This interview was much better than I expected. Some confidence restored (long way to go)... will be interesting to see how the questions and answers evolve over the next few weeks.
To me, there is a difference between buying targeted advertisements on Facebook without having direct access to private data and exporting private data for use in military-style information operations. This interview seems to indicate Facebook plans to stick closer to on-platform targeted advertising in the future.
You'd think the news sites would maybe be a little bit more transparent given all this fake news rabble, but they can't even bother to update with primary sources apparently...
Newspapers and agencies issue retractions on stories all the time. Claiming that they are all fake news is massively disingenuous where you have other major media companies that don't make retractions at all.
The story originally said that Stamos has clashed with Sandberg over addressing the Russia issue. The sentence has now been completely removed. They did't even print a retraction. This is truly disturbing and more than a little ironic considering the context. Shame on them.
He is a CEO in damage control mode. The cynic in me wants me to ignore everything he says right now. The ashes of the privacy debate will be swept under the rug the once the fire is out.
History says making money is more important to fb than being ethical.
The cynic in me thinks he spent a few days using the world's biggest surveillance/analytics apparatus to gauge public sentiment, then came up with talking points and proposals that would cause minimal damage to his business. For example, it sounds good that there will be some notification for the 50 million people whose data was scraped without their knowledge. Will that be a simple email, or a page buried deep in the FB settings menu? How about all of the other companies doing exactly the same scraping? Are their victims notified as well?
And then there was the "after the first billion, people can't afford it, so surveillance is the answer" line. Really? From a man who extracted $50 billion from that business? Here's a thought: pay them.
Your end criticism of Zuckerberg has a very big problem: he's going to give away his fortune, the ~$69 billion, like Gates and Buffett before him.
Here's what would have to really scare you, if I'm gauging your views correctly: Zuckerberg actually believes in what he's doing and based on his behavior the last 14 years he isn't very interested in the money.
He has never acted like a Saudi prince or gilded age tycoon. He never hoarded Facebook equity, he took vast perpetual dilution (despite entirely controlling the Facebook corporation), and produced thousands of millionaires. He spread the wealth around, that's why he only owns ~14% of a company that went public less than six years ago. Larry Ellison by contrast, still owns 27% of Oracle after 40 years.
How about all of those millionaires that got rich on Facebook stock? All those teacher pensions that got massive returns on it? The thousands of Facebook employees that have yielded 1%er salaries and wealth. The tens of thousands of average investors that rode the Facebook giant and made most of the money on it.
Zuckerberg made a lot of money. Everybody else combined made more by a factor of ~8x or more. What's their guilt in having profited on all of this?
Hitting someone with the wealth seeker tag, is the easy way out. The easiest, cheapest negative label there is: the profit motive. Unfortunately for your premise, criticizing him about money, makes very little sense.
>Your end criticism of Zuckerberg has a very big problem: he's going to give away his fortune, the ~$69 billion, like Gates and Buffett before him.
Nope. He explicitly structured his foundation as an LLC to not do that so he, his wife, and I imagine his children, can use his wealth however he sees fit. The reputation of Gates and Buffet’s pledges were just something he capitalized on to make himself appear as benevolent.
He did, however, use his vast wealth to buy up his neighbor’s houses just to knock them down. Ostensibly to protect his own privacy whilst at the same time declairing that other people’s “privacy is history”. Even people who don’t have Facebook accounts.
I'm not sure ethics is ever a real factor in large scale business. If it's there, it's there as a PR move. The only wall companies push up against is that of the law.
> The only wall companies push up against is that of the law.
Even then it's a matter of weighing the risks vs. rewards. Back in the early days of HFT I knew of companies blatantly violating SEC regulations because the rewards were so large any legal consequence should they get busted was insignificant.
Facebook has never been ethical. Zuckerberg doesn't believe in privacy. I remember that from from inception to 2010 every move facebook did eroded the default privacy settings of users[1].
Zuckerberg absolutely does believe in privacy - for himself. If he didn't, he wouldn't be doing things like buying the homes that surround his, and building massive walls around his Hawaiian privacy retreat.
Have to say I respect the guy for what he built up to around 2008 but I have to call this one. He's basically following the old tobacco 'four dogs' strategy if you follow his statements. Some examples from just the past couple of months of statements mostly from last night (all paraphrased):
1) First of all, I don't have a dog. -> 'The idea that someone affected an election with ads on fb is pretty crazy.'
2) And if I had a dog, it doesn't bite. -> 'Facebook is a force in the world for good, because it connects everyone, and my job is to work on something my kids will be proud of, as long as facebook is important.' (benefits outweigh the harms, equating FB with the internet). This is dubious.
3) And if I had a dog and it did bite, then it didn't bite you. -> 'Security is a problem that is never solved, so we like everyone else will always be working on it forever.' Implication: if I weren't working on internet security, someone else would be, and security design problems would still be a threat to internet users, so stop complaining about the state of internet security, because odds are it hasn't affected you, and by the way, look how much I am investing in it by hiring thousands of people to do content moderation on everyone's behalf.
4) And if I had a dog and it did bite, and it bit you, then you provoked the dog. -> '#deletefacebook is obviously not good, but nobody is acting on it in any meaningful numbers' (calling everyone's bluff and in my interpretation actually daring everyone to try and create a more secure and beneficial internet experience without facebook).
Please reply with modifications; I think the essential gist is there.
- never seen both interviewer and Zuck together in a photo op. News stations usually do that and show together photo before or after the interview take place (or during sitting together) so that everyone knows it actually took place;
- Zuck eyes were running back and forth like he was reading from teleprompter;
- weird pauses felt like he is waiting for teleprompter to update;
- first time ever seen any interview - not to mention on a so-called professional news station - that camera angle will be shooting at interviewer's back of his/her head;
- journalist interviewing Zuck did not look at his face or his eyes, but somewhere behind him.
Unless its just my tin foil hat thinking for me...
I would imagine these companies put great effort in to assuring users that their data is safe. The privacy protections Facebook implements look secure to a lot of people.
I’m right there with you that I assume everything I say on these platforms could be made public, but you and I are more informed on data security issues. For many people, they just want to share photos and chat with friends. The deep privacy implications are beyond most people.
>I’m unsure how anyone else can assume any different
The vast majority of FB users are tech illiterate. They have no idea about the capabilities of algorithms and how they can be turned into automated weapons which can target entire populations with psychological warfare.
So I think it's a problem of them not understanding how their data can be so easily and effectively weaponized against them and everyone they know.
Presumably Zuckerberg did not consent to this conversation being captured/recorded and shared.
Do you feel even the slightest bit of embarrassment at the irony and hypocrisy of using this content, that you acquired without consent, to further your argument against the trustworthiness of this guy?
"Now, the good news here is that these problems aren’t necessarily rocket science."
"If you had asked me, when I got started with Facebook, if one of the central things I’d need to work on now is preventing governments from interfering in each other’s elections, there’s no way I thought that’s what I’d be doing"
These are just two examples, but quite a few quotes from this interview are verbatim from the CNN interview. Where has Mark been the last days? Probably rehearsing.
CEOs presidents and actors have a lot in common. Much of their job is performance/comedy/tragedy/entertainment. I wouldn’t expect anything substantive to ever surface in a public facing interview
"Zuckerberg: We took action immediately at that point. We banned Kogan's app from the platform, we demanded that Kogan and Cambridge Analytica and a couple other parties that Kogan had shared the data with would legally certify that they didn't have the data, and weren't using it in any of their operations. They gave us that formal certification. At the time, they told us they never had gotten access to raw Facebook data, so we made that decision.
Zuckerberg: Yes. They gave us a formal and legal certification, and it seems at this point that that was false."
Does it matter whether CA breached some form of "agreement" with FB?
What is the consequence of that?
CA losing their FB privileges going forward?
Does that really address the harm done?
Does "formal and legal certification" mean anything if FB is not going to take legal action against CA? (Maybe FB is worried about FTC and violating their 2011 consent decree, i.e. self-preservation.)
If anyone should be requiring "formal and legal certification" that data was destroyed and that there was no unauthorized usage or transfer, it is the owners of the data: FB users.
Why are FB users upset with FB. Shouldnt they be upset with CA.
There must be a reason that there is so much focus on FB as the problem and not only on CA.
I'm going to bet Facebook is bigger and everyone uses it and CA is based in the UK and not in the US. Who the hell even knew Cambridge Analytica before any of this?
It's fun to hate big companies with recognizable names and blame that big company for electing someone that Americans are increasingly displeased with.
I'm surprised to see someone tell it for what it really is. This is just like the Uber "scandal" from last year in that things got blown way out of proportion in some aspects, but positive changes were made.
In this case, people have, both publicly and privately, warned Facebook about this issue for years. At some point, after having been warned about the situation, inaction is in fact a conscious decision.
I'm going to guess that it's because Facebook was the enabler. Without a Facebook, the "Cambridge Analytica's" of the world would not exist, because they wouldn't be able to buy data of this magnitude. You can throw the CEO of CA in jail, but someone else will just come along to fill his shoes.
So, I think the public gets much more satisfaction out of seeing the CEO of FB raked over the coals, because they think it will attack the problem more at the root. Just my guess anyway.
This part caught my eye, I may have missed some details over the past few days so I'm sorry if I'm reading into it wrong:
>> Frenkel: We understood that Cambridge Analytica had reached out to Facebook and asked that its ban on the platform be reconsidered. Are you giving any thought to allowing Cambridge Analytica back in?
>> Zuckerberg: The first thing we need to do is conduct this full forensic audit of the firm, that they don’t have any people’s data from our community and that they’ve deleted anything, including derivative data, that they might have. We’re working with the regulator in the U.K. on this, so our forensic audit was actually paused in the near term to cede the way for the ICO there to do their own government investigation. We’re certainly not going to consider letting them back onto the platform until we have full confirmation that there’s no wrongdoing here.
So this part:
>>Zuckerberg: We’re working with the regulator in the U.K. on this, so our forensic audit was actually paused in the near term to cede the way for the ICO there to do their own government investigation.
"...our forensic audit was actually paused..."
It sounds like Facebook was already at CA before the investigation started trying to solve what ICO and other government bodies around the globe were going to be asking about / inquiring about / interested at looking into the legal ramifications of the material undergoing forensic audits.
I can't help but feel like Facebook is trying to say that they were trying to solve this problem on their lonesome and take care of the problems head on like they always should have, since the very first inkling of something like this happening.
That sounds nice and all but I can't say I believe it unless somebody else can tell me about why the timing of this is just so... precisely perplexing? I feel like I would have read at least one thing pointing me in an obvious direction that would make me better understand the way he answered that question in such a way.
Did CA asking for its ban to be lifted prompt the forensic audit? Did CA have new business to attend to with Facebook's help and needed to ensure before they underwent another dangerous operation as partners that CA had to be holding up their end of the bargain by destroying any evidence? Something sounds odd. There's no way CA wouldn't be the type of company to play both sides to earn as much money as possible in this endeavor, especially if it's illegal and can help such ridiculously wealthy and powerful people around the globe -- people seemingly willing to spend tens of millions of dollars to either plant their candidate in a designated spot, prevent incumbents from taking or threatening that / a certain spot, or for existing people in power to obtain data to help them further dig in and retain that power and wealth. It keeps coming to my mind that a company that uses blackmail and hookers to ensure it's customers successful results isn't going to be the type of company to play by the rules when it comes to earning profits. If they are getting away with their business as explained by Nix in the video we saw how are we supposed to assume that they ever act as good and noble actors in any other situation with potential for abuse that results in exorbitant profit? I know I am assuming things here but I digress.
That's all my mind can think about after reading this response. It sounds great on paper but knowing what I know and having felt the way I've always felt about Facebook and social media in general (I've been the type to warn family members about the truths of who the product is and why only to get eyes rolled at me) I don't think that this good Samaritan Q&A filled with promises of improvement and doing the very best to break through to the next technological horizon while doing the least amount of damage to anything around Facebook is like the folks who colonized America having to capture...
The timing was perplexing, because Facebook's account of events just don't make sense. They were tackling this problem head on themselves, yet waited till just hours before the ICO shows up at CA's offices to "secure the evidence"? They were "working with" the ICO all along, and not ordered to stand down?
The whole thing of them showing up right before the ICO did, frantically carrying out their "forensic audit" reminds me of the Uber employee talking about how they had a system to instantly wipe all data in case foreign officials raided their offices. The more they try to sugar coat this, the more it reeks.
There are just too many weird little anecdotes about all of this. I'm not trying to bring politics into this but as if Facebook as a corporation isn't high enough up on the food chain as it is (in general as a company that makes lots of money, in terms of it's global use, in terms of it's global power, in terms of it's brand strength overall, in terms of it's use for gain by candidate being elected all the way up to the President of the USA) this story is being tied to Trump's campaign (I don't know to what end, yet, but it could be associated to Trump forcefully -- we'll see when we see) and Zuckerberg going missing for two days seems odd enough on its own.
For him to come back and give a Q&A that sweet and rosy just felt odd to me. The questions weren't total softballs. The questions weren't extremely hard hitting, either. The answers themselves are what bothers me. There is a total lack of empathy, total lack of ownership of the serious implications all of this has, and most importantly to me -- a serious lack of humanity behind the eyes and words of a man who runs a business that claims to bring the world together in a happy, constructive, and peaceful way -- meanwhile that company makes millions hand over fist while selling out those very people they claim they champion and uplift. Profiting off of their secrets and personal doings and sayings. It feels like one of the slimiest things I've ever had the misfortune to understand due to my tech background.
Surely the root is people's relationship with their online data, and the vast majority of the population being uninformed and uninterested in data security and privacy.
There was a recent post about how the internet was better before everyone was on it. I'm not sure I agreen, but the average ability of any internet user to think critically has certainly tanked since the advent of the smartphone.
i just can’t believe facebook’s telling of the story. they are essentially saying that one of the most powerful companies in the world basically just asked pretty please for an offender to delete data amongst other requests and then just took their word for it.
they’re painting it as if they did their darnedest, but i think they just don’t actualy care or something more serious. this entire interview is basically zuckerberg just spewing damage control and explaining that facebook doesn't understand how people are using and abusing their data, with regards to developers, governments, etc. that latter point is either just pure neglect or willful ignorance in turning their head until it hurts them.
I think it's even worse than that, I suspect there have been a lot of companies like CA that have had their access cut off and have retained the data. FB probably has never done a serious investigation of most of them.
This one is only important because it's gotten so much media attention. If it wasn't related to the election it would have been business as usual and nobody would care or know about CA.
you put some content into a service, whether it’s a photo or a video or a text message — whether it’s Facebook or WhatsApp or Instagram — and you’re trusting [you dumb fuck] that that content is going to be shared with the people you want to share it with.
Here's a question, Cambridge Analytica gets 50 million of these highly robust personal data profiles, and that's a "scandal"!
But facebook has something on the order of a billion of these (even more) highly robust personal data profiles, and that's, not a scandal but a multi-hundred billion dollar corporation?
Can it be said the collection of these profiles is a net positive for the world?
Or is this mass societal exploitation for private profit?
Note this isn't asking about the existence itself of facebook, just the collecting of these profiles, fb could function in some way without collecting these profiles.
He's not doing shit. Year after year he's making the same comment over privacy. What is Facebook suppose to do? Stop collecting data? Ridiculous its the core business model of every branch of that disgusting data leech. It's not about the Cambridge Analytica or russian manipulation campaign. It's about our basic right to privacy, that is constantly violated every time You look at that page or any other connected to it.
> The point of what we’re trying to do here is to create a situation where we have a real person-to-person relationship with any developer who is asking for the most sensitive data.
Why is Facebook so dead set on sharing data at all? People keep lumping Facebook in with the rest (Google/Amazon/Microsoft?/other data mining companies) but my impression was that these companies do not do this. It seems reckless to the point of absurdity. Some other event like this will happen again in the future as long as they continue to insist on this, it is inevitable.
>Why is Facebook so dead set on sharing data at all?
What else are they supposed to do to keep their massive infrastructure running?
People would clearly rather invite the likes of CA into their private lives than pay even the tiniest little fee to keep their contacts and pictures in the cloud together with those of their friends.
I unsubscribed from Facebook years ago, because it just didn't seem like a good deal to me.
ahm .. you mean SELLING, that's what FB does, they have no other product besides their userbase ?
google has been scrutinized in the past, one big difference is google doesn't offer this data to private companies (yeah yeah .. NSA ) and their model never really allowed someone like CA to get their data.
google's original product was search, from that they were able to extrapolate insane amounts of user data that they then used in their biggest product: ADS. but they never provided the USER data, they provided an interface for their ad customers to better target their ads. so in a way google uses the data to create products around it while for facebook users and their data ARE the product.
Of course other companies do this. Look at all the different permissions an Android app can request. Go look at the Google+ APIs. Go look at Microsoft's Xbox Live APIs.
In response to a question about Alex Stamos leaving: "So we’re going to double the amount of people working on security this year. We’ll have more than 20,000 people working on security and community operations by the end of the year, I think we have about 15,000 now. So it’s really the technical systems we have working with the people in our operations functions that make the biggest deal."
Huh? 20,000 people? This seems like a wildly misleading number. He's grouping security and "community operations" together, whatever that is. That must include masses of people doing manual video and ad reviews, or something like that. That has nothing to do with the question. It's like you asked the president about the Secret Service and he said "Between the Secret Service and US Army we have over a million people and that number is going up this year!"
He does that all the time.
After the hate posts scandals in Germany he promised that a team of hundreds of moderators would be working from Berlin to address the issue. It claimed it in a way as to suggest that they were Facebook employees.
No way: they are employees of a very well known multinational contractor who are paid minimum wage salaries to spend all day reading and watching the worst humanity has to offer—without any formal psychological support or training.
How is this even a security issue? This wasn't a "breach", right? This is just Facebook pleading with CA to not do naughty things with their data, and CA refusing.
RE [3], I'd like to see data for post-2010. I can't comment on times before, since I've not been on Facebook then, but since early 2010s, I remember that the defaults kept getting annoyingly more private over time, with Facebook constantly reminding me that I can restrict visibility of stuff.
I always got the vibe that they pushed things like that so hard and in your face in order to find out more about you. If you are the type to set your privacy a certain way they corral you into a group where you are looked at in a different way than users who don't toy with their privacy settings in a way where it draws attention to the fact that you actually seriously care about your privacy. This is just a hunch but with their endless data points and the internal teams involved with making these decisions not only decide what privacy options we are shown, how, and why but what the inverse effect would be in terms of how to treat and monitor those specific customers in order to harvest and obtain the types of data that were essential to providing useful and actionable information to those looking to buy that information.
Something about how in your face their privacy awareness campaigns seemed to be while all the while everyone in tech or paying any attention knew that Facebook is in the business of selling personal / private information. I think what you don't say, don't do, and don't want them to see creates just as much of a profile about you as anything you do voluntarily give up to them. I feel they wouldn't be successful if they weren't the type of company that thought that deeply into it.
All that said one of the scenarios in my mind that I figured applies to this, which is very apt right now with the goings-on of Facebook / Cambridge Analytica is when a user is flagged as the type who has locked down their privacy, thus being corralled into the group of "Members who care about personal internet privacy" that would be their cue to needing to harvest your data points via your friend circle or 3rd party Facebook tools / features (like external Like buttons) in order to obtain those data points while still sticking to their "Privacy Manifesto". Maybe that's when they start serving you lots of ads interesting you in dating on Tinder, using external photo sharing apps like Instagram, or external messaging apps like Messenger or WhatsApp. Who knows, really? But they and we know they've had many ways to skin a cat all along.
Maybe I'm paranoid but I'd rather be paranoid and a bit fanatical than ignorant. PS. Not calling anyone out there ignorant. Just ranting is all.
I never actually considered they might be micromanaging those privacy reminders. But yeah, it sounds plausible.
A bit more of context - I might be an outlier here, because from the get-go, I always, deliberately, kept everything on my Facebook profile public. I've always treated it as something similar to a personal website/blog. I still do, despite Facebook's constant reminders that I can limit my posts or profile visibility to my Friends.
Also, in my circles in early 2010s, Facebook was as much about being able to discover other people as it was about sharing things. Over the years I've noticed how people increasingly lock down their accounts (sometimes to sub-Friends granularity); that discoverability use case is pretty much nonexistent nowadays.
It first started off at Harvard and then moved to other elite universities. It finally expanded to all universities by the time I joined. Its exclusivity (only for people at uni) was its major plus against myspace. When I was at uni, you could use it to find people in your class and meet and interact with new people in a friendly manner. Since then the people who can join has expanded, and the positivity for facebook has gone downhill. Its not the same when your parents can see you trying to flirt with random people.
The whole reason for facebook has changed, and for the worst I think. I don't think they can recapture the magic of early facebook and retain their valuations.
I imagine in the early years and as soon as board member's / investor's profit margins started being a topic of discussion it was always known that that model was only the "free trial period" to gain traction, spread awareness, test certain extreme or ambitious features / ideas, and basically do a dry test run of the greater idea: capture as many data points of as many people as possible. I don't think it really would have fit the bill until it was able to capture the internet in the same way that LinkedIn was able to, eventually. But we all know this.
Now the early University members of FB are in a position to become paying customers (in a buying of advertising sense) but the real payday was always in the swath of personal information and data that would come along with true saturation of population enrolled into the FB ecosystem.
It would've been nice if it could have been made into something more altruistic but it only takes one less-than-intent watching of The Social Network to know that the idea was never altruism.
I don't want to go in depth about what I think the masses ignoring what the movie said about Facebook as a whole / the movie's message about Facebook and it's founders considering it was all said in plain dialog as blatantly as possible but that fact surprises me most. That it was stated so plainly and it's taken THIS LONG for the non-tech folks to really start scratching their heads and asking, "Is this is all okay or not?"
Capturing the magic is soooo long gone. Now it's about trying to figure out how to keep the devil / criminal activity, not the lightning, in the bottle for as long as possible. Well, from my POV at least.
I've always kept my online profiles as close to real life as possible just to ensure I never get bit in the ass over it. I have been on the internet long enough to see many people around me get screwed over for trying to live larger on the internet only to be caught and it just never seemed appealing to me.
That said I had Facebook locked down as much as possible as soon as I could. Once I entered the workforce after college I cleaned out the most insane pictures but wanted to make sure any company looking to hire me understood I was a human being who also had fun and wasn't afraid to be myself. I felt like in a way presenting my real self was the only way to do anything public online.
I still don't like the way Facebook does things, obviously, but what really scares me is the folks I love and am friends with who roll their eyes when I tell them about what is really going on and why it's bad. As this latest situation has shown us it truly doesn't matter how strong our individual security is if we are easily figured out just by being associated with ONE SINGLE PERSON who doesn't lock their associated / friend-of-ours account down.
That's the kicker that makes this just a terrible thing to me. The warnings already fell on deaf ears but now it seems that everybody, even the most careful, are caught in the mix anyways -- even if they did every single step perfectly along the ENTIRE route that was their internet social media life.
The un-locked down accounts were essentially unknowing spy cells that could be tapped at any moment to uncover everything about the most locked down people they were associated with. As this CA situation demonstrated it only took a few 100,000 accounts to unlock 50,000,000 others. If we are to assume that those 100,000's of accounts were able to hold the keys to the information Facebook wasn't legally allowed to share with 3rd parties due to "Privacy Policy" and legalities than I'd also, personally, safely assume that regardless of the way the 3rd party backdoor got to those locked down accounts was only one route to obtain that info. The other route? Facebook most likely had all of that information all along anyways through craftier methods such as non-FB pages with like buttons, cross referencing across their other suite of apps (Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram), and mining data from other sources like competitive social media networks, dating applications, and who knows what else really?
They've shown a blatant, almost blood thirsty-like mission towards harvesting personal data by any means necessary -- even people who have never been on FB have profiles about them -- so I've never put anything past them and have rarely been surprised when the actual truth comes out.
I think paranoia regarding anything Facebook says is pragmatic.
The company has a Uber-ish brazen arrogance, and never takes a position that benefits anyone but the company. Even MFA was used as a tool to gather intelligence.
Exactly! In 2003 Mark Z. was charged by the Harvard administration with breach of security, violating copyrights, and violating individual privacy. 15 years later he faced similar charges from the United States of America. You can put lipstick on a pig, but it is still a pig. If a guy doesn't give a shit about user's privacy, it invetiably hits people hard way.
IMO you are grossily exagerating what he's saying to prove your point.
He's marely saying that compared to when social media didn't exist, it was unthinkable to have people exposing others to what they were doing and with whom, what they were eating and how it looked, etc.
He's absolutely right. The social norm HAS changed.
Now, do I think it's good to use user data like Facebook does? Well, it's a business. It might not be ethical, but are companies that sell cigarettes, alcohol, guns, etc. any better (or potentially any better)?
We need to stop complaining about how evil Facebook is, and start talking about personal responsibility. People need to understand what they're doing, it's not Facebook's fault if people don't know their data will be used for advertising, like it's not a tobacco's manufacture's fault if the user doesn't know cigarettes give you cancer.
You don't like how they use your data? Stop using Facebook! End of story.
No one is complaining to the manufacturer about how cigarettes give you cancer demanding a safer alternative, you just smoke at your own risk.
Personally, I don't smoke, and I don't use Facebook.
> it's not Facebook's fault if people don't know their data will be used for advertising, like it's not a tobacco's manufacture's fault if the user doesn't know cigarettes give you cancer.
Lawmakers (at least in the USA) disagree with you fundamentally. That’s why cigarettes have a big warning label telling consumers that it gives you cancer.
I think comparing tobacco and data privacy is like comparing apples and oranges. But the common principle stands: if people might reasonably find a product objectionable because of characteristics that aren’t readily clear, a reasonable effort ought to be made to educate them.
Yes but then you end up having warnings on everything--like in the States.
A knife is potentially dangerous, a rope is potentially dangerous, just about anything is potentially dangerous!
I think it's fine to expect people have a working brain. On the internet it's not immediately clear that if you upload a naked picture or post a racist comment it will stay there _forever_, and might very easily affect you negatively _for an indefinite amount of time_ (employers can see it or do background checks, etc.), but that's just how it is.
You argued PaulStatezny's point for him in your reply. It is "immediately clear" that a knife is dangerous, and nobody expects a warning label on that. It's not "immediately clear" however that smoking gives you cancer or what is possibly being done with your data at Facebook, and thus there should be warnings.
Why would it be immediately clear that a knife is dangerous?
Why is it NOT clear that the contents of a steaming cup of freshly-made coffee that somebody is handling you may be hot, then?
It's NOT clear that if you marry the wrong person you can end up in lot of pain, fighting in court for 10 years, losing all you have, etc., so should the priest or government official read a warning before declaring you married?
When you signed up for Facebook, you agreed to their TOS. Compared to the knife, cup, and wife someone has told you _explicitly_ what's going to happen and how, and _you have agreed to that_. What makes it unclear, then?
You realize essentially the only social reason for marriages to be solemnized by a city official or a government official is because it forces people to at least slightly consider the consequences, right?
Like it or not, there is not yet a similar sort of widespread awareness of the risks of Facebook. If you asked a random person on the street to explain what could go wrong with a marriage, they could give you so many examples that troubled marriages are literally one of the classic sets ups for jokes.
If you asked the average person to explain how the Cambridge Analytica breach happened, or what Facebook can do with the permission to see which WiFi network you’re connected to, for example, they would not be able to give a good explanation.
We need to stop complaining about how evil Facebook is, and start talking about personal responsibility.
I like your standing but there is one more aspect to look at e.g these companies have big data , money and can hire smart people to use that data in a way beyond our imagination.And with backdoor channels to secret agencies and govt. institutions they can manipulate public opinion, as this is the current case.
Probably complaining is first step towards greater personal responsibility and to educate all the users who have no idea what is happening around them. Like in the case of tobacco, tobacco companies suppressed scientific research reaching general public through manipulation of media.
> We need to stop complaining about how evil Facebook is, and start talking about personal responsibility
This is so true and so not gonna happen. Too often you see people lauding new regulations, new laws, new ways of telling someone else what to do because they are not smart enough to know for themselves.
I wish government and their constant rule-requesting constituency would repurpose their effort into education and promotion of alternatives.
> Personally, I don't smoke, and I don't use Facebook.
Sadly, there will be a time where you can't do things like those, even being aware of and accepting of the risks.
When I signed up for Facebook (back when it was just Harvard-only) I made up a new never-before-used password, because going thru other students' passwords was just the sort of thing I'd imagine Mark doing in his spare time...
> When I signed up for Facebook (back when it was just Harvard-only) I made up a new never-before-used password, because going thru other students' passwords was just the sort of thing I'd imagine Mark doing in his spare time...
Did you know Mark personally? What gave you that impression?
He's in damage control mode / managing expectations.
Come on, when your data is the product, who do you think will buy it and what can/will they do with it other than bad things. I can't think of a legitimate use for such detailed profiling of people.
Now Mr. Trump is indirectly bragging about exploitation of Facebook data [1] :
"Remember when they were saying, during the campaign, that Donald Trump is giving great speeches and drawing big crowds, but he is spending much less money and not using social media as well as Crooked Hillary’s large and highly sophisticated staff. Well, not saying that anymore!"
Ok this guy is out of his mind, but Murky Marc should probably go and hand over the company to Sheryl. She knows what to do.
Yep, the media is now busy with another message of Mr. Trump with which he attacked Mr. Biden[1], but soon they will discover the social media thing and it might cause more unpleasant questions for Facebook.
Where were these worries four years ago for the much larger and arguably more manipulative effort by the Obama campaign?
Instead of using a personality quiz, the Obama campaign merely got a portion of its core supporters to use their Facebook profiles to log into a campaign site. Then they used well-tested techniques of gaining consent from that user to harvest all their friends’ data. Sasha Issenberg gushed about how the Obama campaign used the same permissions structure of Facebook to extract the data of scores of millions of Facebook users who were unaware of what was happening to them. Combining Facebook data with other sources such as voter-registration rolls, Issenberg wrote, generated “a new political currency that predicted the behavior of individual humans. The campaign didn’t just know who you were; it knew exactly how it could turn you into the type of person it wanted you to be.”
The level of data sophistication was so intense that Issenberg could describe it this way:
"Obama’s campaign began the election year confident it knew the name of every one of the 69,456,897 Americans whose votes had put him in the White House. They may have cast those votes by secret ballot, but Obama’s analysts could look at the Democrats’ vote totals in each precinct and identify the people most likely to have backed him. Pundits talked in the abstract about reassembling Obama’s 2008 coalition. But within the campaign, the goal was literal. They would reassemble the coalition, one by one, through personal contacts."
Today’s Cambridge Analytica scandal causes our tech chin-strokers to worry about “information” you did not consent to share, but the Obama team created social interactions you wouldn’t have had. They didn’t just build a psychological profile of persuadable voters, and algorithmically determine ways of persuading them, but actually encouraged particular friends — ones the campaign had profiled as influencers — to reach out to them personally. In a post-election interview, the campaign’s digital director Teddy Goff explained the strategy: “People don’t trust campaigns. They don’t even trust media organizations,” he told Time’s Michael Sherer, “Who do they trust? Their friends?” This level of manipulation was celebrated in the press.
How did Facebook react to the much larger data harvesting of the Obama campaign? The New York Times reported it out, in a feature hailing Obama’s digital masterminds:
"The campaign’s exhaustive use of Facebook triggered the site’s internal safeguards. “It was more like we blew through an alarm that their engineers hadn’t planned for or knew about,” said [Will] St. Clair, who had been working at a small firm in Chicago and joined the campaign at the suggestion of a friend. “They’d sigh and say, ‘You can do this as long as you stop doing it on Nov. 7.’ ”"
In other words, Silicon Valley is just making up the rules as they go along. Some large-scale data harvesting and social manipulation is okay until the election. Some of it becomes not okay in retrospect. They sigh and say okay so long as Obama wins. When Clinton loses, they effectively call a code red.
I did not expect that New York Times would do this, but how wonderful would it not be if they had asked directly if either of the political parties in 2016 was given access to use Facebook data in order to create social graphs and use it in their campaigns.
Here's a piece of speculation.
If you have no time for these harsh words, I'm sure you have your mouse at the ready. I am sorry you cannot crumple the page and toss this into the wastebasket if you'd like. Anything except more hand wringing on the internet. Without further ado...
The US propaganda machine has been telling everyone who will listen that "the Russians influenced the election" endlessly for the past year.
Are there hard statistics on this? Is there a methodology, mechanism, or theory describing how effective this manipulation has been, and exactly how we get from a survey to a Trump? I am asking honestly. Because please, please, let's focus on what is quantifiable, if we focus on anything there.
Lose talk, anecdotes, and accusations are not sufficient, nor even necessary, if there are hard statistics on the mechanisms of manipulation.
Let's talk about those, then, and cease this glib gab and mindless anger at what we already know is a pretty shitty business. (Facebook)
My guess is that there are no hard facts. If Facebook didn't want regulation, they might argue forcefully this way - that the troll C.A. did not effectively do much of anything to influence the election.
My guess is that Facebook wants to be regulated. It will gain cultural validity, put up a barrier to entry against competitors,
and cement for the history books this story that "unregulated social media"/"the unregulated internet" "used to allow bad actors to
influence our democratic process."
From then on we will have one social network, Facebook, and everyone will be taught from high school to law school, that such regulations
are necessary to protect our free society from undo influence. Few will question this. The machine will grow. It feeds on ignorance.
(What I really think is that even if C.A. did effect the election, we still should not allow Facebook regulatory capture as incumbent. It is worth the cost of manipulation to have the possibility of Facebook being wiped out in the future. - And above all, to avoid having it enshrined and regulated at the same time as a valid, trusted news source. Then it will really reach its full "potential" ... as a propaganda piece for the US rich and powerful.)
Back to the present:
This Cambridge Analytica (C.A.) story breaks, and almost nobody is talking about whether or not it had any measurable effect on the election at all. Wired ran a companion piece that I can no longer find - a sideline story, stating that "it" (C.A.'s actions) basically had no effect on the election, but this story was not marketed or highlighted. What was marketed was this "big story" that C.A. took user data. The fact that it did nothing of consequence (that I have seen) is a tiny link at the bottom. I can no longer find it in the barrage of stories talking about what happened in broad, anecdotal, scared up, strokes.
(And again, even if C.A. did make an impact, Facebook regulatory capture and validity enshrinement is the one of the worst outcomes imaginable. )
These are war drums we are hearing. And the marching orders are against freedom of information on the internet generally. Facebook will come out regulated, "made safer" (and it will in turn become a better shill for the powers that be) but the real prize is that the rest of the internet is supposed to be regulated too, and the regulators will have unfettered access to whatever they want. The NSA has nothing like what it will have once the hand wringers make the internet safe for democracy.
That is the game plan.
New articles on "bad facebook" "bad Russia" and "bad cambridge analytica" (the last, just next week's scapegoat once facebook is whitewashed and regulated) is all theater in order to get us there.
I recommend everyone stop talking about, and stop worrying about, this stupid sideshow and pay attention to what they are trying to really do to us.
> "Whenever there’s an issue where someone’s data gets passed to someone who the rules of the system shouldn’t have allowed it to, that’s rightfully a big issue and deserves to be a big uproar"
That statement describes Facebook itself. Most users don't understand what data they are sharing, so they are not able to give permission.
108 comments
[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 177 ms ] threadTo me, there is a difference between buying targeted advertisements on Facebook without having direct access to private data and exporting private data for use in military-style information operations. This interview seems to indicate Facebook plans to stick closer to on-platform targeted advertising in the future.
It worries me.
https://lawandcrime.com/exclusive/facebook-forces-nyt-to-qui...
[edit] It had dropped a long way down https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16632743
https://twitter.com/alexstamos/status/975926737111367680 https://twitter.com/alexstamos/status/976175174314635264
You'd think the news sites would maybe be a little bit more transparent given all this fake news rabble, but they can't even bother to update with primary sources apparently...
"Losing a debate" and being "discouraged" are not mutually exclusive.
The story originally said that Stamos has clashed with Sandberg over addressing the Russia issue. The sentence has now been completely removed. They did't even print a retraction. This is truly disturbing and more than a little ironic considering the context. Shame on them.
History says making money is more important to fb than being ethical.
And then there was the "after the first billion, people can't afford it, so surveillance is the answer" line. Really? From a man who extracted $50 billion from that business? Here's a thought: pay them.
Here's what would have to really scare you, if I'm gauging your views correctly: Zuckerberg actually believes in what he's doing and based on his behavior the last 14 years he isn't very interested in the money.
He has never acted like a Saudi prince or gilded age tycoon. He never hoarded Facebook equity, he took vast perpetual dilution (despite entirely controlling the Facebook corporation), and produced thousands of millionaires. He spread the wealth around, that's why he only owns ~14% of a company that went public less than six years ago. Larry Ellison by contrast, still owns 27% of Oracle after 40 years.
How about all of those millionaires that got rich on Facebook stock? All those teacher pensions that got massive returns on it? The thousands of Facebook employees that have yielded 1%er salaries and wealth. The tens of thousands of average investors that rode the Facebook giant and made most of the money on it.
Zuckerberg made a lot of money. Everybody else combined made more by a factor of ~8x or more. What's their guilt in having profited on all of this?
Hitting someone with the wealth seeker tag, is the easy way out. The easiest, cheapest negative label there is: the profit motive. Unfortunately for your premise, criticizing him about money, makes very little sense.
Nope. He explicitly structured his foundation as an LLC to not do that so he, his wife, and I imagine his children, can use his wealth however he sees fit. The reputation of Gates and Buffet’s pledges were just something he capitalized on to make himself appear as benevolent.
http://time.com/money/4346766/mark-zuckerberg-houses/
-- Mark Zuckerberg, probably
Even then it's a matter of weighing the risks vs. rewards. Back in the early days of HFT I knew of companies blatantly violating SEC regulations because the rewards were so large any legal consequence should they get busted was insignificant.
[1] http://mattmckeon.com/facebook-privacy/
1) First of all, I don't have a dog. -> 'The idea that someone affected an election with ads on fb is pretty crazy.'
2) And if I had a dog, it doesn't bite. -> 'Facebook is a force in the world for good, because it connects everyone, and my job is to work on something my kids will be proud of, as long as facebook is important.' (benefits outweigh the harms, equating FB with the internet). This is dubious.
3) And if I had a dog and it did bite, then it didn't bite you. -> 'Security is a problem that is never solved, so we like everyone else will always be working on it forever.' Implication: if I weren't working on internet security, someone else would be, and security design problems would still be a threat to internet users, so stop complaining about the state of internet security, because odds are it hasn't affected you, and by the way, look how much I am investing in it by hiring thousands of people to do content moderation on everyone's behalf.
4) And if I had a dog and it did bite, and it bit you, then you provoked the dog. -> '#deletefacebook is obviously not good, but nobody is acting on it in any meaningful numbers' (calling everyone's bluff and in my interpretation actually daring everyone to try and create a more secure and beneficial internet experience without facebook).
Please reply with modifications; I think the essential gist is there.
- never seen both interviewer and Zuck together in a photo op. News stations usually do that and show together photo before or after the interview take place (or during sitting together) so that everyone knows it actually took place;
- Zuck eyes were running back and forth like he was reading from teleprompter;
- weird pauses felt like he is waiting for teleprompter to update;
- first time ever seen any interview - not to mention on a so-called professional news station - that camera angle will be shooting at interviewer's back of his/her head;
- journalist interviewing Zuck did not look at his face or his eyes, but somewhere behind him.
Unless its just my tin foil hat thinking for me...
Anything I post on social media, I assume the worst.
I’m unsure how anyone else can assume any different.
I’m right there with you that I assume everything I say on these platforms could be made public, but you and I are more informed on data security issues. For many people, they just want to share photos and chat with friends. The deep privacy implications are beyond most people.
The vast majority of FB users are tech illiterate. They have no idea about the capabilities of algorithms and how they can be turned into automated weapons which can target entire populations with psychological warfare.
So I think it's a problem of them not understanding how their data can be so easily and effectively weaponized against them and everyone they know.
Considering the data is what is valuable to them I would find it hard to belive they didn't know how much they had been sharing in the past.
https://twitter.com/AaronGreenspan/status/975957889767505920
https://twitter.com/AaronGreenspan/status/976331044084264960
As I have said time and again, Mark is not trustworthy and never has been.
So if it turns out he has any liability for the data breaches they don't have much to stand on.
Do you feel even the slightest bit of embarrassment at the irony and hypocrisy of using this content, that you acquired without consent, to further your argument against the trustworthiness of this guy?
"If you had asked me, when I got started with Facebook, if one of the central things I’d need to work on now is preventing governments from interfering in each other’s elections, there’s no way I thought that’s what I’d be doing"
These are just two examples, but quite a few quotes from this interview are verbatim from the CNN interview. Where has Mark been the last days? Probably rehearsing.
Zuckerberg: Yes. They gave us a formal and legal certification, and it seems at this point that that was false."
Does it matter whether CA breached some form of "agreement" with FB?
What is the consequence of that?
CA losing their FB privileges going forward?
Does that really address the harm done?
Does "formal and legal certification" mean anything if FB is not going to take legal action against CA? (Maybe FB is worried about FTC and violating their 2011 consent decree, i.e. self-preservation.)
If anyone should be requiring "formal and legal certification" that data was destroyed and that there was no unauthorized usage or transfer, it is the owners of the data: FB users.
Why are FB users upset with FB. Shouldnt they be upset with CA.
There must be a reason that there is so much focus on FB as the problem and not only on CA.
What is it?
It's fun to hate big companies with recognizable names and blame that big company for electing someone that Americans are increasingly displeased with.
So, I think the public gets much more satisfaction out of seeing the CEO of FB raked over the coals, because they think it will attack the problem more at the root. Just my guess anyway.
>> Frenkel: We understood that Cambridge Analytica had reached out to Facebook and asked that its ban on the platform be reconsidered. Are you giving any thought to allowing Cambridge Analytica back in?
>> Zuckerberg: The first thing we need to do is conduct this full forensic audit of the firm, that they don’t have any people’s data from our community and that they’ve deleted anything, including derivative data, that they might have. We’re working with the regulator in the U.K. on this, so our forensic audit was actually paused in the near term to cede the way for the ICO there to do their own government investigation. We’re certainly not going to consider letting them back onto the platform until we have full confirmation that there’s no wrongdoing here.
So this part:
>>Zuckerberg: We’re working with the regulator in the U.K. on this, so our forensic audit was actually paused in the near term to cede the way for the ICO there to do their own government investigation.
"...our forensic audit was actually paused..."
It sounds like Facebook was already at CA before the investigation started trying to solve what ICO and other government bodies around the globe were going to be asking about / inquiring about / interested at looking into the legal ramifications of the material undergoing forensic audits.
I can't help but feel like Facebook is trying to say that they were trying to solve this problem on their lonesome and take care of the problems head on like they always should have, since the very first inkling of something like this happening.
That sounds nice and all but I can't say I believe it unless somebody else can tell me about why the timing of this is just so... precisely perplexing? I feel like I would have read at least one thing pointing me in an obvious direction that would make me better understand the way he answered that question in such a way.
Did CA asking for its ban to be lifted prompt the forensic audit? Did CA have new business to attend to with Facebook's help and needed to ensure before they underwent another dangerous operation as partners that CA had to be holding up their end of the bargain by destroying any evidence? Something sounds odd. There's no way CA wouldn't be the type of company to play both sides to earn as much money as possible in this endeavor, especially if it's illegal and can help such ridiculously wealthy and powerful people around the globe -- people seemingly willing to spend tens of millions of dollars to either plant their candidate in a designated spot, prevent incumbents from taking or threatening that / a certain spot, or for existing people in power to obtain data to help them further dig in and retain that power and wealth. It keeps coming to my mind that a company that uses blackmail and hookers to ensure it's customers successful results isn't going to be the type of company to play by the rules when it comes to earning profits. If they are getting away with their business as explained by Nix in the video we saw how are we supposed to assume that they ever act as good and noble actors in any other situation with potential for abuse that results in exorbitant profit? I know I am assuming things here but I digress.
That's all my mind can think about after reading this response. It sounds great on paper but knowing what I know and having felt the way I've always felt about Facebook and social media in general (I've been the type to warn family members about the truths of who the product is and why only to get eyes rolled at me) I don't think that this good Samaritan Q&A filled with promises of improvement and doing the very best to break through to the next technological horizon while doing the least amount of damage to anything around Facebook is like the folks who colonized America having to capture...
The whole thing of them showing up right before the ICO did, frantically carrying out their "forensic audit" reminds me of the Uber employee talking about how they had a system to instantly wipe all data in case foreign officials raided their offices. The more they try to sugar coat this, the more it reeks.
For him to come back and give a Q&A that sweet and rosy just felt odd to me. The questions weren't total softballs. The questions weren't extremely hard hitting, either. The answers themselves are what bothers me. There is a total lack of empathy, total lack of ownership of the serious implications all of this has, and most importantly to me -- a serious lack of humanity behind the eyes and words of a man who runs a business that claims to bring the world together in a happy, constructive, and peaceful way -- meanwhile that company makes millions hand over fist while selling out those very people they claim they champion and uplift. Profiting off of their secrets and personal doings and sayings. It feels like one of the slimiest things I've ever had the misfortune to understand due to my tech background.
There was a recent post about how the internet was better before everyone was on it. I'm not sure I agreen, but the average ability of any internet user to think critically has certainly tanked since the advent of the smartphone.
they’re painting it as if they did their darnedest, but i think they just don’t actualy care or something more serious. this entire interview is basically zuckerberg just spewing damage control and explaining that facebook doesn't understand how people are using and abusing their data, with regards to developers, governments, etc. that latter point is either just pure neglect or willful ignorance in turning their head until it hurts them.
This one is only important because it's gotten so much media attention. If it wasn't related to the election it would have been business as usual and nobody would care or know about CA.
But facebook has something on the order of a billion of these (even more) highly robust personal data profiles, and that's, not a scandal but a multi-hundred billion dollar corporation?
Can it be said the collection of these profiles is a net positive for the world?
Or is this mass societal exploitation for private profit?
Note this isn't asking about the existence itself of facebook, just the collecting of these profiles, fb could function in some way without collecting these profiles.
https://joinmastodon.org/
https://instances.social/
Why is Facebook so dead set on sharing data at all? People keep lumping Facebook in with the rest (Google/Amazon/Microsoft?/other data mining companies) but my impression was that these companies do not do this. It seems reckless to the point of absurdity. Some other event like this will happen again in the future as long as they continue to insist on this, it is inevitable.
What else are they supposed to do to keep their massive infrastructure running?
People would clearly rather invite the likes of CA into their private lives than pay even the tiniest little fee to keep their contacts and pictures in the cloud together with those of their friends.
I unsubscribed from Facebook years ago, because it just didn't seem like a good deal to me.
google has been scrutinized in the past, one big difference is google doesn't offer this data to private companies (yeah yeah .. NSA ) and their model never really allowed someone like CA to get their data.
google's original product was search, from that they were able to extrapolate insane amounts of user data that they then used in their biggest product: ADS. but they never provided the USER data, they provided an interface for their ad customers to better target their ads. so in a way google uses the data to create products around it while for facebook users and their data ARE the product.
Huh? 20,000 people? This seems like a wildly misleading number. He's grouping security and "community operations" together, whatever that is. That must include masses of people doing manual video and ad reviews, or something like that. That has nothing to do with the question. It's like you asked the president about the Secret Service and he said "Between the Secret Service and US Army we have over a million people and that number is going up this year!"
Source: http://www.sueddeutsche.de/digital/exklusive-sz-magazin-rech...
With non-sequitur answers coming as naturally as that, I think he’s nearly ready!
I remember when this chart[3] first made the rounds. If this didn't convince people that facebook is evil. I don't know what will
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/jan/11/facebook-...
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/21/facebook-ceo-mark-zuckerberg...
[3] http://mattmckeon.com/facebook-privacy/
Something about how in your face their privacy awareness campaigns seemed to be while all the while everyone in tech or paying any attention knew that Facebook is in the business of selling personal / private information. I think what you don't say, don't do, and don't want them to see creates just as much of a profile about you as anything you do voluntarily give up to them. I feel they wouldn't be successful if they weren't the type of company that thought that deeply into it.
All that said one of the scenarios in my mind that I figured applies to this, which is very apt right now with the goings-on of Facebook / Cambridge Analytica is when a user is flagged as the type who has locked down their privacy, thus being corralled into the group of "Members who care about personal internet privacy" that would be their cue to needing to harvest your data points via your friend circle or 3rd party Facebook tools / features (like external Like buttons) in order to obtain those data points while still sticking to their "Privacy Manifesto". Maybe that's when they start serving you lots of ads interesting you in dating on Tinder, using external photo sharing apps like Instagram, or external messaging apps like Messenger or WhatsApp. Who knows, really? But they and we know they've had many ways to skin a cat all along.
Maybe I'm paranoid but I'd rather be paranoid and a bit fanatical than ignorant. PS. Not calling anyone out there ignorant. Just ranting is all.
A bit more of context - I might be an outlier here, because from the get-go, I always, deliberately, kept everything on my Facebook profile public. I've always treated it as something similar to a personal website/blog. I still do, despite Facebook's constant reminders that I can limit my posts or profile visibility to my Friends.
Also, in my circles in early 2010s, Facebook was as much about being able to discover other people as it was about sharing things. Over the years I've noticed how people increasingly lock down their accounts (sometimes to sub-Friends granularity); that discoverability use case is pretty much nonexistent nowadays.
It first started off at Harvard and then moved to other elite universities. It finally expanded to all universities by the time I joined. Its exclusivity (only for people at uni) was its major plus against myspace. When I was at uni, you could use it to find people in your class and meet and interact with new people in a friendly manner. Since then the people who can join has expanded, and the positivity for facebook has gone downhill. Its not the same when your parents can see you trying to flirt with random people.
The whole reason for facebook has changed, and for the worst I think. I don't think they can recapture the magic of early facebook and retain their valuations.
Now the early University members of FB are in a position to become paying customers (in a buying of advertising sense) but the real payday was always in the swath of personal information and data that would come along with true saturation of population enrolled into the FB ecosystem.
It would've been nice if it could have been made into something more altruistic but it only takes one less-than-intent watching of The Social Network to know that the idea was never altruism.
I don't want to go in depth about what I think the masses ignoring what the movie said about Facebook as a whole / the movie's message about Facebook and it's founders considering it was all said in plain dialog as blatantly as possible but that fact surprises me most. That it was stated so plainly and it's taken THIS LONG for the non-tech folks to really start scratching their heads and asking, "Is this is all okay or not?"
Capturing the magic is soooo long gone. Now it's about trying to figure out how to keep the devil / criminal activity, not the lightning, in the bottle for as long as possible. Well, from my POV at least.
That said I had Facebook locked down as much as possible as soon as I could. Once I entered the workforce after college I cleaned out the most insane pictures but wanted to make sure any company looking to hire me understood I was a human being who also had fun and wasn't afraid to be myself. I felt like in a way presenting my real self was the only way to do anything public online.
I still don't like the way Facebook does things, obviously, but what really scares me is the folks I love and am friends with who roll their eyes when I tell them about what is really going on and why it's bad. As this latest situation has shown us it truly doesn't matter how strong our individual security is if we are easily figured out just by being associated with ONE SINGLE PERSON who doesn't lock their associated / friend-of-ours account down.
That's the kicker that makes this just a terrible thing to me. The warnings already fell on deaf ears but now it seems that everybody, even the most careful, are caught in the mix anyways -- even if they did every single step perfectly along the ENTIRE route that was their internet social media life.
The un-locked down accounts were essentially unknowing spy cells that could be tapped at any moment to uncover everything about the most locked down people they were associated with. As this CA situation demonstrated it only took a few 100,000 accounts to unlock 50,000,000 others. If we are to assume that those 100,000's of accounts were able to hold the keys to the information Facebook wasn't legally allowed to share with 3rd parties due to "Privacy Policy" and legalities than I'd also, personally, safely assume that regardless of the way the 3rd party backdoor got to those locked down accounts was only one route to obtain that info. The other route? Facebook most likely had all of that information all along anyways through craftier methods such as non-FB pages with like buttons, cross referencing across their other suite of apps (Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram), and mining data from other sources like competitive social media networks, dating applications, and who knows what else really?
They've shown a blatant, almost blood thirsty-like mission towards harvesting personal data by any means necessary -- even people who have never been on FB have profiles about them -- so I've never put anything past them and have rarely been surprised when the actual truth comes out.
The company has a Uber-ish brazen arrogance, and never takes a position that benefits anyone but the company. Even MFA was used as a tool to gather intelligence.
well said
He's marely saying that compared to when social media didn't exist, it was unthinkable to have people exposing others to what they were doing and with whom, what they were eating and how it looked, etc.
He's absolutely right. The social norm HAS changed.
Now, do I think it's good to use user data like Facebook does? Well, it's a business. It might not be ethical, but are companies that sell cigarettes, alcohol, guns, etc. any better (or potentially any better)?
We need to stop complaining about how evil Facebook is, and start talking about personal responsibility. People need to understand what they're doing, it's not Facebook's fault if people don't know their data will be used for advertising, like it's not a tobacco's manufacture's fault if the user doesn't know cigarettes give you cancer.
You don't like how they use your data? Stop using Facebook! End of story.
No one is complaining to the manufacturer about how cigarettes give you cancer demanding a safer alternative, you just smoke at your own risk.
Personally, I don't smoke, and I don't use Facebook.
Lawmakers (at least in the USA) disagree with you fundamentally. That’s why cigarettes have a big warning label telling consumers that it gives you cancer.
I think comparing tobacco and data privacy is like comparing apples and oranges. But the common principle stands: if people might reasonably find a product objectionable because of characteristics that aren’t readily clear, a reasonable effort ought to be made to educate them.
A knife is potentially dangerous, a rope is potentially dangerous, just about anything is potentially dangerous!
I think it's fine to expect people have a working brain. On the internet it's not immediately clear that if you upload a naked picture or post a racist comment it will stay there _forever_, and might very easily affect you negatively _for an indefinite amount of time_ (employers can see it or do background checks, etc.), but that's just how it is.
Why is it NOT clear that the contents of a steaming cup of freshly-made coffee that somebody is handling you may be hot, then?
It's NOT clear that if you marry the wrong person you can end up in lot of pain, fighting in court for 10 years, losing all you have, etc., so should the priest or government official read a warning before declaring you married?
When you signed up for Facebook, you agreed to their TOS. Compared to the knife, cup, and wife someone has told you _explicitly_ what's going to happen and how, and _you have agreed to that_. What makes it unclear, then?
Like it or not, there is not yet a similar sort of widespread awareness of the risks of Facebook. If you asked a random person on the street to explain what could go wrong with a marriage, they could give you so many examples that troubled marriages are literally one of the classic sets ups for jokes.
If you asked the average person to explain how the Cambridge Analytica breach happened, or what Facebook can do with the permission to see which WiFi network you’re connected to, for example, they would not be able to give a good explanation.
I like your standing but there is one more aspect to look at e.g these companies have big data , money and can hire smart people to use that data in a way beyond our imagination.And with backdoor channels to secret agencies and govt. institutions they can manipulate public opinion, as this is the current case.
Probably complaining is first step towards greater personal responsibility and to educate all the users who have no idea what is happening around them. Like in the case of tobacco, tobacco companies suppressed scientific research reaching general public through manipulation of media.
This is so true and so not gonna happen. Too often you see people lauding new regulations, new laws, new ways of telling someone else what to do because they are not smart enough to know for themselves.
I wish government and their constant rule-requesting constituency would repurpose their effort into education and promotion of alternatives.
> Personally, I don't smoke, and I don't use Facebook.
Sadly, there will be a time where you can't do things like those, even being aware of and accepting of the risks.
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don't know why.
Zuck: They "trust me"
Zuck: Dumb fucks
When I signed up for Facebook (back when it was just Harvard-only) I made up a new never-before-used password, because going thru other students' passwords was just the sort of thing I'd imagine Mark doing in his spare time...
Did you know Mark personally? What gave you that impression?
Zuck: Just ask.
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
Come on, when your data is the product, who do you think will buy it and what can/will they do with it other than bad things. I can't think of a legitimate use for such detailed profiling of people.
"Remember when they were saying, during the campaign, that Donald Trump is giving great speeches and drawing big crowds, but he is spending much less money and not using social media as well as Crooked Hillary’s large and highly sophisticated staff. Well, not saying that anymore!"
Ok this guy is out of his mind, but Murky Marc should probably go and hand over the company to Sheryl. She knows what to do.
[1] https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/97677061942456320...
Do you believe that the number 2 executive officer at FB had no part in any of the bad decisions FB have made recently?
[1] https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/97676541790877696...
Instead of using a personality quiz, the Obama campaign merely got a portion of its core supporters to use their Facebook profiles to log into a campaign site. Then they used well-tested techniques of gaining consent from that user to harvest all their friends’ data. Sasha Issenberg gushed about how the Obama campaign used the same permissions structure of Facebook to extract the data of scores of millions of Facebook users who were unaware of what was happening to them. Combining Facebook data with other sources such as voter-registration rolls, Issenberg wrote, generated “a new political currency that predicted the behavior of individual humans. The campaign didn’t just know who you were; it knew exactly how it could turn you into the type of person it wanted you to be.”
The level of data sophistication was so intense that Issenberg could describe it this way:
"Obama’s campaign began the election year confident it knew the name of every one of the 69,456,897 Americans whose votes had put him in the White House. They may have cast those votes by secret ballot, but Obama’s analysts could look at the Democrats’ vote totals in each precinct and identify the people most likely to have backed him. Pundits talked in the abstract about reassembling Obama’s 2008 coalition. But within the campaign, the goal was literal. They would reassemble the coalition, one by one, through personal contacts."
Today’s Cambridge Analytica scandal causes our tech chin-strokers to worry about “information” you did not consent to share, but the Obama team created social interactions you wouldn’t have had. They didn’t just build a psychological profile of persuadable voters, and algorithmically determine ways of persuading them, but actually encouraged particular friends — ones the campaign had profiled as influencers — to reach out to them personally. In a post-election interview, the campaign’s digital director Teddy Goff explained the strategy: “People don’t trust campaigns. They don’t even trust media organizations,” he told Time’s Michael Sherer, “Who do they trust? Their friends?” This level of manipulation was celebrated in the press.
How did Facebook react to the much larger data harvesting of the Obama campaign? The New York Times reported it out, in a feature hailing Obama’s digital masterminds:
"The campaign’s exhaustive use of Facebook triggered the site’s internal safeguards. “It was more like we blew through an alarm that their engineers hadn’t planned for or knew about,” said [Will] St. Clair, who had been working at a small firm in Chicago and joined the campaign at the suggestion of a friend. “They’d sigh and say, ‘You can do this as long as you stop doing it on Nov. 7.’ ”"
In other words, Silicon Valley is just making up the rules as they go along. Some large-scale data harvesting and social manipulation is okay until the election. Some of it becomes not okay in retrospect. They sigh and say okay so long as Obama wins. When Clinton loses, they effectively call a code red.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/03/cambridge-analytica-s...
The US propaganda machine has been telling everyone who will listen that "the Russians influenced the election" endlessly for the past year. Are there hard statistics on this? Is there a methodology, mechanism, or theory describing how effective this manipulation has been, and exactly how we get from a survey to a Trump? I am asking honestly. Because please, please, let's focus on what is quantifiable, if we focus on anything there.
Lose talk, anecdotes, and accusations are not sufficient, nor even necessary, if there are hard statistics on the mechanisms of manipulation. Let's talk about those, then, and cease this glib gab and mindless anger at what we already know is a pretty shitty business. (Facebook)
My guess is that there are no hard facts. If Facebook didn't want regulation, they might argue forcefully this way - that the troll C.A. did not effectively do much of anything to influence the election. My guess is that Facebook wants to be regulated. It will gain cultural validity, put up a barrier to entry against competitors, and cement for the history books this story that "unregulated social media"/"the unregulated internet" "used to allow bad actors to influence our democratic process."
From then on we will have one social network, Facebook, and everyone will be taught from high school to law school, that such regulations are necessary to protect our free society from undo influence. Few will question this. The machine will grow. It feeds on ignorance.
(What I really think is that even if C.A. did effect the election, we still should not allow Facebook regulatory capture as incumbent. It is worth the cost of manipulation to have the possibility of Facebook being wiped out in the future. - And above all, to avoid having it enshrined and regulated at the same time as a valid, trusted news source. Then it will really reach its full "potential" ... as a propaganda piece for the US rich and powerful.)
Back to the present:
This Cambridge Analytica (C.A.) story breaks, and almost nobody is talking about whether or not it had any measurable effect on the election at all. Wired ran a companion piece that I can no longer find - a sideline story, stating that "it" (C.A.'s actions) basically had no effect on the election, but this story was not marketed or highlighted. What was marketed was this "big story" that C.A. took user data. The fact that it did nothing of consequence (that I have seen) is a tiny link at the bottom. I can no longer find it in the barrage of stories talking about what happened in broad, anecdotal, scared up, strokes. (And again, even if C.A. did make an impact, Facebook regulatory capture and validity enshrinement is the one of the worst outcomes imaginable. )
These are war drums we are hearing. And the marching orders are against freedom of information on the internet generally. Facebook will come out regulated, "made safer" (and it will in turn become a better shill for the powers that be) but the real prize is that the rest of the internet is supposed to be regulated too, and the regulators will have unfettered access to whatever they want. The NSA has nothing like what it will have once the hand wringers make the internet safe for democracy.
That is the game plan. New articles on "bad facebook" "bad Russia" and "bad cambridge analytica" (the last, just next week's scapegoat once facebook is whitewashed and regulated) is all theater in order to get us there.
I recommend everyone stop talking about, and stop worrying about, this stupid sideshow and pay attention to what they are trying to really do to us.
To be clear, I c...
That statement describes Facebook itself. Most users don't understand what data they are sharing, so they are not able to give permission.