Facebook Gave Some Companies Access to Additional Data About Users’ Friends | Hacker News Reader

Facebook Gave Some Companies Access to Additional Data About Users’ Friends

wsj.com

195 pointsradicaldreamer71 comments

I'm starting to feel like the only person out there who didn't have access to this data.

The chant, from Facebook and even some commenters on HN and elsewhere, was always "Facebook doesn't sell user data, that would be stupid. Facebook guards user data very well and uses it to target ads."

With this and previous revelations, we now know that those claims are completely false. The reasoning, as to why Facebook did it, doesn't matter. The fact is that they sold user data. Even if they gave it at no monetary cost, it was given to benefit the company, and hence the data was sold.

I suppose now we just have to wait for another report on how Facebook sold all its user data to data brokers around the world.

But no, based on the responses here it turns out that not all HN commenters know it yet - some are still playing semantic games and excusing Facebook's lies and exploitation.

> With this and previous revelations, we now know that those claims are completely false.

I don't see how Facebook is selling data. What do you mean?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-gave-some-companies-ac...

Facebook didn't sell data to data brokers - they bartered it. I believe Zuckerberg himself admitted to it in the hearings or in a blog post around that time. Facebook gave their data to the brokers, the brokers gave their data to Facebook.

>a (1) : to give up (property) to another for something of value (such as money) https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sell

Such as but not necessarily limited to.

Could you please outline a meaningful distinction between bartering and selling?

Wow, this says the data sharing was after 2015. This directly contradicts Zuckerberg’s congressional testimony does it not?

5 days ago the magazine The Baffler made the argument that Zuckerberg, at his core, is a nice guy. It’s just that he isn’t that intelligent.

As the American Studies professor being interviewed says in the article:

>“And he continues to use words like “community,” a word he does not understand in the least. This is what I mean when I say he’s uneducated. Because he keeps using terms like community, which are complex, fraught concepts, and he doesn’t stop to think what that means. He doesn’t stop to think about the dynamics of a community, the effects of a community, the limitations of a community, and even the very definition of a community. You know, if someone’s going to use community as the core goal of a multi-billion-dollar company, maybe a couple of days of reading would help.”

https://thebaffler.com/latest/the-zuckerberg-follies-denison

As much as that American Studies professor might wish for PR groups to go to them for consulting, the word Community was meant to be received by people who are not American Studies professors (the public, maybe, and also Facebook employees if it's internal-speak). The warm fuzziness of the word choice has already been precisely calibrated.

Zuckerberg's ideal press conference would be some brief tonal warbling that made everybody support Facebook. In lieu of that existing, he talks about community.

The Baffler is a great name for a website that hosts thinkpieces written by people who have no idea what they are talking about.

Have you got a rebuttal for that quotes section?

Oh, there's plenty to refute. Uneducated is plainly false. Not that smart is also clearly a non-starter.

Willful misuse of the word community is different from blundering misuse. Like much of facebook's practice in the black art of dark patterns, malice is suspect well before the presumption of incompetence. No time for Hanlon's razor here.

Emotional blackmail is deeply engrained into facebook's user interface, and serves as a driver of profits. So deeply pervasive this principle seems to be, that it would be unsurprising to find the infectious premise of such a persuasive tactic permeating Zuckerberg's general demeanor and subliminal mannerisms.

Still I'd suspect that calculating organizational malice doesn't preclude an individual still mostly being a nice guy, but with an apparatus like facebook being as huge as it is, beyond any single human, it matters less whether one is simply "a nice guy" at all, but rather a nice guy at what level, and to whom?

Does Mark Zuckerberg regard different types of strangers differently from one another? Which ones? When and why? How do strangers compare to employees, friends on a first name basis, or family members? Not all of these things are likely to be held in equal regard.

I was also taken aback by the author's insistence on Zuckerberg "not knowing the sense of the word community". Can't the author see that the majority of people nowadays have formed communities on Facebook? What does he/her expect, for us to go back to forming zadrugas? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zadruga)

Zuckerberg willfully disregards meanings. It was very obvious in his speech during the testimony. If some members of congress could detect it, I heard no evidence. It is curious to me that sometimes the odd language format in facebook's help section are reminiscent of his disregard.

I am no psychologist but I've seen this behavior in two or three other occasions. One case was a teenager, who was just playing but also using it for obfuscation to his advantage in arguments. I had to explicitly call him on it. I had reason to believe it stemmed from insecurity and him having to daily deal with people who were not intellectually on par or of his type.

If Facebook isn't a community then I don't know what is. Whether we like it or not is irrelevant, but in my book it's the definition of a community. Aka, a place where people meet and interact. We could argue all day whether it is optimized to work as such, for example discussions in there are limited by the UI, but people go to FB to interact with their friends or meet new people.

And calling Zuckerberg an idiot is laughable. The guy is obviously super smart. His problem is the total lack of ethics, either because he never had them, or because it's required when you have to run a multibillion behemoth.

> It’s just that he isn’t that intelligent.

I'm very sure he is NOT a "dumb fuck".

Wow, in particular, "The whitelist deals, with companies including RBC Capital Markets and Nissan Motor Co. , were struck with advertisers or Facebook partners that were valuable for other reasons, according to some of the people familiar with the matter."

They really are that terrible.

Back when Facebook started and people worried that they were giving info to Facebook, most thought the worst that could happen is that Facebook would be the one using that info. Not this dystopian scenario where they give it to everyone else to exploit.

This was inevitable. Even if Facebook didn’t share this info intentionally, no human system is perfect and sooner or later there would be a leak. The only way to keep info safe in the internet age is dead trees or just not collecting it in the first place.

I guess now its official that Zuckerberg lied at the hearing. What are ramifications of such lies?

They’ll just say he wasn’t aware of the deals or the specifics in whatever business agreements they had. He’s got good lawyers, they’ll find an out.

None. IIRC, he wasn’t under oath.

But you don't have to have been under oath to be held accountable for lying to Congress.

https://edition.cnn.com/2017/07/24/politics/penalty-for-lyin...

$5 says they won't prosecute him. The only example the article gives of someone going to prison for this is Reagan's national security advisor, not some billionaire.

Eh. Probably none.

Why are we giving such a pass that it took till 2015 to even start walling off that information?

Prior to 2015 any facebook app developer could make an app that had a vague one-prompt ask for permissions that gave them nearly everything, and a ton of information on friends.

Probably because some employee could not justify “impact” on this. If anything it will lower some key metric that was getting measured, because not giving all friend info will lower app adoption growth numbers. Most levels at facebook is filled with metric obsessed robots (because of how incentives are aligned).

Probably because it was done in plain sight and anybody could have worked through the implications then but nobody cared?

"I didn't realize that one day the media would convince me that this was a really bad thing" is not Facebook's fault.

Most people actually don't care if apps get their "data" and their friend list. But the media worked up a frenzy by vaguely connecting it to the Trump campaign (reminder that nobody blinked when Facebook openly gave everything to the Obama campaign), and now everyone has "realized" that Facebook is to blame for their problems.

So how comes that all these revelations come in such a quick succession after years of relative silence? What changed?

> What changed?

It's in the zeitgeist. The Cambridge Analytica scandal gave the public a tangible threat in Facebook's data promiscuity. At that point, the entire system is incentivized to dig deeper. Whistleblowers who previously wouldn't have thought of leaking start getting inquiries; legal teams ask for contracts to be re-assessed; Congressional staffers make calls; NGOs mobilize to start court cases, et cetera.

Similar to what happened post-Snowden in the E2E space.

I'm sort of hoping there is more of an effect this time around than there was from Snowden... what does "E2E" mean in this context?

After Snowden E2E encryption turned from an implementation detail into a feature. see whatsapp et al.

"End to end", encryption that is opaque to intermediate parties (ie email without GPG is not end to end because your mailserver can read your messages, even if the channel between you and your mailserver is encrypted).

Financial companies need a distraction from their massive leaks of data that you didn't voluntarily hand over to them?

I think you make an important point. The media got into a frenzy over Facebook and Cambridge Analytica and we continue to get reports on it, yet I haven't seen many follow ups on Equifax. This is despite that having your SSN, DOB, Address and Drivers License stolen has higher consequences for you than a political campaign having your Facebook data. Priorities are misaligned.

Oh, it’s even more compelling than that: Cambridge Analytica didn’t rely on Facebook data, but Axciom, Experian and Infogroup to target US voters.

This is a great point - one I wish the media, drunk on the prospect of shiny silicon valley companies falling from grace, would pay more attention too.

Maybe some internal employees are leaking the information?

If you're an employee with information about this project, and you see your CEO (say) pinky-swearing that they didn't share data at all, then you might be motivated to leak this information to a newspaper.

I suspect from details in the article that the leak is from the external parties, probably former employees of the external parties:

- Facebook employees would not call that number “friend link”: it has another name internally; “friend link” sounds like how you’d explain it to someone who’s not familiar with graph theory;

- the WSJ is anything but exacting, but the article is oddly vague on when the program was terminated. That sounds out-of-character, unless the source left since, and couldn’t confirm if the program was maintained.

I think traditional media companies were afraid of Facebook, now they aren't anymore. They are natural enemies. When they fight, there can be only winners from the customer POV.

The Groupthink and Normalization of Deviance that all of this is okay got broken out off - there will be more I'd say.

Things are being revealed, because people are now looking at Facebook's actions.

It seems like the waves of bad press began after FB refused Billionaire Media Mogul Rupert Murdoch's demands to share ad revenue. Murdoch began complaining of financial struggles in November [0] and has been leading the charge against FB ever since they rejected his proposal [1] [2].

M.A.D.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/nov/16/rupert-murdoch...

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/01/23...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-01/murdoch-s...

One reason could be that the media companies saw there is high interest from the readership on this issue = they put more journalists to investigate all the shady stuff Facebook may be doing.

It says right in this article:

>"The revelations come as Facebook is dealing with the fallout in March related to the use of personal data by Cambridge Analytica, a political analytics firm that aided President Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign"

For some reason they thought spying on everyone would only help the democratic party I guess. Seems pretty blind to me...

The parenthetical is not a reason but just something added by the writer or editor.

Donald Trump got elected with the help of a foreign government utilizing Facebook and is now openly helping that government and spurning Western allies.

Up until that point Facebook was a place people could share cat videos and connect with okd friends, now that it has been revealed it can influence a democracy, it is getting more scrutiny.

True

Getting diaper ads because your profile says you fit the category that might have a baby is slightly creepy but ok.

But

Providing a platform for interfering in the governance of another country and denying it is infuriating.

Archive link: http://archive.is/jiO8k

"Let's kill the contract with Chinese companies, and make it a headline"...

While behind scene do all kinds of money-making contracts with anyone with enough price...

Text-only: https://pastebin.com/t4hBTAig

What a shame

Why are people acting shocked? THIS IS THEIR BUSINESS MODEL. It's in their privacy policy! "Your data may be shared with ... our affiliates" or words to that effect.

HN leaks my data, just press my user name, look at all the comments I made, see which other users I’ve interacted with, and have similar interests, also see my submissions. I looked at all your usernames already.

False equivalence. HN makes no claims, explicit nor implied, that any of that information is in any way private. They never have.

The same is not true of FB, not at all.

I see that you’re posting under a pseudonym - in line with Facebook, HN doesn’t allow that unless it’s the nickname you use in meatspace. Please correct and add location data, psychological profiling and demographics so that your data is worth a bit more when sold/leaked. /s obviously.

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