed regulations have edge cases is not something that makes regulation impossible. That seems to be a very engineer-like mindset, but in truth, the law is quite good when it comes to integrating competing interests and principles or do decide that at some point, something is "good enough". Otherwise no laws would ever be written. - IP based restrictions do not become ineffective automatically because VPNs exist. This is proven by the fact that geoblocking works reasonably well on streaming services etc. VPNs are often blocked and, even when not, many people are not technically competent enough to set one up. Of course, it depends on what we want to use IP based restrictions for. If we're targeting criminals (or dissidents), that's probably not a viable solution, but if it's about blocking certain content to certain users then it should work reasonably well. NB: I'm not arguing in favour of geoblocking, it's a stupid thing that should disappear, but the point is solely that it works reasonably well for lots of users. - Finding some sort of common ground between different jurisdictions is something that is necessary in many areas of life which is why trade agreements etc. exist. If the EU pushing GDPR means that Facebook et al. need to adopt better practices wrt. privacy across the globe (because it's too difficult to determine whether a user is EU-based or not), then I guess that's gonna be the price they have to pay to operate in the EU. If the price for operating in China is, nobody is able to talk critically about China anymore, then the response should be "well I guess we won't be operating in China, then" (or, failing that, this should become something that would make western users abandon the network, or even better, something that other countries would take issue with, forcing the service to actually have to take a stand on this).

dleslie 5y ago

I take issue with the final off-hand comment he made about Tik Tok[0] on one of the linked twitter threads: > Also: the tiktok algorithm has decided that I am a "foodie"; it's pretty much correct about that. Why should I suffer a more mediocre & less valuable experience? Because "democracy is at stake" because of bunch of people never learnt how to identify conspiracy theories at school? Well, it's not so great. The ability to discover preferences and adapt content could also be used by a malicious actor to discover targets; ie, for a totalitarian regime to discover dissenters. Such a regime needn't have an agreement with the social network, either; they need only use the tools made available to users and advertisers upon that network to harvest information about dissenters. It's as simple as creating a honey pot. Moreover, if an agreement exists with the social network, then the curation itself can omit undesirable content in the general case, and keep it available in the explicit case; not censoring it, per se, but ensuring that it does not receive an equitable platform. That's what many are clamoring for, isn't it? A way to selectively weed out voices and people that are undesirable. I feel like the problem is two fold: 1. That there's this assumption that somehow the tools used to harm some won't be used to harm others. 2. That the feed is necessarily worth saving. (2) is most interesting to consider, I think. Perhaps it's not. Perhaps algorithmic social media feeds aren't worth saving. 0: https://twitter.com/AlecMuffett/status/1451997185478963211 https://twitter.com/AlecMuffett/status/1451997185478963211

tablespoon 5y ago

> The world is a far less bad place than people credit. The impact of speech is still not the same as that of sticks and stones, and guns, knives, or fists must still be wielded by people, not Youtube videos. Generations have been wrongly certain that children needed legislation to keep them safe from the evils of crystal-set radios, comic books, video nasties, satanism, “dungeons & dragons”, and Kate Moss’ “heroin chic” — let alone Instagram. This guy underestimates the power of speech, and seems to get there by cherry-picking his examples. I'm generally supportive of privacy and opposed to censorship, but there are some pretty serious and legitimate problems that exist nowadays that challenge that view (some are new, some are amplified versions of perennial problems). Hand wavy dismissals of those problems don't make a compelling argument. Personally, my sense is the democratization of industrial-scale broadcasting technology might have made some bad tradeoffs, compared to the previous system where that technology was controlled by well-educated elites subject to social regulation by peers. That previous system certainly had its flaws, but it did slow many things down and tended to be more restrained (on average), and that was probably better. So you might be able to avoid the need for censorship by making wide-scale broadcasting technology as hard as it used to be (or at least harder than it is now).

burnished 5y ago
Yeah. Invoking sticks and stones and the satanic panic but seemingly not addressing genocide enabled by the platform seems.. bad.

pbalau 5y ago

This [0] is related to the topic at hand. 0. https://twitter.com/AlecMuffett/status/1452725377332297734 https://twitter.com/AlecMuffett/status/1452725377332297734

alex_young 5y ago

There’s a genuine moral dilemma here isn’t there? Imagine for a moment that we are debating what a company should do with a chalkboard in a public square. People keep writing things on it organizing racially motivated killings, etc. The company has implemented a technology which allows people to write things on it without anyone being able to see who posted what or when. If the company does nothing it will surely lead to the government rightly removing access to the board, but perhaps some similar thing would go on in people's own private spaces anyway. Seems like a lose lose problem to try to solve.

tayistay 5y ago
Bad analogy. Facebook has an algorithm which promotes posts that drive engagement, which is often extremist stuff. Just regulating that (as Haugen suggests) would improve things.
- alex_young 5y ago
  Context is the discussion about e2e encryption. Sorry if that wasn't clear.

tayistay 5y ago

loeg 5y ago
> Nobody would have heard of this guy were it not for "the current crop of whistleblowers." You might not have heard of him, and that's fine, but Alec Muffet has had a Wikipedia article dating back to 2013. He's been a public figure since long before this crop of "whistleblowers."
- tayistay 5y ago
  Despite his short wikipedia page, nobody outside of tech has heard of him, and his holier-than-thou stuff about not rage quitting (a straw man anyway, Haugen didn't rage quit) sure did a whole lot of good.

CarelessExpert 5y ago

Man, there is a profound lack of self-awareness when you cite 1984 in an article defending Facebook, when Facebook is complicit in the creation of modern surveillance capitalism and the slow but inexorable shift to the digital panopticon...

mensetmanusman 5y ago

“ AM: I believe that the pushback we are seeing from Governments against Facebook for pursuing this goal, is substantial and aimed squarely at making an example of FB to discourage further adoption of end-to-end encryption.” Who to trust…

tqi 5y ago

The nuanced tone / takeaway from the actual interview transcript feel very different from the final article: https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-papers-badge-posts-former-employees/ https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-papers-badge-posts-form... Reading both, and seeing how disengaged the interviewer actually was with the interviewee, it really feels like Levy came into the interaction with a pre-constructed narrative in mind.

etc-hosts 5y ago

The only whistleblowers you should trust are ones the government is attempting to completely ruin.