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Kind of serves as a good example of "single central conspiracy" versus "many actors given common cause to act in a certain way" ways of thought. It's easy to im

by jerf 4y ago

Kind of serves as a good example of "single central conspiracy" versus "many actors given common cause to act in a certain way" ways of thought. It's easy to imagine Zuckerberg going to work every day and laughing maniacally as he personally shepherds your stolen conversation with friends yesterday about your experiences with laundry detergents into The Facebook Info Vault and then personally uses that information to send you ads about Tide laundry detergent, but what Facebook really is by sheer necessity is a whole bunch of agents operating with their own goals. The end result is a massive machine that turns privacy violations into money, but there isn't necessarily a single place where the bad thing happens. In fact you could conceivably be taken on a tour of the system and agree that every individual component is acceptable, or that the vast bulk of them are OK and there's only a single-digit number out of thousands that are problematic. Nobody could possibly manage Facebook as a centralized single entity, but it's hard to imagine it any other way from the outside.

jkingsbery 4y ago
While I appreciate this distinction and is an interesting way to look at things, I don't think it's inevitable. I've never worked at Facebook, but I work for another large tech company. Every project at our company, particularly the ones that deal with personal data, must produce a threat model [1] before going into production. In another thread, someone claims "Well that's because the question is meaningless," but from a threat modeling standpoint an engineer needs to understand all aspects of "where" data is for the system under design. Where physically is it stored? What database is it stored in? And knowing that, one must look at what threats are available. Who has access to the data? What other systems have access to the data? How are those users/systems authenticated? Is that access logged? Now, sometimes systems diverge from the design, and sometimes threat models are incomplete. But the exercise of generating a threat model makes understanding who manages data more manageable. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threat_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threat_model
- lupire 4y ago
  > understand all aspects of "where" data is for the system under design. There easy! But also useless! The data is everywhere. That's why every "where" was created. Everything is a potential threat vector and needs to be protected by layers of fallible security.
lupire 4y ago
Not even conspiracy. Governments, free markert, natural world all works the same way. Many semi-independent actors making local optimizations, with varying levels of sophistication in organization and hierarchy. Many emergent properties. IT in the large is like physics, chemistry, biology, psychology anthropology, and sociology. It's not building one precise bridge over and over again.

by jerf 4y ago

jkingsbery 4y ago

While I appreciate this distinction and is an interesting way to look at things, I don't think it's inevitable. I've never worked at Facebook, but I work for another large tech company. Every project at our company, particularly the ones that deal with personal data, must produce a threat model [1] before going into production. In another thread, someone claims "Well that's because the question is meaningless," but from a threat modeling standpoint an engineer needs to understand all aspects of "where" data is for the system under design. Where physically is it stored? What database is it stored in? And knowing that, one must look at what threats are available. Who has access to the data? What other systems have access to the data? How are those users/systems authenticated? Is that access logged? Now, sometimes systems diverge from the design, and sometimes threat models are incomplete. But the exercise of generating a threat model makes understanding who manages data more manageable. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threat_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threat_model

lupire 4y ago
> understand all aspects of "where" data is for the system under design. There easy! But also useless! The data is everywhere. That's why every "where" was created. Everything is a potential threat vector and needs to be protected by layers of fallible security.

lupire 4y ago

Not even conspiracy. Governments, free markert, natural world all works the same way. Many semi-independent actors making local optimizations, with varying levels of sophistication in organization and hierarchy. Many emergent properties. IT in the large is like physics, chemistry, biology, psychology anthropology, and sociology. It's not building one precise bridge over and over again.