Statement by FTC Regarding Reported Concerns about Facebook Privacy Practices
ftc.gov
ftc.gov
This is the crux of the issue. The problem is that when Facebook asks for "location information", the consequences of this are not being conveyed to the user. The user might think, "ah they want my location for the weather recommendations and event suggestions in my neighbourhood". They do not realise how something so "innocuous" as location information could be weaponised against them.
I used location data as an example because you could infer almost everything about a person just from that. You could know their social circle, their approximate tax bracket, which banks they use, who is their lawyer, their accountant and their wealth manager, their familiar situation, how healthy they eat, how healthy they are, whether they are chronically ill, and what type of chronic diseases they might have, what activities they engage in, what are their political leanings, I could go on, I do not think this is anywhere near an exhaustive list...
The user does not know that Facebook it going to tip off the insurance provider about the user's unhealthy eating habits or his chronic medical condition. Or maybe tip off his bank that he has substantial wealth elsewhere.
I think regulation around this idea may be most effective. Companies should have limits on what they can do with the data by default. If they want to use it for more, then they should not only offer a much greater degree of transparency but they should have to abide by much higher standards, too, similarly to how medical companies have to abide by much higher standards when collecting your information.
So if a company asks for location data just to use it for weather information, that could be obtained with a single click from the user. If the company intends to use that location data to allow advertisers to target you, then it should be made very clear to the user that this is what the purpose of collecting the data is. And they should need to do more than just click once on a button.
If the same company intends to give the data to electoral campaigns, then higher standards still should be imposed on that company.
The point is we need to start regulation the use of data, and not just what type of data can be collected.
Even if all companies were required to and did comply with a law like that and fully disclosed the information, the collected data would just be laundered through a third party in some way so that the terms of service were technically correct, but they could still get away with business as usual.
I think these companies just need to be barred from using data in this way period. It's the only way to ensure users are protected in my opinion.
You could be "doing nothing wrong" and still get screwed by right people thinking the wrong things about your data.
1984 or Brazil - it doesn't matter they're both dystopias that revolve around totalitarian constructs - neither of them work without this kind of comprehensive information.
[edit: clarity]
I should feel better now that people of aware of the nefariousness of this type of data collection, but I feel worse. The general public is being fed this as "Russia" and "Trump", and not getting the real, horrifying, surveillance state truth of what's going on.
I'm less worried that the Trump campaign used CA (and that the Clinton campaign used CTR), than I am by Obama saying "it's just metadata".
The standard nickel is 5 grams but they typically weigh between 4.9 and 5.1 grams. However for such a large number of nickels, due to wear, I'd say it's a safer bet to lean towards the lower bound, and also add some uncertainty so a more accurate answer is probably 204±5 thousand nickels.
But, and maybe someone can clarify, every single intelligence agency has come out and said that there was some interaction between Russia and Trump and, more specifically, between Facebook and Russia. And it's been proven Facebook is directly implicated in both the Trump campaign and Russian election meddling.
We hold the ability to vote in free elections as pretty a basic fundamental right in a democracy, so why wouldn't this be the thing we should all be worried about?
If we were so worried about the integrity of democracy, we wouldn't have our fingers in so many other ones. You've just described soft power.
Great question. We don't know, because either we don't get caught or doesn't happen to begin with.
We can make up all sorts of conspiracies, but Russia got caught so the conversation starts there.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_electoral_interventi...
Probably a level which should induce intense concerns in citizens of those countries if they already had a democracy to protect in the first place.
But thanks for the textbook display of Whataboutism.
Whataboutism is pointing at an unrelated problem, to divert attention from your problem. "But what about African Americans getting beaten!" to draw attention from bread lines and GULAGs - that sort of thing.
This is an incredibly related problem. The two cannot be discussed in isolation. This is quite literally, one of the top countries for 'interference in democratic elections' having an issue with its election being interfered with by a foreign power (In a relatively[1] minor way.)
Notice how none of the talking heads or politicians are taking a principled stance against interference with elections - they are just taking a stance against interference with their elections.
[1] Relatively, in terms of impact, effort expended, size of the United States.
Yes, the accusation you've launched is one of blatant hypocrisy; the use of such accusations against those raising an issue as distraction technique to draw attention away from the issue raised is exactly the definition of Whataboutism.
You can probably construct an argument where the hypocrisy of some speaker advancing the argument would itself actually be relevant to the argument being advanced [0], but that's almost never the case in any real discussion; instead Whataboutism (and then tu quoque fallacy more generally) has the same rhetorical purpose as guilt by association or as hominem; create a negative emotional charge attached to some group associated with an argument, and use that to get people to dismiss the argument without considering it's merits.
The accusations in the motivating instances for naming Whataboutism were often both indisputably true and the same type of wrong as the act they served to distract from.(which is as close to relevance as charges of hypocrisy get.) They were still fallacious, just as this one is, irrespective of its truth or.degree of analogy.
[0] e.g., if the argument specifically included as a key point that the speaker did not engage in hypocrisy.
You can cry "whataboutism" all you want when confronted with examples like these ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r... ), but don't be surprised or dismayed when no one listens.
Sure, it's a “thing”, specifically a name based on rationalization given to the cognitive filtering mechanism which a number of fallacies, notably as hominem and tu quoque, target.
But it's never relevant to the merits of the argument; targeting moral authority is always an effort to avoid consideration of the merits of the argument.
If so, I sympathize. I get that a lot, myself.
If the citizens of Iran or Vietnam or Korea or Iraq have a right to be upset at a lack of political self-determination, so do I. Punishing the people of a country for the actions of the leaders they did not meaningfully choose is exactly why US interference is wrong.
And it is because I as an individual care about democracy that I oppose the actions of both my leaders and anyone else to override democracy.
No, they say (in the public assessment) that Russia intervened to favor Trump, not that there was interaction between Russia and the Trump campaign.
Now, there's been at least one guilty plea from the Mueller investigation specifically referencing interaction, but that's a separate thing from the public intelligence assessment.
The FBI strongly disagrees with that statement. Facebook has been proven to be used as one of the tools to achieve those ends.
Whatever the FBI or people in it believe, the public assessment put forth by the US Intelligence Community does not address interaction; it is inaccurate to attribute that as a public unanimous conclusion of the Intelligence Community.
Note that I'm not making the “no collusion” argument, hence the reference to the Papadopoulos plea. The Trump-Russia interaction just is outside the scope of the public Intelligence Community assessment, and shouldn't be described as the public conclusion of the US intelligence community.
No, they don't.
> There's at least two anti-Trump rallies alleged to have been organized by Russia.
Be that as it may, the public assessment does not state as the ICs assessment that any part of the intervention had an anti-Trump purpose (a rally can be organized whose overt message supports a cause without the purpose being advancing that cause.)
A nickel is 75% copper and 25% nickel.
There are 2000lbs in a ton. That's 1500lbs of copper and 500lbs of nickel.
Scrap pricing is $2.50/lb for copper, $3750. Scrap pricing is $4.83/lb for nickel, $2415.
Total = $6165
Interesting, I thought nickle was the coin and nickel was the metal, but it seems that isn't the case and/or changed. (?)
"For in every country of the world, I believe, the avarice and injustice of princes and sovereign states, abusing the confidence of their subjects, have by degrees diminished the real quantity of metal, which had been originally contained in their coins."
-- Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denarius#Debasement_and_evolut...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denarius#/media/File%3AFinenes...
On top of that, as someone with experience in database marketing, people act as if they are being personally spied on. If you are tracking 800k people and you have 20 employees, the issue isn't really having another person looking at your data, the issue is the unethical ways organizations are using that data to manipulate you and the rest of society.
It's the difference between "The government conducts unethical surveillance" and "The government is spying on me."
When everything is remembered forever anything you've done can be retroactively traced backed to you when you become a person of interest.
* Logically consistent in niche fields that could be verified if more information was public (Room 641A); these should really just be called "theories"
* Harmless garbage ideas perpetuated by dumb people (flat earthers); these theories deserve open ridicule
* Propaganda created by intelligent people with the intent of causing harm (Uranium One); these should simply be illegal as libel
Those are important distinctions. Some conspiracy theories are straight up garbage, they do not deserve any modicum of respect... legitimate theories are in the minority.
The "Uranium One conspiracy theory" was a libelous attack on a political candidate. That attack is a prime example of legitimate conspiracies.
* Harmless garbage ideas perpetuated by dumb people (flat earthers); these theories deserve open ridicule
Those theories are anything but harmless, actually kill people and sabotage decades of medicinal breakthroughts, which saved millions of lifes.
I just had an existential age-related hiccup realizing that I had a school paper on the subject back in 2002.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/the-incredible-story-of-how-t...
https://www.twilio.com/marketplace/add-ons/nextcaller-advanc...
Give it a try with your phone number. It'll provide your address (current and former), income bracket, relatives, siblings, children, etc, etc.
Guess what Facebook asks you to provide when initially setting up!?
Amusingly enough, so does Fetlife (NSFW). It's not outside the realm of possibility that even your specific kinks could be appended to that list.
"Name, Address, Email, Carrier, Line Type, Secondary Phone, Age, Gender, Household Income, Marital Status, Presence of Children, Home Owner Status, Home Market Value, Length of Residence, High Net Worth, Occupation, Education Level, Twitter Handle & Followers, Facebook Profile & Followers, LinkedIn Profile"
I do not speak for Fitbit, but I work for Fitbit, and I do not appreciate my employer being baselessly lumped in with violators of privacy.
It's not a baseless assumption that fitness trackers abuse access to people's private data. Maybe your particular fitness tracker doesn't today. That doesn't mean others don't.
And I am - for argument's sake - agreeing with the notion that privacy violation happens when the online service does something "wrong" with the data, not when the online service demands to keep their own copy, for their own uses, as a precondition to using the software.
History has shown that software that sends as much data home as possible can simply not be trusted with that data. Fitbit is one "innovation" or management team change away from further abusing the access to their user's data. I don't mean to coldly disregard the fact you trust your employer. But if I want an accurate assessment I can't care. Facebook employees trust Facebook.
Just insert NN generated Noise into there databases. Instant devaluation of there most treasured asset. That has to hurt.
Initially cookie was designed to help website track you around THEIR website; it wasn't design to track you around the WHOLE internet. While it may be in Facebook spirit of "hacking things" and "breaking things", I'm surprised EU and US have not come up with strict rules and regulations on how cookies can be utilized.
I remember in EU Facebook tried to argue that they track you around web for your safety and security but I'm unsure how much water it hold.
I'm not aware of any US protections unless they came along with recently passed legislation, but the GDPR had some recourse for European citizens. They are now guaranteed a right to explanation and a right to correct the data. So if a person is given a higher health insurance premium, they are allowed to ask for an explanation. If the answer is "Google thinks you're gay, so we're raising your premium," the person is allowed to correct the information, basically saying, "I'm not gay, so please lower my premiums to what they were."
Advertising "gay" products to you based on the fact that your cell phone spends a lot of time in close proximity to a gay bar probably doesn't meet the bar for a discrimination lawsuit.
where do you get this outlandish nonsense from?
"Under the statute it is effectively illegal to perform any of the following in the presence of minors: hold gay pride events, speak in favor of gay rights, or say that gay relationships are equal to heterosexual relationships"
"The law subjects Russian citizens found guilty to fines of up to 5,000 rubles and public officials to fines of up to 50,000 rubles."
Typically thuggish laws from a state run by its own intelligence services-cum-mafia.
If not for the media coverage of this, Facebook would be unable to care any less. The media coverage though is driving the stock prices down and effect the company many orders of magnitude more negatively than any legal enforcement will.
Regardless What pisses me off is FB not providing evidence to the contrary, that they don't harvest data in the bqckground. Not providing this evidence makes it quite clear that they do harvest this data. The issue isn't about permissions. 'Sir, may I come inside your house, is fine, but ransacking the house once you get is is douchebaggery.
There's probably even better ways of doing it.
On mobile networks I believe the carries will gladly sell the tower-IMEI mapping. They already have to collect that for law enforcement purposes anyway.
Right now GeoIP identifies my desktop computer as being in northern Nevada. I'm 400 miles away.
Right GeoIP identifies my laptop as being in Atlanta. I'm 2,300 miles from Atlanta.
Right now GeoIP identifies my wireless hotspot as being in Los Angeles. I'm more than 400 miles from Los Angeles.
Three devices, inches away from each other in reality. But GeoIP thinks they're on opposite ends of the country.
GeoIP has certainly improved in the last few years, but I would never rely on it for anything important.
Any application can do this on iOS, with a few caveats:
- iOS prompts you to grant permission when the application requests it for the first time. If you refuse, the application cannot keep prompting you.
- After a few days, it reminds you that the application has been accessing your location in the background and asks you if you want to keep allowing it or revoke access.
- There is an indicator in the status bar to let you know when an application is tracking your location.
- You can see which applications have access and which applications have used that access recently by going to Settings > Privacy > Location Services.
- You can revoke access at any time in the same place or by going to Settings > App Name.
- You can also only grant applications access to your location while you are using the application, as long as the application supports that.
- If an application doesn't intrinsically need location services to function and the developer tries to force users to grant permission by disabling functionality, the application is unlikely to be allowed in the App Store.
As others have mentioned, there are also other ways in which applications may be able to infer your location indirectly.
Are you aware of any instance in which this has actually happened? AFAIK Facebook has not been selling location data to anyone, and this would be a direct violation of their privacy policy.
Further, if I worked for an insurance company or bank, I’d have customers install my mobile app that has lots of convenience features, and have that app request location permissions so that I could get GPS data directly from their mobile device. Then I’d use that location data, that I obtained directly and in accordance with all applicable privacy policies, in all of the scary ways you mention and then some.
Going to Facebook is not the most efficient way to violate the privacy of most individuals. Most people will happily trade their privacy for a small discount or to be able to save a few seconds interacting with a service they use. This is where any legislation in this area should focus - not on punishing a specific company because the “wrong” candidate happened to win an election.
https://stratechery.com/2018/the-facebook-brand/
https://stratechery.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Screen-Sh...
https://web.archive.org/web/20130911191323/https://developer...
The market has a short memory, and FB is not going anywhere. However, there may be some welcomed changes in data abuse.
With that said, I think the stock is a bargain today.
Is it even possible to come up with an answer for this?
You can get away with a pretty much anything as long as it's legal, not a big symbol, or that you have money to bypass the legal issue: the public won't hold you responsible for long.
Here it's even worst, because it's also coupled with a total lack of interest. People mostly don't care about co-creating a society. They just want to enjoy the rewards of it right now.
Unless pictures of them doing something they are ashamed of are displayed on a highway billboard, data privacy is not even on their map.
A sustained 20% drop in market share for a very large, very established company that has fairly few competitors, substantial network effects, and a high barrier to entry. That's a significant drop. It didn't wipe out the company, no, but it's a far cry from saying that "the market doesn't remember" - in this case, the market very clearly did remember.
And still falling. A dark part of me hopes the sharks looking to make a profit without recognition of how Facebook is in really deep shit just lose everything. A lot of glib predictions about catching falling knives here, but they seem to ignore Facebook not being quite as essential or inescapable as someone’s bank or credit reporting agency.
People don’t really understand Equifax, and simple breaches don’t bother them as much actively manipulated. Facebook provides a really nominal service for most people, and I think some here are trying very hard to convince themselves this is something other than their bubble being pricked.
Good luck.
Given the existence of the shadow profile, FB is exactly as inescapable as a credit reporting agency.
That's not true. Facebook has data, but their data isn't as valuable and important to individuals as that controlled by a credit reporting agency.
For instance, Equifax has info to enable straightforward identity theft, and I need all that data to be there if I want reasonable terms on a loan I may want.
The Facebook social graph is mainly valuable to advertisers and intelligence agencies, both of which I can happily ignore day-to-day. It's data could be a tool for identity theft, but I doubt they have the SSNs or CC numbers in their shadow profiles needed to make that easy.
It might be the case that the sum is greater than the parts, but I don't know if the market would respond to a split from a purely rational stance, at least initially.
The problem with Equifax is that I can't do anything to retaliate against the company.
Facebook, this kind of stuff is inherent in their business model. Our data is the only obvious thing they can turn into money.
You could freeze your credit with Equifax, if you're not looking to take out new credit lines. It costs money, but I've heard it pretty much stops them from making money off your info. That's why the credit agencies are pushing things like "credit locks," which don't have legal mandates behind them meaning they can design the service to suit themselves.
They are a financial stalker for others
However, I'm not an expert and I'd like to hear more about this.
The stock was literally dead money for decades and the ramifications are clear. The recent selling pressure is driven to an extent by memories of Microsoft and the financial impact. The stock is in no meaningful sense a bargain.
But they finally got a credible cloud strategy together which recognized today's realities which is why their stock is doing better.
I won't say anti-trust had no impact but they had more fundamental problems.
> “They’re afraid, it seems. Whether it’s antitrust in U.S. or in Europe, they seem to be slowly reacting to the world around them, rather than trying to get in there fast."
Certainly some academics would nontrivially attribute the strategic moves to anti-trust-related conservatism
How did "the market" not notice?
If users happen to decide that a company is not "cool" anymore or dispase its public figure(Zuckerberg), it may actually go away.
Remember IE(stands for Internet Explorer)? Using Firefox and later Chrome became a crusade and the almighty brand of the richest person in the world that holds the monopoly on computers platforms bled to death.
Every developer on Earth could leave Facebook and it would not make the experience of using fb any worse. Facebook is not a software platform, it’s an ad platform.
If anything fb would get better if we stopped targeting it.
When the Chrome came along, Firefox already put a dent in IE market share and it already became socially unacceptable for techies to use IE but regular people still used IE so the devs were forced to make sure that everything works perfectly on IE too. For the masses, thanks to the developers, IE displayed the websites just fine up until the bitter end.
Friends didn't let friends use IE and it was killed.
It’s far from dead, although we’re finally seeing Edge and Firefox rise a bit more sharply.
Slow-moving, heavily regulated corps with lots of internal legacy apps simply cannot use Chrome with its frequent feature deprecation, weak management, and constant desire to send telemetry and who knows what else to Google servers.
In 2011, Facebook was good at its job, with a chronological news feed, meaningful notifications, and a messenger paradigm that worked much like AIM in the early 2000s -- you could see who was online, away, go invisible, etc. In 2018, Facebook has lost all of those positives, and with it a lot of user engagement, all for the sake of cramming the maximum number of ads down the users throats. And I'm not even getting into the nasty dark UX patterns, like hiding the ability to delete your profile (seriously, there isn't a link to do this anywhere on the site -- you need to search Google for it and they change the link all the time to break external guides) and showing random pictures of "friends who will miss you if you leave!" when you try to delete your account. I don't think your average user would mind leaving Facebook much if there was any actual alternative.
This is just a minor quibble to lambda_lover's point, which still stands. Facebook may understand it's job is to shove as many ads in its users' faces as they will tolerate, but that's not why users use its app. It's users view its job as being useful to them, and being bad at that makes makes FB vulnerable to competitors or even just general dissatisfaction.
:)
Facebook isn't the VC company, Facebook is who those companies hope to sell to later.
Older people can't. I think sharing photos with extended (ie, older) family is a huge use case for Facebook.
Politics and some hobby groups are on Facebook and interesting, but the real meat is the personal photos and stories that would never be in the news.
People can adapt. In my fantasy football group we used to do Facebook messages until me and another friend dropped Facebook. Now we do group messages or groupme. People you care about will find a way to contact you.
Exactly - that's the danger for FB. If the coolest of kids head somewhere else, that strong social pressure works against FB and not for it.
Then anything he touches becomes toxic. Zuckerberg isn't even divisive like Trump, he may have issue finding people to rally with him against the deserters.
I wanted these platforms to succeed, I've had an account and tried using most of them - Diaspora, Friendica, Red Matrix, someothermatrixIdontrememberthenameof, Mastodon, identica/statusnet, ... They're all the same. (I'm sure I'm forgetting at least one or two, but they all blend together.)
Digg was abandoned because it broke itself. The codebase that all those users knew and depended on was completely trashed (the original author hangs out here sometimes), the site dropped a number of its key functions, and the user experience was redesigned to maximize Digg's ability to show ads, no matter how obnoxious that got, with many people saying that it was almost entirely ads by this point (I had personally stopped using Digg years before the big v4 debacle, so I can't speak to this directly).
People want the path of least resistance. They'll tolerate some ads, but their tolerance ends when it's just easier to click over to the other guy's site and get a comparable experience. If you neuter/break Digg, and reddit is right there, well...
The path of least resistance for Facebook users is still Facebook, regardless of the news cycle. Facebook will remain dominant until it is no longer the path of least resistance, just like everything else.
Users have different levels of tolerance. The moment a switch is the path of least resistance differs for everyone, usually corresponding to their level of emotional investment in the platform and their individual tech savvy. Facebook has a lot of very invested, very non-tech-savvy users.
The right types of questions to ask are along the lines of whether we're sure competitors have sufficient ground to catch up to massive incumbents and keep them honest (and in this case specifically, whether certain misrepresentations or violations occurred that should be made to materially affect market standing through government intervention). For the most part, tech is non-competitive due to terrible legislation like the CFAA.
That case is about an almost identical twin, but I would also consider sites that are not so similar but serving the same function. I haven't had a Facebook account so not sure what it is exactly, but people are happy as long as I have Whatsapp.
I don't see how there could ever be any viable competition. Facebook already has many of the top engineering minds in the world who are pushing the edge of what computers are capable of, not to mention the largest database and neural network of human behavior ever created.
How is any of that necessary?
I don't give a shit about their bleeding-edge neural network or army of PhDs. I just want to send my mom pictures of my kids and maybe send an occasional party invitation to some friends. What does Skynet contribute to this workflow?
I would argue that all that technical bloat only made the Facebook experience worse. Facebook itself had humble beginnings. All a competitor needs is a LAMP or MEAN stack, an experience worth migrating to, and enough ethical sense to not treat its userbase like a science experiment.
It also needs the ability to make the transition plausible for consumers. There's really no reason that Facebook should be able to enforce a stringent walled garden and bar specific user agents that aren't negatively impacting the network and aren't exceeding the access of the user they represent.
But Facebook did exactly this in Facebook v. Power Ventures, leaving an entrepreneur with a ruined business and a bill for $3M in damages for creating a system that exfiltrated only one's own personal, copyrighted data from Facebook. It wasn't even taking other peoples' feeds or trying to multiplex data. It was simply trying to make one's own data accessible and portable.
Large tech companies have done this for decades, abusing the CFAA and the Copyright Act to enforce de facto platform monopolies. These companies know that if they can't assert ownership over the data, they'll have to compete on merit in the open marketplace, and who wants to deal with that?
This is also why you don't see new protocols like POP3 or NNTP anymore. Academics trying to build a transparently-syndicated collaboration platform are out. Big companies looking to hoard your data and assert some type of incidental, indirect ownership over it are in, and they want to make sure that you don't really have the option to leave. Lock-in is king.
Once a critical mass outside of the tech-savvy early adopter crowd is obtained, aggressive legal methods like those used against Power allow incumbents to hold onto power in perpetuity. Granny doesn't care about all of that tech mumbo-jumbo. She just knows that she can't see Auntie's pictures anymore because you broke it by switching her to F+. Since they're legally forbidden from multiplexing Facebook's content into a universal "social media reader", Granny's options are to stare at a blank feed or go back to Facebook -- even though Auntie would be perfectly willing to allow Granny to see her content through F+, and it's really more of an accident that Facebook is the platform that received the initial post.
What is Granny gonna do in this situation? Why have we awarded tech companies the right to hold user-generated content hostage like this? Wrap anything in custom HTML and it's suddenly very difficult for a third-party to access it without infringing your copyright on the exterior HTML wrapping, regardless of the status of the content inside. In the US, it's infringement to load copyrighted content into RAM, per the RAM Copy Doctrine.
Good luck convincing a technologically-illiterate judge that your software is no more disruptive than Chrome or Firefox, especially when you have to do so over the objections of Facebook's $X000/hr law firms and previously-referenced army of PhDs.
Such rules have stifled online innovation for decades now, and they're the reason that the internet is becoming a walled garden.
Under the GDPR, which mandates all companies provide a machine-readable export of user data within some fairly short timeframe (less than a week iirc), things may become marginally more fluid for people in EU countries, but I wouldn't count on it.
Disclaimer: not a lawyer
This is already sort of happening anyway with the "my parents are on Facebook now" problem. That I think is a much bigger threat to Facebook's future than any regulations that are coming.
Re: GP's examples, Uber is a "user-facing" company, and the Wells Fargo and Bank of America scandals involved consumer services.
Also, it's not like companies are incapable of making conscientious decisions with regard to other companies with which they do business.
A distinction without a difference.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#/m...
It was no-brainer to switch to Chrome.
Also, Google was this cool company that was giving away revolutionary products. Don't do evil was their motto.
If you want Facebook to die you have to come up with an alternative with improved usability to convince people to switch over. Now you have do that with the added handicap of "do no evil" (so less money from targeted advertising etc...) while fighting to gain market share against some of the biggest companies in the world. My guess is that if you manage to do all of that you'll just end up bought by Facebook anyway.
Of course.. unfortunately you can't say no when some behemoth wants to buy you. /s
Honestly if fb were to just take the money from me and leave me alone i'd be happy to pay that ransom for my friends.
Most importantly, those who wished to make the switch from IE to Firefox or Chrome or Safari or Opera, etc. could do so without requiring any additional action by others. Again, outside of a few compatibility issues on a few sites, I could change the software I used without convincing webmasters or other users to do anything.
Same went for webmail. I could switch to Yahoo or Gmail or Hotmail or whatever I wanted without requiring me to convince every other relative, friend, and business contact to do the same.
With something like Facebook, you can't just use a different platform to interact with those same people in the same way unless you convince them all to migrate with you. If everyone you know only wants to use Facebook, then that's your option. You can't set up your profile on Diaspora or Google+ or whatever and expect to enjoy all the things you prefer about them because there's no shared protocol like there is with web browsing or email.
and how can consumers avoid giving business to equifax?
There was an awakening, the public mood changed, people were energized and emboldened to take action. What used to be an open secret is now taboo and many powerful men have been fired and disgraced.
Remember the awakening about the unhealthy effects of sugary carbonated beverages? That wasn't a one-time fad as sales of soda in the US have dropped every year for the last 12 years.
Similar awakenings are now happening in economics, politics, law enforcement, and now digital rights and privacy.
I'd be very surprised if the outrage fades away with no serious damage to Facebook.
Quitting Facebook leads to higher levels of well-being [1]. People are waking up to this reality, just like they woke up to the dangers of smoking, and it's long-term negative for Facebook and their shareholders.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-soda-sales-study/u-s-soda...
I suspect where possible, politicians prefer to minimize the number of highly influential entities. That the public is also helped is just gravy.
Like, when you could brag about benefitting from that, and still be President? I remember that like it was the day after yesterday...
“Nobody cares” feels more like desperate wishing/spinning, and it’s getting old in a hurry. It also ignores how this is being driven by Trump’s election, which has freaked a lot of people out, and by a general backlash against big tech. A lot of anecdotes are being bandied about, in the face of a lot of realities that are not anecdotal.
So buy the stock, but don’t be shocked when like Moore’s Law, past performance fails to predict future gains.
Do I care? Sure I do. But will a tiny minority of tech users matter to the stock in the long term? Unlikely.
Its quite possible that the stock is oversold at this point.
Its not wishing/spinning. At this point it does look quite plausible.
The conspiracy theorist in me would say that Facebook is reaching the end of its lifecycle and the company has prepared itself in advance for the move to newer social media platforms, and that they’re not particularly concerned about people leaving Facebook.
However, all those were acquisitions. I think Facebook's doomed if it's ever prevented from buying rival social networks. I think trend cycles can throw a wrench in network effects, and Facebook's too established to really innovate in this category.
Yeah, good luck electing FDR (or even a lite version) in the USA for the next decades.
Uber will likely go into bankruptcy soon, if everyone remains very vigilant about their failed self-driving car project. Because without it, Uber is done. The self-driving car project was the last thing the investors hoped would save the company. And it won't.
People also remember Equifax. There is just little they could do, because they don't directly deal with Equifax. It's their banks or credit card companies that do. Plus, Congress almost immediately saved Equifax from lawsuits, and people haven't yet had an opportunity to "respond" to that. They will this fall.
Maybe FB isn't going anywhere but if users and advertisers do you can be sure the market will reflect that.
I could flip your comment though. Unless you have some clairvoyant powers you don't actually know that "Fallout from this is forthcoming". There may be no further negative fallout from this.
There are at a number of significant events in FB's future being hauled in front of Congress in the US, being hauled in front of Parliament in the UK, the FTC investigation, numerous state attorney general's investigations and of course shareholder lawsuits.
I think its fair to say that the fallout is not yet done.
That's very disingenuous for you to say. If you are in it, you should disclaim it so that others know why you paddle it. If you know anything on TA (technical analyst) you know it broke uptrend and major barriers and will temporarily stop around 140-150 before it decides what to do next. In mere you should warn its your personal opinion.
People think voting with your wallet doesn't change a thing -> they keep buying from unethical companies -> nothing changes -> voting with your wallet doesn't change a thing.
The problem is that it's always the same small group of people who actually change their commercial choices based on companies' ethics. I've avoided Lenovo like the plague since superfish, but I know people who've bought lenovo laptops even knowing quite well about the superfish issue and understanding what firmware level malware means.
The FB consent degree was ignored and so far had little effect. I doubt it will continue to be ignored now as the following has changed:
- FB leveraged by Russian trolls and via data leakage affected the US Presidential elections. Puts the spotlight of politics on social media and FB in particular
- same for Brexit
- GDPR in Europe is a big thing with penalties
- US branches of government shifting left over the next 4 years in reaction to extremist right policies.
- Younger people get Mr. Robot. Older people die. Demographics have been shifting audience away from FB for some time.
These are trends that will not go away. They will affect every decision within FB and with it the growth trajectory.
Source: My partner wrote his doctoral dissertation on irony, so I happen to have picked up an appreciation for the subject.
This whole outrage over privacy is disingenuous. It’s painfully obvious the outrage is about Donald Trump being elected president, not personal information used to target ads.
> The crisis was familiar in a way: Facebook has burned its fingers on issues of data privacy frequently in its 14 year history. But this time it was different. The data leakage hadn’t helped Unilever sell mayonnaise. It appeared to have helped Donald Trump sell a political vision of division and antipathy.
So a guy you didn't like got elected and now this is a problem. The same journalists could barely keep it in their pants when Obama was squeezing every mile he could out of data in 2008 and 2012.
People don't have to be "damaged" by something to object to it. How do human rights abuses in third world countries "damage" you, exactly? Just because there isn't a direct link doesn't mean that there's nothing bad going on.
I myself don't care that this data was used to help Donald Trump ascend to the presidency -- besides, I bet that Hilary's campaign did similar sketchy things with private data. The issue is that our private data is being abused by a company that misled us about data use -- and for folks who don't even have a Facebook account, whose information has been harvested via shadow profiles sourced from our less-privacy-conscious friends, data compilation occurred entirely without consent.
This reeks of whataboutism to me. Why are you trying to imply that we shouldn't be concerned about privacy?
We can pretend that "omg we always cared about data", but that's not the truth. We just hate Trump so much that we're willing to see Zuck for the snake he is. I guess that's not the worse outcome.
I don't think I've seen a single person use the term "whataboutism" correctly since November 2016.
People in this chain are simply pointing out that if somebody is angry at Cambridge Analytica, but not Obama's 2008/2012 campaigns, they do not actually care about data privacy. They just don't like Donald Trump. You can bet that the next time a data privacy issue comes up, these people will be indifferent so long as the abusing party is aligned with their politics. They also will likely be supportive of people they agree with circumventing any privacy regulations that may arise from this particular scandal.
Asking these questions is a useful filter to help determine how many people actually care about the core privacy issue, and how many are just worried about "their team" having an advantage.
I was complaining that people are using Obama's data use to justify CA's data use. Obama did it and it was wrong. CA did it and it was still wrong.
But how about this, then, since you're so intent on making this political? How about we fix this so that no future politicians can benefit from this kind of targeted advertising - both liberal and conservative?
I’d be fine with it, but the first step is admitting that yes, Obama benefited from harvested social media data as well. No one wants to do that, this is all a Trump thing as far as the media, and therefore the general public, is concerned.
Because whataboutism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
What Obama did was unethical as far as I'm concerned, as is most modern marketing. (I will say one campaign was selling hope and progressive change while the other was fear mongering and spreading divisiveness. So I think there is a difference.) Having said that, I don't know that it matters. Granting these powers to people we happen to like doesn't mean they won't be abused by people we don't. Modern mass marketing is gross. It's the grand scale manipulation of people by exploiting individual human weakness/bias. I'd like to see some smart regulation around it, but I'm skeptical that will happen.
Ah, the current flavour of the year on reddit when it comes to debates.
It's not whataboutism. It's calling out hypocrisy among the reaction of journalists and general public who either ignored or in fact went on to rave about ingenious use of ads. In fact fb personally went on to remove api rate-limiters for one of the apps used by Obama's campaign. Suddenly now that it's someone that left/liberals don't like is in power, these very same practices are being questioned.
And more specifically, it's calling out the fact that the whole CA thing could have been prevented if, instead of fawning over the Obama campaign's use of targeted advertising in 2012, the media instead collectively asked, "wait, you did _what_ with our data?"
So, it's exactly Whataboutism: “Whataboutism (also known as whataboutery) is a variant of the tu quoque logical fallacy that attempts to discredit an opponent's position by charging them with hypocrisy without directly refuting or disproving their argument, [...]”
And calling out hypocrisy isn't wrong thing to do in this matter. I'm not saying what trump's campaign did was the right thing to do. What i find appalling is the so called "literate/educated" class of people completely ignored and continue to ignore or in fact praised the very same thing Obama did.
Heck, i'm neither a citizen of USA nor a resident and could frankly care less who is in power.
No, I'm deflecting, if anything, a distraction from the argument, by not accepting the shift in subject matter.
My only argument in this subthread was that the charge of Whataboutism was correctly made, and cannot be rebutted with a claim of pointing to hypocrisy, since Whataboutism is exactly the fallacy of pointing to hypocrisy to avoid the topic of debate.
Person i replied to clearly uses whataboutism in negative manner and dismisses valid points of use of extended unauthorized data by OFA (Obama for America).
"What Obama did was unethical as far as I'm concerned, as is most modern marketing. (I will say one campaign was selling hope and progressive change while the other was fear mongering and spreading divisiveness. So I think there is a difference.) Having said that, I don't know that it matters"
Because the forthcoming regulations will inevitably target conservatives if we allow the public discourse on this issue to be dominated by "muh Russia, muh Trump."
The forthcoming regulations are going to have to make it through a republican house, a republican senate and a republican president and not get challenged in our republican courts. Rest assured you're safe.
the first is explicitly political; the second is actively hiding their intentions
*edit: also they used the data very differently. obama used it to push people’s hopes and dreams; trump used it to push people’s fears. overall, obamas campaign was FAR more positive than trumps
By their own words the Obama Campaign ingested the whole social graph because the single person they targeted could bring in the information of all their friends:
Facebook 2012 election had the ability
for people to opt in the Obama campaign
like rocked this right we got people to
opt in and the privacy policies at that
time on Facebook were that if they opted
in they could tell us who all their
friends were
[...]
but we were actually able
to ingest the entire social network
social network of the US that's on
Facebook which is most people most
people where this gets complicated is
that freaks Facebook out right so they
shut off the feature well the
Republicans never built an app to do
that so the data is out there you can't
take it back right so the Democrats have
this information so when they look at a
voter file and someone comes to them
they can immediately be like oh here are
all the other people that they know and
here are people that they can help us
persuade because they're really good
friends with this person the Republicans
do not have that information and will
not get that information
I'm fine with political campaigns advertising for their candidate. If I see an advertisement for a candidate on Facebook, TV, or anywhere else, and I agree with the advertisement's message or call to action (donating), I'm happy I saw it! If I see an ad for a candidate I don't agree with, then at worst I feel my attention was wasted. To the extent advertisers use personal information to target those advertisements, that just means I see less of the ads that I'm less likely to find valuable. Targeted political ads aren't causing a problem for me personally.
So I don't see a problem with political advertising, but I do see a political bent in the outrage at Cambridge Analytica and its connection to Donald Trump.
Most people agree that social media surveillance is bad. The majority of the HN comments that bring up Obama 2008/2012 are not trying to justify the CA/Facebook incident, rather they're pointing out a hypocritical double-standard.
I want the surveillance to stop and the record to be set straight. We're dangerously close to public sentiment solidifying around the idea that the CA/Facebook incident was unprecedented and arguably stole an election in 2016. I don't think the truth supports that at all and am trying to use comments like this to keep such false narratives out of textbooks 10 years from now.
The big four banks did this after 2009, and they are even more entrenched and systematically important than they were before. Expect Facebook to borrow liberally from their playbook.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/10-years-aft...
And I'm not 100% sure of this, but I think downvotes on this platform have consequences beyond just hiding one comment.
I've noticed ordering anomalies here where people who posted newer comments and had > 0 points were ranked below people who posted older comments and had <= 0 points. There was some intrinsic ranking going on.
- Ads
- Subscriptions
- Loss leader for another product
- Microtransactions
Facebook does ads.
Subscriptions hurt network effects.
Google+ ran into a brick wall of network effects.
Nobody uses Flattr, and it's hard to imagine people paying a buck for video filters or other premium features.
It'd be great to solve the problem without building another Facebook, but my best guess is that if Facebook goes down someone else builds another system basically identical to Facebook and we all have this conversation again 10 years in the future.
Hmm. Maybe that’s not right. Maybe the lowest quality content will be on the most common denominator platform - maybe that’s what we’re seeing. And maybe that’s why I’ve effectively left Facebook - the folks I want to share and connect with aren’t there.
Everything that Facebook is saying to its American audience, it's also saying to the European GDPR regulators.
They need to walk a very fine line here and right now I don't think they're doing a particularly good job of it.
By subsidising otherwise prohibitively expensive mobile data connections for Facebook traffic only, Facebook has become the internet in many countries.
Facebook have their app preinstalled by pretty much every Android vendor. As a system app that you can't remove.
Other services require you to have a Facebook account to login, there aren't many services that devs trust for this.
Competing with something this deeply entrenched would be difficult, and doing that with ethical limitations that they don't have is damn near impossible.
I like to see how much revenue Facebook gets from those countries vs. the US and Western Europe.
> Competing with something this deeply entrenched would be difficult
I don't think anything you listed makes FB so entrenched that's it's invulnerable. Facebook's big strengths are network effects and its pile of cash, but its weakness is that it's a leisure item in a somewhat trend-driven market. All the money in the world can't keep something fashionable forever.
That's not even the point, even if they're loosing money at the moment it's almost certainly worth it to capture those new users.
> All the money in the world can't keep something fashionable forever.
Facebook isn't fashionable or trendy, myspace et al took that angle which is why they're gone now, and also that's missing the point again.
Facebook is a social utility that a crapload of people can't live without. I have friends who I can't even contact without using facebook/messenger/whatsapp, and this is in a country where mobile data is cheap and SMS/phone calls are basically free. Go to a place where facebook-subsidised connections are the only option that people can actually afford and your only alternative is basically social suicide.
I don't think many people truly grasp the scale and pervasiveness of Facebook and how there just isn't anything that is even remotely close to competing.
> Go to a place where facebook-subsidised connections are the only option that people can actually afford and your only alternative is basically social suicide.
It's relevant because a new competitor can target the more valuable developed-country users. FB being so dominant that it's "the internet" in some undeveloped countries is not a barrier to that.
> Facebook is a social utility that a crapload of people can't live without.
That's not true. There are very few people who can legally use FB who were born after it was created. There are also a crapload of people who are totally off it who get along fine.
> I have friends who I can't even contact without using facebook/messenger/whatsapp
I do to, but they're not people who I actually want or need to contact regularly.
Also, I'm pretty sure if you can contact someone on Whatsapp you can contact them without it. It's keyed on phone numbers, so you could always go back to texting.
> don't think many people truly grasp the scale and pervasiveness of Facebook and how there just isn't anything that is even remotely close to competing.
I don't agree you can infer longevity from present ubiquity. I don't think the social barriers that are protecting Facebook are as high as you think they are. To reiterate my point...
>> I don't think anything you listed makes FB so entrenched that's it's invulnerable. Facebook's big strengths are network effects and its pile of cash, but its weakness is that it's a leisure item in a somewhat trend-driven market. All the money in the world can't keep something fashionable forever.
Facebook can't demand user-exclusivity in developed markets, so its network effect strengths are vulnerable to attack. If it can't continually acquire the competitors that threaten to replace it, it will wither and die as its core app becomes unfashionable and superseded by shinier messaging and social broadcast platforms.
Really got me there, lol.
Not familiar with open non-public legalese but it sounds like an oxymoron.
Non-public - you already know this :)
the irony