Facebook will hold emergency meeting to let employees ask questions about CA | Hacker News Reader

Facebook will hold emergency meeting to let employees ask questions about CA

theverge.com

70 pointslnguyen30 comments

> The meeting, which is scheduled for 10AM PT, will be led by Paul Grewal, the company’s deputy general counsel. Grewal is expected to explain the background of the case, which involves the user profiles of as many as 50 million people being used by Cambridge Analytica as part of its ad targeting efforts during the 2016 election. Grewal is also expected to take questions via a polling feature found on the meeting’s internal event page.

Why is being run by the head of their general counsel? Because this isn't about addressing employees' concerns or addressing the issue. It's about making sure that everyone at the company has a shared understanding of Facebook's legal stance on CA.

In a more pessimistic light, that might include an understanding of what FB will do to you as an employee if you publicly disagree with their narrative.

> The meeting, which is scheduled for 10AM PT, will be led by Paul Grewal, the company’s deputy general counsel.

What? Paul Grewal was a judge who presided over Facebook court cases. How is that legal?

Apparently he recused himself from FB trials during the time that FB was interested in hiring him in 2016: https://www.engadget.com/2016/05/13/facebook-hires-u-s-magis...

For a single month, he was in that position for six years prior though. Not necessarily wrong but it doesn't look great. Probably a normal level of revolving door though.

It's still a little unclear to me what Facebook did wrong here. (Besides suspending the whistleblowers account, which seems like a dumb move.)

Is it that they collect too much data? We've known that they been doing that for years.

Is it that they allow apps to read not only your data but your friends data? That's not a surprise either.

So some company somewhere figured out a way to abuse these already known parts of Facebook in a way that already violates the their ToS.

What should/could they have reasonably done differently that didn't require changing their entire business model?

At least here in Italy/Europe, beside the "tech bubble", people is vaguely aware that FB is collecting information about them but they are sure "there is nothing they can do with my data beside showing me some silly ad". The discovery that data can be used to actually affect their life has been a shock.

Yes I know, like you, that there is nothing new in the "discovery" but it seems that it's not what people perceive. And this is a significant fact, whatever we think about it.

Do you think anything will really change over here? I don't really believe it.

This is not at all unique to Italy/Europe. Americans have the same attitude as I'm sure many others do. People simply cannot think abstractly enough or far enough ahead (depending on how you want to look at it) to make sense of their world and protect themselves. Or won't. I don't know which, but this failure is hardly unique and encompasses most of most people's lives.

Maybe then changing their business model would be the reasonable thing to do?

It's a collective moment of "yeah but we didn't think they would ACTUALLY DO those things they asserted their right to do in the TOS."

As you've said, everything has been "above board" (in the sense of it being advised in the TOS) apart from maybe the fact that apps get access to friends' profiles. Everyone's just outraged that someone put some real effort into using the tools that Facebook provided as they were clearly intended to be used.

(Also maybe it's due to the success of the campaigns by Facebook, Google etc. to redefine 'privacy' as 'no-one but us gets your data'. People were fine with Facebook having the data, but despite being told it would happen, are really not fine with other companies getting access to significant chunks of that data.)

Facebook sells political-influence-as-a-service. The question is how someone ate their lunch right under their noses.

They should have notified the users whose information was leaked, as soon as they knew about it.

The 50M users whose information was handed to Kogan, and then Kogan sold to CA, should have been notified by Facebook as soon as Facebook found out.

Those users did not agree to that kind of usage of their information.

Well there's three parts to this: One is that data was collected without consent - ie, the third party can collect information about me because my friend gave consent. That's something that facebook has actually stopped now - but the damage is already done.

The second is that Facebook weren't diligent with who allowed to access this data - the 'researcher' collected data and then passed it to a commercial entity with no consequences. This is probably in breach of quite a few laws (especially in the EU).

The third is that Facebook knew that CA had participated in this deliberate breach of their terms to steal data and allowed CA to continue to use this data to target advertising on FB during an election campaign. They only banned CA after it got bad publicity, rather than when the actual infraction occured.

But you consented to give your data to your friend... why is it Facebook's problem what your friend does with your data?

They showed their hand on a topic the news has taught the normies to care about.

Better yet, this will allow everyday people to see the problem because they're given a lens that doesn't make them feel like a rube. (i.e. They will think the data can be abused because it convinced people that are not them to do a thing they find stupid (vote Trump)).

Do you think because "we" know what they're doing, it has any impact on how they act? 95% of people with the vaguest notion of what they're doing find a way to rationalize it as good-or-neutral because they make money from a surveillance company and want to sleep well at night.

Does anyone really believe that FB wants to figure out what went wrong? For some reason, I imagine it playing out like the "Top Men" scene from Indiana Jones.

Zuck will put on the Hoodie of Credibility and promise a Full Investigation. Sheryl will invite others to Lean In. Staff will nervously finger their stock options and ponder their vesting schedules.

Having said that I don't really want them to fix it so I'm being a touch cynical.

> I don't really want them to fix it

Any particular reason for saying so?

Not the GP, but I too feel like if they actually fix it, then there is less chance of catching the other equally culpable actors who now seem to think they have gone above the law (AmaGooFaceSoft). Or worse, actually emboldening them to continue their mad rush to collect every piece of information they can about you.

If FB actually faces complete implosion, their employees are more likely to rat out on the practices of the other companies based on nothing more than having worked at the other company too (after all, when one tech giant hires someone, they are more likely to be hired by a competing tech giant).

They know what went wrong, they already fixed the barn door a while ago, although 50M profiles had already left the barn.

And they are angry (or should be). Not because they care about users, but because their business is selling influence, and it's not enough that someone managed to outsmart them and sell the most expensive form of influence using facebook's data (with facebook getting little or nothing, certainly not the lion's share or even 100% as they are used to when selling influence) - they are being publicly shamed about it.

Everyone who cared (including facebook, politicians, journalists, and a non-trivial amount of the population) knew what was happening. Every single thing about the outrage is a charade, except perhaps Facebook's outrage that CA ate their lunch and left them holding the bag.

And if you ask a question, your name will be taken down.

"How can I properly toe the line and be the ideal obedient FB employee?"

What's the over/under on any asking "Are we the baddies?"

The first sign of a sinking ship is information starts leaking. Thats what seems to be happening with facebook.

By that measure, Apple has been a sinking ship for over a decade.

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