We Can’t Trust Facebook to Regulate Itself
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
But the thing I would want more regulation on is their possession of personal data and the tools to target people using that data. The same applies to all similar advertising-first platforms.
If all of this data and the tools to analyze it are as powerful as the data giants seem to suggest by their marketing and actions (given the increase in collection, storage, and analysis)... Then maybe we, as a society, need to have a conversation about that. And possibly regulation of some kind is an outcome of that conversation.
FB have datasets designed to find those people who will register for a conference, sign up to a streaming service or buy a shoe. The same tools also work for "spreading fake news, etc." There are side effects to large scale use of this, beyond the basic. "Bubbles" was a first pass at describing it, but I think it understates the issue by putting the emphasis on groups of people, and implying insularity is the root cause. I think the truth is more individual focused. There are two types of groups. One is the type you could describe in terms of facebook's "social graph," people connected to eachother in various ways. Another is a segment. People who are not necessarily related to eachother, but "inform" on eaother statistically.
Finding a piece of content you will like is becoming finding a piece of news you will believe.
FB are now a news outlet, the biggest and most important one. I don't know if regulation is the best path to a better news media, it could also make things worse. But, what I'm worried about is that FB does not want to be a news outlet. They would like to maintain their "agregator" designation, like the news tab in google search. I'd like to see them abandon that position, and take on the role of news media more consciously and deliberately. Journalism has an ethic, it's not perfect but at least it recognizes that they play a responsible role in society. FB need to adopt something like this, regulaton or not. .
Call it a conspiracy theory. I really don't see the actual cause being, primarily, anything other than those.
This doesn't have anything to do with Hillary or that whole "election hacking" story. If you've followed the hearings and the angles that US legislators have been taking on these companies it seems clear that most of them don't see this as being related to the elections at all.
From what I've seen the focus has been on the fact that foreign nation states are able to use the tools provided by these companies to target groups of people and then directly use the promotion and communication channels provided by these companies to pump propaganda to those groups.
And that this has been done already, specifically to instigate division and confrontation between groups within our society.
Side notes:
1. Maybe you think that their tools don't have an impact on people and this is all just hyperbole. Perhaps that's true, but if it is true then the business model they've been pitching to advertisers seems like hyperbole as well.
2. All of that aside. These few companies have quickly become the dominant gateway for which a majority of people access the internet. It's where they read news, talk to family and friends, organize events, keep all of their photos, keep their contact list, authenticate into other websites on the internet, get tracked by ads and social media buttons across the internet... None of which is inherently bad but it seems foolish for us to not keep them in check. We don't exist to make sure their companies survive. If society decides that the amount of risk and harm resulting from them outweighs the potential good in their current form then we should consider regulation.
If your opaque point is that we need to break these companies up for... reasons... (Because maybe Russia-something?) Then I suppose I disagree with you less, but not on that principle.
It seems to me that these problems are better solved through education, rather than censorship & policing. But educating is impossible because it would lead to a more informed public.
Regulation by publicly elected and representative officials in our democracy.
> It seems to me that these problems are better solved through education, rather than censorship & policing.
I'm not talking about censorship. My point was regarding the mass data collection and analysis of our personal information that's being done at an impressive scale by these for-profit companies without any form of oversight or transparency.
It isn't cool when the NSA does it and it isn't cool when they're doing it either. Especially not if they're actually profiting from selling our data to other people who are doing whoknowswhat. There is no incentive for them to be responsible.
When I hear a Senator Dianne Feinstein scolding a panel of tech giants, I don't hear a benevolent leader with our best interests at heart, I hear someone infantalizing me for their own gain.
If the topic is data retention, let's target everyone. No one should be safe unless they can justify it under scrutiny & demonstrate security.
If the topic is "fake news", then its a battle of definitions, & regulation is unconstitutional on any government level--no matter how you spin it.
The definition of “Fake News,” that was being used when it started “trending” and the definition FB are now using in their anti-fakenews efforts is not inaccurate news, bad news, biased news or anything like that. It refers to a simple, common sense meaning of “fake.” Articles pretending to be news: written by a fictional journalists in a fictional publication, citing fictional sources at a fictional address.
Fake news did quickly become an insult that everyone (especially you -know-who) uses to flavour their scorn of regular news. …like the way “fraud,” or “whore” are used as insults.
This is not some impossibly abstract conversation about truth. It’s a simple conversation about spam.
I'm genuinely asking. I don't intend for my question to be a slight against your argument.
It also shifts the blame away from Americans who liked what Trump was saying.
A similar thing is happening in the UK with the brexit vote. People are now claiming that Russians bought some adverts. They want to deny the decades of Euroskepticism and misleading stories (bendy bananas anyone?), and years of anti-immigrant newspaper stories.
No one is forced to give their data to Facebook. It's not a public utility. It's an entertainment site, first and foremost.
Neither do we have to. Facebook is grabbing it all anyway. With pre-emptive measures ala ad-, cookie and tracker blocking we can reduce the amount of data they get, but they still get something.
If they'd only collect data about their users, that would be totally fine. But they don't. They build shadow profiles of people who are not on FB and track them just the same way.
FB is a whole lot closer to Orwellian surveillance apparatus than it is to entertainment site.
Maybe they think "you don't have to use FB"... By that logic "you didn't have to use AT&T or the internet at all" either.
And then there's also the thing that, arguably, Google and FB give those people something in return which they might consider worthwhile for just data. I'd question that the majority of the user population is aware of the implications of handing over data about themselves and specifically other people, who may or may not be okay with that.
All the more reason to keep an eye on the people who control the page that so many people view their news from these days.
Given that the mass media is in direct competition with FB, I wonder why they haven't destroyed FB already.
All things considered, Facebook presents a similar level of risk, especially if nation states use it as a digital weapon as we've seen recently.
When the state tells you its on, its at least to your face.
Many social groups use Facebook to organize on. If an individual weren't on Facebook, they'd be much more socially isolated in the same way that if they didn't use a phone (considered a public utility), they'd also be more isolated. I suspect for some people, Facebook/Messenger/Whatsapp is more important than a telephone number.
Some services now require Facebook to use their service. For example, for people who can't afford to own a car, GetAround lets you rent neighbors cars, but they don't accept a government issued ID, only Facebook.
This meme has to stop. In many countries universities are state-run, and they provide more value than most companies.
There are also countless examples of privatisation disasters. Source: am British.
Although those often are to some degree a result of corruption.
- Universities develop social media algorithms that are provenly secure and respectful of privacy. "Federation" should handle issues of trust over network partitions.
- Governments (not a single one) decide if they want to provide computing infrastructure for said algorithms. Alternatively, users could host their own social networks or partitions thereof.
- Big companies provide hardware and maintenance. (And that's all they do. I.e., hands off of our valuable data).
Basically, that's a lot like how the internet functioned when it just started (Universities and DARPA developing the concepts, and companies doing just hardware).
Efficiency is out of the question as well. You cant argue the State will do it better. It wont. And in this case, it can even be harmful.
With shadow profiles, they are being forced to give their data to Facebook or live like an outcast.
How intrusive are the shadow profiles actually? We will know only if their data collection process (as well as the data collection process for all these ad-first companies) is completely and thoroughly investigated.
By having it myself, I have the technical capacity to cut the middleman, which is better for me and for the advertisers that target me.
(This is not a defense of FB, only trying to be useful)
The above statement has a high reach: information fb uses to then deduce something for advertisers has to be included. It doesnt work immediately, so I will have to wait analyze what they share. Its certainly good that they do.
EDIT: just looked at the docs and it is better than I thought but might not be probably enough to get the effect I want to achieve.
ITs revelatory that it contains all the chats I ever had, and would find that hard to share with anyone, yet, clearly FB has it .
Is it? I've always seen it pitched as a communication service with emphasis on staying in touch with friends and always being connected with loved ones.
Why should they be regulated?
Because the more ubiquitous a service becomes, the more it is ingrained in everyday life, the harder it is to avoid. And it should be regulated.
After all, nobody is forcing you to have and use electricity. So why should power companies be regulated?
Or car manufacturers. Or anything really.
Because it makes society a better place.
It is absolutely possible to have privatized power supply.
Edit: to elaborate a little, one shows the ownership form and the other how free of constrains is that activity on the market.
It is. And power companies should be regulated anyway.
For example: to provide current within specific parameters so the white smoke doesn’t escape our devices.
Same with Google - website optimise for Google and Google ranks them higher. Network effect completely captured the market.
Another word for it is 'experience monopoly' - there is no one else that can offer remotely useful to it.
Most people recognize that behaviors that can be seen as voluntary agreements between independent parties can still be problematically imbalanced or in need of "regulation."
It's not reasonable to just ignore the power of network operators. How do you think about net neutrality?
Facebook is a social media website. It doesn't provide a basic, necessary service. It doesn't operate under the physical constraints that utilities do, and it's not impossible to compete with Facebook, as evidenced by the numerous social media services out there like Snapchat, Tumblr, Youtube, Reddit, LinkedIn, Google+, Qzone (China), and Sina Weibo (China).
I'm certainly not against regulation as a general concept. The free market does not produce the best, ethical incentives in all cases. That being said, I fail to see why regulating Facebook is even necessary, and what that would look like in practice.
People on HN seem to take as a given that Facebook having loads of personal data is somehow a bad or dangerous thing. Why? Facebook has 2 billion users. That's 25% of the human population. 2 billion people voluntarily created profiles, provided details about themselves like their age and relationship status, and uploaded photos of themselves, their friends, and their families. For those 2 billion people, the "cost" of "losing privacy" was worth it to them. Face it, nobody outside of the tiny HN bubble cares about the security of their vacation photos or cat pics, nor should they.
And people say Facebook allows companies to upload their customer data to Facebook so they can be targeted through ads on FB, so it would be possible (in theory, not sure about the practice) that Facebook has things like your address and income level as well, for example if you ever filled a marketing survey.
Speaking as someone who often feels disconnected due to their refusal to accept facebook TOS, I would come at this from a very different direction.
Facebook should be required to provide a standardized API and data storage format that allows syndication with other social networks and allows users to transition their data to other social networks.
Think "Pacific Railway Act 1863" for social networks. You can build as much infrastructure as you like, but it _must_ be inter-operable with your competitors.
Then Facebook can ban who they like, there's nothing stopping people from using a different provider.
Their pre-existing intellectual incuriosity is the root problem IMO, not the current medium on which they gorge their ignorance. And by the time the same clowns in Congress who think it's hunky dory to tax grad student tuition waivers craft anything to regulate Facebook, there will be a new and scarier kid on the block extracting and analyzing the information at a whole new unforeseen level.
As others have said, large corporations are effectively the malevolent AIs Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking keep squawking about. Good luck with regulating that.
The entire "Fake news" epidemic seems absurd to me. (and frankly, an intentional distraction) Tabloids have been around literally my entire life. The only difference now is that people apparently can no longer distinguish them from fact. (Not to mention as far back as our first presidents, you can find newspaper articles trumpeting that e.g. Jefferson was in a pact with Satan and his alcoholism would overturn the country. Somehow America prevailed then; what is different now.)
Meanwhile, we have public schools in some states that can't afford more than 4 days a week, politicians for whom lying is absolutely a pathology with no one holding them accountable, and a literacy/numeracy rate far below many other first world countries.
I have many thoughts on why this comes to pass but the cynic in me is focused heavily on that the incentives in the current system (for the current power-players at least) do not align with spending resources to have a highly educated population en-masse.
A few decades back we had and now loosing: - Traceable reputation -- which is now lost, and much harder to learn in our uncontrolled, random and sparse feed interactions. - Focus on topic -- social crises were build up, considered, reflected on. Nowadays, we moved into the realm of emotional reactions. Noone is expected to have mental capacity to consume as many pieces of disjoint information as we do today on social media. In an average feed, a president eats a kid, and a cat does a funny trick one after another.
The prime incentives in the current social system is the instant gratification. This new system is easy to abuse, as we are moving further away from analytical to emotional consumption.
The information overload is due to centralization and advertising.
Individuals can easily overcome information overload via compartmentalization, but Facebook works directly against that strategy by mixing sources, and mixing in advertisements.
What we need to provide individuals is a decentralized communication network that has all the features and accessibility users want.
What would a break-up of Facebook look like? The most famous modern example is the breakup of Bell, but the infrastructure lent itself to a natural geographical split. It's not entirely obvious if a geographic split would work for FB, and it's not entirely obvious along what planes one could split up the company.
Facebook being able to eat up any and every new form of social media is worrisome in its own right. This recent article in particular discusses some pretty solid points: https://stratechery.com/2017/why-facebook-shouldnt-be-allowe...
A long-running antitrust probe of FB or other tech giants might have a similar chilling effect on growth plans, even if the case itself doesn't result in big changes.
It isn't necessarily the best choice, but it is one choice. I'm not sure there's necessarily a much better one, either. It's a very big problem to try to wrap your head around.
[1]: I think you heard it here first, though I can't promise nobody else has come up with that. I haven't heard it before to my knowledge.
I really like the idea of essentially forcing federation protocols to be developed. E-mail was an overwhelming success -- we should look for ways to repeat that success with other aspects.
so ppl would be able to choose platform based on variety of variables like advertisements, data collection, looks, usability.... just an idea
[1]: https://www.w3.org/community/ostatus/wiki/images/9/93/OStatu...
https://mediagoblin.org/news/tpac-2016-and-review-activitypu...
In 2003, Microsoft was ordered by EU to stop bundling OS with browser, media player and other software that seemed so important to them at the time. MS complied.
We look back now and think so what? The EU wasn't really wrong, so much as too focused on the issue-of-the-month.
Regulation of technology is necessarily painting in slow-motion with indelible paint using a broad brush.
We can't even compare to hypothetically breaking up Microsoft, because we could and probably still would have broken it up along product lines. Facebook is definitely more like Standard Oil in the sense that there isn't such a clear line to break the company up on.
Another difficult aspect of this problem is that the oil companies had physically distributed employees. Who is going to be assigned to the part of Facebook responsible for Florida? (Does Facebook even have any non-SV offices? Honest question, I have no idea.) The newly-created business to serve "the Southeast United States" without being located there is going to face some headwinds as the Baby Faces diversify. There's also some good questions around how to prevent one of them from simply winning in a way that a Michigan Baby Bell customer couldn't just decide to use Pacific Bell.
Break-up is a misguided approach. In the case of SO, it only served to make the consequently-more-highly-valued parts more acceptable to, and the whole more deeply integrated into society.
I think technology will again be the solution to today's evil-of-the-month. Which is not to belittle these real and important issues.
1) Publish open APIs that enable federation between Facebook-like services 2) Split Facebook.com into three companies - Facebook the infrastructure company, Facebook the we-sell-advertisements-to-our-users-plus-sell-unprocessed-user-data company, and Facebook the we-process-user-data-to-sell-insights-useful-for-advertising company. Establish legal walls between these companies to ensure that they only communicate with each other through their APIs. 3) Enforce federation by splitting the middle "we actually host users and their walls and their data" company along state lines and international borders, so that they are more beholden to local authorities and jurisdictions.
this would push up the costs massively. Every single state int he US requiring its own data centre. And what do you do if I have a friend in another state and share a post with them? who has the legal power to block that post?
Both states have the power the block - the state hosting the post may block the post from being posted on it's instance, and the state accessing the post may block the post from being seen. Again, because the API is publicly available, oppressive outcomes will probably result in competing solutions implementing the federated API and adopting more liberal administration.
Instagram Whatsapp Facebook the site, which is required to sell its user data to third parties (think large ad services) Facebook the advertising service, which buys userdata & advertising space from Facebook the site and sells it to third parties.
The final two separations are not particularly likely in my opinion.
We could do the same with Facebook. Force them to segregate out different demographics (maybe by continent)
An interesting question. The network effect - the requirement that users can interact with each other - obviously complicates it. Here are a few ideas, which could also be combined in some ways:
A. Eliminate the vertical integration: Infrastructure, UI, advertising, etc. I'm not sure that resolution, by itself, would sufficiently address the problems mentioned in the article.
B. Break it up horizontally, whether geographically or some other arbitrary way, and require they all follow open standards that allow interoperability. If you think of it, that's no different than the Bell breakup - they remained interoperable; people using one post-AT&T company could call someone on another.
C. Both A & B: Different companies could create different UIs, as one example, competing to provide different kinds of user experiences to different markets - one-size-fits-all probably isn't the best solution anyway, especially for an industry selling to every subculture on the globe. The same could apply to other layers, such as advertising: B2B analytics companies would compete to sell differentiated services to advertisers. (It would be essential, IMHO, that the new social network system provide users with opt-out, complete privacy - maybe they could sell their personal info to competing buyers of it.)
The more I think about it, the better it sounds. From this perspective Facebook seems like an awkward monopoly - trying to be all things, on so many layers, to all people and businesses, profiting from monopolistic control, and preventing what seems like (at first impression) the vast innovations that competition would bring if it was opened up.
My realization is this: There's no reason one company must run the entire social network for users to benefit from network effects. Plenty of systems provide network effect benefits without central control - the entire Internet and its protocol stacks, the web, email ...
How about making Facebook give all its data back to users? All the data, photos, metadata, social graph - all of it.
Open source the social graph and give the users their data... would that make sense? Or just create a security nightmare?
Web sites are different. Facebook is just one end of a spectrum of thousands, perhaps tens or hundreds of thousands of electronic destinations that come and go, and cost a few bucks to operate.
Regulations aimed at Facebook would potentially end up targeting every web site with user generated content.
However, I do sympathize on how much facebook is getting from its network effected position. It looks impossible to dethrone. Same for google.
I think the change has to come from how users deal with their own data. If you as a consumer had unlimited access to your data, you could potentially resell it to someone else, forcing facebook and the likes to compete on price. The key here is that the data has to be owned by the consumer, not by facebook itself.
With some meaningful regulation, we could put a stop to this overnight. The internet existed and flourished before this manipulative business model became the norm, and it would exist if we outlawed it. We wouldn't even need to outlaw it, just require explicit written consent to sell personal data.
Can you imagine the ramifications? Once you eliminate the lazy, tired, and frankly intellectually barren model of "make a mediocre service that sucks enough personal data from our users so we can sell ads against them", startups could go back to designing products that solve interesting problems that people are willing to pay for!
So what specifically would that regulation say?
In the end, all systems must have some form of regulator - from engines to code. If you are lucky, you create a governing function by playing engine forces against each other.
Demand is modulated by the ability of a pipe to supply fuel for example.
But most systems may not be with a self governable/equilibrium point. OR they may have one, but it is obviously repugnant to the purpose of the system.
It is then only logical, that a governing system is introduced to deal with the problem within the confines of what is human and practical.
The alternative is not necessarily something of value.
Or at the very least, more expensive.
Let's suppose a false rumor about you spread to hundreds of millions of readers on Facebook. You're shit out of luck and Facebook doesn't have to pay a dime. Germany however might change that with the new law.
Facebook is accountable to their users in the same way a farmer is accountable to his livestock.
"A break-up would be highly disruptive and slow down innovation. It is likely that a Googlet or a Babyface would quickly become dominant again."[1]
Federated social networks will never catch on if they require more work from the user for likely less utility.
Facebook is also nothing like MySpace. This comparison is tired: Facebook is orders of magnitude larger than MySpace ever was. It's not going to get squashed away by a competitor, especially given its ability (alongside Google, Amazon) to buy up would-be competitors while they're young.
I also quite dislike the idea of regulating Facebook as a utility, as I dislike the idea of that tight coupling with government. Facebook quickly becomes a tool for coercion, propaganda, and oppression.
There needs to be a new set of rules built around enforcing competition around the data economy. The real risk is that a couple small players completely shut the door to new competition (which leads to more improper use of data as a few players have all of it). Regulators need to get smarter about blocking mergers (like FB and WhatsApp). New rules, like enforcing data sharing, need to be explored (although this reveals a big risk for data privacy).
[1]: https://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21721634-how-it-shap...
Agreed. In the US, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was the last major attempt at FCC rework. Our world looks nothing like 1996.
My emphasis would be on a more utilized regulatory authority over two methods of entrenchment: (1) data & (2) cloud infrastructure.
Service providers past a certain market share should be limited in how they're able to wield these against competition. If they choose to utilize either for their own, non-neutral services, they should be required to offer them to external parties under reasonable terms that allow for existential-caliber competition.
I realize we failed at this with carriers, but I don't see how the alternative is anything other than a mono-, duo-, or tri-opoly that's able to simply buy any threat to its revenue before the company is able to scale.
Innovation is not a panacea, especially when it's primary goal is to sell you advertising.
Isn't that pretty much what Facebook always has been?
I don't trust Facebook or Google...but I also don't trust the government to regulate them (in the regard to the topic of this piece); or for government to be unduly influenced by either company's competitors trying to stifle the companies, or the possibility of limiting speech. There are so many things that can go wrong in getting government involved in this aspect.
Using your reasoning, you might ask why it's bad to let vulnerable elderly individuals be hoodwinked out of their savings. What happened to their responsibility?
It seems to me that the people as a body are incapable of managing themselves and so they need safeguards. (Wow, that makes me sound like a dictator.)
It's a bit different because in your case, we're actively reducing harm. You can't just say "censorship will fix it" or "oversight will fix it" unless we're talking about specific scenarios. Which is why, in general censorship and oversight doesn't really fix anything.
This is also why laws are very detailed and specific. It would be nice to say "be good to one another" and be done with it.
What could do good? A disclaimer every time you log in saying "Pro tip: get your news from reliable sources, not your facebook feed."? Are there any ways people could be prompted to do the right thing?
The question is then: what can be done? Just because it's hard to know how to handle the problem doesn't mean we shouldn't try to.
Do they? I don't, most of my friends are idiots (and still my best friends) Isn't that their fault however? The government cannot tell you to trust or distrust your friends.
> How do you protect the people who can't use critical thinking to get answers?
It's a scary world when you want the government to tell you what you are allowed to read and believe.
2. I didn't say I wanted the government to tell me or other people what they were allowed to read and believe. I'm saying I somehow want something to be done to help people realize that they can't trust everything they read online for unverified sources.
You're right that the government can't tell us whether to trust or distrust our friends. But can people be taught to think for themselves?
Maybe a better option is adding training to the curriculum specifically designed to teach students how to classify sources by bias and by probable authenticity.
Lack of funding isn't the cause.
Schools in the US receive more funding per pupil than schools in the EU or top performing Asian countries. More directly, the US spends more than Canada and gets far worse results. It's difficult to find the root of problem, but I would blame religiosity and widespread violent crime. Young earth creationists are still doing their best to hamstring the sciences no amount of money spent on a child can make up for a father who is dead or imprisoned.
http://news.gallup.com/poll/170822/believe-creationist-view-...
How could the educational system possibly be unaffected by most of the country still denying a foundational part of modern science?
Upon further investigation, we can see that it's not unaffected. Pitched battles are still being waged on intellectual ground settled generations ago in nearly every other developed country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_and_evolution_in_publ...
The reality is that only one of the above opinions, "God created humans directly in their present form" is provable/disprovable in any way and therefore the only one which science has anything to say about.
That said, 42% is still an admittedly high number. But you are the one who fails to understand a foundational part of modern science when you assume that correlation equals causation, and that increased religiosity results in poorer education while failing to realize that both are correlated with increased levels of poverty, which seems far more likely to cause poor education than religion.
With everyone on the web, it turns out that now large meta processes - like elections, are being affected.
At this point, things are no longer the same, and new meta systems are required.
The world changed, and the internet is no longer just for us.
Even if the Times went completely far far far left, they aren't the only game in town. I can choose to read any of a number of other papers, LA Times, Wall Street Journal, Economist etc..
What alternative is there fire FB?? Mastodon.. Hubzilla..? They're great, if someone has the capability to run the service. I'd argue that most users can't be bothered to learn more than a chromebook let alone understand how to run their own server.
When you have a monopoly like this, it either needs government regulation, ( which is generally bad because it tends to hurt other similar companies), or break them up, i think this is the ideal option, but i don't know in this case.. Break it up by forcing all their code to open source, of perhaps force them to run it more federated or diaspora like and mandating interoperability with these other services..
I'm not sure what the answer is. Of course the real answer is nobody has to use Facebook.. But for a lot of people, that's not an option they're interested in, and since fb literally have all the data, it likely needs regulation which i find very distasteful and terrifying.
Are we breaking them up because they have "too much information"? What does that even mean? A move like that would be beyond unprecedented.
NYTimes is far from a monopoly - there are tons of news site with more traffic. But there's no competitor that comes close to Facebook
[1] http://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...
Why? Do you find it terrifying that your doctor, hospital, and health insurance company have very strict regulations on keeping your health data private? I, frankly, find it distasteful and terrifying that they have essentially no regulations on the data and can do whatever they want with it. I mean look at what happened at Equifax for example.
Early in their history, credit agencies collected very private personal information about people for inclusion in their credit files. The information in peoples' credit files was frequently inaccurate, and consumers had no way of correcting that information, and no way of even knowing what was in their credit file.
The Fair Credit Reporting Act [1] limits the information that credit agencies can keep on people, mandates that people be allowed to access what is in their file, mandates that people be able to correct inaccurate information, and restrains how third parties can access the information.
In fact, that all sounds like a great start to regulation for social networks and other internet giants!
In fact, Zynga, and many other social gaming Developers, practically went out of business as FB started to enforce data usage policies.
It's like the NSA saying "We collect your information, but we have laws to prevent their abuse.". First you have to be caught, and then they'll punish you. There are no technical limitations. This is like someone like Equifax saying "Here's our database server credentials, but connecting to it or querying is illegal.".
FB trusted Developers to do the right thing with that data through T&Cs.
Someone is always going to be thinking about the bottom line, but come on now. Facebook isn't the only internet business that the russians used to influence people. Have you looked at reddit over the last 3 years? Any and every site with influence is going to get gamed by every government who has the bandwidth to play ball. You can't regulate your way around that. Look at how the Trump administration is currently using Twitter. Is that proper? no, but it's great for Twitter. Should they refuse to service him?
Governments shouldn't be looked to for solutions. Government is TERRIBLE at solving any problems. If change is required or desired, you go about making change happen the good old fashioned way - by getting others to agree with you.
The recent "regulate Facebook" furor (as seen near-daily at the NYT) seems to feed into a larger pattern of this. There are a lot of establishment-friendly, technocratic people who don't seem to have adjusted their worldviews to accommodate the last ~18 months.
These are people who argued over the last eight years that we need the trustworthy, knowledgeable parts of government (roughly defined as "executive branch bureaucracies") to rein in the excesses of productive-yet-reckless businesses.
And then Trump became president and appointed a string of regulatory heads who support entrenched businesses and oppose the existence of their own departments. And seemingly, no one noticed. Whether or not Tom Wheeler and Michelle Lee were qualified to regulate the tech sector, Ajit Pai and Andrei Iancu aren't.
My opinions on regulation are not strictly libertarian. But I'm absolutely baffled by watching left-leaning voices work their hardest to empower grossly incompetent regulators who disagree with all of their goals.
The thing is, I actually agree with the overall message, and that's why such a change of heart from the media is so noticeable - I've been talking about this for years, and I never saw opinions like that in the MSM. But now it seems like there's an article like that every week on the HN front page.
What happened?
So one and more of
WhatsApp vs Instagram vs fb vs messenger
FB video vs FB ads vs fb news
FB EU vs US vs India vs...
FB identity vs fb communication vs fb ads
There was no precursor to regulating standard oil in the last century, and no precursor to regulating Google, FB, Amazon, this century.
Doesn't mean it's not warranted.
If Facebook builds in the tools so governments can control exactly what is posted on them then expect every single nation in the world to require access to these tools overnight.
Even nations we might think of as being very condition of the right of their citizens have content they deem illegal and would if they could be required by their own laws to compel Facebook to let them control this.
This, in the end, would not just be about public content but also about all private content, messages sent over FB messenger etc.
Do we want a popover to show up next time we share a hypothetical "dick pick" with a 'lover' saying 'awaiting review from your local authorities'? God forbid you are on holiday/changing planes in a religious extream region of the world and find yourself carted off to jail for 10 years for this.
For example, I know that a current employee accessed data on profiles I had viewed and shared it with another friend. Unclear how they secure PII and how such abuse can be reported.
Just stop using it, it really isn't that important.
the most important point is that I can keep going indefinitely as long as I don't get bored, because you can't outspend me if it doesn't cost me anything to keep going.
Like talking to people, in real life: face to face?
They're making a dent in that.
The call to regulate a free press (Facebook) is far more disturbing than any targeted advertising Facebook is engaged in.
I don’t consider FB a pure evil, just a potential danger. Their moral hazard is comparable to that of a heroin dealer—-they are incentivized to get you using the product as much as possible, regardless of the possibility that more than a small amount could be harmful.
It's a farce. It reminds me of church pedophilia in Poland. Various transgressions commited by priests are left for the Church to handle with its internal procedures. Which is usually just sweeping under the carpet, like moving a pedo priest to a different region. The faithful do their part - denial, and ostracism for people who criticize Church too loud.
The Fair Credit Reporting Act [1]:
- regulates what data credit agencies can store,
- mandates that people be able to access data about themselves,
- mandates that third parties cannot access a person's data without the person's consent every single time,
- mandates that people must be able to correct false information in their credit file,
- mandates that people be able to place a "freeze" on uses of their credit data
Each of these things translates quite nicely to private data that internet giants gather on us.
If it's not measurable and automateable, you can't trust it.
Why not take over the domain name, dismantle the company and put its board on prison?
That would make sense.
Is there something about NY times (I don't read it) that warrants a downvote on OP's comment?
I trust the government even less.
There's got to be a better solution.