As Facebook Raised a Privacy Wall, It Carved an Opening for Tech Giants
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The feature, introduced in 2008, continues even though some Facebook users have objected to it, unsettled by its knowledge of their real-world relationships. Gizmodo and other news outlets have reported cases of the tool’s recommending friend connections between patients of the same psychiatrist, estranged family members, and a harasser and his victim.
Facebook, in turn, used contact lists from the partners, including Amazon, Yahoo and the Chinese company Huawei — which has been flagged as a security threat by American intelligence officials — to gain deeper insight into people’s relationships and suggest more connections, the records show.”
Well, that explains some of the conspiracy-mongering that was so rampant around this feature. Facebook (probably) wasn’t secretly recording your phone calls etc. They didn’t need to - they were getting streams of data from other partners.
“Facebook also allowed Spotify, Netflix and the Royal Bank of Canada to read, write and delete users’ private messages, and to see all participants on a thread”
Uhhhh, excuse me?
There's a settlement out there for anyone with a Facebook account who was turned down for a loan by RBC. No chance RBC wants its dirty laundry aired in a Fair Housing suit.
With every single one of these companies I am...baffled, that anyone thought this was a good idea, but in this situation especially it makes zero sense. All that liability for what possible upside?
We could only access the private message history containing the conversations we had had with the individual, nothing else.
You think people care about their personal data, you should see what type of information they provide through private messaging platforms. Including through public posts, it's shocking.
Not sure why the others needed it
https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/14/16143354/facebook-messeng...
At this point it’s hard to dispute that at Facebook “private” is synonymous with “public” for most practical purposes.
You give permission for those and the data accessed is often not public. There are degrees of privacy - what you're trying to do make up your own definition of 'public' and then have message board fights about it. It's not really a sensible position, let alone interesting conversation.
This is actually a fair criticism. I don't know why you're being downvoted for it.
I'm not sure this was always the case with Facebook though. Let's say my friend John gives RBC access to his messages and I message him asking to loan me $50 because I'm struggling with money. Down the road if I apply for a loan from RBC they now have access to my "private" message, without my permission and can ostensibly then use that information when determining my creditworthiness. All without my knowledge or consent.
If so, the New York Times is throwing shade on Facebook basically for not being enough of a walled garden. I hope their journalists are not that confused?
Oh hey, would you look at that: https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/14/16143354/facebook-messeng...
I wonder if the delete permission was by accident or whether these companies were actively deleting private messages - craziness.
They've clamped down repeatedly on how much data comes out of the API - you used to get full info on friends, then just their names and IDs, then that list wound up filtered to just other friends who'd authorized the same app.
It used to be extremely wide-open.
Address book import and triangle closing drives the most PYMK features across every social network. It's a gold mine, and that's why everything wants it.
They are the bad guys. They didn’t need to steal Android phone logs either, but they did.
On Instagram last weekend I and a friend were shown a number of ads for Chandon sparking wine after I bought a bottle, and someone else at the party also did and we talked about it.
Both of us insist we didn't google sparkling wine, Chandon, or anything we think relevant... it really does on the face of it appear Facebook had listened to us.
Also surely advertising the same wine I just bought to me is... dodgy ROI at best?
It'll remain a mystery forever.
It could have been that she then searched for a charger and being a small company we all shared an external IP address, that we also shared the ads... or it could have been that spy software on my phone had sold our conversation to advertisers. Either way, mic privileges were locked down and ad and tracker blocking efforts doubled after that.
If you ever get in a car accident in the United States don't be surprised to get mail the very next day from accident insurance attorneys because you bet every service you use is selling every aspect of your life without your explicit knowledge or consent. Every time you use a credit card to purchase something that information is sold to a network larger than you can imagine, who will in turn sell it to their network. Your geographical location is sold by your cellphone provider whether you realize it or not and whether you think you have GPS tracking turned off. If you have a SIM card that's tied to you as an individual, it's being sold.
Here's just one example: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/06/19...
Notice how the keyword is "suspend"? I don't doubt that they've quietly resumed the practice. In fact, I bet all of these companies and service providers are overjoyed right now that the media is so focused on FB to care about all of the shady shit they're doing on a daily basis.
I'd rather not have any of my data shared, of course, but if I had to pick and choose between my health insurance being sold and versus what TV shows I liked on FB, I'll take the TV shows any day.
A far more probable and less exciting explanation is that your credit card provider (or the store you bought the wine from) is selling your information and Facebook happens to be one of the buyers.
Furthermore, people grossly overestimate how unique they are. At any given point in time you're a target market for millions of products, you just don't notice the ads for the ones you don't buy. Just because there's a correlation doesn't mean you were singled out as an individual.
"On May 14, 2014, Acxiom announced that it had acquired LiveRamp, a data onboarding company, for $310 million. LiveRamp was founded in 2011 as a spinout of RapLeaf, a marketing data and software company founded in San Francisco, California in 2005 by Auren Hoffman and Manish Shah.
In May[2017], LiveRamp announced a consortium formed with two other ad tech companies, AppNexus and MediaMath, to compete with Facebook and Google in the area of programmatic advertising, the term used to refer to the use of automation software to buy advertising.
In 2016, LiveRamp acquired two data and identity-matching startups, Arbor and Circulate, for more than $140 million combined. The company also announced the launch of IdentityLink, a method of anonymizing consumer's identities as they are tracked across multiple platforms.
In February 2018, Acxiom announced a reorganization from three divisions into two - a Marketing Solutions group and its LiveRamp business. In May, the company announced international expansion into Brazil, Netherlands and Italy, and released Global Data Navigator (GDN), a portal for identifying available data elements by country. In June 2018, Consumer research firm GfK MRI has partnered with Acxiom."
You may have brought it online in which case almost certainly there was a FB tracking pixel fired back from the e-commerce website to signal that you did. On the other hand if you bought from an offline store and swiped a loyalty card while doing so, your transaction might have been uploaded to create a custom audience. If you paid by your phone or have your loyalty app on your phone this becomes even easier - convenient offline to online matching is the only reason loyalty program apps are pushed.
Finally, even if you didn't do any if these and the other person did, if you both connected to the WiFi at the party and checked FB (or better still you added the other person as a friend), the shared IP address between your devices is enough of a signal to begin connectings.
It's quite possible that, even at a company that has done some bad things, other things have a more innocent explanation.
In Canada, the only way method for P2P money transfer is through a system called Interac, which relies on email addresses. Using Facebook Login + Messenger was a big improvement since it's harder to accidentally send money to the wrong person.
I really wish there was a law requiring real disclosure of such customer/user-data sharing agreements with enough detail to know what's actually happening. The disclosures should include things like schemas, example records, and reasonable names for data receiptients (e.g. Amazon Inc., not Sunshine Data Brokers II Inc., an unacknowledged subsidiary of Amazon).
There's no way to make an informed choice about using a particular service or dealing with a particular company without that.
Geez, and I thought I was annoyed with mere former bosses showing up who I didn't part on good terms with
> The social network permitted Amazon to obtain users’ names and contact information through their friends, and it let Yahoo view streams of friends’ posts as recently as this summer, despite public statements that it had stopped that type of sharing years earlier.
The records the New York Times reviewed were "generated in 2017" and "some were still in effect this year." That means not only did these agreements cross through Facebook's representations to various governments, they also overlap with GDPR.
Looked like |______|.
Then one day, no more. So odd.
Both Facebook and Google were hit with GDPR-related lawsuits since the first day of GDPR enforcement.
Companies are being sued left and right by privacy advocates and by "ambulance chasers".
Which is great IMO, I hope Facebook gets at least a big fine for this.
Facebook still hasn't fully come clean because they knew they were doing unsavory activities and just wanted to not get caught and keep getting away with it.
If you were the CIA, wouldn’t you work on protecting/ preventing such people from having a trial?
1. https://www.theonion.com/cias-facebook-program-dramatically-...
"If you owe the bank a million dollars, the bank owns you. If you owe the bank a billion dollars, you own the bank."
Preferably multiple life sentences to ensure he can never get out or create another monstrosity like FB. Also get laws created/strengthened against such repeat abusers of people.
There should be a CFAA for personal information.
> The social network permitted Amazon to obtain users’ names and contact information through their friends, and it let Yahoo view streams of friends’ posts as recently as this summer, despite public statements that it had stopped that type of sharing years earlier.
This information contrasts with a statement Facebook provided in 2018, stating that such data sharing partnerships ended at the end of 2015. That statement itself was correcting an earlier statement stating that such access had ended even earlier.
From https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/facebook-shared-user-...:
> Facebook shared personal information culled from its users' profiles with other companies after the date when executives have said the social network prevented third-party developers from gaining access to the data, the company confirmed Friday.
> The companies had access to the data during a stretch of time in 2015 after Facebook had locked out most developers who build apps that work on its social network. Facebook gave select "whitelisted" companies extensions before they were also blocked from getting its users' personal information.
> Those extensions expired before the end of 2015, Facebook said. The company believes the previously unreported extensions with a select group of companies is consistent with previous statements that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made, including in testimony to Congress, about shielding its 2.2 billion users' personal information from third parties since 2015.
> "Any new 'deals', as the Journal describes them, involved people's ability to share their broader friends' lists — not their friends' private information like photos or interests," Ime Archibong, Facebook's vice president of product partnerships, said in a written statement.
One wonders at Facebook's very passive strategy here. They're not controlling the narrative at all, and we're reading a fresh bit of bad news almost every day.
Facebook is as bad or worse a company as its strongest critics suggest. There's not some dump of bad news, there's horrific practices everywhere you look, so every investigation uncovers more bad stuff since it's the norm for the company rather than the exception…
I don't think it is intentional but rather a function of most employees being in a weird corporate "filter bubble" with extra strong cool-aid being served on the daily.
Actually, when I was in school, there actually was an extensive ethics module in one of the required courses, and I think it was required by an accreditation body or the ACM. It also felt like it was used to satisfy some kind of writing-intensive course requirement, since it consisted of banging out 10-page papers on various topics.
Neither the professors nor the students took it very seriously because everyone was more interested in technology, not philosophy. It felt like it only existed to check-off a checkbox.
The ABA and AMA take a lot of heat here on HN and other libertarian-leaning forums, and some of it is deserved, since they clearly do engage in cartel-like behavior.
However, it is important to remember that they have established a set of laws and practices that give the members of the profession the ability to resist unethical commands from "superiors". For example, generally speaking, a non-lawyer can't own a law firm. Same for physicians. A lawyer must be licensed to practice, and that right can be revoked. A lawyer isn't allowed to say "my boss made me do it", but at the same time, a lawyer can't have a non-lawyer boss, and that boss can't legally go hire someone who isn't a lawyer (and isn't bound by a code of ethics) to do it instead.
I want to be clear that I'm aware that in reality, it doesn't come close to working out this neatly. But the conceptual framework, at least, is there.
I do think programmers are in an untenable position, when they are stripped of any professional strength but called on to resist unethical demands of clients and bosses. And yeah, I do mean stripped, not just denied. A large section of the programming workforce is employed under visa conditions where their employer controls their right to live and work in the US, as well as their position in a very long queue for a green card application. So we aren't just ordinary workers with no special protections but no special liabilities either, we are often a workforce that is particularly vulnerable and unable to push back against the orders of people who aren't ethical and aren't part of our "profession".
We have a word for "when everyone who pushes back against wrongdoing must go out on a limb and do it at tremendous personal expense": Gomorrah. (I mean, in the sense of wanton immorality, not the dubious sexual mores.)
Markets regulate themselves to a profit driven “ethics” solution that reverberates.
I think we're just seeing 22 year olds' ethics are collapsing when they're given $150k/year straight out of school.
That's a big ask even for someone who has taken hundreds of ethics courses.
In talking to friends and coworkers it sounds like taking an ethics course was more common than not.
As a hypothetical example:
- Some engineer implements the Like/Share buttons to push more users onto Facebook.
- Some engineer working on the ads product realizes that the Like button is a great Trojan horse to gather info about a user's browsing habits. Thinks of it in terms of analytics - "understanding who the users are." Harmless enough, but now we're over the ethical hurdle of collecting that data.
- Another engineer working on the ads product realizes that using this data to target ads could get advertisers to pay more for the same ads. Now you're just using data we already have, right?
- Facebook signs a bespoke advertising deal with some companies which includes access non-anonymous data. Facebook already collects and uses it and users sign it over in terms of service, so... what's the problem with using it in a way that's still advertising, just specific to some new partners?
None of the steps look that bad if you don't look too closely. No engineer had to think too hard about the specific ethical problems, but the aggregate effect is the travesty we have today. If any decision maker along this path stopped to really think about it and cared enough to stop it, this might not have happened, but market competition and general indifference meant nobody really took a long, hard look at this chain of events as it was happening.
https://twitter.com/_mades/status/1075228269845336064
What this seems to boil down to is a side channel for certain partners with looser technical controls but tighter monitoring of misuse, and no evidence that that tradeoff actually resulted in any misuse that couldn't have occurred through normal data access channels.
> When you hear things like read/write access that access was only granted when the user gave permission. For example, if you share a Netflix link to messenger, the post is coming from Netflix.
> If you're sharing using messenger, you're able to search who you're sharing with through Netflix. If you then delete the message within Netflix, it would delete on Facebook. Very similar to using Tweetdeck for Twitter - same permissions
You guys sold your family and friends out for RSUs.
is there something so bad that fb could do that would get you to stop? If so, what is it? Where is your red line?
Or absent an alternative with fb's network effects, will you keep using their products regardless of the unseen costs you rack up?
In all seriousness, if companies actually had to pay for your data, suddenly their business models would flip and you would find that we would go from being the products to being the customers.
Honest answer: my purchasing/social network data is worth extremely little to me, so I don't care who has it. And I don't have a problem with advertising; I prefer to allocate responsibility to individuals for their own decisions, so if somebody is influenced by an advertisement, if anybody is to be faulted then it's themselves, not the advertisement/advertiser.
I recall being in my early teens, when I went to create my (first) Facebook account. I mentioned it to my dad. He explicitly told me that whatever I did on Facebook would go to their servers, that whatever reached their servers was theirs, and that they would do whatever they wanted with that data regardless of whether you agreed to it or not. The whole reason I gave up and made an account was because my friends had already given the app their contact list, and the service already had my phone number.
From day one I've treated online services like amoral, dangerous animals, and so far nothing these organizations have done has especially shocked me, though I have been impressed or surprised on occasion. My mantra is generally 'if I or the NSA could imagine it, private industry will attempt it'.
I still get a lot of value out of my Facebook account. Facebook pages are a gateway to niche interest groups, social trends, and the political fringes that would otherwise be inaccessible to outsiders. Seeing the ads Facebook puts in my feed helps me to calibrate my mental model of how I'm being observed, who's sharing data with who, and how online services perceive me (I typically use ad-block, and only occasionally close it to check my ads).
If I want to contact someone I've only met in passing, keep up with family and political bubbles, or do a bit of background investigation, Facebook's there for me.
Accessing the service requires a bit of a faustian bargain. But by the time I joined, the country had already made it on my behalf, so I opted to reap the benefits of that bargain rather than just being social collateral.
Facebook could scare me off the way Google Search did - by sanitizing its content feed to the degree Google's sanitized its search. But I'd still use Messenger, and any other useful service they come up with.
But otherwise it'd have to become obsolete in the same way as MySpace.
Today, I use Facebook because it's useful for connecting with people I just met, long lost friends, and because Messenger is the most convenient messaging app out there. Instagram is a great app that I enjoy using and will continue to use (also anecdotal, but I've never seen an ad in Instagram either. I guess I must not follow enough people?)
Realistically, the only way I stop using FB's services is if they start charging for them. That's my personal red line, just because I'm too lazy to pay and I figure most of my friends will be, too, so they'll just move on to the next big thing.
For current events, I use Searx, Bing, Yandex, Yahoo, and Baidu (if I'm really digging). I don't trust any one provider on politically sensitive topics, and the the order/kinds of the results can occasionally carry as much signal as the the content of them.
I'm not conspiracy mongering, though. I merely think of search algorithms as extensions of the contexts in-which they're designed, and are more likely to represent the interests of their creators than my search for knowledge.
While I'm more than likely to take the papers of record at their words, I've known more than enough police officers, journalists, and armchair philosophers to know that consciously or not, individual biases can color the processing and presentation of information.
Details that may seem obvious or superfluous through one lens may not be to another.
Only by extracting perspectives and datapoints from each source I access, can I confidently say that I have a reasonable understanding of the progression of any given event, as well as the metanarratives surrounding it.
Depending on the topic at hand, omission from one search engine can be as damning as the inclusion of propaganda in another.
The obsession with reputability is why I abandoned Google. In narrowing the array of sources the search engine surfaced in the hopes of protecting the average user from misinformation, it narrowed access to fringe sources of knowledge, which although unreliable can be a goldmine of supplemental information.
Say what you will of Baidu and Yandex, if you know a bit about their nation's leadership and international policies, you can guess their biases and can guess how they'll adjust what you see. That's useful. American companies can be much less predictable.
And yes, you should be afraid of western spooks if you live in a western country. I wouldn't have said that 10 years ago.
“The central television’s family name is the party” - a real actual quote from an actual "media" organization:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/19/xi-jinping-tou...
It feels like a red line ... I'm mulling over various options including just letting it go.
It seems like a bad idea for them since I'm one of the few people I know in my circle of friends that's still active and posting ...
I don't really care if FB sells my information to advertisers, so they can market products to me more effectively.
I don't care if FB co-operates with other companies in order to suggest friends to me.
FB adds a lot of value to my life (messaging & finding out about events).
What I truly dislike about FB is that it creates information bubbles, so people are never exposed to viewpoints outside of their own. Also FB doesn't regulate false information/alt-right propaganda enough.
Obviously, I would prefer if FB didn't sell my data, but at the end of the day it doesn't impact me at all.
That being said, if I ever become an important figure who is running a business that is competing with Facebook in some way, then I'll be sure not to use their service.
Wow...that’s scary
Wow, this seems like yet another contortion to get out of asking the user what they want.
Turns out NYT either doesn’t understand the technical details or doesn’t want to
If it weren't for this linked article (much of which I learned a significant amount and was news to me), we wouldn't have had such a response from Facebook with further clarification on this topic. For example, did I know they were also passing my private messages to other entities? No. I also don't blame myself because they could've made it a lot more obvious that I was sharing such personal content with other third parties.
Journalists have a tough job, but they should be commended when bringing to light articles like this.
I do believe corporations like the NYTimes and facebook have accrued too much power and are corrupt and a destructive force in the country and the world. I think we need more competition in the traditional media and social media space.
For all the talk about monopolies in tech, we talk too little about the monopolies in news and media along with every other industry from agriculture to banking.
Also, Facebook is a symptom of a national ( or international ) economic system that applies to pretty much every major industry today. Too much consolidation and too little respect for privacy. Facebook is providing what every industry ( including the news industry ) wants. Information and data. And every industry is invading their own customers' privacy and selling data. Credit card and banks sell your data. The NYTimes sells your data ( after all they sell ads too ).
(B) if you are alluding to their ads, then the local media you praise is just as guilty, and so is any other site financed by ads. They all just include whatever JS snippet the ad platforms give them.
(C) The rest of your comment is just repeated assertions that you don’t like the Times. It’s hard to take advise on newspapers seriously, when they come from someone who apparently has not read enough to pick up on the proper handling of spacing around parentheses.
(D) Are you making any claim that the story here contains (specific) inaccuracies? Are you accusing the Times of any specific facts being wholesale fabrications? Can you point to any instance of the Times publishing fabricated information? And please don’t use an example that’s old enough to drive, was discovered and disclosed by the Times itself, and resulted in career-ending firings of the reporter responsible.
However, their coverage of Facebook since the election has showed me how much bias there is in the media as well as how much an entity can serve their own agenda.
Unfortunately the truth behind these integrations are beyond what your average person can understand. Your average person doesn’t understand how OAuth and user consent / permissioning works. And so media can prey on the ignorance of people to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt. NYTimes comes off just as bad as Fox News.
I bet you none of the authors have ever implemented 3rd party auth. I doubt any engineers were consulted. Instead they quote so called “media experts” that are just professors at universities who again know nothing about the technical integration and how it works.
I’ve seen some people who understand how OAuth works but these are clearly engineers. NYTimes could’ve used the opportunity to explain how people gave consent but instead chooses a different narrative in order to 1) get page views; 2) attack an arguably competitor in the media space and 3) blame FB for getting Trump elected.
“Internal documents obtained by The Times show that Facebook shared data with more than 150 companies — most of them tech businesses, but also automakers, media organizations (including The Times) and others.“
I think it takes an awful lot of motivated reasoning not to hold an organisation in the highest regard that freely works against its own interest, in the pursuit of its mission.
>Did partners get access to messages? >Yes. But people had to explicitly sign in to Facebook first to use a partner’s messaging feature. Take Spotify for example. After signing in to your Facebook account in Spotify’s desktop app, you could then send and receive messages without ever leaving the app. Our API provided partners with access to the person’s messages in order to power this type of feature.
Facebook is trying to spin it in a positive way ('you had to sign up first!!'), but nowhere did you agree that Spotify could read all of your messages.
> But people had to explicitly sign in to Facebook first to use a partner’s messaging feature.
This does not say you had to "explicitly sign in first for Spotify to get access". It says you had to sign in to use the feature enabled by Spotify already having access.
> After signing in to your Facebook account in Spotify’s desktop app, you could then send and receive messages without ever leaving the app.
This says exactly the same, only using the Spotify example. It again dodges the question when data sharing started.
I hold the idea of assuming good faith in the highest regard. But a statement as important as this must have gone through several layers of lawyers with the finest combs available, right? To then so artfully miss answering the actual question... It would be quite a coincidence.
If indeed it is deliberate, OP of this thread falling for this artfully crafted admission of guilt should actually command some respect for the craftsmanship of their PR people, in a certain, ethically-challenged light. Although people ignorantly finding fault with everything the Times does may just be an easy mark for PR wordsmiths.
Edit: After perusing OP rock_hard’s history, I will have to once again break “assumption of good faith”, sorry. Almost literally all their posts are defending Facebook, or making accusations against Apple, Google, or the New York Times. I’ve often seen responsible disclosures of self-interest by, among others, people working at Google here. This is the first time I’ve seen a pattern this suggestive of the opposite.
If they wanted to do this, couldn't they have done some plugin, where all interaction with FB features is within that plugin but inaccessible to to the broader app? Because otherwise, they have to effectively assume that this partner has gotten full access to the PMs. In crypto terms, a "total break" for that user.
I'm not even sure how this makes sense from a greedy megaglobocorp perspective. FB should be guarding that data tightly against other companies having it; their exclusive access is valuable.
Help?
This is spin by Facebook.
Remember in their last scandal, they denied using The Definers at first then weeks later admitted it.
I wouldn't conduct anything on it that you'd care to keep secret, though.
> Apple officials said they were not aware that Facebook had granted its devices any special access. They added that any shared data remained on the devices and was not available to anyone other than the users.
Any more information about that? I would be curious to know if we have actual proofs about those statements.
It would let you sync your contacts and add their Facebook profile pic to them, as well as post to Facebook using a system UI. Apparently this API gave Apple more permission than was needed for these features, but that Apple was unaware of it.
https://www.macrumors.com/2017/06/05/facebook-twitter-integr...
"and gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages"
When I watched 21 on Netflix, Facebook Messenger on my phone suggested to play blackjack, literally the hour after.
So yes, it is anti-competitive for Facebook to block access against the explicit wishes of its users. But it’s also despicable to sell user data to whomever without asking permission first. It’s pretty obvious from Facebook’s actions that they consider it their data, not your data.
> The Times also reviewed more than 270 pages of Facebook's internal documents and performed technical tests and analysis to monitor what information was being passed between Facebook and partner devices and websites.
Deleted my Instagram three weeks back because my feed was 1 ad for every 3 posts. Haven't missed it.
If I could only get rid of Whatsapp, I would never need to use anything from this awful company
Although I tried getting one friend to switch today, didn't work because of network size. I'm afraid our only alternative is to organize all our really cool stuff on Signal and get 'em with FOMO.
If only there were some means for people to use whatever apps they liked and for these to communicate with each other.
My family was easy. No pics of my daughter on any social network. "Y'all want pics? install Signal. If I catch you posting on FB, you're cut off"
Once mom installed Signal, the rest followed.
As to my friends, the ones I actually care for are privacy freaks like me - although they're not techies - and understood its importance.
Too many features and plugins Facebook has seem to be leaky in some respect. Messanger does not use default end-to-end encryption for whatever mysterious reason. If Facebook owns the endpoints, it can just as easily obtain the data for themselves before encrypting and submitting the message if it were enabled anyway.
How could I have any faith Facebook doesn't collect messages intended to be sent in confidence if collecting them suits Facebook's purposes?
I'm not sure however if Facebook's sketchiness is intentional or not. We have few examples of companies that were early movers in the inception days of the modern internet. And the decisions made early on prefigured everything that was to come.
At this time I would look to other others for inspiration about the correct way to make use of a data jackpot. Facebook's own totally unrestricted laissez-faire mentality in the relentless pursuit and utilization of its data is undermining itself.
If not, what the hell are they paying top-of-industry salaries for?
I don’t mean server to client. I mean clients have the keys and only the clients.
Why are we relying on third parties to pretty please enforce access control?
C. F. email.
IIRC, we could see the agrnt’s half of the exchange only, and they were certainly informed of exactly what was going on. The software did other things, too, such as being able to post approved content on their behalf, but this was a core function. Their alternative was to not be able to use Facebook at all.
Time to pay the piper!
He's lied to Congress. He's lied to half of Europe. (Or blown them off.) He's knowingly directed the violation of a federal consent decree and several EU directives. He presides over a platform profiting from mass atrocities in multiple countries.
There's plenty to go after him with. The only things protecting him are his standing and lack of unexpected criminality.
The rules for you and I are not the same rules for Zuckerberg or Clapper.
Maybe that's not fair, but I just assume that very little in the form of corporate regulation is on the table right now.