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Comment by jonathanehrlich | Hacker News Reader

(disclosure: i used to work for FB). This article left out words like "publicly available information" and "user consent". Why?

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Yes: why? Or better: what. As in: what are you trying to tell us? That private messages are publicly available information, anyway? Or friends list, when set to private?

But to fulfill your yearning, the original NYT report mentions “consent” 12 times: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/18/technology/facebook-priva...

(Although two of those mentions are in the context of “consent decree”, which arguably doesn’t make it look any better)

A taste:

“This is just giving third parties permission to harvest data without you being informed of it or giving consent to it,” said David Vladeck, who formerly ran the F.T.C.’s consumer protection bureau. “I don’t understand how this unconsented-to data harvesting can at all be justified under the consent decree.”

No where in this article do they say users gave consent to have their information shared which they were required to do before such services could be implemented. At best, that's bad reporting and misleading at worst it's an agenda.

I really don’t think you are doing your employer any favors by your transparently obtuse attempts to misrepresent the actual content of the accusations.

i don't work for FB anymore. The content of the accusation leave out two critical pieces. 1. Users gave consent to share private information. 2. Only publicly available information was shared these partners. Those are pretty important omissions in my opinion.

The article clearly says users did not consent. And even if they did, that would presumably clash with your other assertion, namely that “only publicly available information was shared”.

So I stand by my accusation that you are pretending to be stupid, because no person working at Facebook would really be unable to find the accusation of private data being shared in an article titled “Facebook gave Spotify and Netflix access to users’ private messages”

You seem to be asserting that you have knowledge of the situation, enough to dispute the article. And you're an ex-employee of FB. That's most interesting. What else can you tell us? Be detailed.

I'm confused about what is publicly available information in private messages. Can you explain?

I'm not sure either but i don't believe there is such a thing. No private message data was shared publicly.

I mean, the articles don't suggest it was shared publicly :-) They suggest it was shared with specific companies - but that it was shared nevertheless. That sounds like a serious violation of users' privacy.

If they did it without user consent, it would be an issue for sure.

If by "publicly available information" you mean the EULA, this can in practice not really be expected to be read and understood by the average user. A wall of text with vague remarks is par for such things. Add to this a constantly moving set of settings that change meaning over time (who can read this post now again?).

you don't need to give consent for publicly available information. if we are friends FB and you like a song on spotify and share that on fb publicly, why shouldn't I be able to see that when i'm on FB or Spotify? It makes my experience better on both. That's what instant personalization was. Again, the times failed to talk about that.

There's a difference between tech industry "consent" and informed consent.

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