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Facebook bans 7 'surveillance-for-hire' companies that spied on 50k users
- CursedUrn 5y agoIronic given Facebook's business model is to spy on users.
- kelnos 5y agoAnd I'm sure another 7 will take their place. Or the same 7 will change their name and rebrand, and sneak back in for a while. The root of the problem is that Facebook provides an environment where this sort of activity is possible. But fixing that would hurt their profits, so they won't.
- authed 5y agoOnly 7 forgot to pay their dues?
- GhettoComputers 5y agoThere’s a lot of info about mostly Israeli ones, but a vague description of one Chinese one. I see parallels of the traditional usage of Jews as scapegoats. Christians aren’t allowed to lend for interests so they used Jews. When the king or other Christian ruler needed money, a pogrom was initiated, the assets of Jews were taken, and the cycle was repeated. The US uses a lot of Israeli intelligence, as if the CIA and 5 eyes (yes there’s more but it’s just the term used) wasn’t enough. It’s easy to blame the Israelis, and the foreign country of Israel but the US funds them. It’s similarly easy to blame China for taking American jobs, but it’s often ignored who gave them those jobs in the first place? Banning intelligence operations is nothing but virtue signaling, I’m sure they’ll give up, there’s no way to figure out how to beat Facebook’s ban, especially since intelligence isn’t very good at bypassing bans or regrouping as other companies.
- najqh 5y ago"Only" four for them are Israeli.
- GhettoComputers 5y agoThanks, I think the page didn’t load completely for me, and it had lots of info on the Israeli firms. 4/7 is a lot and there’s a lot of focus on it in the first parts. One is Chinese and there’s very little focus on it or info. I doubt this will have any significance, I’m not sure what spying means from the article. Are they just scrapers of public info or have friend requests that you’d share your info with publicly like the first image? Spying is ok when FB gets all the info, but it’s not ok if their ad revenue can be threatened or data they get on their own. If you’re sharing info on Facebook it’s hard to take the words “spying” seriously unless you say Facebook is a spy too.
- nimos 5y agoIn other news 7 'surveillance-for-hire` companies create arms length shell companies.
- DoctorNick 5y ago"Yeah, that's our racket!"
- jasonhansel 5y agoMaybe Facebook just wants to take out the competition.
- beervirus 5y agohttps://frinkiac.com/meme/S05E12/1100532.jpg?b64lines=T05MWSBJIE1BWSBTUFkuIA== https://frinkiac.com/meme/S05E12/1100532.jpg?b64lines=T05MWS...
- walrus01 5y agoMore on Black Cube, NSO group, and Citizen Lab: https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/99/ https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/99/ https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/100/ https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/100/ https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/28/world/black-cube-nso-citizen-lab-intelligence.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/28/world/black-cube-nso-citi... https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/24/insider/hacking-nso-surveillance.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/24/insider/hacking-nso-surve... https://citizenlab.ca/2021/09/forcedentry-nso-group-imessage-zero-click-exploit-captured-in-the-wild/ https://citizenlab.ca/2021/09/forcedentry-nso-group-imessage...
- kerneloftruth 5y agoTo be honest, it sounds like an extraordinarily interesting field to work in: "This is a one-of-a-kind opportunity for someone who lives and breathes spying and espionage to become part of a world where wild fantasies of undercover operations become reality. If you think you have what it takes, we want to hear from you." Unfortunately their opportunity is out of reach, as I'm not in the UK nor Israel -- and they're not specifically seeking technical skills, per se.
- JumpCrisscross 5y agoDrug dealing involves all the same risks without the moral detritus.
- willcipriano 5y agoSorta depends on the drug, the drugs that you can make real money selling tend to ruin peoples lives.
- GhettoComputers 5y agoVolume of “good drugs” can offset this, but addiction with high margins is the best model for making money. Fentanyl analogs are LSD dose size, not expensive, highly physically addictive and very deadly done without proper dosing.
- wolverine876 5y ago50K users is a drop in the bucket. The issues are: * Can MetaFace reliably detect such bad actors? * Is their current technology, where users don't control their own data, compatible with protecting users privacy? In other words, isn't this exactly where we expected to end up when these technologies were first built? * How can we trust that they don't just ban the ones they don't like and leave users to the mercies of the others?
- GhettoComputers 5y agoDo you already know the answer to that? They can and choose not to, someone used their own 2012 tools they developed in a scientific paper (detection of Nazis) Nobody controls their own data, it’s not FB it’s all data mined. How can you trust Facebook? I refuse to use their rebrand, you don’t give trust, they earn it. Did Facebook earn your trust? The proof they can detect is is they use it to advertise. https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-facebook-nazi-metal-ads-20190221-story.html https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-faceboo... Nazis are pretty easy to detect (caste discrimination can be trained, anti Muslim sentiments are easy too, but this is a low hanging fruit). Like Leary said, do they care? Facebook obviously can do it, they’d rather sell ads and use the users as marketing data instead of removing them, until they need to virtue signal. I can’t find the paper but I doubt anything I said is a surprise. These tools are used to make money, not moderate.
- JetAlone 5y agoI wonder how often if ever extreme groups eager to recruit use the ads served to them as a source of potential "proto-shibboleths" to look into. If the advertisers with their dearth of data could know, before even you do, what sort of stuff people like you tend to like, you could use them as a bleeding edge to go to events/locations associated with that thing to meet fellow sympathizers who could potentially be activated, or unmet fellow activists who just happened to be around.
- FridayoLeary 5y agoThere's an even bigger issue *Do they actually care? I think the answer is obvious given facebooks business model. The only issue is competition.
- pdimitar 5y agoYeah, of course they will. They don't like competition. But it's more likely than not a PR show. They might even privately contact those companies and advise them to rebrand and then re-sign the contracts with them. If at the start of 2022 you are still trusting Facebook then you have problems with your critical thinking process.
- roody15 5y agoAll companies are based out of Israel… Just like NSO with Pegasus. Geez
- GhettoComputers 5y agoMy hated comment I thought the same thing , the site didn’t load completely for me, maybe you had the same issue. 4/7 are, there’s a brief mention of a Chinese site. The focus is disproportionately on the Israeli firms which are often used by the US. The US armed and taught the Taliban, why are we blaming the Taliban instead of the CIA for giving us the problem? It’s like blaming constructors of a crude oil rig instead of the oil companies for making it.
- akomtu 5y agoIn other words, the drug cartel bans 7 small dealers who are doing business on the cartel's territory without permission.
- ForHackernews 5y ago> These ... companies ... try to trick them into handing over sensitive personal information so that the firms could install spyware on their devices Could this be seen as anti-competitive behaviour by Meta?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- klabb3 5y agoAmazing.
- hsnewman 5y agoFacebook is a surveillance company, I guess they don't want other companies getting in on their action.
- authed 5y agounless you pay them a fee.
- sneak 5y agoIt's the same with posting advertising. You can mark anything as spam except the ones paying Facebook for your attention.
- comrh 5y agoFacebook is horrid imo but nothing like NSO or Black Cube
- keyme 5y agoFacebook are much much worse. An NSO, a Candiru or a weapons manufacturer provide tools to governments, who are at least in theory (but usually in practice) accountable to their people. Occasionally governments even act for the benefit of their people. Facebook only acts for the benefit of Facebook, to the detriment of everyone else in society.
- cheesecake_luvr 5y agoThey will just rename/reform themselves. And there are other channels for spying on people. This brings up the question: is there a good, realistic guide for a normal person on how to prevent being spied on?
- gentleman11 5y agoLike how Facebook renamed itself to meta?
- sneak 5y agoDelete your Facebook account and use DNS and browser extensions to block facebook, instagram, and oculus domains.
- GhettoComputers 5y agoYou won’t like this but don’t use technology and especially the Internet. Your data is being mined by ISPs and linked to transactions, your mobile devices are triangulated so the know your location at all time, and expecting any privacy in a world that mines your data is impossible, especially since security actually means “hasn’t been hacked or don’t know if it’s been hacked yet”. If you relocate, you can move to Japan, the culture is very privacy friendly. They don’t even tell spouses if they’ve seen a missing person. The culture shift is probably the easiest but immigration to Japan isn’t easy and they don’t allow dual citizenship.
- authed 5y agodrop one ally
- syngrog66 5y agoI get so many random foreign people (ostensibly) wanting to connect with me on Facebook, who I dont know, I began to assume a good percentage of them are just bots or puppets (or "personas") trying to catfish me or inject further data-gathering probes into the Fb social network. LinkedIn has this phenomenon too, but there it feels like a percentage are just aggressive career-networkers. But on Facebook, its out of control and more obvious.
- bryan_w 5y agoYou can set it so that only friends of friends can send you friend requests
- syngrog66 5y agonice tip, thanks. makes me suspect further thats why those puppets/catfishers try to friend people at random on Facebook and LinkedIn. because once the initial suckers accept them in, they've breached the outer defenses of the social media web-o-trust. after that, they can try to friend more targets, but then have the benefit of being able to get past the "must be friends of friends" filter.
- 14 5y ago"Black Cube obtains legal advice in every jurisdiction in which we operate in order to ensure that all our agents' activities are fully compliant with local laws," it said. In other words they looked for every loophole or underhanded way they could get the information while staying just on the side If legality.
- pc86 5y agoExplain to me the difference between "finding a loophole" and "following the law."
- colonelanguz 5y agoYour like ironic actual point is well taken but I just wanted to note that even without the irony this is actually a very cool thought provoking question and I couldn't answer it at first.
- 55555 5y agoOne hint is that some jurisdictions, including France, have a law that says that merely breaking the spirit of the law is also illegal. Other countries, especially dictatorships, are less textbook about legal interpretation. In other words, if you wanna play with loopholes, do it in the US and similar countries.
- colonelanguz 5y agoThat is wild. What is an example?
- 14 5y agoThe difference is the spirit of the law but you are correct in that it is technically following the law. But breaking the spirit of the law garners you no public sympathy. So though we see possibly Black Cube didn’t break any laws and therefor are not liable, no body gives a shit that they were kicked off of Facebook.
- 5y ago
- datavirtue 5y agoThey probably lose 100k users a day.
- Sneha_1 5y agowhat did they got by spying on faccbook account?
- golemiprague 5y agoThere should be a low that outside company can spy on any data that the hosting company can. The information is out there, why facebook should be the only one who can access it?
- subbz 5y agoEliminating competition...
- LightG 5y agoJust in the nick of time ...
- bjourne 5y ago> NSO has said it sells its software to governments to combat terrorism and serious crime, and isn't responsible for how it may be misused. Such bullshit. In the Nuremberg trials in the aftermath of the Second World War, several directors of IG Farben were held responsible for shipping the chemical Zyklon B to the SS which used it commit mass murder. The court rejected the defendants argument that they weren't responsible for how their product was used. Similarly, NSO and other spyware companies are responsible for how authoritarian regimes use their products to harass and endanger dissidents.
- nindalf 5y agoI agree with the spirit of what you’re saying. My only quibble is where we draw the line when it comes to supplying software. Is Microsoft ultimately responsible for the nuclear deterrents that run on Windows XP?
- BiteCode_dev 5y agoThey had to explicitly pass through the DoD certifications and contracts requirements, and probably had to implement some custom features on Windows for it. So hes, they are. Now, the question is: would you rather have lived the cold war without a nuclear deterrent in your country? It's a harder question to answer.
- keyme 5y agoYou tech bros have seriously lost it at this point, haven't you. You are literally comparing selling gas that was essentialy designed to mass murder people in camps, to selling a surveillance tool that can hack your precious iphones.
- BiteCode_dev 5y agoIt doesn't matter where you are on the scale if the scale of "helping dictators with malicious intents". Don't get me wrong, I don't think facebook or any big tech companies has any kind of moral upper hand, given they all spy on people, lie, engage in corruption, monopoly abuses, and so on. And they all have weapon dealers in their portfolio, which sell arms to the same people using pegasus.