"Facebook understands the emotions expressed in what you type as statuses, and in messages via Messenger or WhatsApp."
Is this correct? There was a very involved discussion about WhatsApp's encryption that I thought indicated they don't, in fact, have access to WhatsApp messages.
Unless Facebook has some sentiment analysis tech that's far better than academia's (which isn't that unlikely), "understanding the emotions" of statuses is still a long way off.
Facebook likely has a watson-like technology that can answer a lot of interesting questions about a user, but "understanding emotions"... that's still a ways off. Maybe a long long way off. But it's wrong not to be very, very concerned.
Suffice it to say: (Paraphrasing Dijkstra) Whether Facebook understands human emotions from text is as relevant a question as whether a submarine can swim. I think they can get a helluva lot out of what you're typing and what you're liking. That should be enough to worry about.
"Understanding" emotion is definitely a biological trait that computers are unlikely (maybe 2200) to ever be capable of replicating.
But lexical content is a very well understood field, and emotion recognition is a huge industry for advertising. Even if facebook doesn't know that "I like it when stan fingers my butthole" was just a joke between buddies... there is tone inferred from the words and grammar involved. Positive vs. Negative is relatively straightforward, and when associated with a topic... can lead to lots of "opinion" data.
He wants to run for president. That's why he's found religion, why he's touring the country, why he changed some rules so he can control Facebook while holding office. There's been a creation myth about Zuckerberg for years. Even Jobs didn't get a Hollywood movie about him until he was dead.
Zuckerberg is dangerous because he's so damn vanilla. Outside of his contemptuous statements about his users being "dumb fucks" when he was a kid, everything he does is a PR move. Having a child? Better make a social statement out of it. Headed to Nigeria? Better have someone take pictures.
If you listen to Zuck obviously he's intelligent but he'll never say anything controversial or especially enlightening. He's had the world in his hands since he was 21 (or younger), never been challenged. What does that do to one's ego? Some of us talk too much and we've never ever done anything. What happens when you've been a billionaire since you were 25 or are worth $50 billion at 30?
He's far more dangerous than Trump ever was. He's normalized invasions of privacy, has more information on people than anyone in the world save maybe some government agencies and Facebook has more clout than many countries.
It'd be nice if Facebook was replaced by something better, but I hope people will stand up against what they are doing. It's unethical. If you ever combine that mindset with government, it's over. Maybe not by Zuckerberg but by the next Trump, which is the great irony in Zuckerberg and Facebook's social positions.
Zucks rants about his dream for society scare the hell outta me. It's seriously 1984 type shit... the only way to create "safe" and "friendly" global communities is with bulletproof censorship. Some level of civil disobedience and public disagreement is needed for a properly functioning society. Look up China and "harmonious society" if you don't buy it.
I wish Sergey or Larry from the Goog had such aspirations. At least from what I've read their intentions are pretty benign despite running such a huge monopoly.
I agree, but... I wonder if we're at peak-Facebook yet? All good things must come to an end. Maybe it will be Snapchat, or more likely a slow decline. I remember when Microsoft was at its peak, and seemed invincible. Facebook seems that way in social right now.
I hope Zuck pulls a Gates and goes full-time philanthropic, but he might be too young for that.
Some people certainly seem to like Trump, but I can't say I see the charisma myself. Some pretty toxic, hideous, unpleasant people have been elected to very high positions.
True. People still choose to join FB and give their data/privacy away. I don't know what it would take for a rebellion or if there will ever be an open decentralized platform to replace it.
Yes. I think that what must happen is a revolution of the value of one's private information. An open platform that made certain that information was only shared with particular "trusted nodes" and also was flushed from storage after a certain time would be cool. Like an information vault where your info was held, and you could selectively choose what fb could see and what must be deleted and re-cached in x many hours or days.
* One of the most addictive products the world has ever seen (Opioids, another such product, were used to overthrow countries)
* The single most important media company in the world
* Controlled by one person
Threat to free society? Jury's out. But at this point, it certainly seems worth regulating.
(Edit: The above points are not meant to paint FB/Zuck in a bad light. To their credit, they've built an incredible ecosystem and a mind-bogglingly good product. We all strive to create sticky/addictive products.
My point is: When your product is incredibly addictive to a large chunk of humanity, regulation should be considered)
I was telling people last year (before the tide shifted against FB) that there will one day (decades away) be Big Tobacco style litigation by governments against Facebook for intentionally making their service addictive when they knew the harmful effects (e.g., depression). I did not expect the sentiment to change so dramatically but I guess people are looking to blame anyone for the election.
The question is if you can hold out long enough and if the change you predict will happen fast enough.
That can get expensive quickly, so it's not quite the inverse of holding stock where the only downside is how far the stock can drop, not how far it can go up.
Facebook will remain an "ads" company for as long as it's profitable. Marketing dollars will always need go somewhere, so I'm not convinced the advertising market will just wither and die in the face of adblockers. As long as Facebook commands an army of eyeballs, its advertising business will be profitable.
Facebook has shown a willingness to diversify its social properties via synergetic integration. See: whatsapp, instagram.
Facebook will likely continue to diversify its business. For example, it could easily repurpose its excess hardware to enter the cloud computing market and compete with AWS/GoogleCloud. I would be surprised if this is not on the roadmap.
Yes. As we've seen, the only way to stop such things, is for the next disruptive company to come along and fuck their shit up.
Something will likely come along. My guess is that it will be spam-related, which will make the FB user-experience too difficult to use to get a quality experience. FB will try to appeal to government for protectionist legislation, but it won't happen fast enough.
Man I agree with you 100%.
I have been trying to get this message across whenever these topics come up in discussions with people.
We are risking the minds of people.
Take this example. So many mobile games which essentially leverage the thrill of gambling to make their games addictive. Of course, this only increases micropayment revenues. How many people get hooked and waste hundreds of hours? How many kids!?
To me this is the same as cigarettes. Why do we regulate it? Because the average person is unlikely to know its harmful effects. What about these applications? Which are profitable by tapping into our desires and impulsive tendencies.
okay, then let's regulate donuts, let's regulate hacker news because I just can't stop myself from checking it everyday. let's regulate cereals and candy, etc. Oh and coffee too. oh and toothpaste as well, i can't help but brush my teeth two or even 3 times a day!
my sister has an addicition to shopping for clothes, so that's going to need regulation, as well as my friend's action to watching tv, etc.
Of course, the laws and regulations that have cropped up sometimes are in response to the addictiveness of particular vices. That's why we don't regulate shopping for example. It is kind of disingenuous to put "shopping for clothes" and nicotine addiction on the same footing.
I agree with much of what you said. I'm not sure where I'd place Facebook in this case. Honestly, I'm not sure I'd make ruddct's argument for regulation based on the addictiveness of facebook more than I'd make the old anti-trust, money in politics and unchecked influence arguments.
Cigarette addicts can lead useful, productive lives before cancer or emphysema takes them out. Gamers on the other hand twitch away the best years of their natural lives, in some self-chosen dark sweatshop. Cigarettes then arguably the more benign of the two.
I feel like your conflating 2 arguments here. And I agree with 1 but whole heartedly disagree with the other.
Many Mobile games do abuse psychological elements. Agree they shouldn't abuse and should be stopped.
Waste hundreds of hours? I thoroughly enjoy hundreds of hours of game play so I don't see anything wrong with that.
Tapping into our desires? What's wrong with tickling our fancy?
Tapping into our impulsive tendencies. I feel like this is abusing human psychology again.
I'm not a gambler but I have felt the excitement and joy of it. I also love video games. I see nothing wrong with either of these things. But there is a clear distinction between the rewards of playing and the manipulation a company takes to enrich their bottom line.
Except it's not physically addictive. It's at most psychologically addictive and the withdrawal is not terribly painful. Just stop using it. Distract yourself with a good novel for a couple of days and it's done.
That was not my experience. I had a goal of reading 52 books last year, one for each week of the year. I reached 40 but never felt the need to post any cover photos on FB. Your relationship with it changes quite fast once you start finding other things to do rather than hang out on Facebook
Very interesting. Is it really controlled by one person? Or is facebook dependent on user's, well, using it?
If facebook went away tomorrow, would meatspace life materially change for any of its users?
A little peer pressure to affirm that Facebook is a giant waste of time, narcissistic and generally kind of silly is all it takes plant the seed to drop FB altogether. I have seen that work in meatspace.
The "what would happen if it went away tomorrow" question is not particularly useful to determine facebooks power, since it's not going to go away tomorrow.
I think the argument is about influence, not complete determination. Influence can be exercised independent from a services replacability.
> When your product is incredibly addictive to a large chunk of humanity, regulation should be considered
Yes. Let me compare FB to a phone company. When telephony was first invented, it quickly turned out to be addictive to a large chunk of humanity. Did we leave it unregulated? No, we didn't. In fact, there was regulation stating that telephone conversations may not be eavesdropped by telephone companies. Other regulations allowed other companies to be active on the same network so people could call eachother, regardless of their operator.
But somehow, we think that these types of regulation should not apply in this day and age. Strange.
>But somehow, we think that these types of regulation should not apply in this day and age. Strange.
Who is the "we"? I certainly think it should apply. I'd argue that the main difference in this day and age is that the "we" now includes corporate entities as persons who, thanks to Citizens United, now hold the lions share of political influence to affect whether regulations like this come to be.
I don't think FB itself is the structural threat to free society - treating corporate persons equally with flesh and blood people under the law is the structural threat. FB is just one of the more frightening corporate mega personages at the moment. Any of them would be equally so if they were as adept at people farming.
That's a great comparison. Facebook has taken on that kind of quality for me. It's become one more communication channel. Fantastic for keeping up with my friends who use it, but not intrusive. I'd say telephones are still addictive (along with email and other forms of communication as a whole), but more in the category of food being addictive than drugs. Yes, some people used to ring up $2000 phone bills, but the more common case was legitimate communication.
> Yes, some people used to ring up $2000 phone bills, but the more common case was legitimate communication.
Telephone tariffs in some parts of the world made long distance relationships very hard. Monopolists (often government controlled) took consumers to the cleaners every chance they got.
Only in the last two decades have prices finally been coming down.
So even those $2000 phone bills could easily be legitimate communication.
Today I'm still very conscious of the time I spend 'on the phone', especially when abroad. On mobile phones I've been hit more than once with a surprise bill because of living close to the border that was in that neighborhood (but the phone company was good about dropping those charges because even if I was on Dutch soil my phone kept switching to a German base station that was very strong where I lived).
One theoretical framework that justifies regulating telecoms, but not necessarily Facebook is that telecoms usually have special privileges granted to them by governments, up to and including monopoly status.
Building the hardware layer for a telecom network requires access to public land, and often private land where the landowners may not be cooperative. In exchange for the government enabling the telecom to build its network, the government gets to impose rules, sometimes even mandating competitor access to said network.
Facebook is different. The internet is already there, and is not owned by any single entity. Facebook does not need to compel cooperation from anyone to operate. It does not invite regulation in the same way a telecom does.
Now, there are plenty of people who believe that anything is fair game for the government to regulate if it's in the public interest, but I think that position is less universally accepted than that of trading special privileges for regulation.
This is actually a great comparison. FB has > 1 billion users, and it would be great if through gov't regulation those users could chat between whatsapp, snapchat, apple messenger, etc.
In the past this would be deemed "anti-competitive", now it's perfectly reasonable from an "innovation" standpoint.
It's the inconvenience of having multiple accounts and logins with multiple services. Sure it's not as inconvenient as having multiple phone line accounts so AT&T customers can talk to Bell Atlantic customers but at the end of the day, your data is providing revenue to these companies and the companies continue to silo themselves.
Wouldn't that be easily solved if all the other services offered a "log in with Facebook" feature and routed messages to other people who also logged in with Facebook?
I assume there's a gaping flaw in this idea that I can't quite see at the moment ;-)
Part of the gaping flaw is that Facebook will very quickly disable your API account so you can't offer login with Facebook, if you're competing with them. :)
I disagree with those saying that this is a good comparison. Telephone companies were not regulated because they were addictive, but rather because they are a public utility. Facebook possesses none of the characteristics of a public utility:
-Supplies an essential good or service
-Prohibitively expensive to replicate/enormous initial investment
> Other regulations allowed other companies to be active on the same network
well, this sort of thing is due (at least in part) to the physicality of infrastructure.
adding more telephone lines (and gas, electrical, etc) is welcomed for the first person to come through, but subsequent businesses/developers have a LOT more pushback if not outright blockage from local authorities.
It's safe to assume data miners won't be interested in designing a neutral ecosystem.
Consider the Open Mustard Seed project;
Open Mustard Seed (OMS) is an open-source framework for
developing and deploying secure and trusted cloud-based
and mobile applications. OMS integrates a stack of
technologies including hardware-based trusted execution
environments, blockchain 2.0, machine learning, and secure
mobile and cloud based computing. This platform enables
the managed exchange of digital assets, cryptocurrency,
and personal information. Harnessing mobile and personal
data, OMS establishes a sovereign identity, pseudonyms,
and verified attributes and provides each user with a
3-factor biometrically-secured digital wallet. This gives
individuals control over their identities and their data
and supports the formation of decentralized, responsive,
and transparent digital ecosystems.
* Sadly, the developer site is down at the moment, but the design considers a standardized set of APIs to verify identities and allow personal ownership and hosting and licensing of your social media data.
All three of those points are hyperbolic to the extreme.
Unlike opioids facebook can not kill you if you stop using the service. And addiction rates are still being studied best I can tell. Certainly no leading papers claiming an epidemic [0]
Sources required and likely highly deterministic on how you develop a scale for such ranking
*FB is a publicly traded company with a board, it, by definition is not completely controlled by one person.
I personally am no fan of social media, don't really see the point in most contexts, but a call for government regulation into communication is the wrong step. IMO cults of ignorance, luddites, and anti-intellectualism are the threats to free society not social-networking.
And yet, you have something called: personal choice. People should be responsible for their own actions. Most of the concerns listed in the article, are things any other company or entity could do: "creating shadow profiles", 'crawling the web', etc.
If you don't want FB to have your pictures then don't go there. The parent article is over-reaching it's concern.
And it's not exactly accurate that it's controlled by 1 person. Ultimately FB can't do anything we don't want it to do. If FB does something we don't like, we're just one tab lick away from putting them out of business.
The last thing we need is more useless regulations that will stifle the already stiffled and slowing of innovation.
Facebook is a fad that will pass. Pretty soon people will be onto the next big digital media thing and forget all about their facebook accounts. But targeting and regulating a single enterprise just because it is too popular will set a dangerous precedent in law that will reverberate throughout the ages.
There have been other dominating monopolies before, (ma bell telecom monopoly comes to mind) which was much dangerous than a website.
Also facebook isn'really a media company. Yes they have some news stories, but that's not what people really go to facebook for, people go there to keep updated on their friends, which doesn't seem like such a threat.
Yes internet and social media addiction is bad and dangerous, but that is something that would exist with or without facebook and can be addressed in other ways besides regulating facbeook
I've been thinking about this, and personally, I thought Twitter was done years ago. To me, it was just a media that was designed specifically to give a few well-privileged famous celebrities a way to spew their empty garbage to the masses. It's very much a one-way "popular kids" channel.
I thought that most people would find it boring and useless and abandon it. But I think it's done the opposite. It's fed into the tabloid-news impulse of the lowbrow class, and only become more popular.
The genius of FB is that when sub-groups of people piss each other off, they can just unfriend, block, and ban, and they're in a nice comfy bubble.
The next thing that comes along will probably be both of these. With better AI-generated/sourced content.
I just started using Twitter this past year. What you get out of Twitter really depends on who you follow, which is not obvious at all to get a hook into and find good accounts you'd value hearing from. I luckily found a few good ones, and you find more by being exposed to content they retweet. It has been a great boon to me because I found a few cogent tweeters of the kind of politics and analysis I like, who I would not have been exposed to otherwise. I feel like it has expanded my political awareness and given me a better informed commentary than I'd find elsewhere. Not just empty heads there. You also get some minor amount of conversational interaction with them and others, and real time commentary on unfolding current events, and some of the jokes that get retweeted are funny. It's easier to see the value of Twitter on the inside than from the outside and its gimmick of short messages.
A lot of content to shift through, so following too many is not so good, and no real way way to sort them into themed content or more favoured tweeters, is my issue.
Facebook is a de-facto standard of communication. They have your info, you friends info - and you need FB to find and share with others.
The technology medium is completely irrelevant.
It's like saying 'hospitals are not important for saving lies, what matters the most are 'roads' because that's how sick people get around'.
My Space was never a communication mechanism, it was almost purely social, moreover, it didn't have broad appeal. My mother and grandmother never used MySpace - but they use Facebook.
Facebook has cross generational and cross cultural appeal, and has a 'global critical mass' making it the default platform for a lot of human communication.
I don't like Facebook at all, but they are here to stay for a while, until something else replaces it.
> I don't like Facebook at all, but they are here to stay for a while, until something else replaces it.
Just like MySpace. At the time, MySpace was the defacto standard of communication for most young people of a minimum socioeconomit status. You're missing the point by ignoring the history/reality.
Telephones still exist because the infrastructure is difficult (expensive, time consuming, hard to maintain) to replicate in a robust fashion. Wireless has come a long way, but it's still using the hardline protocols because we still have hardlines. Usually where financial incentives to switch are different.
Facebook is about talking (and texting, and instagraming) to your friends (and family, and acquaintances, and people you can't quite remember). That's not a fad, that's a general human desire.
Facebook the company might fail in the market and be replaced by someone better, just as they did to their early competitors. The desire for this kind of communication is universal though (and Facebook surely did much less to invent the idea than Graham Bell!). It's not going away.
> Facebook is a fad that will pass. Pretty soon people will be onto the next big digital media thing and forget all about their facebook accounts.
I used to think Facebook would become a passing fad as well, but we've been saying this for a while and nothing has changed other than Facebook growing larger in size.
> Also facebook isn'really a media company. Yes they have some news stories, but that's not what people really go to facebook for, people go there to keep updated on their friends, which doesn't seem like such a threat.
The Facebook brand is tenacious and it's pivoting into other things. Take for example the recent deal to stream live MLS games [1] or news outlets leveraging Facebook Live for supplementary content. Let's also not forget that, sadly, Facebook is a primary source of news and information for many people. I think the days of Facebook being only about status/friend updates are over.
It's addictive if you want/need to be social. My wife does, not me. I'm not a very social guy honestly, I have a few friends in my inner circle who I text/gchat/fb messenger with but I don't use the facebook app or the web interface.
Since I deactivated my acct in Dec last year to focus on bschool apps, I've accomplished so much, and I say that not to brag, but to illustrate that it was a bit of a timesuck for me and I've been able to do a lot more since I quit.
On one hand, you compare Facebook to opioid drugs in terms of addictive potential.
On the other hand, you suggest "regulation" in response.
But, if history and the nature of the state are our guides we must conclude that state intervention is unlikely to produce healthy outcomes, since the state has been unable to craft any "regulation" in the face of a century-long opiate(-iod) epidemic other than a prohibition environment, which has been disastrous for public health and dynastically enriching for drug cartels.
We are agreed that the government's response to opioids has been both awful, from a humanitarian perspective, and ineffective, from an engineering perspective.
But regulation must not be viewed as a monolith. Especially in the realm of communication tools, where many good, pro-consumer pro-competition regulations exist. e.g. number portability for mobile providers, common carrier rules, etc)
(Disclaimer: Obviously not all comm. regulations are good, cough cough cable companies in America. But clearly some regulation of these entities is needed, so let's fix the regs rather than trashing them.)
My sense is that, with time as the X-axis and need for the state as the Y-axis, we're experiencing a downward slope.
I find it plausible (in truth I find it inevitable) that the state will crumble and that society will be better for it, especially in terms of corporate domination of everyday needs, which I believe that state empowers rather than "regulates."
That's fair criticism. My intent was to give an example of a hugely addictive product that shaped the course of history. Facebook is, obviously, not physically addictive like an opioid.
But it is addictive. Dopamine-hit addictive (thanks, likes and little red notification dots!). In what appears to be a very universally appealing way.
* Facebook is not "unregulated" - the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Trade Commission both regulate it. The latter has taken multiple interventions, and will probably continue to do so in the future.
* Facebook is not physically addictive - there's a huge difference between addictions like gambling and drug addictions.
* Facebook is not the most important media company in the world - Facebook does not produce news, only disseminate it.
* Facebook is not controlled by one person - it is a publicly traded company.
Any kind of non-democratic for-profit organization is going to have incentives that don't align with "free society".
When one of those organizations runs the top centralized content and communications silo, use it to censor, stalk its users and promote its or its sponsors interests, it becomes a threat.
Non-democratic organizations inherently don't represent all parties and interests participating within it. If they did, they would be democratic organizations. A non-democratic organization will be influenced by, and will bend to the interests of, the few.
A for-profit organization inherently has incentives that are perverse. Historically, the profit motive has incentivized things that run contrary to the well-being, and rights enjoyed by, society. It is profitable to censor, erode privacy, erode labor protections and rights, use psychological manipulation to influence the behavior of others and push negative externalities onto others.
Yes, democratic non-profit organizations can misalign with a "free society". However, a non-democratic for-profit organization is fundamentally incompatible with the ideals expressed in the article.
> Those adjectives mean little (as does "free society") without a definition.
Merriam-Webster works for most when colloquial definitions bottom out or are hard to recall.
This picture reminds me of a scene in a sci-fi flick called "Cypher" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0284978/). I wonder if some other parallels could be applied to FB...
Not that I want to defend any intelligence organisation but war is not a binary thing. Other countries might be harming your country even without you knowing it. Agencies try to prevent that from happening.
Not an expert, but as secret stuff gets leaked it tends to create huge public discourse and leads to political action.
Knowledge about their actions does seem to have an effect on the country. Secret service staff would probably not necessarily evaluate it as a good effect though.
> Knowledge about their actions does seem to have an effect on the country.
Can you give me an example?
Take the latest Wikileaks Vault thing for instance. That was a leak that created public discourse, what was the effect?
I still don't trust my iPhone and pretty much most of the software I use, were any 3 letter agency looking to get me.
While I don't necessarily disagree with the spirit of your point, Wikipedia gives three current wars the U.S. is involved in[0]: in Northwest Pakistan, in numerous locations against ISIL, and the war in Afghanistan. You might argue that most of our foes aren't states, and you'd be right, but the fact is still that we are at war and have been continuously for over a decade.
The truly unacceptable part of this for me is that congress has quietly, and passively relinquished one of its key powers, the ability to declare war. ever since korea we have had these anemic 'use of force resolutions' that are frankly not a check on executive power in the slightest. I am not a peacenik by any means, if anything I am a hawk, particularly about russia, but I detest living in a state of forever war, undeclared and un-debated. WE HAVE BOOTS ON THE GROUND IN SYRIA and no one cares or is even aware.
I understand the 'threats' that we face are complex non-state actors..but I do not think the amount of blood and treasure we invest in going abroad to find foreign monsters to slay is worth it and there is never true congressional argument on this topic.
this is quite silly. the cia/nsa are about attacking and investigating foreign nationals(obviously followed in the breach sometimes- see SNOWDEN) ..the fbi is required to follow american law in regards to due process. we do not extend those rights to foreign actors. I am for increased oversight of our national security apparatus but rolling in international facing organizations into domestic ones is a terrible idea.
as for having these organizations even during peacetime...Si vis pacem, para bellum. If we want these capabilities to some degree, we must keep them running. You can't launch spy satellites into orbit the day after an attack on american soil...
The biggest problem with Facebook is that it's a walled in garden. Whatever you write there isn't accessible outside the web. It's not even searchable inside FB itself. I'm sure this is done on purpose, if people knew that the crap they write could be searchable they'd be much more reluctant to express themselves.
> How is this different from proprietary software?
Most free software is proprietary software! Big chunks of Facebook's code base is proprietary, and the data they collect is extremely proprietary. Ditto for google.
By "the expectation that software should be free", parent meant the expectation that you don't pay money for access to a hosted copy.
This is absolutely not true. There's so much wrong with that argument and how it applies to Facebook it's hard for me to provide decent criticism, but I'll try anyway.
Facebook is not provided 'for free'. Nothing is. Facebook is provided to users in exchange for their personal and social data. Facebook is also not really 'a thing'- it's much more complicated than that. The worst part of your argument is that this criticism of free software also holds true for proprietary software- there are plenty of nonfree services which do the same thing. More generally, 'free' software as you define and apply it is not a useful categorization of software to make. What about freemium services? Are those free or do you pay for those? Whether or not you pay in currency for a software license is not really meaningful in the discussion of user freedom. I recommend you actually do some reading on the topic of software freedom and Facebook before you go spouting completely unfounded aphorisms online again.
So better pay for the privilege? There's no reason a paid social network service (aside from the fact that no one would ever use it) wouldn't collect the same information. The issue is that Facebook is not free (as in libre) so users don't have personal control of their information.
RMS is fond of making up "cute" names for things. It lets people identify themselves as part of the tribe.
OP is complaining about free services (like Facebook) but said free software (like PHP) so the whole comment is a non-starter. I'm not sure why nobody else pointed that out... Facebook has huge operating expenses.
(Disclosure: I have accepted a job offer at Facebook, but not yet started)
Does Facebook really have a unique amount of data? Google also knows a lot about people through billions of searches a day. Apple can learn a lot through people's iDevices, and Google (again) or Samsung can do the same with Android. So can any cellular service provider, or anyone running coax or fiber into your home. The government can tap any or all of those. At least Facebook doesn't have an army, or paramilitaries like DHS or just about any sheriff's department I've ever encountered.
I'm not saying the author's concerns are invalid. I've had occasion to think about these exact issues a lot, and I'm sure many of my soon-to-be colleagues have too. The way I see it, Facebook and other social media occupy much the same position as phone companies used to, both in terms of how they facilitate interaction and in their privileged financial/infrastructural positions they occupy. There's good in that (e.g. ability to pursue the kinds of speculative projects that Bell Labs was famous for). There are also dangers, no question.
The thing is, if it wasn't Facebook it would be someone else. There's no shortage of others ready to step in if Facebook alone were targeted with laws and regulations. Instead of worrying about Facebook specifically, we need to think about what a modern "common carrier" law should look like in the social-media age. Perhaps some kinds of regulations on use of information do make sense, but that dialog isn't likely to be very constructive so long as most of the people on one side seem to be free-market fundamentalists betraying their own principles by singling out one company among many.
Facebook has the advantage that its users connect themselves with their friends, colleagues, and relatives. The users also give Facebook nearly all data about themselves (full name, phone number, date of birth, mother, father, etc.). People organize their events and talk about everything related to their lives. Facebook also provides their newsfeed and can track what they click and, most importantly, like.
Unless you have a Gmail or a Google+ account Google has to guess. Google can guess pretty well but they still have to guess instead of just know. You search for something on Google and then go there. Facebook keeps you on its site and encourages you to comment on Facebook which then incentivizes others to stay on Facebook, too.
Facebook messenger is also unencrypted, and I'm not sure if their privacy policy grants permission to read the chats, but I know they definitely do insert Uber ads into messenger whenever a car or "ride" is mentioned.
Would you rather have a Facebook with people who actually think about these kind of issues, or a Facebook without such people? At least there are debates within Facebook about such things. I've heard - publicly, long before I had any thoughts of working there myself - that they can get quite fierce. Never hear of such things at Twitter or Google. Is it better that people there just don't seem to give a damn? I don't think so.
If people rule out or discourage internal regulation with nastiness like yours, all that's left is the external kind. I'm pretty sure that's against a lot of people's principles, but I guess those who failed the coding test are willing to sacrifice principles for revenge.
Look, here is a simple suggestion. Come back here in about 6 months after you join FB (settle down first). Since there is no realistic chance for FB to improve their practices within that timeframe, there will be one more complaint thread about some ethical practice or the other at that point. Give us a little inside peek into these supposed "fierce debates". Just participate and add something meaningful to the discussion by telling us the different positions people took in the debate and what the outcome was. We will even give you a handicap - you don't actually have to tell us who took which position. Since you seem to be so passionate about this, I don't think you are going to make up stuff.
If you actually manage to do this, then not only will people here appreciate you, but more importantly, I am sure you will be doing a heck of a lot of good for your soon to be employer's image.
> Does Facebook really have a unique amount of data? Google also knows a lot about people through billions of searches a day. Apple can learn a lot through people's iDevices, and Google (again) or Samsung can do the same with Android.
In amount it's hard to tell. Google and other big players of surveillance capitalism also collect what they can. But it does not really make it any better to have an oligopoly which has a similar huge amount of knowledge about a huge amount of the population.
> At least Facebook doesn't have an army, or paramilitaries like DHS or just about any sheriff's department I've ever encountered.
Maybe not until Zuckerberg is president of the USA ;). Also governments, esp. those who already run their own massive mass surveillance programs will use that privately collected data (at least in the long run if they do not do so already).
> The way I see it, Facebook and other social media occupy much the same position as phone companies used to, both in terms of how they facilitate interaction …
Not remotely. A far as I know they did not influence on a personal level with whom you interact, when that interaction takes place and surely not the topic of the interaction. Also Facebook today is a media company which does much more than providing infrastructure for communication of individuals.
> The thing is, if it wasn't Facebook it would be someone else.
You are aware that's probably the most lame excuse to do evil one can think of?
> You are aware that's probably the most lame excuse to do evil one can think of?
Nice assumption of doing evil there. I'm saying someone else would fill Facebook's role whether it's evil or not. Do you disagree? Do you not see the others waiting in the wings, from direct clones to Twitter and Google and Amazon? Do you deny that they lack mostly the ability to collect as much information, but have the same will? Brin and Page would be glad to step into Facebook's shoes, or Bezos, or Thiel. How is that better?
Again, whether it's evil or not, this kind of information gathering will continue and accelerate. Personifying it as Facebook or Zuckerberg just makes privacy a big game of Whack-a-Mole. Bills of attainder are both immoral and ineffectual. We need to address the what, not the who. The only lame excuse here is failing to work toward a viable long-term solution because it's easier (or more fun?) to demonize.
> I'm saying someone else would fill Facebook's role whether it's evil or not. Do you disagree?
History says you're right.
There were many similar sites before Facebook existed, including Friendster and Google's Orkut. You might also count MySpace.
There have been a few attempts to replace Facebook, the most obvious one being Google Plus.
Typically, due to power law effects, technologies end up with a dominant supplier: there's only one Amazon, one Google, one Wikipedia, etc.
Given that Google is already dominant in search, email, online video (YouTube) and mobile phones, there's a case for defending Facebook as the lesser evil...
>This is rather flimsy rationalization, see "The Futility of Illusion"
I'm going to be honest with you, but there's a logical fallacy for just about every argument ever contrived. If one were to hold the standards of debate dialogue to the arcane, byzantine and endless rules of logical fallacies, then we couldn't argue for or against anything. Our judicial system would grind to a standstill if the rigor of Wikipedia's bible of logical fallacies were used as a gold standard. Every argument inherently has weaknesses and maybe even a logical fallacy, but that doesn't automatically make it a wrong argument in toto.
I have recently created an account, having resisted up until now with the excuse that my son, then a teenager, said that it was "creepy" when persons of my generation were on Facebook. He informs me, however, that persons his age are leaving Facebook in favor of SnapChat and Instagram.
(I have so far spent all my Facebook time looking into what would be required to use its OAuth functions.)
The threat is that Facebook has become too big to fail. A major leak of private data and messages of its users would be devastating to society given the scale.
What happens if/when Facebook fails as a company? What happens to the data then? It gets sold off. That's a scary prospect.
Facebook is in the fickle game of Internet advertising. When the noise overcomes the signal in what Facebook shows, when the content of the users' connections gets drowned out to advertising, people will leave in droves. When advertisers fail to see the return on their investment, the money will dry up.
What data can facebook possible have that would "devastating" in a leak scenario? Facebook has only what users have put on the site to share, and all data present is at least semipublic. There are no addresses, no bank accounts, no SSNs. The valuable part of facebook is already freely available: your list of "liked" pages and your social graph.
It's very reductive to claim that only addresses, bank account [numbers], and SSNs could be dangerous if leaked.
What about people who discuss private matters in chat? (e.g. sexuality, medical history, drug use, etc.) Yes, we know that's a bad idea, but most people aren't HN readers.
What about state actors using Facebook's metadata alone to quash democratic movements before they get off the ground?[1] To advertisers, most of the social graph is available only in a semi-abstracted form (e.g. target X, Y, and Z qualities and degrees of connection). A leak or sale could make that information available directly.
What about criminals using a public leak of location data and some predictive algorithms to strategically rob homes? (and maybe also using patterns of likes and connections to predict whose home is worth burgling?)
Really, to say that the valuable part of Facebook is already freely available brings to mind the words "limited imagination." Facebook keeps the valuable part to itself and meters even limited access to it. And there is extensive danger with the possibility of a leak or sale of the raw data.
That's what I'm saying... Actually, it reminds me of when Wikileaks first came out, and I'd been reading the book of Revelations (as literature, it's an epic poem). There is this part where there is a scroll with 7 seals. An angel asks "who is worthy to break these seals?" People are weeping about it.
What kind of society can handle a full disclosure of information on this magnitude, now or even in the future, looking back? Imagine living 40 years from now, and your parent's full social media records have just been leaked in a mass dump of some data collection company. Could you handle that?
Okay and without appealing to apocalyptic literature, just think about the potentially devastating consequences of mass numbers of people getting access to their enemies' private data all at once. Good for you if you survive that kind of dump personally, but what about your community, your family?
But back to the metaphysical level, shit's about to get real wild if scientific knowledge keeps growing like it has been, especially as "ai" comes more able to translate and interpret these masses of digital data... Plus the vast stores of biological information waiting to be tapped.
Really, a history of likes, a corpus of chat messages, a corpus of public status, and some corpus of potential location data/ usage data depending on the devices used; that's what you liken to an apocalyptic event? Your family, your community, everyone will be just fine. Potentially some population already living in oppressive situations will be impacted (your religious family learns you're gay, etc) but the vast majority will just stop using Facebook and move to the next social media site. What kind of data do you imagine people storing on facebook (remember nothing is there you, the user, hasn't explicitly decided to share with someone aside from whatever they track internally interms of usage and location).
By default a person's friends list is visible from their public profile so if you want to go put together a graph you're welcome to.
First off, yes, I also think people will make it through this and be better in the long run. But I think this stuff is inevitably going to be a major source of heat, and it's going to take some processing. There is a lot of 'potential energy' stored up in private information (I'm not just talking about Facebook). People keep secrets, and the amount being held behind cryptographic algorithms is only growing by the year.
I'm mostly talking about private messages, browsing history, stuff that people would prefer not to be known widely because of pervasive judgements and stigmas in our society.
"What kind of data do you imagine people storing on facebook..."
Nude photos and videos, secrets, accusations, candid personal details, private plans, irrational fears, fantasies, love notes to people who aren't their spouses, etc.
The human web is thickly interwoven. You say "Potentially some population already living in oppressive situations will be impacted". Well, their experiences would not be trivial, and your experience is not disconnected from "those people" either for that matter. I'd imagine they are your friends, your neighbors, your community too. People around us are having secretive relationships ("affairs"), while others hide domestic or sexual abuse. People have skeletons in the digital server closets, things they'd rather forget about and move past, but which are lingering on redundant backups somewhere.
Uh, it's widely known that fb buys tons of data from many 3rd party brokers. It's not hard for them to get whatever they need, including ssn's I'm sure. And they definitely do have addresses from 3rd parties.
>" Facebook has only what users have put on the site to share, and all data present is at least semipublic. There are no addresses, no bank accounts, no SSNs."
No FB buys third party/offline data about its users, I don't we know what they have:
> A major leak of private data and messages of its users
What's to say this isn't already happening in real-time? You don't even need to tap the trunk lines (to use a Matrix reference), you simply need to have enough "fakebook" contacts and some Persona Management Software [1].
If a major leak will be that devastating to society, we need a major leak even more urgently, so that the illusion of privacy is dispelled and people can properly calibrate to the costs and/or risks of their behavior. Otherwise we only continue to raise the stakes.
I really don't think the best deterrent to getting into a fatal car accident is to get into a fatal car accident. Also, I don't wish to experience losing a limb but surviving a car accident in order to prime myself to avoid a fatal accident.
The events of the last couple of years caused me to evaluate the psychological toll that me self-induced exposure to media, of all forms, was taking. I came to the conclusion that with social media, mankind was participating in the largest social experiment of all time and just hoping that things turned out well. I decided the results, so far, have not been promising and I no longer wanted to participate. I deleted my FB and canceled cable. Now I chose what I'm exposed to. I advise more people to do the same.
Funny Story. I had to create a new FB account recently so I can give them money(advertise) but I didn't want people to friend me. So, I put a short version of my name. But somehow they figured out that I didn't give the correct name and suspended the account. So much for trying to give them money. :)
> I had to create a new FB account recently so I can give them money(advertise)
Can you really not place advertisements on Facebook without a 'social Facebook account' (I accept you obviously need some kind of 'account' for billing, monitoring purposes, etc.) linked to your real name?
“We have to create culture, don't watch TV, don't read magazines, don't even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you're worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you're giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told 'no', we're unimportant, we're peripheral. 'Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.' And then you're a player, you don't want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.”
― Terence McKenna
it's stereotypical counterculture talk, but the dichotomy of creating vs consuming really sticks with me
Strongly disagree. Facebook is not the threat. It's individuals who make decisions to sell their data in search of convenience. Maybe individuals make this decision out of ignorance but pretty much everyone in Western world is on Facebook, so I have to think that people consciously trade their data.
Its not like Facebook is shoving the product down our throat.
> Its not like Facebook is shoving the product down our throat.
No, but network effects are a thing and you can't open a webpage these days without a Facebook 'like' button on it. (Well, ok, you can but they are definitely getting rarer and rarer.)
You wouldn't believe the amount of pressure that people put on each other to sign up for Facebook. In some of my circles I'm next to invisible because I'm not 'on facebook'.
That's never going to work on me but I can't fault people for giving in and going with the flow. Still, in many cases it's not as voluntary as it might seem to be to you, just like it almost is no longer voluntary not to have a phone, not to have email and not to have internet access.
Theoretically you should be able to live your life without those, but in practice it is getting harder all the time and a choice against any or all of these comes with a social price that not everybody is willing to pay.
I don't disagree with your comment (in fact, I face the same issues in my life). My point is that we have to accept we live in a democracy and there is probably nothing we can do. It turns out that this is just our personal preference. To give some examples:
* Cars everywhere. Nobody gives a shit about global warming or pollution.
* Gmail everywhere. Nobody cares that your email gets marked as spam if you pick some other email provider. People will just ask you to switch to gmail.
* Chrome everywhere. Nobody cares that you now use Firefox and their website does not work well.
* Waste and opulence everywhere. Nobody cares about the insane things we dump _every_ day in the oceans.
My point is that this is humanity. All these are individual decisions and not pushed down by corporations. But people are not prepared to make any sacrifice at a personal level.
> Nobody gives a shit about global warming or pollution.
Plenty of people do.
> Nobody cares that your email gets marked as spam if you pick some other email provider. People will just ask you to switch to gmail.
Yes, that's one more example of network effects at work.
> Nobody cares that you now use Firefox and their website does not work well.
True, but then they'll lose me as a potential customer. They probably don't care so point taken.
> Nobody cares about the insane things we dump _every_ day in the oceans.
The worst to me are things that are manufactured in order to be thrown away. Tools that are so bad you can't use them even once, consumer goods whose sole feature is they are created to be presents that nobody ever uses afterwards, packaging, mountains of packaging, all kinds of disposable paper goods. It's incredible.
Have you watched the movie "The age of stupid?"
If you have try to reconcile that with the current head of the EPA being who he is...
So even if those decisions are all made - in principle - of people's own volition our views of the world and our actions in it are shaped to a fairly large extent by governments, corporate entities and media (this comment being a part of that because of the reference to the movie above).
> But people are not prepared to make any sacrifice at a personal level.
>It's individuals who make decisions to sell their data in search of convenience.
Here's the problem: They're selling your data, too. If you have an average social life, your picture will end up on Facebook. People will click on the little box around your head and put in your name. They may mention you or discuss you in the comments.
With enough of that kind of stuff, Facebook knows you exist, what you look like, and where you like to hang out. It can make educated guesses at other things like whether you went to college and where, plus all the things you can derive from pictures like age, ethnicity, and weight.
Social networks really are networks, and you can know a lot about a network node from its neighbors.
Is media a structural threat? No.
Facebook is a very very weak form of media. So no.
The huge response of sentiment about how it is (or might be or whatever) is silly.
Grand statements about people's feelings as the premise for these gushes about personal distaste and fears and elitist cliches are used throughout:
> Freedom and freedom for a society, in a modern information age, relies on the individuals that make up that society having control of that information.
The society does have control. The questions are always about truth or validity, but there's no critical thought applied to the pretty words. Mediocrity masquerading as greatness again.
I don't think Zuckerberg is malicious, nor are people working at or in control of facebook. However, that doesn't exclude the whole system from being bad for society, just like the constituents of of viruses or cancers are just benevolent atoms and electrons.
Regardless of whether they are malicious, their actions are causing significant societal harm. Zuckerberg retains almost complete control of the company and this is occurring under his guidance. He might not be malicious, but he is certainly at fault, as are the ridiculous and shameful engineers picking up paychecks to create a such an authoritarian product.
Black box warnings exist in the drug industry because its understood people do not understand complex risks and they don't read the fine print. Facebook IS a threat only because many of its users are sharing information ignorant of the risks.
HIPAA exists in healthcare because its understood data can be misused to the great detriment of patients. Facebook IS a threat only because its users have no recourse over the misuse of their information.
Products liability laws exist for manufactured goods because raising the costs of failure to protect your customers results in safer products, and because it decreases government's obligation to support injured consumers. Facebook IS a threat only because there is no cost associated with injuring users, and little awareness of how Facebook is injurious.
Its a systemic issue beyond Facebook. Legislative reform is required.
I find it amusing that news media outlets are stoking fear and resentment over the government hacking technology to spy on us when the information it gathers is a mere shaving of what corporations like Alphabet and Facebook have access to on the back end.
How is it preferable that a handful of incredibly talented, well-funded, private companies know more about you than your mother or your best friend (or arguably yourself)? Why are people more frightened by a bureaucratic government agency led by Donald J. Trump than the world's leading researcher in artificial intelligence, who owns the index to the entire internet, and creates things like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7xvqQeoA8c? Why is Wikileaks working so hard to protect these companies?
> How is it preferable that a handful of incredibly talented, well-funded, private companies know more about you than your mother or your best friend (or arguably yourself)?
It's not preferable, but it's less worrying. It's less worrying because companies can't legally throw you in jail or take all your money or kill you.
And scary robotics promo videos aside, they aren't in command of the world's most powerful military and an enormous police force to boot.
If at any time they threaten you in a meaningful way, you can freely leave their services. If things get particularly bad -- like, worst case scenario -- you can even flee to a part of the world where they have less influence. Government does not provide you any of those options.
People are right to be more worried about government intrusion than private intrusion. (They are of course also wrong to be unworried about private intrusion.)
> Why are people more frightened by a bureaucratic government agency led by Donald J. Trump than the world's leading researcher in artificial intelligence
If it comes down to a forced choice, I'd much prefer Page or Brin over Trump. At least the former two are on IMO the correct side of existential issues -- nuclear arms, global warming, and so forth. (Of course, as indicated above, I'd prefer neither.)
It's less worrying because companies can't legally throw you in jail or take all your money or kill you.
But they do this all the time. Sometimes illegally, sometimes with full force of law.
The settlement of the Americas, through what might be considered a public-private partnership on the part of several nations (Spain, Portugal, England, France, Holland, Russia, largely), resulted in the genocide of a native population once numbering perhaps 40 - 50 millions. What this lacks in the intensity of nuclear annihilation, it greatly exceeds in magnitude.
The public-private partnership of Belgium in the Congo saw untold atrocities, including the unhanding of hundreds of thousands or millions of Congo natives. See Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness.
Or of England, the East India Company, its private government and army within India, and the Opium Wars against China -- chemical, biolical, and conventional war against two entire cultures.
Labour unionisation, a concept and principle defended by Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and other classical economists, say violent opposition by factory and mine owners particularly in the UK and United States. U.S. Steel, the West Virginia Mountain Wars, the Wobblies, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, and more.
Industrial accidents have killed or destroyed many tens or hundreds of thousands: the Halifax, Galveston, Port Chicago, and West, Texas, explosions -- some entirely private, some public-private partnerships. Mining accidents claimed an average of greater than 2,000 lives/year for much of the first half of the 20th century, statistics tabulated by the US Department of Labour, and available online. That's on the order of 100,000 souls over the century, virtually all of their deaths preventable. The Union Carbide Bhopol disaster. Dam failures, including Johnstown, in the United States (this was the instigation of the Red Cross as a disaster releif organisation, and of significant concepts expanding liability law). For public-private parternships, the Vajont dam disaster, claiming 2500 lives. And showing that poor management, planning, engineering, and response aren't solely the remit of nominally capitalist societies, the Banqiao Dam disaster of 1975, in China, in which some 170,000 souls perished, on par with your nuclear bombing example, though it was but 25 thousands who died immediately from drowning, the others were lost due to starvation and disease in the following weeks -- as I said, exceedingly poor planning and response.
There's the US housing bubble leading up to the 2007-8 global financial crisis, and the robosigning and fraudulent documentation depriving people of their very homes.
For raw corporate aggression, I'd suggest the Johnson County War:
On April 5, 1892, 52 armed men rode a private, secret train north from Cheyenne. Just outside Casper, Wyo., they switched to horseback and continued north toward Buffalo, Wyo., the Johnson County seat. Their mission was to shoot or hang 70 men named on a list carried by Frank Canton, one of the leaders of this invading force.
There is the insidious poisoning of millions through lead, asbestos, tobacco, mercury, and dioxins, both generally and across specific sites, all whilst paid corporate shills actively and deliberately sowed confusion on the matter, knowing full well that their position was false. Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway have covered much of this history excellently in Merchants of Doubt.
And there's the little matter of carbon dioxide emissions and their effects on global tempeatures and ocean chemistry, known since the 1880s, and recognised as a major threat since the 1950s, but still actively denied by numerous interests more concerned over their trillions of dollars of accumulated wealth and power than over th...
* > still actively denied by numerous interests more concerned over their trillions of dollars of accumulated wealth and power than over the fate of the planet they live on and the souls they share it with.*(
Interests that are now controlling the US government....
However, Trump says climate change is a Chinese hoax and bullshit. Trump's advisor Myron Ebell says the environmental movement is "the greatest threat to freedom and prosperity in the modern world". Trump's head of the Environmental Protection Agency is Scott Pruitt, who believes the EPA shouldn't even exist.
Trump's Secretary of State is Rex Tillerson, former boss of Exxon. Exxon is being investigated for spending decades ignoring its own scientists’ research, which tied fossil fuels to climate change. It also has a $500 billion oil deal with Putin, for which Trump will have to remove sanctions.
Trump also says he's going to bring back "beautiful clean coal".
So, under Trump, there's a green light to destroy the US environment and the whole planet for the pursuit of profit.
Trump is using the presidency as a marketing platform to promote himself, his properties (including Trump Tower and Mar a lago), his daughter and in-laws. The GOP is using it to give very rich people $600bn in tax cuts while ensuring that (if its AHCA goes through), tens of thousands of ordinary Americans die because of a lack of health insurance.
What's going on in broad daylight is bad enough. The behind-the-scenes corruption is probably worse.
[I]if you have heavily invested in fossil fuels, time is running out to realize a return on your investment. Buying a US administration tailored to maximize ROI while fighting a rear-guard action against action on climate change and roll-out of a new, rival energy infrastructure is therefore rational (in business terms).
Russia and the Putin angle is best understood as part of this; oil and gas exports accounted for 68% of Russia's export revenues in 2013. The possibility that Trump is personally heavily invested in Rosneft via shell proxies while being at loggerheads with Merkel might be an inversion of the normal state of affairs in international relations for the past 70 years but is entirely consistent with the big money picture: Germany is trying to push (heavily) for renewable power....
This, quite frankly, makes as much sense to me as anything else. If not considerably more.
An: sometimes a conspiracy really is a conspiracy, and they really are out to get you.
Interesting piece. The move to exploit dirty energy while destroying the environment is clearly the centrepiece of Trumpism, as I said above. Whether Bannon is actually planning some sort of "final solution" is open to question.
The real problem is that the world burns whether there's a conspiracy or not....
There's a tendency toward this among all living things, and worse cases in the past: Great Oxygenation Event and Snowball Earth being an extreme case. William R Catton, Jr., made the point, in Overshoot, that assigning blame isn't particularly useful. It's the dynamics which drive the thing.
At the same time, humans can, and do, know better. Yet we're headed down that same path. And there definitely appear to be those capitalising on the short-term view.
To me, at least, there's a difference between information I willingly, if unwittingly share on a social network vs having the government unwittingly and unwillingly collect information indiscriminately. Furthermore, Facebook, Google, et al do not have SWAT teams that can be sent to smash open my door and flash bang a baby based on what they find.
I'm not saying I think it's good that private companies collect all of our data (and personally the info a CC company has creeps me out far more than FB or Google), but I can choose to stop using their service and greatly minimize the amount of data they receive. There's very few caves in the world where you can hide from the US Government.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 303 ms ] threadIs this correct? There was a very involved discussion about WhatsApp's encryption that I thought indicated they don't, in fact, have access to WhatsApp messages.
Suffice it to say: (Paraphrasing Dijkstra) Whether Facebook understands human emotions from text is as relevant a question as whether a submarine can swim. I think they can get a helluva lot out of what you're typing and what you're liking. That should be enough to worry about.
But lexical content is a very well understood field, and emotion recognition is a huge industry for advertising. Even if facebook doesn't know that "I like it when stan fingers my butthole" was just a joke between buddies... there is tone inferred from the words and grammar involved. Positive vs. Negative is relatively straightforward, and when associated with a topic... can lead to lots of "opinion" data.
He wants to run for president. That's why he's found religion, why he's touring the country, why he changed some rules so he can control Facebook while holding office. There's been a creation myth about Zuckerberg for years. Even Jobs didn't get a Hollywood movie about him until he was dead.
Zuckerberg is dangerous because he's so damn vanilla. Outside of his contemptuous statements about his users being "dumb fucks" when he was a kid, everything he does is a PR move. Having a child? Better make a social statement out of it. Headed to Nigeria? Better have someone take pictures.
If you listen to Zuck obviously he's intelligent but he'll never say anything controversial or especially enlightening. He's had the world in his hands since he was 21 (or younger), never been challenged. What does that do to one's ego? Some of us talk too much and we've never ever done anything. What happens when you've been a billionaire since you were 25 or are worth $50 billion at 30?
He's far more dangerous than Trump ever was. He's normalized invasions of privacy, has more information on people than anyone in the world save maybe some government agencies and Facebook has more clout than many countries.
It'd be nice if Facebook was replaced by something better, but I hope people will stand up against what they are doing. It's unethical. If you ever combine that mindset with government, it's over. Maybe not by Zuckerberg but by the next Trump, which is the great irony in Zuckerberg and Facebook's social positions.
I wish Sergey or Larry from the Goog had such aspirations. At least from what I've read their intentions are pretty benign despite running such a huge monopoly.
I hope Zuck pulls a Gates and goes full-time philanthropic, but he might be too young for that.
My impression is that he has the charisma of a loaf of bread and won't do real well in politics.
Look at the pundit reaction to his speech a couple weeks ago, or at how well people respond to his extemporaneous word salad.
Some people just want to watch the world learn.
Some people just want to watch the world learn.
That's a good line. I'll have to borrow it from you.
[0] I can't blame FB for anything regarding the latter. Quite the opposite.
Well, https://www.corbettreport.com/meet-in-q-tel-the-cias-venture...
http://www.therealnewsonline.com/our-blogs/facebook-and-its-...
* One of the most addictive products the world has ever seen (Opioids, another such product, were used to overthrow countries)
* The single most important media company in the world
* Controlled by one person
Threat to free society? Jury's out. But at this point, it certainly seems worth regulating.
(Edit: The above points are not meant to paint FB/Zuck in a bad light. To their credit, they've built an incredible ecosystem and a mind-bogglingly good product. We all strive to create sticky/addictive products.
My point is: When your product is incredibly addictive to a large chunk of humanity, regulation should be considered)
Google may have a chance of beating Apple at #1 but Facebook has quite a margin.
Essentially both Facebook and Google are ads businesses. Facebook seems to be optimizing for short term growth at the expense of their brand.
I know many people who joined Facebook around 2008 and absolutely were big fans of it. After 10 years none of them even use it, the novelty wore off.
PS - There's an easy way to bet on this, just buy some stock :)
EDIT - Well, technically, you want to short the stock.
The question is if you can hold out long enough and if the change you predict will happen fast enough.
That can get expensive quickly, so it's not quite the inverse of holding stock where the only downside is how far the stock can drop, not how far it can go up.
Facebook has shown a willingness to diversify its social properties via synergetic integration. See: whatsapp, instagram.
Facebook will likely continue to diversify its business. For example, it could easily repurpose its excess hardware to enter the cloud computing market and compete with AWS/GoogleCloud. I would be surprised if this is not on the roadmap.
Something will likely come along. My guess is that it will be spam-related, which will make the FB user-experience too difficult to use to get a quality experience. FB will try to appeal to government for protectionist legislation, but it won't happen fast enough.
To me this is the same as cigarettes. Why do we regulate it? Because the average person is unlikely to know its harmful effects. What about these applications? Which are profitable by tapping into our desires and impulsive tendencies.
Its time we discuss this.
my sister has an addicition to shopping for clothes, so that's going to need regulation, as well as my friend's action to watching tv, etc.
But putting Facebook and shopping for clothes on the same footing isn't. And the "Facebook causes depression" arguments are utterly unconvincing.
Do you believe there should be a minimum age to buy tobacco?
Do you believe tobacco companies should have to publish information stating that tobacco is addictive and dangerous on their products?
Taxes.
Many Mobile games do abuse psychological elements. Agree they shouldn't abuse and should be stopped.
Waste hundreds of hours? I thoroughly enjoy hundreds of hours of game play so I don't see anything wrong with that.
Tapping into our desires? What's wrong with tickling our fancy?
Tapping into our impulsive tendencies. I feel like this is abusing human psychology again.
I'm not a gambler but I have felt the excitement and joy of it. I also love video games. I see nothing wrong with either of these things. But there is a clear distinction between the rewards of playing and the manipulation a company takes to enrich their bottom line.
If facebook went away tomorrow, would meatspace life materially change for any of its users?
A little peer pressure to affirm that Facebook is a giant waste of time, narcissistic and generally kind of silly is all it takes plant the seed to drop FB altogether. I have seen that work in meatspace.
I think the argument is about influence, not complete determination. Influence can be exercised independent from a services replacability.
Yes. Let me compare FB to a phone company. When telephony was first invented, it quickly turned out to be addictive to a large chunk of humanity. Did we leave it unregulated? No, we didn't. In fact, there was regulation stating that telephone conversations may not be eavesdropped by telephone companies. Other regulations allowed other companies to be active on the same network so people could call eachother, regardless of their operator.
But somehow, we think that these types of regulation should not apply in this day and age. Strange.
Who is the "we"? I certainly think it should apply. I'd argue that the main difference in this day and age is that the "we" now includes corporate entities as persons who, thanks to Citizens United, now hold the lions share of political influence to affect whether regulations like this come to be.
I don't think FB itself is the structural threat to free society - treating corporate persons equally with flesh and blood people under the law is the structural threat. FB is just one of the more frightening corporate mega personages at the moment. Any of them would be equally so if they were as adept at people farming.
Telephone tariffs in some parts of the world made long distance relationships very hard. Monopolists (often government controlled) took consumers to the cleaners every chance they got.
Only in the last two decades have prices finally been coming down.
So even those $2000 phone bills could easily be legitimate communication.
Today I'm still very conscious of the time I spend 'on the phone', especially when abroad. On mobile phones I've been hit more than once with a surprise bill because of living close to the border that was in that neighborhood (but the phone company was good about dropping those charges because even if I was on Dutch soil my phone kept switching to a German base station that was very strong where I lived).
Building the hardware layer for a telecom network requires access to public land, and often private land where the landowners may not be cooperative. In exchange for the government enabling the telecom to build its network, the government gets to impose rules, sometimes even mandating competitor access to said network.
Facebook is different. The internet is already there, and is not owned by any single entity. Facebook does not need to compel cooperation from anyone to operate. It does not invite regulation in the same way a telecom does.
Now, there are plenty of people who believe that anything is fair game for the government to regulate if it's in the public interest, but I think that position is less universally accepted than that of trading special privileges for regulation.
In the past this would be deemed "anti-competitive", now it's perfectly reasonable from an "innovation" standpoint.
I assume there's a gaping flaw in this idea that I can't quite see at the moment ;-)
-Supplies an essential good or service
-Prohibitively expensive to replicate/enormous initial investment
-Inelastic demand
-Region-specific
-Few or zero consumer alternatives
well, this sort of thing is due (at least in part) to the physicality of infrastructure.
adding more telephone lines (and gas, electrical, etc) is welcomed for the first person to come through, but subsequent businesses/developers have a LOT more pushback if not outright blockage from local authorities.
Consider the Open Mustard Seed project;
https://idcubed.org/open-platform/platform/https://archive.org/details/FromBitcoinToBurningManBeyond
* Sadly, the developer site is down at the moment, but the design considers a standardized set of APIs to verify identities and allow personal ownership and hosting and licensing of your social media data.
Architecture of the OMS TCC: http://i.imgur.com/HV04itY.png
https://stratechery.com/2017/manifestos-and-monopolies/
Unlike opioids facebook can not kill you if you stop using the service. And addiction rates are still being studied best I can tell. Certainly no leading papers claiming an epidemic [0]
Sources required and likely highly deterministic on how you develop a scale for such ranking
*FB is a publicly traded company with a board, it, by definition is not completely controlled by one person.
I personally am no fan of social media, don't really see the point in most contexts, but a call for government regulation into communication is the wrong step. IMO cults of ignorance, luddites, and anti-intellectualism are the threats to free society not social-networking.
[0]https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=addictiveness+of+social...
Building a wall isn't going to fix climate change. Facebook is clearly a threat to a free society, but it may be the only chance we have.
If you don't want FB to have your pictures then don't go there. The parent article is over-reaching it's concern.
And it's not exactly accurate that it's controlled by 1 person. Ultimately FB can't do anything we don't want it to do. If FB does something we don't like, we're just one tab lick away from putting them out of business.
The last thing we need is more useless regulations that will stifle the already stiffled and slowing of innovation.
That's all well and good until you get to US Customs and they demand to see your Facebook before they let you back in the country.
There's a trivial error in your example: I can upload the photo of you to Facebook, and there's no mechanism you can use to take it down.
Basically impossible if you have friends that use Facebook - which most people have unless you run only in very specific circles.
There have been other dominating monopolies before, (ma bell telecom monopoly comes to mind) which was much dangerous than a website.
Also facebook isn'really a media company. Yes they have some news stories, but that's not what people really go to facebook for, people go there to keep updated on their friends, which doesn't seem like such a threat.
Yes internet and social media addiction is bad and dangerous, but that is something that would exist with or without facebook and can be addressed in other ways besides regulating facbeook
I thought that most people would find it boring and useless and abandon it. But I think it's done the opposite. It's fed into the tabloid-news impulse of the lowbrow class, and only become more popular.
The genius of FB is that when sub-groups of people piss each other off, they can just unfriend, block, and ban, and they're in a nice comfy bubble.
The next thing that comes along will probably be both of these. With better AI-generated/sourced content.
A lot of content to shift through, so following too many is not so good, and no real way way to sort them into themed content or more favoured tweeters, is my issue.
It's the default communication mechanism for many people.
Telephones stink and we still use them because they are a standard.
> I don't think myspace is a fad. > It's the default communication mechanism for many people.
This is just as relevant.
Facebook is a de-facto standard of communication. They have your info, you friends info - and you need FB to find and share with others.
The technology medium is completely irrelevant.
It's like saying 'hospitals are not important for saving lies, what matters the most are 'roads' because that's how sick people get around'.
My Space was never a communication mechanism, it was almost purely social, moreover, it didn't have broad appeal. My mother and grandmother never used MySpace - but they use Facebook.
Facebook has cross generational and cross cultural appeal, and has a 'global critical mass' making it the default platform for a lot of human communication.
I don't like Facebook at all, but they are here to stay for a while, until something else replaces it.
Just like MySpace. At the time, MySpace was the defacto standard of communication for most young people of a minimum socioeconomit status. You're missing the point by ignoring the history/reality.
Telephones still exist because the infrastructure is difficult (expensive, time consuming, hard to maintain) to replicate in a robust fashion. Wireless has come a long way, but it's still using the hardline protocols because we still have hardlines. Usually where financial incentives to switch are different.
Facebook is about talking (and texting, and instagraming) to your friends (and family, and acquaintances, and people you can't quite remember). That's not a fad, that's a general human desire.
Facebook the company might fail in the market and be replaced by someone better, just as they did to their early competitors. The desire for this kind of communication is universal though (and Facebook surely did much less to invent the idea than Graham Bell!). It's not going away.
I used to think Facebook would become a passing fad as well, but we've been saying this for a while and nothing has changed other than Facebook growing larger in size.
> Also facebook isn'really a media company. Yes they have some news stories, but that's not what people really go to facebook for, people go there to keep updated on their friends, which doesn't seem like such a threat.
The Facebook brand is tenacious and it's pivoting into other things. Take for example the recent deal to stream live MLS games [1] or news outlets leveraging Facebook Live for supplementary content. Let's also not forget that, sadly, Facebook is a primary source of news and information for many people. I think the days of Facebook being only about status/friend updates are over.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/10/facebook-scores-a-deal-to-...
tell that to the millions of people who get most of their news via facebook. Zuckerburg also disagrees (https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/21/fbonc/)
Since I deactivated my acct in Dec last year to focus on bschool apps, I've accomplished so much, and I say that not to brag, but to illustrate that it was a bit of a timesuck for me and I've been able to do a lot more since I quit.
On the other hand, you suggest "regulation" in response.
But, if history and the nature of the state are our guides we must conclude that state intervention is unlikely to produce healthy outcomes, since the state has been unable to craft any "regulation" in the face of a century-long opiate(-iod) epidemic other than a prohibition environment, which has been disastrous for public health and dynastically enriching for drug cartels.
But regulation must not be viewed as a monolith. Especially in the realm of communication tools, where many good, pro-consumer pro-competition regulations exist. e.g. number portability for mobile providers, common carrier rules, etc)
(Disclaimer: Obviously not all comm. regulations are good, cough cough cable companies in America. But clearly some regulation of these entities is needed, so let's fix the regs rather than trashing them.)
My sense is that, with time as the X-axis and need for the state as the Y-axis, we're experiencing a downward slope.
I find it plausible (in truth I find it inevitable) that the state will crumble and that society will be better for it, especially in terms of corporate domination of everyday needs, which I believe that state empowers rather than "regulates."
But it is addictive. Dopamine-hit addictive (thanks, likes and little red notification dots!). In what appears to be a very universally appealing way.
Regulation is the threat to free society.
Nonsense pseudo-intellectual one-liners are fun!
* Facebook is not physically addictive - there's a huge difference between addictions like gambling and drug addictions.
* Facebook is not the most important media company in the world - Facebook does not produce news, only disseminate it.
* Facebook is not controlled by one person - it is a publicly traded company.
* Experts are beginning to disagree with this http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
* Facebook workers recently admitted to filtering content they didn't agree with (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/05/09/fo...)
* Zuckerburg controls facebook: http://fortune.com/2016/04/27/zuckerberg-facebook-control/
When one of those organizations runs the top centralized content and communications silo, use it to censor, stalk its users and promote its or its sponsors interests, it becomes a threat.
Those adjectives mean little (as does "free society") without a definition.
A for-profit organization inherently has incentives that are perverse. Historically, the profit motive has incentivized things that run contrary to the well-being, and rights enjoyed by, society. It is profitable to censor, erode privacy, erode labor protections and rights, use psychological manipulation to influence the behavior of others and push negative externalities onto others.
Yes, democratic non-profit organizations can misalign with a "free society". However, a non-democratic for-profit organization is fundamentally incompatible with the ideals expressed in the article.
> Those adjectives mean little (as does "free society") without a definition.
Merriam-Webster works for most when colloquial definitions bottom out or are hard to recall.
Most of my friends, for instance, ignore that FB knows most of their web chronology through the omnipresent Like button.
And we must fight the "I-have-nothing-to-hide" attitude.
Roll personal and funding into the FBI (Note: this does not make me a fan of the FBI) so there is at least some public oversight.
Knowledge about their actions does seem to have an effect on the country. Secret service staff would probably not necessarily evaluate it as a good effect though.
Can you give me an example?
Take the latest Wikileaks Vault thing for instance. That was a leak that created public discourse, what was the effect? I still don't trust my iPhone and pretty much most of the software I use, were any 3 letter agency looking to get me.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Uni...
https://warisboring.com/the-united-states-of-forever-war-4bc...
I understand the 'threats' that we face are complex non-state actors..but I do not think the amount of blood and treasure we invest in going abroad to find foreign monsters to slay is worth it and there is never true congressional argument on this topic.
as for having these organizations even during peacetime...Si vis pacem, para bellum. If we want these capabilities to some degree, we must keep them running. You can't launch spy satellites into orbit the day after an attack on american soil...
Frankly, software should not be free. When you let people give you things for free, you basically let them control you and take away your freedom.
How is this different from proprietary software? Where you have no idea what's going on under the hood?
Granted, "giving in order to get" is a common and effective social engineering tactic.
Most free software is proprietary software! Big chunks of Facebook's code base is proprietary, and the data they collect is extremely proprietary. Ditto for google.
By "the expectation that software should be free", parent meant the expectation that you don't pay money for access to a hosted copy.
Of course the Free Software Foundation is going to disagree with that statement.
"Software must be free" usually means free and in speech not free as in beer.
Facebook is not provided 'for free'. Nothing is. Facebook is provided to users in exchange for their personal and social data. Facebook is also not really 'a thing'- it's much more complicated than that. The worst part of your argument is that this criticism of free software also holds true for proprietary software- there are plenty of nonfree services which do the same thing. More generally, 'free' software as you define and apply it is not a useful categorization of software to make. What about freemium services? Are those free or do you pay for those? Whether or not you pay in currency for a software license is not really meaningful in the discussion of user freedom. I recommend you actually do some reading on the topic of software freedom and Facebook before you go spouting completely unfounded aphorisms online again.
OP is complaining about free services (like Facebook) but said free software (like PHP) so the whole comment is a non-starter. I'm not sure why nobody else pointed that out... Facebook has huge operating expenses.
Does Facebook really have a unique amount of data? Google also knows a lot about people through billions of searches a day. Apple can learn a lot through people's iDevices, and Google (again) or Samsung can do the same with Android. So can any cellular service provider, or anyone running coax or fiber into your home. The government can tap any or all of those. At least Facebook doesn't have an army, or paramilitaries like DHS or just about any sheriff's department I've ever encountered.
I'm not saying the author's concerns are invalid. I've had occasion to think about these exact issues a lot, and I'm sure many of my soon-to-be colleagues have too. The way I see it, Facebook and other social media occupy much the same position as phone companies used to, both in terms of how they facilitate interaction and in their privileged financial/infrastructural positions they occupy. There's good in that (e.g. ability to pursue the kinds of speculative projects that Bell Labs was famous for). There are also dangers, no question.
The thing is, if it wasn't Facebook it would be someone else. There's no shortage of others ready to step in if Facebook alone were targeted with laws and regulations. Instead of worrying about Facebook specifically, we need to think about what a modern "common carrier" law should look like in the social-media age. Perhaps some kinds of regulations on use of information do make sense, but that dialog isn't likely to be very constructive so long as most of the people on one side seem to be free-market fundamentalists betraying their own principles by singling out one company among many.
imagine what you'll tell the grandkids
Unless you have a Gmail or a Google+ account Google has to guess. Google can guess pretty well but they still have to guess instead of just know. You search for something on Google and then go there. Facebook keeps you on its site and encourages you to comment on Facebook which then incentivizes others to stay on Facebook, too.
You will make a good Facebook worker drone
If people rule out or discourage internal regulation with nastiness like yours, all that's left is the external kind. I'm pretty sure that's against a lot of people's principles, but I guess those who failed the coding test are willing to sacrifice principles for revenge.
If you actually manage to do this, then not only will people here appreciate you, but more importantly, I am sure you will be doing a heck of a lot of good for your soon to be employer's image.
Do you really believe that the average worker bee's opinion at FB carries any weight?
Mark Zuxkerberg controls Facebook:
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-04-28/mark-zuck...
In amount it's hard to tell. Google and other big players of surveillance capitalism also collect what they can. But it does not really make it any better to have an oligopoly which has a similar huge amount of knowledge about a huge amount of the population.
> At least Facebook doesn't have an army, or paramilitaries like DHS or just about any sheriff's department I've ever encountered.
Maybe not until Zuckerberg is president of the USA ;). Also governments, esp. those who already run their own massive mass surveillance programs will use that privately collected data (at least in the long run if they do not do so already).
> The way I see it, Facebook and other social media occupy much the same position as phone companies used to, both in terms of how they facilitate interaction …
Not remotely. A far as I know they did not influence on a personal level with whom you interact, when that interaction takes place and surely not the topic of the interaction. Also Facebook today is a media company which does much more than providing infrastructure for communication of individuals.
> The thing is, if it wasn't Facebook it would be someone else.
You are aware that's probably the most lame excuse to do evil one can think of?
Nice assumption of doing evil there. I'm saying someone else would fill Facebook's role whether it's evil or not. Do you disagree? Do you not see the others waiting in the wings, from direct clones to Twitter and Google and Amazon? Do you deny that they lack mostly the ability to collect as much information, but have the same will? Brin and Page would be glad to step into Facebook's shoes, or Bezos, or Thiel. How is that better?
Again, whether it's evil or not, this kind of information gathering will continue and accelerate. Personifying it as Facebook or Zuckerberg just makes privacy a big game of Whack-a-Mole. Bills of attainder are both immoral and ineffectual. We need to address the what, not the who. The only lame excuse here is failing to work toward a viable long-term solution because it's easier (or more fun?) to demonize.
History says you're right.
There were many similar sites before Facebook existed, including Friendster and Google's Orkut. You might also count MySpace.
There have been a few attempts to replace Facebook, the most obvious one being Google Plus.
Typically, due to power law effects, technologies end up with a dominant supplier: there's only one Amazon, one Google, one Wikipedia, etc.
Given that Google is already dominant in search, email, online video (YouTube) and mobile phones, there's a case for defending Facebook as the lesser evil...
No but they hand that data over to the surveillance state:
https://www.aclunc.org/blog/facebook-instagram-and-twitter-p...
>"The thing is, if it wasn't Facebook it would be someone else"
This is rather flimsy rationalization, see "The Futility of Illusion":
https://ethicsalarms.com/rule-book/unethical-rationalization...
I'm going to be honest with you, but there's a logical fallacy for just about every argument ever contrived. If one were to hold the standards of debate dialogue to the arcane, byzantine and endless rules of logical fallacies, then we couldn't argue for or against anything. Our judicial system would grind to a standstill if the rigor of Wikipedia's bible of logical fallacies were used as a gold standard. Every argument inherently has weaknesses and maybe even a logical fallacy, but that doesn't automatically make it a wrong argument in toto.
(I have so far spent all my Facebook time looking into what would be required to use its OAuth functions.)
What happens if/when Facebook fails as a company? What happens to the data then? It gets sold off. That's a scary prospect.
Facebook is in the fickle game of Internet advertising. When the noise overcomes the signal in what Facebook shows, when the content of the users' connections gets drowned out to advertising, people will leave in droves. When advertisers fail to see the return on their investment, the money will dry up.
What about people who discuss private matters in chat? (e.g. sexuality, medical history, drug use, etc.) Yes, we know that's a bad idea, but most people aren't HN readers.
What about state actors using Facebook's metadata alone to quash democratic movements before they get off the ground?[1] To advertisers, most of the social graph is available only in a semi-abstracted form (e.g. target X, Y, and Z qualities and degrees of connection). A leak or sale could make that information available directly.
What about criminals using a public leak of location data and some predictive algorithms to strategically rob homes? (and maybe also using patterns of likes and connections to predict whose home is worth burgling?)
Really, to say that the valuable part of Facebook is already freely available brings to mind the words "limited imagination." Facebook keeps the valuable part to itself and meters even limited access to it. And there is extensive danger with the possibility of a leak or sale of the raw data.
[1]: https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metad...
What kind of society can handle a full disclosure of information on this magnitude, now or even in the future, looking back? Imagine living 40 years from now, and your parent's full social media records have just been leaked in a mass dump of some data collection company. Could you handle that?
Okay and without appealing to apocalyptic literature, just think about the potentially devastating consequences of mass numbers of people getting access to their enemies' private data all at once. Good for you if you survive that kind of dump personally, but what about your community, your family?
But back to the metaphysical level, shit's about to get real wild if scientific knowledge keeps growing like it has been, especially as "ai" comes more able to translate and interpret these masses of digital data... Plus the vast stores of biological information waiting to be tapped.
By default a person's friends list is visible from their public profile so if you want to go put together a graph you're welcome to.
I'm mostly talking about private messages, browsing history, stuff that people would prefer not to be known widely because of pervasive judgements and stigmas in our society.
"What kind of data do you imagine people storing on facebook..." Nude photos and videos, secrets, accusations, candid personal details, private plans, irrational fears, fantasies, love notes to people who aren't their spouses, etc.
The human web is thickly interwoven. You say "Potentially some population already living in oppressive situations will be impacted". Well, their experiences would not be trivial, and your experience is not disconnected from "those people" either for that matter. I'd imagine they are your friends, your neighbors, your community too. People around us are having secretive relationships ("affairs"), while others hide domestic or sexual abuse. People have skeletons in the digital server closets, things they'd rather forget about and move past, but which are lingering on redundant backups somewhere.
And my larger point is not so much about Facebook messages, but about biological data... http://www.ctpost.com/local/article/Yale-study-Brain-scans-m...
Their published data partners: https://www.facebook.com/help/494750870625830
No FB buys third party/offline data about its users, I don't we know what they have:
http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2016/12/30/facebook-...
What's to say this isn't already happening in real-time? You don't even need to tap the trunk lines (to use a Matrix reference), you simply need to have enough "fakebook" contacts and some Persona Management Software [1].
[1] http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/02/16/945768/-UPDATED:-Th...
Check [0] if you, like me, hadn't.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
Funny Story. I had to create a new FB account recently so I can give them money(advertise) but I didn't want people to friend me. So, I put a short version of my name. But somehow they figured out that I didn't give the correct name and suspended the account. So much for trying to give them money. :)
Can you really not place advertisements on Facebook without a 'social Facebook account' (I accept you obviously need some kind of 'account' for billing, monitoring purposes, etc.) linked to your real name?
― Terence McKenna
it's stereotypical counterculture talk, but the dichotomy of creating vs consuming really sticks with me
Its not like Facebook is shoving the product down our throat.
No, but network effects are a thing and you can't open a webpage these days without a Facebook 'like' button on it. (Well, ok, you can but they are definitely getting rarer and rarer.)
That's never going to work on me but I can't fault people for giving in and going with the flow. Still, in many cases it's not as voluntary as it might seem to be to you, just like it almost is no longer voluntary not to have a phone, not to have email and not to have internet access.
Theoretically you should be able to live your life without those, but in practice it is getting harder all the time and a choice against any or all of these comes with a social price that not everybody is willing to pay.
* Cars everywhere. Nobody gives a shit about global warming or pollution.
* Gmail everywhere. Nobody cares that your email gets marked as spam if you pick some other email provider. People will just ask you to switch to gmail.
* Chrome everywhere. Nobody cares that you now use Firefox and their website does not work well.
* Waste and opulence everywhere. Nobody cares about the insane things we dump _every_ day in the oceans.
My point is that this is humanity. All these are individual decisions and not pushed down by corporations. But people are not prepared to make any sacrifice at a personal level.
Plenty of people do.
> Nobody cares that your email gets marked as spam if you pick some other email provider. People will just ask you to switch to gmail.
Yes, that's one more example of network effects at work.
> Nobody cares that you now use Firefox and their website does not work well.
True, but then they'll lose me as a potential customer. They probably don't care so point taken.
> Nobody cares about the insane things we dump _every_ day in the oceans.
The worst to me are things that are manufactured in order to be thrown away. Tools that are so bad you can't use them even once, consumer goods whose sole feature is they are created to be presents that nobody ever uses afterwards, packaging, mountains of packaging, all kinds of disposable paper goods. It's incredible.
Have you watched the movie "The age of stupid?"
If you have try to reconcile that with the current head of the EPA being who he is...
So even if those decisions are all made - in principle - of people's own volition our views of the world and our actions in it are shaped to a fairly large extent by governments, corporate entities and media (this comment being a part of that because of the reference to the movie above).
> But people are not prepared to make any sacrifice at a personal level.
Some people are. Generalizations are hard.
Here's the problem: They're selling your data, too. If you have an average social life, your picture will end up on Facebook. People will click on the little box around your head and put in your name. They may mention you or discuss you in the comments.
With enough of that kind of stuff, Facebook knows you exist, what you look like, and where you like to hang out. It can make educated guesses at other things like whether you went to college and where, plus all the things you can derive from pictures like age, ethnicity, and weight.
Social networks really are networks, and you can know a lot about a network node from its neighbors.
Grand statements about people's feelings as the premise for these gushes about personal distaste and fears and elitist cliches are used throughout:
> Freedom and freedom for a society, in a modern information age, relies on the individuals that make up that society having control of that information.
The society does have control. The questions are always about truth or validity, but there's no critical thought applied to the pretty words. Mediocrity masquerading as greatness again.
HIPAA exists in healthcare because its understood data can be misused to the great detriment of patients. Facebook IS a threat only because its users have no recourse over the misuse of their information.
Products liability laws exist for manufactured goods because raising the costs of failure to protect your customers results in safer products, and because it decreases government's obligation to support injured consumers. Facebook IS a threat only because there is no cost associated with injuring users, and little awareness of how Facebook is injurious.
Its a systemic issue beyond Facebook. Legislative reform is required.
How is it preferable that a handful of incredibly talented, well-funded, private companies know more about you than your mother or your best friend (or arguably yourself)? Why are people more frightened by a bureaucratic government agency led by Donald J. Trump than the world's leading researcher in artificial intelligence, who owns the index to the entire internet, and creates things like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7xvqQeoA8c? Why is Wikileaks working so hard to protect these companies?
It's not preferable, but it's less worrying. It's less worrying because companies can't legally throw you in jail or take all your money or kill you.
And scary robotics promo videos aside, they aren't in command of the world's most powerful military and an enormous police force to boot.
If at any time they threaten you in a meaningful way, you can freely leave their services. If things get particularly bad -- like, worst case scenario -- you can even flee to a part of the world where they have less influence. Government does not provide you any of those options.
People are right to be more worried about government intrusion than private intrusion. (They are of course also wrong to be unworried about private intrusion.)
> Why are people more frightened by a bureaucratic government agency led by Donald J. Trump than the world's leading researcher in artificial intelligence
If it comes down to a forced choice, I'd much prefer Page or Brin over Trump. At least the former two are on IMO the correct side of existential issues -- nuclear arms, global warming, and so forth. (Of course, as indicated above, I'd prefer neither.)
But they do this all the time. Sometimes illegally, sometimes with full force of law.
The settlement of the Americas, through what might be considered a public-private partnership on the part of several nations (Spain, Portugal, England, France, Holland, Russia, largely), resulted in the genocide of a native population once numbering perhaps 40 - 50 millions. What this lacks in the intensity of nuclear annihilation, it greatly exceeds in magnitude.
The public-private partnership of Belgium in the Congo saw untold atrocities, including the unhanding of hundreds of thousands or millions of Congo natives. See Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness.
Or of England, the East India Company, its private government and army within India, and the Opium Wars against China -- chemical, biolical, and conventional war against two entire cultures.
Labour unionisation, a concept and principle defended by Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and other classical economists, say violent opposition by factory and mine owners particularly in the UK and United States. U.S. Steel, the West Virginia Mountain Wars, the Wobblies, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, and more.
Industrial accidents have killed or destroyed many tens or hundreds of thousands: the Halifax, Galveston, Port Chicago, and West, Texas, explosions -- some entirely private, some public-private partnerships. Mining accidents claimed an average of greater than 2,000 lives/year for much of the first half of the 20th century, statistics tabulated by the US Department of Labour, and available online. That's on the order of 100,000 souls over the century, virtually all of their deaths preventable. The Union Carbide Bhopol disaster. Dam failures, including Johnstown, in the United States (this was the instigation of the Red Cross as a disaster releif organisation, and of significant concepts expanding liability law). For public-private parternships, the Vajont dam disaster, claiming 2500 lives. And showing that poor management, planning, engineering, and response aren't solely the remit of nominally capitalist societies, the Banqiao Dam disaster of 1975, in China, in which some 170,000 souls perished, on par with your nuclear bombing example, though it was but 25 thousands who died immediately from drowning, the others were lost due to starvation and disease in the following weeks -- as I said, exceedingly poor planning and response.
There's the US housing bubble leading up to the 2007-8 global financial crisis, and the robosigning and fraudulent documentation depriving people of their very homes.
For raw corporate aggression, I'd suggest the Johnson County War:
On April 5, 1892, 52 armed men rode a private, secret train north from Cheyenne. Just outside Casper, Wyo., they switched to horseback and continued north toward Buffalo, Wyo., the Johnson County seat. Their mission was to shoot or hang 70 men named on a list carried by Frank Canton, one of the leaders of this invading force.
I've written on this previously: https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/xwjjk1bh7yki6ja4lrg7ka
There is the insidious poisoning of millions through lead, asbestos, tobacco, mercury, and dioxins, both generally and across specific sites, all whilst paid corporate shills actively and deliberately sowed confusion on the matter, knowing full well that their position was false. Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway have covered much of this history excellently in Merchants of Doubt.
And there's the little matter of carbon dioxide emissions and their effects on global tempeatures and ocean chemistry, known since the 1880s, and recognised as a major threat since the 1950s, but still actively denied by numerous interests more concerned over their trillions of dollars of accumulated wealth and power than over th...
Interests that are now controlling the US government....
However, Trump says climate change is a Chinese hoax and bullshit. Trump's advisor Myron Ebell says the environmental movement is "the greatest threat to freedom and prosperity in the modern world". Trump's head of the Environmental Protection Agency is Scott Pruitt, who believes the EPA shouldn't even exist.
Trump's Secretary of State is Rex Tillerson, former boss of Exxon. Exxon is being investigated for spending decades ignoring its own scientists’ research, which tied fossil fuels to climate change. It also has a $500 billion oil deal with Putin, for which Trump will have to remove sanctions.
Trump also says he's going to bring back "beautiful clean coal".
So, under Trump, there's a green light to destroy the US environment and the whole planet for the pursuit of profit.
Trump is using the presidency as a marketing platform to promote himself, his properties (including Trump Tower and Mar a lago), his daughter and in-laws. The GOP is using it to give very rich people $600bn in tax cuts while ensuring that (if its AHCA goes through), tens of thousands of ordinary Americans die because of a lack of health insurance.
What's going on in broad daylight is bad enough. The behind-the-scenes corruption is probably worse.
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2017/02/some-not...
[I]if you have heavily invested in fossil fuels, time is running out to realize a return on your investment. Buying a US administration tailored to maximize ROI while fighting a rear-guard action against action on climate change and roll-out of a new, rival energy infrastructure is therefore rational (in business terms).
Russia and the Putin angle is best understood as part of this; oil and gas exports accounted for 68% of Russia's export revenues in 2013. The possibility that Trump is personally heavily invested in Rosneft via shell proxies while being at loggerheads with Merkel might be an inversion of the normal state of affairs in international relations for the past 70 years but is entirely consistent with the big money picture: Germany is trying to push (heavily) for renewable power....
This, quite frankly, makes as much sense to me as anything else. If not considerably more.
An: sometimes a conspiracy really is a conspiracy, and they really are out to get you.
The real problem is that the world burns whether there's a conspiracy or not....
At the same time, humans can, and do, know better. Yet we're headed down that same path. And there definitely appear to be those capitalising on the short-term view.
I'm not saying I think it's good that private companies collect all of our data (and personally the info a CC company has creeps me out far more than FB or Google), but I can choose to stop using their service and greatly minimize the amount of data they receive. There's very few caves in the world where you can hide from the US Government.