Ask HN: What would you have asked Mark Zuckerburg? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What would you have asked Mark Zuckerburg?

20 pointsnotjtrig20 comments

Is Facebook collecting or storing data related to persons who have not agreed to Facebook's ToS and who have no Facebook account?

No doubt. Every load of their Like button and Comments widget on millions of sites is saved somewhere, building a nice graph of all the pages you ever visited from a particular IP and probably a cookie the widget saves.

Given all the talk and waving around of the Facebook ToS in the hearing, it would have been nice to have this question asked.

I would have asked this too (aka shadow profiles).

It's sad that it looks like the senators weren't even aware of this, or maybe some were but couldn't phrase in layman's terms.

I do not have a Facebook account, though friends have uploaded pictures of me, and now my name comes up for tagging suggestions on other pictures. Facebook recognizes me, and knows my name, identifying me, even though I've never agreed to any ToS.

He admitted that facebook used to collect your friends' data too, but they stopped doing that.

Certainly. Facebook runs ads outside of just their own site, so they have to track as many folks as possible. Whether they're tracking PII of non FB users though is (hopefully) unlikely.

Why did you hire a psychologist from the company that inappropriately disclosed data to Cambridge Analytica?

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/18/facebook-cambri...

Mr. Zuck, for the purposes of this conversation 'Data' does not mean likes, cat videos or news articles you post.

Data will be defined to include but not limited to, websites users visit due to ad tracking, friends, installed apps, apps installed by friends, any any other tracking data generated by the facebook platform.

Saying that, do you share 'data' with any 3rd parties.

Amazed me none of them could decouple 'data' stuff I actively upload or share with stuff facebook 'generates' based on users behavior.

would people pay facebook to target people if they could buy and export the data?

facebook has a huge incentive to NOT sell the data, keep it to themselves, and be the only one that can use the data to target ads.

its the same reason they WANT every developer who exported data to delete it. they want to be the only ones with data of any type.

About the presence of the FB Like button and Comments widget on a large portion of the web, and what do they do with the data about all the sites and pages their users visit, which is readily available for Facebook to collect, store and use on any site that includes their widgets and even those that don't by way of the Referrer http header in case the next site you visit has FB widgets.

Facebook has far more data about the pages you visit than an ISP ever will (to which HTTPS pages are invisible unless they employ MITM techniques). Facebook sees it all...

I'd ask him to give a straight answer.

I think he would probably dodge our questions majestically..

I mean, he's not dead. You can still talk to him.

NOTHING :)

What did the five fingers say to the face?

What's the last vowel in your surname? (It's "e", not "u".)

Will you implement Article 17 from EU GDPR for all Facebook accounts?

Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of a political party that acted in the interests to elect Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton for the presidency?

Mr. Zuckerberg, you personally are the controlling party in an unregulated entity that can sells advertising. You have admitted that you were not aware to the extent that your platform is used to sell misinformation. Do you think that your platform could have been used to subvert the democratic process in previous elections?

"How long have you been on this planet called Earth?"

More productively:

"How can you claim to let users delete content when the papers on your own company's storage and file systems explicitly state that data is never deleted but instead marked as unavailable?"

EDIT:

To wit:

https://code.facebook.com/posts/685565858139515/needle-in-a-...

> The delete operation is simple – it marks the needle in the haystack store as deleted by setting a “deleted” bit in the flags field of the needle. However, the associated index record is not modified in any way so an application could end up referencing a deleted needle. A read operation for such a needle will see the “deleted” flag and fail the operation with an appropriate error. The space of a deleted needle is not reclaimed in any way. The only way to reclaim space from deleted needles is to compact the haystack (see below).

I think it eventually does get deleted.

> Compaction is an online operation which reclaims the space used by the deleted and duplicate needles (needles with the same key). It creates a new haystack by copying needles while skipping any duplicate or deleted entries. Once done it swaps the files and in-memory structures.

Just in an efficient way for FB

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