Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasonlfunk | Hacker News Reader

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?

View on HN

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?

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.

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

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.)

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.

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.

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com