6 ms·

Meta enforces purpose limitation via Privacy Aware Infrastructure at scale

33 points by seanieb 2y ago

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
transpute 2y ago
Ambitious effort! Was this motivated by regulation? It would be interesting to compare the capabilities and policy challenges of at-scale data privacy, with patterns in single-node systems like SE Linux and App Armor, which have been historically daunting. Sqrrl (now Amazon) work on Apache Accumulo has tools for access control plumbing in large datasets, https://accumulo.apache.org/ https://accumulo.apache.org/ > Every Accumulo key/value pair has its own security label which limits query results based off user authorizations.
- DilutedMetrics 2y ago
  Likely for complaince regarding the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA) based on what I've seen other impacted companies build
miken123 2y ago
Lovely that their blog with privacy propaganda has a cookie banner that is not compliant with any privacy law in any way. Says everything about their efforts, I guess.
- yodsanklai 2y ago
  Can you explain?
  - ceejayoz 2y ago
    An “accept” only cookie notice isn’t generally permissible in the EU. They may be serving more compliant versions based on geolocation, though. > To help personalize content, tailor and measure ads and provide a safer experience, we use cookies. By clicking or navigating the site, you agree to allow our collection of information on and off Facebook through cookies.
  - miken123 2y ago
    Many reasons: - They are not asking for consent, there is just an ok button. - They assume consent when you navigate further on the site, this is not valid consent. - Consent needs to be for specific, well defined purposes. “help personalize content, tailor and measure ads and provide a safer experience” are three purposes in one and none of them are well defined. - They are probably already setting the cookies in your first request, when you have not seen any information yet (did not check)
- Phemist 2y ago
  It was a trap. Clickbait to get every privacy-minded tech enthusiast on their site. Now, simply because they interacted with the page, facebook, in their opinion, gets a blank cheque to track you wherever they wish, on and off-site.
  - xvector 2y ago
    Having actually worked for Meta in both security and privacy capacities, I guarantee you that it's really not that conspiratorial. No one wrote this article with the intention of "trapping privacy-minded tech enthusiasts." I mean no offense, but this sort of thinking (that an engineering blog is attempting to attack you) is unhinged. There is not some grand conspiracy. Companies like this are not the shadowy, highly-competent and absolutely evil entities you think they are. They are barely functional to begin with.
    - Terretta 2y ago
      > I mean no offense, but this sort of thinking (that an engineering blog is attempting to attack you) is unhinged. There is not some grand conspiracy. “You know, since we're trying to Z but don't have Y, we could probably use X to get Y…” said no inventive engineer ever. No conspiracy needed. This happens.
      - tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago
        X to get Y happens. A tech company using a blog to get whatever imaginary consent from random anonymous privacy-aware individuals is so many levels of unhinged that it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
        Terretta 2y ago
        The company wouldn't. Someone retroactively realizes they have the data, and then it does. I'm certainly not saying it happened, or will happen, here. I'm saying it definitely happens. This is why in regulated industries, there's an emphasis on "data minimization". Much like the principle of least privilege, but applied to whether you're letting your people or systems be exposed to it in the first place. It's easy to follow a least privilege policy if there's an actual technical control not just agreement, and even easier if the control is "I never had it, didn't derive it, and made sure I couldn't if I wanted to". If you aren't collecting it for any use, even inadvertently, you can't retcon it into availability for alternative uses.
imiric 2y ago
What a strange article and initiative by Meta. So we're expected to believe that Meta is doing all this engineering out of some newly discovered concern for user privacy, and ignore the decades of blatant privacy violations, for which they've been fined numerous times? I suppose they've decided that the cost of this effort is less than the fines they would have to pay otherwise, so it probably makes business sense. It doesn't hurt as PR fodder to balance the negative press either. But let's not be fooled. Advertising and user privacy is a zero-sum game. Adtech is a giant business today precisely because they've violated user privacy since the beginning, taking advantage of the fact that the average web user is either unaware of what they're giving up, or they just don't care. All these supposed privacy initiatives by adtech corporations are simply an answer to increased regulation and public awareness. Otherwise they would happily continue siphoning everyone's data without thinking twice about it. They actually still do for areas of their business that are not under the spotlight yet: shadow profiles, data broker transactions, etc.
- TZubiri 2y ago
  Meta correlates to privacy, you just have the correlation inversed. You have privacy settings on almost all meta apps. They have tools to make it hard to download personal pictures without uploader consent. They respond to privacy concerns constantly. Maybe that's why you are confused, you read or listen to their responses to privacy concerns, and you focus on the concerns rather than the responses.
  - yowayb 2y ago
    This resonates with me. I’ve found big tech to always give me reasonable, sometimes excessive control. I’ve also found “privacy” to be a thought-terminating device that prevents granular discussion of who needs what. I also personally find it weird that so many people highlight the opposing nature of business and government as if it wasn’t enshrined in law.
  - ipaddr 2y ago
    "They have tools to make it hard to download personal pictures without uploader consent" What tools are you talking about. Facebook images are save as. Privacy rules can make your photo not appear on your profile but tag a friend and their friends get to see it. A few years ago facebook would show you the first picture of every private album if you went to a general url (photos?id=1234). Back in those days photo urls were sequential with hundreds of numbers skipped between photos but easy enough to take the first photo of a private album and sequentially get every photo. If you put your photos on facebook at some point someone you didn't realize had access to your photos.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
barbazoo 2y ago
Like putting lipstick on a pig.
tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago
This looks very much like it was created (at least partly) in response to the Digital Markets Act, which prohibits companies regulated under it ("Gatekeepers", https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/gatekeepers_en https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/gatekeepers_en) from combining data across different services without the consent from the user. Fines for DMA violations are up to 10% of global revenue (not profit) for the first violation, up to 20% for repeat violations, plus other penalties and remedies. Also, an ongoing fine of 5% of revenue until brought in compliance. My impression is that DMA is taken quite seriously by Big Tech, especially given that it's clear that they're directly being targeted by it.
- VectorLock 2y ago
  It feels like with fixed value fines most businesses just consider fines to be a cost of doing business but damn "10% of global revenue" is insanely dangerous.
  - xvector 2y ago
    10% of global revenue is practically unenforceable and would result in major tech companies simply ignoring the fine and pulling out of the EU. "Forcing" companies to pull out in this manner would instantly ignite a trade war between the US and the EU. This is a no-win situation for the EU - if WhatsApp is shut down in the EU, for instance, it will cause massive problems, loss of life and money, etc. Whatever new solution arrives on the scene will struggle to turn a profit and probably be even less compliant with regulations for many years due to the sheer amount of regulation that has slowly accumulated.
    - EMIRELADERO 2y ago
      So what do you think the solution is then? If the fines are small, people complain that they have no teeth and that corporations just see them as a cost of doing business. If the fines do actually have teeth, we have your comment here. What would you consider acceptable?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Terretta 2y ago
Meanwhile, I can't use Threads without tying it to Instagram. And from there, in turn, FB: https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/108777/prevent-instagram-from-suggesting-me-to-my-facebook-friends-accounts-not-linked https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/108777/prevent-i...
- rkagerer 2y ago
  Or Facebook without Messenger (not that I particularly want/like either).

33 points by seanieb 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

Ambitious effort! Was this motivated by regulation? It would be interesting to compare the capabilities and policy challenges of at-scale data privacy, with patterns in single-node systems like SE Linux and App Armor, which have been historically daunting. Sqrrl (now Amazon) work on Apache Accumulo has tools for access control plumbing in large datasets, https://accumulo.apache.org/ https://accumulo.apache.org/ > Every Accumulo key/value pair has its own security label which limits query results based off user authorizations.

DilutedMetrics 2y ago
Likely for complaince regarding the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA) based on what I've seen other impacted companies build

miken123 2y ago

Lovely that their blog with privacy propaganda has a cookie banner that is not compliant with any privacy law in any way. Says everything about their efforts, I guess.

yodsanklai 2y ago
Can you explain?
- ceejayoz 2y ago
  An “accept” only cookie notice isn’t generally permissible in the EU. They may be serving more compliant versions based on geolocation, though. > To help personalize content, tailor and measure ads and provide a safer experience, we use cookies. By clicking or navigating the site, you agree to allow our collection of information on and off Facebook through cookies.
- miken123 2y ago
  Many reasons: - They are not asking for consent, there is just an ok button. - They assume consent when you navigate further on the site, this is not valid consent. - Consent needs to be for specific, well defined purposes. “help personalize content, tailor and measure ads and provide a safer experience” are three purposes in one and none of them are well defined. - They are probably already setting the cookies in your first request, when you have not seen any information yet (did not check)
Phemist 2y ago
It was a trap. Clickbait to get every privacy-minded tech enthusiast on their site. Now, simply because they interacted with the page, facebook, in their opinion, gets a blank cheque to track you wherever they wish, on and off-site.
- xvector 2y ago
  Having actually worked for Meta in both security and privacy capacities, I guarantee you that it's really not that conspiratorial. No one wrote this article with the intention of "trapping privacy-minded tech enthusiasts." I mean no offense, but this sort of thinking (that an engineering blog is attempting to attack you) is unhinged. There is not some grand conspiracy. Companies like this are not the shadowy, highly-competent and absolutely evil entities you think they are. They are barely functional to begin with.
  - Terretta 2y ago
    > I mean no offense, but this sort of thinking (that an engineering blog is attempting to attack you) is unhinged. There is not some grand conspiracy. “You know, since we're trying to Z but don't have Y, we could probably use X to get Y…” said no inventive engineer ever. No conspiracy needed. This happens.
    - tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago
      X to get Y happens. A tech company using a blog to get whatever imaginary consent from random anonymous privacy-aware individuals is so many levels of unhinged that it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
      - Terretta 2y ago
        The company wouldn't. Someone retroactively realizes they have the data, and then it does. I'm certainly not saying it happened, or will happen, here. I'm saying it definitely happens. This is why in regulated industries, there's an emphasis on "data minimization". Much like the principle of least privilege, but applied to whether you're letting your people or systems be exposed to it in the first place. It's easy to follow a least privilege policy if there's an actual technical control not just agreement, and even easier if the control is "I never had it, didn't derive it, and made sure I couldn't if I wanted to". If you aren't collecting it for any use, even inadvertently, you can't retcon it into availability for alternative uses.

imiric 2y ago

What a strange article and initiative by Meta. So we're expected to believe that Meta is doing all this engineering out of some newly discovered concern for user privacy, and ignore the decades of blatant privacy violations, for which they've been fined numerous times? I suppose they've decided that the cost of this effort is less than the fines they would have to pay otherwise, so it probably makes business sense. It doesn't hurt as PR fodder to balance the negative press either. But let's not be fooled. Advertising and user privacy is a zero-sum game. Adtech is a giant business today precisely because they've violated user privacy since the beginning, taking advantage of the fact that the average web user is either unaware of what they're giving up, or they just don't care. All these supposed privacy initiatives by adtech corporations are simply an answer to increased regulation and public awareness. Otherwise they would happily continue siphoning everyone's data without thinking twice about it. They actually still do for areas of their business that are not under the spotlight yet: shadow profiles, data broker transactions, etc.

TZubiri 2y ago
Meta correlates to privacy, you just have the correlation inversed. You have privacy settings on almost all meta apps. They have tools to make it hard to download personal pictures without uploader consent. They respond to privacy concerns constantly. Maybe that's why you are confused, you read or listen to their responses to privacy concerns, and you focus on the concerns rather than the responses.
- yowayb 2y ago
  This resonates with me. I’ve found big tech to always give me reasonable, sometimes excessive control. I’ve also found “privacy” to be a thought-terminating device that prevents granular discussion of who needs what. I also personally find it weird that so many people highlight the opposing nature of business and government as if it wasn’t enshrined in law.
- ipaddr 2y ago
  "They have tools to make it hard to download personal pictures without uploader consent" What tools are you talking about. Facebook images are save as. Privacy rules can make your photo not appear on your profile but tag a friend and their friends get to see it. A few years ago facebook would show you the first picture of every private album if you went to a general url (photos?id=1234). Back in those days photo urls were sequential with hundreds of numbers skipped between photos but easy enough to take the first photo of a private album and sequentially get every photo. If you put your photos on facebook at some point someone you didn't realize had access to your photos.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

barbazoo 2y ago

Like putting lipstick on a pig.

tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago

This looks very much like it was created (at least partly) in response to the Digital Markets Act, which prohibits companies regulated under it ("Gatekeepers", https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/gatekeepers_en https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/gatekeepers_en) from combining data across different services without the consent from the user. Fines for DMA violations are up to 10% of global revenue (not profit) for the first violation, up to 20% for repeat violations, plus other penalties and remedies. Also, an ongoing fine of 5% of revenue until brought in compliance. My impression is that DMA is taken quite seriously by Big Tech, especially given that it's clear that they're directly being targeted by it.

VectorLock 2y ago
It feels like with fixed value fines most businesses just consider fines to be a cost of doing business but damn "10% of global revenue" is insanely dangerous.
- xvector 2y ago
  10% of global revenue is practically unenforceable and would result in major tech companies simply ignoring the fine and pulling out of the EU. "Forcing" companies to pull out in this manner would instantly ignite a trade war between the US and the EU. This is a no-win situation for the EU - if WhatsApp is shut down in the EU, for instance, it will cause massive problems, loss of life and money, etc. Whatever new solution arrives on the scene will struggle to turn a profit and probably be even less compliant with regulations for many years due to the sheer amount of regulation that has slowly accumulated.
  - EMIRELADERO 2y ago
    So what do you think the solution is then? If the fines are small, people complain that they have no teeth and that corporations just see them as a cost of doing business. If the fines do actually have teeth, we have your comment here. What would you consider acceptable?

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

Terretta 2y ago

Meanwhile, I can't use Threads without tying it to Instagram. And from there, in turn, FB: https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/108777/prevent-instagram-from-suggesting-me-to-my-facebook-friends-accounts-not-linked https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/108777/prevent-i...

rkagerer 2y ago
Or Facebook without Messenger (not that I particularly want/like either).