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As much as I don't like facebook as a company, I think the jury reached the wrong decision here. If you read the complaint[1], "eavesdropped on and/or recorded
by gruez 1y ago
As much as I don't like facebook as a company, I think the jury reached the wrong decision here. If you read the complaint[1], "eavesdropped on and/or recorded their conversations by using an electronic device" basically amounted to "flo using facebook's sdk and sending custom events to it" (page 12, point 49). I agree that flo should be raked over the coals for sending this information to facebook in the first place, but ruling that facebook "intentionally eavesdropped" (exact wording from the jury verdict) makes zero sense. So far as I can tell, flo sent facebook menstrual data without facebook soliciting it, and facebook specifically has a policy against sending medical/sensitive information using its SDK[2]. Suing facebook makes as much sense as suing google because it turned out a doctor was using google drive to store patient records.
[1] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/55370837/1/frasco-v-flo-health-inc/ https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/55370837/1/frasco-v-flo...
[2] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.372884/gov.uscourts.cand.372884.625.1.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.37... page 6, line 1
- HeavyStorm 1y agoThat's why in these cases you'd prefer a judgment without a jury. Technical cases like this will always confuse jurors, who can't be expected to understand details about sdk, data sharing, APIs etc. On the other hand, in a number of highprofile tech cases, you can see judges learning and discussing engineering in a deeper level.
- echoangle 1y agoIs it easier for the prosecution to make the jury think Facebook is guilty or for Facebook to make the jury think they are not? I don’t see why one would be easier, except if the jury would be prejudiced against Facebook already. Or is it just luck who the jury sides with?
- azemetre 1y agoI mean it totally depends what your views on democracy are. Juries are one of the few, likely only, practices taken from Ancient Athenian democracy which was truly led by the people. The fact that juries still work this way is a testament to the practice. With this in mind, I personally believe groups will always come to better conclusions than individuals. Being tried by 12 instead of 1 means more diversity of thought and opinion.
- tracker1 1y agoI mostly agree here, but would add there's definitely a social pressure to go along with the group a lot of the time, even in jury trials. How many people genuinely have the fortitude to stand up to a group of 10+ others with a countering pov.
- azemetre 1y agoI don't disagree, but think of the pressures a judge has as an individual as well. Pressures from the legal community, the electorate, and being seen as impartial. There is a wisdom of the crowd, and that wisdom comes in believing that we are all equal under the law. This wisdom is more self evident in democratic systems, like juries.
- dylan604 1y agoI'd imagine Facebook looking for any potential juror in tech to be dismissed as quickly as possible while the prosecution would be looking to seat as many tech jurors they can luck their way into seating.
- mrkstu 1y agoMy understanding is defendants always get to choose, no? So that was an available option they chose not to avail themselves to.
- zahlman 1y ago> Technical cases like this will always confuse jurors... On the other hand, in a number of highprofile tech cases, you can see judges learning and discussing engineering in a deeper level. Not to be ageist, but I find this highly counterintuitive.
- willsmith72 1y agohow exactly? you expect the average joe to have a better technical understanding, and more importantly ability to learn, than a judge? that is bizarre to me
- zahlman 1y agoI expect the average joe to use technology much more than a judge.
- pc86 1y agoJudges aren't necessarily brilliant, but they do spend their entire careers reading, listening to, and dissecting arguments. A large part of this requires learning new information at least well enough to make sense of arguments on both sides of the issue. So you do end up probably self-selecting for older folks able to do this better than the mean for their age, and likely for the population at large. Let's just say with a full jury you're almost guaranteed to get someone on the other side of the spectrum, regardless of age.
- BobaFloutist 1y agoThe judge is at their job. The jury is conscripts that are often paying a financial penalty to be present.
- mulmen 1y agoWeird deference to authority
- BobaFloutist 1y ago
- at-fates-hands 1y ago>> Technical cases like this will always confuse jurors. This has been an issue since the internet was invented. Its always been the duty of the lawyers on both sides to present the information in cases like this in a manner that is understandable to the jurors. I distinctly remember during the OJ case, there were many issues that the media said most likely were presented in such a detailed manner, many in the jurors seemed to be checked out. At the time, the prosecution spent days just on the DNA evidence. In contrast, the defense spent days just on how the LAPD collected evidence at the crime scene with the same effect, that many on the jury seemed to check out the deeper the defense dug into it. So it not just technical cases, any kind of court case that requires a detailed understanding of anything complex comes down to how the lawyers present it to the jury.
- dehrmann 1y agoI've also heard you want a judge trial if you're innocent, jury if you're guilty. A judge will quickly see through prosecutorial BS if you didn't do it, and if you did, it only takes one to hang.
- benreesman 1y agoI tend to agree in this instance. But this is why you don't build a public brand of doing shit very much like this constantly. Innocent until proven guilty is the right default, but at some point when you've been accused of misconduct enough times? No jury is impartial.
- 1oooqooq 1y ago[flagged]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- zahlman 1y ago> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes. > When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." > Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
- prasadjoglekar 1y agoFlo shouldn't have sent those data to FB. That's true. Which is why they settled. But FB, having received this info proceeded to use it and mix it with other signals it gets. Which is what the complaint against FB alleged.
- changoplatanero 1y agoI wish there was information about who at Facebook received this information and “used” it. I suspect it was mixed in with 9 million other sources of information and no human at Facebook was even aware it was there.
- Espressosaurus 1y agoSo they shouldn’t be punished because they were negligent? Is that your argument?
- pc86 1y agoI think their argument is that FB has a pipeline that processes whatever data you give it and the idea that a human being made the conscious decision to use this data is almost certainly not what happened. "This data processing pipeline processed the data we put in the pipeline" is not necessarily negligence unless you just hate Facebook and couldn't possibly imagine any scenario where they're not all mustache-twirling villains.
- qwertylicious 1y agoYeah, sorry, no, I have to disagree. We're seeing this broad trend in tech where we just want to shrug and say "gee wiz, the machine did it all on its own, who could've guessed that would happen, it's not really our fault, right?" LLMs sharing dangerous false information, ATS systems disqualifying women at higher rates than men, black people getting falsely flagged by facial recognition systems. The list goes on and on. Humans built these systems. Humans are responsible for governing those systems and building adequate safeguards to ensure they're neither misused nor misbehave. Companies should not be allowed to tech-wash their irresponsible or illegal behaviour. If Facebook did indeed built a data pipeline and targeting advertising system that could blindly accept and monetize illegally acquired without any human oversight, then Facebook should absolutely be held accountable for that negligence.
- bluGill 1y agoI would say you have a responsibility to ensure you are getting legal data. you don't buy stolen things. That is meta has a reponsibility to ensure that they are not partnering with crooks. Flo gets the largest blame but meta needs to show they did their part to ensure this didn't happen. (I would not call terms of use enough unless they can show they make you understand it)
- deadbabe 1y agoIf Flo accepted the terms of use, then it means they understand it. Really the only blame here should be on Flo.
- gruez 1y ago>Flo gets the largest blame but meta needs to show they did their part to ensure this didn't happen. (I would not call terms of use enough unless they can show they make you understand it) Court documents says that they blocked access as soon as they were aware of it. They also "built out its systems to detect and filter out “potentially health-related terms.”". Are you expecting more, like some sort of KYC/audit regime before you could get any API key? Isn't that the exact sort of stuff people were railing against, because indie/OSS developers were being hassled by the play store to undergo expensive audits to get access to sensitive permissions?
- hedgehog 1y agoFacebook chose to pool the data they received from customers and allow its use by others, so they are also responsible for the outcomes. If it's too hard to provide strong assurance that errors like Flo's won't result in adverse outcomes for the public, perhaps they should have designed a system that didn't work that way.
- gruez 1y ago>Facebook chose to pool the data they received from customers and allow its use by others, so they are also responsible for the outcomes. "chose" is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here. Suppose you ran a Mastodon server and it turned out some people were using it to share revenge porn unbeknownst to you. Suppose further that they did it in a way that didn't make it easily detectable by you (eg. they did it in DMs/group chats). Sure, you can dump out the database and pore over everything just to be sure, but it's not like you're going to notice it day to day. If a few months later the revenge porn ring got busted should you be charged with "intentionally eavesdropping" on revenge porn or whatever? After all, to some extent, you "chose" to run the Mastodon server.
- nikanj 1y agoSuing Facebook instead of Flo makes perfect sense, because Facebook has much more money. Plus juries are more likely to hate FB than a random menstruation company.
- mattmcknight 1y agoThey sued both.
- jlarocco 1y agoThat's only the first part of the story, though. Facebook isn't guilty because Flo sent medical data through their SDK. If they were just storing it or operating on it for Flo, then the case probably would have ended differently. Facebook is guilty because they turned around and used the medical data themselves to advertise without checking if it was legal to do so. They knew, or should have known, that they needed to check if it was legal to use it, but they didn't, so they were found guilty.
- gruez 1y ago>Facebook is guilty because they turned around and used the medical data themselves to advertise without checking if it was legal to do so. What exactly did this entail? I haven't read all the court documents, but at least in the initial/amended complaint the plaintiffs didn't make this argument, probably because it's totally irrelevant to the charge of whether they "intentionally eavesdropped" or not. Either they were eavesdropping or not. Whether they were using it for advertising purposes might be relevant in armchair discussions about meta is evil or not, but shouldn't be relevant when it comes to the eavesdropping charge. >They knew, or should have known, that they needed to check if it was legal to use it What do you think this should look like?
- jjulius 1y ago>What do you think this should look like? My honest answer that I know is impossible: Targeted advertising needs to die entirely.
- const_cast 1y agoI don't think it's impossible. If it's too hard to do something legally, then the solution is don't do it. Like, for example, running a gambling operation is very risky and has a high compliance barrier. So most companies just don't. In fact, most B2B won't even sell to gambling companies depending on what exactly they're selling.
- SilasX 1y agoYeah, I'm not sure if I'm missing something, and I don't like to defend FB, but ... AIUI, they have a system for using data they receive to target ads. They tell people not to put sensitive data in it. Someone does anyway, and it gets automatically picked up to target ads. What are they supposed to do on their end? Even if they apply heuristics for "probably sensitive data we shouldn't use"[1], some stuff is still going to get through. The fault should still lie with the entity that passed on the sensitive data. An analogy might be that you want to share photos of an event you hosted, and you tell people to send in their pics, while enforcing the norm, "oh make sure to ask before taking someone's photo", and someone insists that what they sent in was compliant with that rule, when it wasn't. And then you share them. [1] Edit: per your other comment, they indeed had such heuristics: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44901198 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44901198
- gpm 1y agoAt the time of [1 (your footnote)] the only defendant listed in the matter was Flo, not Facebook, per the cover page of [1], so it is unsurprising that that complaint does not include allegations against Facebook. The amended complaint, [3], includes the allegations against Facebook as at that time Facebook was added as a defendant to the case. Amongst other things the amended complaint points out that Facebook's behavior lasted for years (into 2021) after it was publicly disclosed that this was happening (2019), and then even after Flo was forced to cease the practice by the FTC, and congressional investigations were launched (2021) it refused to review and destroy the data that had previously been improperly collected. I'd also be surprised if discovery didn't provide further proof that Facebook was aware of the sort of data they were gathering here... [3] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.372884/gov.uscourts.cand.372884.64.0.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.37...
- gruez 1y ago>At the time of [1 (your footnote)] the only defendant listed in the matter was Flo, not Facebook, per the cover page of [1], so it is unsurprising that that complaint does not include allegations against Facebook. Are you talking about this? >As one of the largest advertisers in the nation, Facebook knew that the data it received >from Flo Health through the Facebook SDK contained intimate health data. Despite knowing this, >Facebook continued to receive, analyze, and use this information for its own purposes, including >marketing and data analytics. Maybe something came up in discovery that documents the extent of this, but this doesn't really prove much. The plaintiffs are just assuming because there's a clause in ToS saying so, facebook must be using the data for advertising.
- gpm 1y agoNo... In the part of my post that you quoted I'm literally just talking about the cover page of [1] where the defendants are listed, and at the time only Flo is listed. So nothing against Facebook/Meta is being alleged in [1]. They got added to the suit sometime between that document and [3] - at a glance probably as part of consolidating some other case with this one. Reading [1] for allegations against Facebook doesn't make any sense, because it isn't supposed to include those.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]