After reading facebooks response I am once again disappointed by the art of journalism we have to deal with these days :(
Turns out NYT either doesn’t understand the technical details or doesn’t want to
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.
>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?
“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.
This is spin by Facebook.
Remember in their last scandal, they denied using The Definers at first then weeks later admitted it.