A Look Inside the Tactics of Definers, Facebook’s Attack Dog
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
1. Before Ms. Sandberg’s Senate testimony, Facebook lobbyists pushed lawmakers to refrain from questioning her about privacy, censorship and other issues, and to stick to election interference. The committee’s chairman, Senator Richard Burr, Republican of North Carolina, was swayed and warned members to stick to the hearing’s planned topic, The Times reported Wednesday.
2. Facebook had also lobbied for the hearing to include a Google emissary of similar rank to Ms. Sandberg. Mr. Burr invited Larry Page, a Google co-founder, but he did not show up.
3. In an email days before the hearing, a Definers employee pressed a Times reporter to write that Facebook was taking the senators’ concerns seriously while Google was irresponsible for skipping the hearing.
4. The day before the hearing, NTK Network reported that Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, had suggested that Google was possibly a monopoly.
5. Those pieces were just two of at least 11 negative items NTK has posted about Google since late March.
Facebook really seems butthurt about Google. Instead of learning from Google about being transpernt on how they use user data, they basically dragged Google in the controversy, and I would say they have been pretty successful.
I am curious evidences of this. Or are you comparing objectively with the two relative to recent events? Then sure. FB’s been very sketchy all this time with little knowing until the whole election interference and Cambridge scandal went public and viral did people pay attention.
But thanks for the takeaways.
Google, for all the negative press and bashing they are getting lately, has not hidden what they collect, how they collect. They also do not sell user data (that's not their business model). Sure, they have had their share of issues, but I don't think they are systematic or intentional. They are happy if you want to take your data and go to someone else - they released takeaway tool more than 10 years ago.
Fb, on the other hand, never were trustworthy, even before any of the recent scandals became public. They have had history of changing things around that led to users unknowingly expose their details they thought they had locked down, more than once. They have been caught lying to advertisers about clicks and views.
But those finer points are lost when they have successfully dragged Google in the mudbath with their smear campaign, irrespective of the scale or intentions at Google.
Or Google is just better at staying out of the spotlight:
> Disclosure will likely result “in us coming into the spotlight alongside or even instead of Facebook despite having stayed under the radar throughout the Cambridge Analytica scandal”, Google policy and legal officials wrote in a memo obtained by the Journal. It “almost guarantees Sundar will testify before Congress”, the memo said, referring to the company’s CEO, Sundar Pichai. The disclosure would also invite “immediate regulatory interest”.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/oct/08/google-pl...
I'm curious what led to you to this conclusion and how you define "hide." What about how they were tracking location information even after you turned off location history??
[1]https://www.businessinsider.com/google-is-not-reading-your-g... [2] https://www.businessinsider.com/google-allows-app-developers...
http://persephonemagazine.com/2013/01/can-we-please-stop-usi...
Example: "autistic".
In recent times, this word is sometimes used as an insult, which seems to me to be somewhat offensive to those with the actual syndrome. However, referring to those who do have the syndrome as medically autistic is obviously not offensive.
This is a more clear-cut example to make the point that misappropriating a word and giving it secondary connotations in certain contexts does not make the word unfit for use in all cases.
Your source is the blog entry of some self-professed 'angry feminist' making up an etymology and then trying to police everyone's language on that basis. People like this are such insufferable know-it-alls.
I had never previously made a connection between that term and anal rape and frankly I'm irritated that ForrestN put the idea in my head.
Now, I know what it's like when you have a pet peeve about public discourse. For me, I wish people didn't use the term "cakewalk" or phrase "piece of cake", even though they do it innocently, because I once went and looked it up and it's fucking horrible. (If you go look it up, brace yourself, it's really ugly. It has to do with American slavery. You've been warned.)
I have this idea, I call it "The Grey File". It's like an idea for a sci-fi story. In the near future history will be controlled and whitewashed. All of the crazy bad stuff we used to do is almost entirely forgotten, but records are kept in a kind of museum called the Grey File. It's built in the middle of the desert, or on Antarctica, or somewhere inaccessible, and it's staffed by inmates: perverts who get off on corrupting innocence. It's kind of a prison for them.
The thing is, I can't tell if this idea is dystopian or utopian.
But since you did...
Well, it's been whitewashed there, as you might expect for an information source so prominent in the public eye.
I'll be damned if I'm going to try to unpack the enormities contained in the idea of masters awarding slaves cake for the best performances of their own mockery, here on HN, on a thread about FB.
I'll point out that the wikipedia section on "Fancy ladies" opens with a warning that "This section's tone or style may not reflect the encyclopedic tone used on Wikipedia."
These details have only recently escaped the Grey File. I didn't suspect about "Fancy ladies" until I read certain passages in Sam Clemens' uncensored autobiography when it was finally published in 2010. They sure don't teach this stuff in school.
My meta-point stands: should I feed you more details until you see the horrible truth, like some deviant that gets off on violating innocence? Should I keep my mouth shut and look forward to a day when all the nightmares have been forgotten?
As for being shocked so deeply by this, perhaps it's time to grow up a little and realise history isn't clean sections with adverts in-between and censoring of the violence, it's full of arseholes doing the most rotten shit they can get away with either for pleasure or gain, and then realise the shocker: those arseholes still exist.
You're reiterating my point. And also, perhaps, missing it at the same time?
Butt is not same as butthole.
Why? And how long is "election season" these days? It seems to be almost always.
Shadow accounts for those who don't comply and real accounts for those who login.
Facebook makes money by being a walled garden.
Take your data outside Facebook and they have no value.
NY Times then digs up this fact and uses it to expose Facebook as hypocrites.
It's hypocrites all the way down, folks.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
Can we please stop with the NYT assassination pieces on Facebook? This piece is barely tangentially related to technology at all, and serves no purpose other than to allow more virtue signalling and hearsay arguments and personal opinions on right and wrong.