Naively I would think that at some point Facebook would say, "Hey, maybe we should stop lying and honestly confront the problems here."
It really amazes me the extent to which companies like Facebook and Twitter can simultaneously understand the power of social media and brand reputation while also being utterly unable to be proactive about things that will obviously make them look terrible. And also the extent to which "this has become a PR problem" is the closest they can come to a moral sense.
An alternative explanation is that they routinely bury similar negative stories so they have good reason to believe that obsfuscation and spin will work.
Maybe there are just hundreds of these horrendous things happening at facebook at any one time and almost all of them never get exposed but from the public's view it looks like they are always missing things that should be obvious.
It makes sense when you look at the market’s reaction to these scandals. Investors don’t care enough about stories like Cambridge Analytica to jettison their holdings in Facebook, and the market reacted positively to their recent fine.
Until the US government is willing to stand up and nail them to a wall with serious fines and criminal investigations, continue to be amazed because nothing is going to change.
It's easy to tell yourself you're not evil when you're one small person in an organization comprising thousands (or millions) of people. It would be happening with or without you, right? You didn't decide to do these evil things, and not everything the organization does is evil.
Every evil organization in history has been staffed and sustained by thousands of people telling themselves this same thing.
I have a friend at Facebook who absolves(?) himself this way: "I don't want to get into politics. I just want to work on cool code."
He, like many people, believes that being apolitical or choosing to abstain from moral arguments is an innocent position, when in fact it's just the act of choosing the side that's winning.
Reminds me of the song about Wernher von Braun who built rockets for the Nazis and the US.
”Don't say that he's hypocritical
Say rather that he's apolitical
’Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department’ says Wernher von Braun”
I think we tech people need to be more interested in what the technology we build ultimately will be used for. I’m not saying we should be paralyzed before every task out of worry, or that we can be morally perfect, but I don’t think we should just throw our hands in the air and pretend that only the person pulling the trigger could’ve done differently.
> I think we tech people need to be more interested in what the technology we build ultimately will be used for.
I don't think that's a universally sound position, unless you hold extremely pacifist views. It's too hard to predict the end game for military technology, given that the world is full of bad guys.
Should techies work on rockets/guns/missiles? Yes - your country might need them to defend itself against an invading force, or even to menace/subdue a threatening force. Perhaps one day, far in the future, your country will need those weapons when it joins a coalition to invade an otherwise peaceful country that refuses to stop burning fossil fuels.
I’m willing to concede that it can be hard to speculate what the technology will be used for, but sometimes it’s very easy. Wernher von Braun knew about the Holocaust and that the missiles he built was going to be used by the same regime. The person who works at Facebook in the comment I responded to, who doesn’t want to get all political and just write code, could still have heard about what the technology is used for.
Once you have confirmation that what you build will be used for harm I think you should reflect on that. Sure, it might be that the technology is used for so much good that you can defend building it even if it’s also used for harming people, and that’s good. As long as you actually did some thinking and didn’t just say ”I don’t really care about all the bad stuff it’s used for, I just want to make cool code”.
Totally. If we are building a technology that could be used for good or bad, I think it's especially important that we find out which, rather than just throwing up our hands and cashing the paycheck.
The phrase “your country” complicates things even more. Suppose you have an engineer born in Country A, lived most of his life in Country B, currently works in Country C, for a company based in Country D, on technology being sold to Country E. How should that employee think about country loyalty and the potential applications of his code?
I think a good rule of thumb could be: Ask yourself how you would feel if the software you are writing were deployed against you? In other words if the designed purpose of your software application results in winners and losers, put yourself in the shoes of the loser. I think we would have a lot fewer people willing to work on weapons if everyone thought about this a little.
Guilt tripping and shaming your friend isn't productive. He is just going to get defensive or feel bad. People when pushed into that state of mind don't exactly effect change or are open to change.
If he feels bad, that's the point of guilt tripping and shaming. If you think it's bad to work at Facebook, you want people who work at Facebook to feel bad about working there. This will tend to make them more interested in leaving the company.
If you don't want to be political, there are plenty of other companies to work at where people won't force politics on you for working there.
>If he feels bad, that's the point of guilt tripping and shaming.
At least you're open about the fact that guilt tripping and shaming is not about trying to change behavior.
Feeling bad about it usually has the outcome of avoiding the person making them feel bad about it, not changing behavior. And while I don't have any hard scientific data, the consensus in the world of negotiation is that overt guilt tripping is often less effective than not discussing the topic at all (i.e. guilt tripping increases the chance the undesired behavior will occur).
>If you don't want to be political, there are plenty of other companies to work at where people won't force politics on you for working there.
Putting the particular case of Facebook aside, my recommendation is always to avoid people who force politics onto you because of where you work. They are usually the least objective.
> At least you're open about the fact that guilt tripping and shaming is not about trying to change behavior.
That's only true if you didn't read the next two sentences. My point was that feeling bad is the mechanism that guilt-trippers and shamers are trying to utilize.
I'm sure guilt and shame don't work well in negotiations. I don't know whether that translates to shaping society or influencing your friends. Personally, I don't do it because that's not how I want to treat my friends.
>That's only true if you didn't read the next two sentences.
I understood it well. What we both agree on is that it will make them feel bad. What we disagree on is this statement of yours:
>This will tend to make them more interested in leaving the company.
Now I don't want to claim 0 correlation. There sometimes is a weak correlation. There is also often a negative correlation (they'll stay longer at Facebook with guilt tripping than with no peer pressure at all). I'm not an academic, so I don't have the studies at hand.
>I'm sure guilt and shame don't work well in negotiations. I don't know whether that translates to shaping society or influencing your friends.
It's a fallacy to treat negotiations as distinct from friendship. I think you're confusing bargaining with negotiations. You engage in negotiations with almost every person you interact with - friends, spouses, children, parents, coworkers, charities, etc. Want to have dinner with a friend? When and where? That's a negotiation. An ordinary person will negotiate a few times a week at a minimum. The discipline of negotiations encompass these interactions.
Negotiations courses/books often spend time on how your negotiation strategy will impact your relationship with the other person, and which strategies may help or harm the relationship. They don't suggest one never use guilt tripping - they merely suggest not to use it if you want to maintain a relationship with the other person.
Guilt and shame are stone age tools to get people to be obedient and fit into domination based hierarchies. Lot of cavemen still use them. But this is not the stone age and there are better ways of getting things done. The Outcomes speak for themselves when you use guilt/shame/fear/duty/obligation and when you dont.
Marshall Rosenberg on the subject - "We all pay dearly when people respond to our values and needs, not out of their own desire, but out of
fear, guilt, or shame. Sooner or later, we will experience the consequences of diminished goodwill on the part of those
who comply with our values out of a sense of either external or internal coercion. They, too, pay emotionally, for they
are likely to feel resentment and decreased self-esteem when they respond to us out of fear, guilt, or shame.
Furthermore, each time others associate us in their minds with any of those feelings, we decrease the likelihood of
their responding compassionately to our needs and values in the future."
The more productive way to do things is to just focus the conversation on your needs and values. And leave it at that. Don't bring judgement/blame/demands/guilt/shaming etc into the picture and then watch the difference in how people respond to your political positions.
I appreciate the irony that we're talking about personal strategies of emotional manipulation in a thread about a company that weaponised strategies of emotional manipulation on an industrial scale.
Maybe if we want people to stop working for Facebook we should run a Facebook ad campaign micro-targeted at Facebook employees using the personal information they shared with Facebook.
>when in fact it's just the act of choosing the side that's winning
In a fairly benign way, maybe. But if you want to take the moral high ground then you should be careful not to steer people, friends and family especially, into an us vs them trap which inherently forces them to militarize their position. Myself, I have no issue with people who aren't for me or against me and I have no idea how the 'for me or against me' phrase could maintain popularity in any civil society. Some people truly do just want to get through life and feed their family without the bs of others trying to coopt their minds and bodies into fighting their personal battles for often petty reasons. I get militarizing against big threats, I served my time, but there's just so many petty battles out there that's not worth wasting energy over and better left to more productive energy.
> Some people truly do just want to get through life and feed their family without the bs of others trying to coopt their minds and bodies
Sure. Everybody wants that. But not everybody gets it. And if some people are getting paid because other people are getting exploited, then their peace is coming at the expense of other people's pain.
If the Facebook guy is comfortable with the fact that he is making a living working for a company that is morally dubious (even ignoring that they make their money selling their users up for manipulation), then he should own that. But we aren't all obligated to pretend that isn't happening just so he feels better about his fat paycheck.
I used to make a lot of money working for financial traders. But I don't do that work any more because it was at best zero sum, but in practice I think it was mostly parasitic on society. Now I do work that I think is more valuable, even if it pays less. Nobody owes me the difference in pay, just like if I had stayed, nobody would have owed me participation in the fiction that I was doing something worthwhile.
I used to know someone who worked on missile guidance systems. He rationalised it as "I only care about the code."
Then there was a war in the middle east and there were TV images of dead and badly injured people being pulled out rubble on the news. They'd been put under the rubble by the missiles he had helped design.
He changed jobs not long after.
But it would be misleading to reduce this to a moral binary. He wasn't a bad person in most ways, and like most people who aren't bad people in most ways he ended up in that situation through a disinterest in anything outside of his domain, and also because he was allowing economics to do his moral thinking for him.
He was doing work that interested him, paying his bills, and keeping on top of the mortgage. What more can you ask of someone?
I suppose the moral question here is, how much do you trust your employer (or country) to use your code only for good? If you're guiding missiles, I think you're naive to think you'll never guide missiles into innocent people.
If you're working on Facebook, the question is whether you trust Zuckerberg's moral leadership. It was plausible to be unsure in the past, but at this point, you know he's going to do something unethical and post another "sorry-not-sorry" message online when he gets caught. You know your code will be misused, and that's on you now.
This is a very poorly-written story... From the first paragraph of back-slappy happy talk and inside innuendo to the lack of any coherent introduction or even narrative.
If I were to re-write it I'd fist begin with why anyone should care. What's at stake?
This style of writing might be fine for those who have already concluded that Facebook is responsible for the election of the president.
For this who haven't, this story doesn't move the ball one inch.
The filter bubble that Facebook created where all sorts of misinformation was shared back and forth ad nauseam (I couldn't believe some of the stuff that was shared during the run up between my family members), was far worse than what Cambridge did to the election.
I don't really like the tone of this article. The linked document doesn't show anything evil; they're not saying "haha look at this terrible secret we're keeping" or "word came from above, let's not fix this problem" or anything like that. It's just a non-specific bug report that Cambridge Analytica might be doing something sketchy, where nobody really did anything for a few months because they couldn't figure out how to get more details.
They say there's a timeline conflict, but I don't get what it's supposed to be. The new information seems very consistent with Zuckerberg discovering the issue in December, unless he makes a habit of reading every JIRA ticket at the company.
Maybe you haven't worked in a big company: someone raises a thread that one of your users is crawling and stealing all of your data and you don't resolve it for 3 months?
At minimum, "Facebook" knew about the problem for 3 months. If it wasn't raised to Zuck personally, it should at least have been handled by someone more quickly than that.
FB claimed they didn't know about it, but they knew about it for at least 3 months before the guardian article. Don't get tricked by weasel words where Zuck pretends to have selective Amnesia. Maybe he knew, maybe he didn't. But multiple people knew, and there were multiple email threads about it.
Some of the employees had concerns about what CA is doing. Which btw didn't do much different from what many others were previously doing with FB data. That doesn't mean it immediately rose to CEO level and everybody in top brass knew everything about it. Of course, if whoever handled it knew then what they know now - that it'd be such a public issue - they'd escalate faster, but they didn't. As such, "Facebook knew" is a bit meaningless statement - "Facebook" is not one person, it's very many persons, and knowledge propagated through this number of persons over some time. They details how it happened may be curious, but there's no additional proof of anything or refutation of the statement that FB top brass didn't know about it - it very well may be that some people knew, but didn't report (yet) it to FB top brass, because they did not realize what exactly is happening and how important it is about to become.
but we do agree that this can be throw in the garbage because the real case is that the CEO didn't have data protections in place. he can claim ignorance but wont be able to down besides VP leve if we want to be realistic. either you handle the legal requirements or you hire someone, otherwise you are negligent and can't claim you didn't know the law. so discussion in this and every other individual casew is futile, as we should be discussing if data protections should be a given like health inspection or not.
It doesn’t really matter how the chain of responsibility works within FB, or how many people “knew” about the incident. FB handles an amount of extremely personal data never seen before in human history. It’s their responsibility to act as quickly as possible to protect such data.
I've seen many instances, even on HN over the last few years, of large companies with the most hideous security practices being told over and over again, and simply doing nothing.
My guess (only a guess) would be that the inside of Equifax was a toxic mess where plenty of techies knew of the dangers well before their hack.
They didn't resolve it for 3 months because they didn't think it was particularly important.
And I mean, I'm not trying to exonerate Facebook here. Enforcing data access policies is extremely important, they were wrong to think otherwise, and they'd better have learned their lesson. But we already knew all of that.
I'd have to chalk it up to incompetence and mismanaged incentives. I reckon senior management didn't have a problem with what Cambridge Analytica did at all considering its the same thing the Obama campaign pioneered (data driven political profiling and targeted advertising) in 2012. Because of how warped company opinion must be on the concept of personal data, they probably didn't care.
As I mentioned in my other comment, it might be the case in order to monetize users personal information Facebook enabled personal data feeds, without realizing it's use case. "Cambridge Analytica" is just one of the companies whose details are out due to political implications.
I am still not sure if Facebook did anything to move away from monetizing user's personal information. Indeed after "Cambridge Analytica" added "WhatsApp" and "Instagram" as additional personal information collection data conduit.
Still today the only business Facebook earns all it's revenue is providing user's personal data feeds to millions of companies, may be with some additional procedure to fulfill the law on paper not in spirit. So they might just be doing enough, so that they are not prosecuted.
Its not a pro-active effort to move away from economy of selling user's personal information for profit.
Your comment exposes that your view of accountability is different from how real world operates.
Zuck certainly does not review Jira tickets. But at the end of the day he is the ceo and ultimately the responsible person for facebooks actions. This is a failure of facebooks internal processes that management chain failed to handle which he is ultimately responsible for.
> I don't really like the tone of this article. The linked document doesn't show anything evil; they're not saying "haha look at this terrible secret we're keeping" or "word came from above, let's not fix this problem" or anything like that.
It may not show evil, but it does show negligence. (I'd even argue that it shows gross neglicence.)
> It's just a non-specific bug report that Cambridge Analytica might be doing something sketchy, where nobody really did anything for a few months because they couldn't figure out how to get more details.
When you suspect a client of doing something very sketchy with data entrusted to you, allowing the client to continue accessing the data is extremely questionable. And "not being able to figure out how to get more details" makes it even worse; far worse.
I feel like you've watched too many movies. Evil in the real world often looks mundane and boring. It's "ah, it's not important, we have more pressing matters to handle" because privacy, rights, safety or lawfulness aren't prioritised institutionally. Or there's a deadline, sales targets, revenue, growth, etc. to hit and is it really so bad if we skip the checks on those crucial parts, because it worked out the last time. Why don't we loosen the requirements a bit so we can get those cheaper parts or labor?
I think, fundamentally, that we're all capable of good and evil, and it doesn't make sense, in a lot of cases, to paint a single person as wholly evil. It's a combination of inherent personality traits combined with an environment that incentivizes and motivates certain kinds of behaviours and ways of thinking. In the right kind of system, evil is just the natural consequence and it's something we see every day, all over the world.
I think that's pretty much par for the course if you look at human history. Given that our culture is being locked up and thrown away with infinite IP extension and the game industry has successfully stolen PC games for the last 20 years and we now have windows "as a service" in windows 10. Evil looks pretty much like our MO as a species.
This is a very weird form of evil, then. This appears to be an earnest investigation into whether CA was violating their policies, and they concluded they likely were and that it needed to stop. What else do you want from them?
You could argue the platform itself did not have proper technical safeguards in place to prevent this, but it's actually quite difficult to automatically detect this sort of thing. I'm not sure how else it would've been uncovered without a manual investigation like this.
You could argue that this is unsurprising given that Facebook's whole purpose is to harvest people's data, but that's nothing we didn't already know. This just feels like a clickbait story to me.
When they approved for access to personal data feeds of information, they might not have imagined the use-case or might not have know about the usage in details. "Cambridge Analytica" came out due to political implications, there might be many others people don't now.
Facebook's primary business is selling personal information for profit. This is how they sustain their business. So it will be naive for users to think otherwise. Now even WhatsApp and instagram become a conduit for collecting personal data with photos. Indeed sometimes I am astonished that many people are worried not about privacy, but more about that people do not know them or like or dislike them on Facebook and Instagram so they do everything to become influencers.
I was astonished when an account is created for a 11 year old kid, facebook and instagram suggested them adult friends or people to follow, which are not part of their circle. This is done as many kids use parents phone and Facebook use the contact phones of parents to suggest link to kids.
I talked to one of my banker friend and he told me that the kind of data he gets from Facebook is simply not possible with any other company. He can pinpoint his target market at an individual level using Facebook and customize his banking products like loans, investments, equities, bonds for them.
Small, but really important clarification: Facebook and Google do not “sell personal information”. They sell advertising.
There are lots of companies (called data brokers) that actually sell personal information to advertisers. Facebook, Apple, Google and other walled gardens don’t do that. Instead, they let advertisers target people, but ultimately the advertisers don’t get access to peoples’ data.
Why is this at the bottom? It is amazing that people (even on this site) still don't get how targeting works.
Pick a page, word, or interest, and the platforms will target users to match the input, and optimize who is show based on predicted preferred action. It is a blackbox to the client and mostly to the platform.
Facebook hire armies of people to discredit it's criticism. So this is normal any critical comments will be at bottom.
In case of"Cambridge Analytica" it's not advertising or targeting but personal datafeeds access provided by Facebook. It's the same feed they offer to large MNC's.
It's not an anonymous system but a system based on personal and private information of individuals including their address or contact books and their communication history.
I do not think Facebook provides advertising and datafeeda from anonymous data. I believe there system is based on intimate personal data they collect not the anonymous data respecting user's privacy.
I didn't explain myself properly. You're right they do share extremely targeted data to big companies/advertisers and that's deplorable, but they also have less invasive methods of advertising. What we need is a discussion on where the line lies, rather than 'facebook bad'.
Facebook is not really an anonymous advertising system. "Cambridge analytica" is not some anonymous advertising system access either. Facebook offered personal datafeeds as they offer to large MNC customers.
This is the only way they make money using private and personal information including communication history, photos and videos to provide specific target audience feeds at an individual level with numbers to MNC customers. If it's an anonymous system and they follow the privacy laws in spirit not just enough to avoid prosecution, no one will pay them the premium. Since those anonymous statistics, company can collect on their own.
> He can pinpoint his target market at an individual level using Facebook and customize his banking products like loans, investments, equities, bonds for them.
Maybe he can, but I've never seen or heard about a bank doing anything like this. I'd be fine with a bank tailoring their products to fit my needs better (I have spectacular credit scores, good salary and quite modest credit needs from time to time, which would be very easy and safe for a bank to serve if they were interested) - but that never ever happens. I get surveiled up to wazoo, get tracked on every site I visit - and the dream of "personally tailored services" that I've been told about for over a decade now is still nowhere here. What the heck are they doing with this information? Sell it to each other to serve me poorly targeted ads which I block anyway? Eventually leak it to criminals so that they can sell me credit monitoring services? Sell it to politicians which try to convince me to vote for some guy who I never heard of but immediately hate once they start talking about him? Seriously, what that whole industry is doing and could it do at least a little to provide some useful stuff? I mean, if you killed my privacy (or at least tried very hard to), can I please get at least some spoils from it?
I've always been curious why nobody cared when Obama misused Facebook data in 2012 to win the election.
I remember countless tech articles lauding him as a genius and talking about how this would be the new way to campaign.
Facebook knew about it and allowed it to happen. They then closed the door for other politicians.
This sort of election meddling is worse than the Russians.
The mainstream media doesn`t care because they supported the person that did it.
It really seems like it only matters because a Republican was involved. If Hillary had won, things would be business as usual and we wouldn't even know about election interference.
I actually find that comments supporting Democrats, and especially progressive ideas are more likely to be downvoted on Hacker News. Almost like corporate PR doesn't want them to become popular opinions.
I’ve struggled with the what-about-ism there as well. When researching it I’ve found there are some differences, particularly about degree of openness towards the people targeted:
This seems false. The root of the problem is the FB API used to grant you access to friend-of-friend data. This capability is what led to the possibility of having a million sign ups get you data on the entire US. Those people mined through second order links did not give consent.
>You seem really relaxed about foreign powers interfering with our elections.
The reality is that Americans have historically been quite relaxed about the US interfering in others' elections - they do it more than any other country.[1] At least they're consistent if they're relaxed when it happens the other way round.
I'm not relaxed about anyone interfering with our elections either a domestic private company or a foreign power.
Both subvert Democracy.
Russia is really a non-issue. They have a pittance in terms of economy and a handful of bots and phishing attacks didn't really do anything to change the election.
The stadiums of people that still come out for Trump supports this.
We should be worried about big tech. They are altering our elections through massive censorship of opposing views and search result tampering to change the definition of the 'truth'.
If the Ceos of these companies were Republicans, there would be endless lawsuits.
My issue with the whole CA debacle is that I’ve seen no proof that the services they offered were actually effective in persuading anyone.
They were a consulting firm that exaggerated claims on their own effectiveness like every consulting company and the media took those claims at face value and presented them as some magicians when they in actuality had nothing more than some suspect personality data and your likes.
And Obama or PAC's used the exact same tactics in 2012 it has been shown, but nobody cared then because the home team was doing the doping and nobody knew about them yet.
Double reply, but for a different angle it might be interesting to read The Gamble: Choice and Chance in the 2012 Election. It paints an interesting picture of what was effective and what wasn't in political advertising (classical advertising mostly, less focused on social media). In some cases, it's remarkable how close the margins were and how little change campaigns might effect.
There were conservatives who cared then. But yeah, traditional media tends to be more liberal so you heard about it more this time. I guess that's the tradeoff we have. In America, media tends to bias towards liberalism as we know it whereas other industries like military and police might have a more right-wing bias. At least in the former, it might hurt people's feelings when the media says things you don't like but the power the latter has over people's lives is even more worthy of mention, which it rarely is. Sorry about the whataboutism but that was also your argument.
> At least in the former, it might hurt people's feelings when the media says things you don't like but the power the latter has over people's lives is even more worthy of mention, which it rarely is.
The military or police don't really play a large role in deciding who's going to be elected though.
You've never served, have you? The military is highly influential, especially among family, in influencing political views. Not to mention social media which gives us all a pen as well as a sword, proverbially. Either way, if you complain about being oppressed by powers, all the aforementioned are a potential force of it so it's mostly moot to complain of the bias of one without mentioning the bias of the others.
> The military is highly influential, especially among family, in influencing political views
That's something very different vs the media. If you break it down to "they can influence somebody", then well, kindergarten teachers have influence over elections.
> so it's mostly moot to complain of the bias of one without mentioning the bias of the others
As soon as the military starts a coup and takes power, you'll be absolutely right. Until then, they don't decide domestic elections.
I’m saying this from a British perspective; but arguing about the effectiveness of CAs incredibly targeted advertising is missing the forest for the trees.
They broke several electoral laws and even if they didn’t. The intent was to target people on the fringe leaving no possibility for dissemination, discourse or even a record of what was shown.
There’s no justification for that, that is poison for democracy. It doesn’t matter if it works or not.
Well, it’s not evidence, but haven’t they won every election they’ve been hired to manipulate?
I especially find the way they did it in Trinidad interesting. They set up an anti establishment movement saying “don’t vote” which grew into actual grass roots. They targeted it at everyone, because their data showed, that one side of the political spectrum would still vote, despite participating in the movement. At the election their predictions came completely true and only one side refrained from voting.
What worries me is that CA is just one company. Now that the cat is out the bag, everyone is going to do this.
David Carroll tweeted "... effects cannot be measured. There are no control groups in elections" [1]. His stake in it was getting access to his data though, not coming at it from a data science perspective. I'm not sure I agree with his assessment about it not being measurable though.
My big issue is that Share Blue and Correct the Record did the exact same thing at the same time and they are ignored because they are aligned with the other side.
Shareblue's tactics were also used against other democratic candidates including Bernie Sanders, which is perhaps the main reason they lost, and this story has not been converted at all.
Some context around the FB staff trying to identify app IDs: Cambridge Analytica themselves never had an app on the FB platform. Instead, they bought the data from Kogan, who had built the app "thisisyourdigitallife" which was a personality quiz.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: I made Mark aware of this general type of problem in April 2005. In writing. With a warning about violating the FTC Act. Learning about Cambridge Analytica ten years later would have been at least the second time he heard about a friend-of-friend data breach. https://www.plainsite.org/documents/amjxp/facebook-origins-t...
> I made Mark aware of this general type of problem in April 2005. In writing. With a warning about violating the FTC Act.
That's actually pretty amazing considering how long back it was. It's a shame something wasn't done then. Was this an email he responded to? How was it communicated?
With all due respect to FB's engineering , how can a company be so vile in blatantly not monitoring data that was used for obviously not so ethical means. I deleted my FB account and that to me has been the most amazing decision personally i have made.
But things are getting scary , there is a Public Interest petition in court in India where there is a case pending on linking Identity cards with FB (https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/internet/linking-o...). This is even more scary!.
FB is a shady organization by any figment of imagination (so are the other free biggies as well) and can go to any lengths for personal profiteering.
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106 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 217 ms ] threadIt really amazes me the extent to which companies like Facebook and Twitter can simultaneously understand the power of social media and brand reputation while also being utterly unable to be proactive about things that will obviously make them look terrible. And also the extent to which "this has become a PR problem" is the closest they can come to a moral sense.
Until the US government is willing to stand up and nail them to a wall with serious fines and criminal investigations, continue to be amazed because nothing is going to change.
Every evil organization in history has been staffed and sustained by thousands of people telling themselves this same thing.
I have a friend at Facebook who absolves(?) himself this way: "I don't want to get into politics. I just want to work on cool code."
He, like many people, believes that being apolitical or choosing to abstain from moral arguments is an innocent position, when in fact it's just the act of choosing the side that's winning.
”Don't say that he's hypocritical Say rather that he's apolitical ’Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department’ says Wernher von Braun”
I think we tech people need to be more interested in what the technology we build ultimately will be used for. I’m not saying we should be paralyzed before every task out of worry, or that we can be morally perfect, but I don’t think we should just throw our hands in the air and pretend that only the person pulling the trigger could’ve done differently.
I don't think that's a universally sound position, unless you hold extremely pacifist views. It's too hard to predict the end game for military technology, given that the world is full of bad guys.
Should techies work on rockets/guns/missiles? Yes - your country might need them to defend itself against an invading force, or even to menace/subdue a threatening force. Perhaps one day, far in the future, your country will need those weapons when it joins a coalition to invade an otherwise peaceful country that refuses to stop burning fossil fuels.
Once you have confirmation that what you build will be used for harm I think you should reflect on that. Sure, it might be that the technology is used for so much good that you can defend building it even if it’s also used for harming people, and that’s good. As long as you actually did some thinking and didn’t just say ”I don’t really care about all the bad stuff it’s used for, I just want to make cool code”.
I think a good rule of thumb could be: Ask yourself how you would feel if the software you are writing were deployed against you? In other words if the designed purpose of your software application results in winners and losers, put yourself in the shoes of the loser. I think we would have a lot fewer people willing to work on weapons if everyone thought about this a little.
If you don't want to be political, there are plenty of other companies to work at where people won't force politics on you for working there.
At least you're open about the fact that guilt tripping and shaming is not about trying to change behavior.
Feeling bad about it usually has the outcome of avoiding the person making them feel bad about it, not changing behavior. And while I don't have any hard scientific data, the consensus in the world of negotiation is that overt guilt tripping is often less effective than not discussing the topic at all (i.e. guilt tripping increases the chance the undesired behavior will occur).
>If you don't want to be political, there are plenty of other companies to work at where people won't force politics on you for working there.
Putting the particular case of Facebook aside, my recommendation is always to avoid people who force politics onto you because of where you work. They are usually the least objective.
That's only true if you didn't read the next two sentences. My point was that feeling bad is the mechanism that guilt-trippers and shamers are trying to utilize.
I'm sure guilt and shame don't work well in negotiations. I don't know whether that translates to shaping society or influencing your friends. Personally, I don't do it because that's not how I want to treat my friends.
I understood it well. What we both agree on is that it will make them feel bad. What we disagree on is this statement of yours:
>This will tend to make them more interested in leaving the company.
Now I don't want to claim 0 correlation. There sometimes is a weak correlation. There is also often a negative correlation (they'll stay longer at Facebook with guilt tripping than with no peer pressure at all). I'm not an academic, so I don't have the studies at hand.
>I'm sure guilt and shame don't work well in negotiations. I don't know whether that translates to shaping society or influencing your friends.
It's a fallacy to treat negotiations as distinct from friendship. I think you're confusing bargaining with negotiations. You engage in negotiations with almost every person you interact with - friends, spouses, children, parents, coworkers, charities, etc. Want to have dinner with a friend? When and where? That's a negotiation. An ordinary person will negotiate a few times a week at a minimum. The discipline of negotiations encompass these interactions.
Negotiations courses/books often spend time on how your negotiation strategy will impact your relationship with the other person, and which strategies may help or harm the relationship. They don't suggest one never use guilt tripping - they merely suggest not to use it if you want to maintain a relationship with the other person.
Marshall Rosenberg on the subject - "We all pay dearly when people respond to our values and needs, not out of their own desire, but out of fear, guilt, or shame. Sooner or later, we will experience the consequences of diminished goodwill on the part of those who comply with our values out of a sense of either external or internal coercion. They, too, pay emotionally, for they are likely to feel resentment and decreased self-esteem when they respond to us out of fear, guilt, or shame. Furthermore, each time others associate us in their minds with any of those feelings, we decrease the likelihood of their responding compassionately to our needs and values in the future."
The more productive way to do things is to just focus the conversation on your needs and values. And leave it at that. Don't bring judgement/blame/demands/guilt/shaming etc into the picture and then watch the difference in how people respond to your political positions.
Maybe if we want people to stop working for Facebook we should run a Facebook ad campaign micro-targeted at Facebook employees using the personal information they shared with Facebook.
He said that there’s a lot of internal conflict and debate about certain scandals, but that he doesn’t get involved.
In a fairly benign way, maybe. But if you want to take the moral high ground then you should be careful not to steer people, friends and family especially, into an us vs them trap which inherently forces them to militarize their position. Myself, I have no issue with people who aren't for me or against me and I have no idea how the 'for me or against me' phrase could maintain popularity in any civil society. Some people truly do just want to get through life and feed their family without the bs of others trying to coopt their minds and bodies into fighting their personal battles for often petty reasons. I get militarizing against big threats, I served my time, but there's just so many petty battles out there that's not worth wasting energy over and better left to more productive energy.
Sure. Everybody wants that. But not everybody gets it. And if some people are getting paid because other people are getting exploited, then their peace is coming at the expense of other people's pain.
If the Facebook guy is comfortable with the fact that he is making a living working for a company that is morally dubious (even ignoring that they make their money selling their users up for manipulation), then he should own that. But we aren't all obligated to pretend that isn't happening just so he feels better about his fat paycheck.
I used to make a lot of money working for financial traders. But I don't do that work any more because it was at best zero sum, but in practice I think it was mostly parasitic on society. Now I do work that I think is more valuable, even if it pays less. Nobody owes me the difference in pay, just like if I had stayed, nobody would have owed me participation in the fiction that I was doing something worthwhile.
Then there was a war in the middle east and there were TV images of dead and badly injured people being pulled out rubble on the news. They'd been put under the rubble by the missiles he had helped design.
He changed jobs not long after.
But it would be misleading to reduce this to a moral binary. He wasn't a bad person in most ways, and like most people who aren't bad people in most ways he ended up in that situation through a disinterest in anything outside of his domain, and also because he was allowing economics to do his moral thinking for him.
He was doing work that interested him, paying his bills, and keeping on top of the mortgage. What more can you ask of someone?
If you're working on Facebook, the question is whether you trust Zuckerberg's moral leadership. It was plausible to be unsure in the past, but at this point, you know he's going to do something unethical and post another "sorry-not-sorry" message online when he gets caught. You know your code will be misused, and that's on you now.
To take responsibility for the effects of their actions? That doesn't seem like too much.
Hardly anyone ever does this until they have to, on either a personal or business level, and those that do are seldom rewarded in this life.
This is why external accountability is so important.
If I were to re-write it I'd fist begin with why anyone should care. What's at stake?
This style of writing might be fine for those who have already concluded that Facebook is responsible for the election of the president.
For this who haven't, this story doesn't move the ball one inch.
They say there's a timeline conflict, but I don't get what it's supposed to be. The new information seems very consistent with Zuckerberg discovering the issue in December, unless he makes a habit of reading every JIRA ticket at the company.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
At minimum, "Facebook" knew about the problem for 3 months. If it wasn't raised to Zuck personally, it should at least have been handled by someone more quickly than that.
FB claimed they didn't know about it, but they knew about it for at least 3 months before the guardian article. Don't get tricked by weasel words where Zuck pretends to have selective Amnesia. Maybe he knew, maybe he didn't. But multiple people knew, and there were multiple email threads about it.
FB can't claim ignorance here.
My guess (only a guess) would be that the inside of Equifax was a toxic mess where plenty of techies knew of the dangers well before their hack.
And I mean, I'm not trying to exonerate Facebook here. Enforcing data access policies is extremely important, they were wrong to think otherwise, and they'd better have learned their lesson. But we already knew all of that.
- incompetence
- malice
I'd have to chalk it up to incompetence and mismanaged incentives. I reckon senior management didn't have a problem with what Cambridge Analytica did at all considering its the same thing the Obama campaign pioneered (data driven political profiling and targeted advertising) in 2012. Because of how warped company opinion must be on the concept of personal data, they probably didn't care.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
> "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
I am still not sure if Facebook did anything to move away from monetizing user's personal information. Indeed after "Cambridge Analytica" added "WhatsApp" and "Instagram" as additional personal information collection data conduit.
Still today the only business Facebook earns all it's revenue is providing user's personal data feeds to millions of companies, may be with some additional procedure to fulfill the law on paper not in spirit. So they might just be doing enough, so that they are not prosecuted.
Its not a pro-active effort to move away from economy of selling user's personal information for profit.
Zuck certainly does not review Jira tickets. But at the end of the day he is the ceo and ultimately the responsible person for facebooks actions. This is a failure of facebooks internal processes that management chain failed to handle which he is ultimately responsible for.
It may not show evil, but it does show negligence. (I'd even argue that it shows gross neglicence.)
> It's just a non-specific bug report that Cambridge Analytica might be doing something sketchy, where nobody really did anything for a few months because they couldn't figure out how to get more details.
When you suspect a client of doing something very sketchy with data entrusted to you, allowing the client to continue accessing the data is extremely questionable. And "not being able to figure out how to get more details" makes it even worse; far worse.
You could argue the platform itself did not have proper technical safeguards in place to prevent this, but it's actually quite difficult to automatically detect this sort of thing. I'm not sure how else it would've been uncovered without a manual investigation like this.
You could argue that this is unsurprising given that Facebook's whole purpose is to harvest people's data, but that's nothing we didn't already know. This just feels like a clickbait story to me.
Facebook's primary business is selling personal information for profit. This is how they sustain their business. So it will be naive for users to think otherwise. Now even WhatsApp and instagram become a conduit for collecting personal data with photos. Indeed sometimes I am astonished that many people are worried not about privacy, but more about that people do not know them or like or dislike them on Facebook and Instagram so they do everything to become influencers.
I was astonished when an account is created for a 11 year old kid, facebook and instagram suggested them adult friends or people to follow, which are not part of their circle. This is done as many kids use parents phone and Facebook use the contact phones of parents to suggest link to kids.
I talked to one of my banker friend and he told me that the kind of data he gets from Facebook is simply not possible with any other company. He can pinpoint his target market at an individual level using Facebook and customize his banking products like loans, investments, equities, bonds for them.
There are lots of companies (called data brokers) that actually sell personal information to advertisers. Facebook, Apple, Google and other walled gardens don’t do that. Instead, they let advertisers target people, but ultimately the advertisers don’t get access to peoples’ data.
Pick a page, word, or interest, and the platforms will target users to match the input, and optimize who is show based on predicted preferred action. It is a blackbox to the client and mostly to the platform.
In case of"Cambridge Analytica" it's not advertising or targeting but personal datafeeds access provided by Facebook. It's the same feed they offer to large MNC's.
It's not an anonymous system but a system based on personal and private information of individuals including their address or contact books and their communication history.
I do not think Facebook provides advertising and datafeeda from anonymous data. I believe there system is based on intimate personal data they collect not the anonymous data respecting user's privacy.
This is the only way they make money using private and personal information including communication history, photos and videos to provide specific target audience feeds at an individual level with numbers to MNC customers. If it's an anonymous system and they follow the privacy laws in spirit not just enough to avoid prosecution, no one will pay them the premium. Since those anonymous statistics, company can collect on their own.
Maybe he can, but I've never seen or heard about a bank doing anything like this. I'd be fine with a bank tailoring their products to fit my needs better (I have spectacular credit scores, good salary and quite modest credit needs from time to time, which would be very easy and safe for a bank to serve if they were interested) - but that never ever happens. I get surveiled up to wazoo, get tracked on every site I visit - and the dream of "personally tailored services" that I've been told about for over a decade now is still nowhere here. What the heck are they doing with this information? Sell it to each other to serve me poorly targeted ads which I block anyway? Eventually leak it to criminals so that they can sell me credit monitoring services? Sell it to politicians which try to convince me to vote for some guy who I never heard of but immediately hate once they start talking about him? Seriously, what that whole industry is doing and could it do at least a little to provide some useful stuff? I mean, if you killed my privacy (or at least tried very hard to), can I please get at least some spoils from it?
I remember countless tech articles lauding him as a genius and talking about how this would be the new way to campaign.
Facebook knew about it and allowed it to happen. They then closed the door for other politicians.
This sort of election meddling is worse than the Russians.
The mainstream media doesn`t care because they supported the person that did it.
It really seems like it only matters because a Republican was involved. If Hillary had won, things would be business as usual and we wouldn't even know about election interference.
I have suspected there were voting bots on HN for awhile now...And now it seems like it's actually happening.
https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/mar...
At the end, it states that neither campaign were able to persuade many voters. If that's the case, why do we care?
The reality is that Americans have historically been quite relaxed about the US interfering in others' elections - they do it more than any other country.[1] At least they're consistent if they're relaxed when it happens the other way round.
[1]: https://www.npr.org/2016/12/22/506625913/database-tracks-his...
Both subvert Democracy.
Russia is really a non-issue. They have a pittance in terms of economy and a handful of bots and phishing attacks didn't really do anything to change the election.
The stadiums of people that still come out for Trump supports this.
We should be worried about big tech. They are altering our elections through massive censorship of opposing views and search result tampering to change the definition of the 'truth'.
If the Ceos of these companies were Republicans, there would be endless lawsuits.
They were a consulting firm that exaggerated claims on their own effectiveness like every consulting company and the media took those claims at face value and presented them as some magicians when they in actuality had nothing more than some suspect personality data and your likes.
e.g. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-the-obama-campai...
The military or police don't really play a large role in deciding who's going to be elected though.
That's something very different vs the media. If you break it down to "they can influence somebody", then well, kindergarten teachers have influence over elections.
> so it's mostly moot to complain of the bias of one without mentioning the bias of the others
As soon as the military starts a coup and takes power, you'll be absolutely right. Until then, they don't decide domestic elections.
They broke several electoral laws and even if they didn’t. The intent was to target people on the fringe leaving no possibility for dissemination, discourse or even a record of what was shown.
There’s no justification for that, that is poison for democracy. It doesn’t matter if it works or not.
https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/who-we-are-and-what-w...
Most of the money used to pay Cambridge Analytica came from Aaron Banks, who got it from... "somewhere".
I especially find the way they did it in Trinidad interesting. They set up an anti establishment movement saying “don’t vote” which grew into actual grass roots. They targeted it at everyone, because their data showed, that one side of the political spectrum would still vote, despite participating in the movement. At the election their predictions came completely true and only one side refrained from voting.
What worries me is that CA is just one company. Now that the cat is out the bag, everyone is going to do this.
[1] https://twitter.com/profcarroll/status/1161446789850906624
https://mobile.twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/963804731759038...
Your tweet suggests that a person paid companies that paid humans to tweet.
How is that the exact same thing?
they are ignored because they are aligned with the other side.
The New York Times reported in 2016: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Outrage Machine, Allies Push the Buttons - https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/23/us/politics/hillary-clint...
That's actually pretty amazing considering how long back it was. It's a shame something wasn't done then. Was this an email he responded to? How was it communicated?
> Thursday, April 7, 2005
> 4:12:44 PM EDT
> Mark Zuckerberg starts a conversation with Aaron Greenspan on AIM
>
> [...]
> ThinkComp: i don't care who wrote it
> ThinkComp: or where they are
> ThinkComp: it's your responsibility to get it done
> zberg02: yea but it's also my responsibility to get other stuff done as well
> zberg02: you know how it is to run a business
> ThinkComp: believe me, i totally understand that :-)
> ThinkComp: i'm drowning in taxes
> ThinkComp: and have 20 other projects going on
> zberg02: yea
> ThinkComp: but those projects affect maybe 30 people collectively
> ThinkComp: and there's no danger element
> zberg02: and i really do get that you care about people's security
> ThinkComp: you could have opened yourself up to another lawsuit had you left it open longer
> zberg02: not quite
> ThinkComp: oh yes
> ThinkComp: very much so
> ThinkComp: FTC code section 5
> [...]
SHOOOOOOOT
But things are getting scary , there is a Public Interest petition in court in India where there is a case pending on linking Identity cards with FB (https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/internet/linking-o...). This is even more scary!. FB is a shady organization by any figment of imagination (so are the other free biggies as well) and can go to any lengths for personal profiteering.
We can also develop hacked Facebook , twitter, instagram, yahoo, gmail passwords etc. I’m certain there is someone out there that wants to keep an eye on their spouse by gaining access to their emails,cell phones,social media platform? Parents do you want to know what your kids are up to on a daily basis on social networks?
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