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I think the issues are: - they were collecting data from users who were below legal age for responsibility and/or local laws about collecting data about minors. - The general public know very little about everything. Companies have a moral duty to not only educate their users but also to not do wrong.

Personal responsibility is a flag many people wave but it's a farce. That argument can be used for anything, from seatbelts, to smoking, to privacy. It is impossible for everyone to know enough to make informed choices about EVERYTHING. There is a need for societal organisations (governments, NGOs, responsible journalism) to provide guidance to the public and legal limits in order to provide protection to the whole.

Wow, what a condescending view point that people can't possibly think through things on their own without other people making decisions for them.

1. Parents need to monitor their child's Internet and phone activity. Why is it FB's responsibility to do that for them?

2. Smoking, seatbelts, and privacy are all personal choices that people should be able to make for themselves. You don't need to know that much to make an informed choice. It's called common sense and it is something that is disappearing and with it so are our rights.

> Wow, what a condescending view point that people can't possibly think through things on their own without other people making decisions for them.

...

> Smoking, seatbelts, and privacy are all personal choices that people should be able to make for themselves.

There is a legal minimum age for purchasing cigarettes. Most states have laws requiring the use of seatbelts. So why shouldn’t some power, be it governmental or corporate, push people towards protecting their privacy?

If you’re going to cherrypick counterexamples to the idea that people can think things through and make the right decision for themselves maybe try picking, ya know, counterexamples?

Actually I'm really happy that I was informed from my young age that smoking decreases my life expectancy. I never smoked in my life (except once-twice for trying it out).

I wish I knew this for air pollution as well, as I didn't care about it, and now I'm feeling the consequences every day.

Just the fact that smoking can lead to cancer is a recent development that improved the lives of so many people, it's statistically significant in the average life expectancy of the human race. But to get here it took fight from many researchers, regulators and non-profit organizations. This has nothing to do with common sense.

One more thing: have you seen the video of the child who's smoking at 2? Is he doing it because he's lacking common sense?

Monitoring internet activity is FB’s business. That’s how they make their money. That’s the product they sell to advertisers. Since this is their product they have responsibilities in this regard, no?

If I let you monitor all of my internet activity then no big deal. There are no society wide consequences from this. If a company the size of Facebook can do this then there are society wide consequences. Some of those consequences are good and some are bad. We need to mitigate the bad consequences. This is analogous to the mortgage industry problems back in 2008. If I make a bad loan to you no big deal. But if I make millions of bad loans that can wreck the entire economy then there’s a problem that society ought to mitigate against.

How interesting that you would choose as your examples "seatbelts", "smoking", and "privacy".

If you print in large letters on every pack of cigarettes, "SMOKING KILLS" and people still choose to smoke, should a benevolent government be allowed to prevent an individual's poor choice?

Right now, we allow the sale of cigarettes and prohibit the sale of raw milk.

Don't you see any room for personal responsibility? None?

I'm eagerly waiting for Facebook to release T&C with terms as simple as "SMOKING KILLS". Yes, companies have to cover their asses and legalese is complex, but I'm assuming that nothing prevents them from having simplified, non-binding version of T&C available.

My first thought is that the simplified terms would be argued to be the real terms in court.

Isn't it something that more legalese in T&C could solve? Or a huge warning before simplified terms? I think I've seen few companies publish simplified terms, but I'd have to search for the examples now.

Thought experiment: if cigarettes were invented today, do you think they would be legal?

Smoking is an interesting example because the negative effects aren't just confined to the individual. Smoking a cigarette is the atmospheric equivalent of peeing in the pool except it also causes cancer and other health issues. Maybe it's actually an important example because it's an undeniable illustration of 2nd order effects, which are less pronounced in other cases but probably still exist.

And "any room for personal responsibility"? There are plenty of domains of behavior that aren't regulated; there's a whole world of choices individuals are responsible for alone.

Various forms of regulation regarding smoking, seat belts, and yes, even raw milk are all working in areas where limited human capacity for evaluating risk meets deadly consequences. Privacy is arguably different since it's unlikely to be directly deadly, but it does meet risk evaluation limits and adds in that incentives of 3rd parties are against individual incentives, and many of those 3rd parties have incredible resources available to them in order to obscure behavior and subvert protections. A collective response is a reasonable one.

Privacy also meets your test for “second-hand” negative effects. You can be a monk, but someone snapping a picture and writing up a post can destroy your privacy as well as using the service yourself. More realistically, you can use FB for the bare minimum, but if your friends and family use it a lot, your privacy is gone again.

Do I need to go through 500 pages of convoluted legal bullshit to understand smoking kills me?

Some of the people using the Facebook spy app in this case were as young as 13 -- with "signed parental consent forms".

What do you think would be the proper response to a store selling cigarettes to 13-year-olds as long as they had a parent's signature? I think we'd still step in and stop them. The government can even revoke their license to sell tobacco to anyone in that case.

There's no "personal responsibility" at issue here. Our society has decided that 13-year-olds aren't old enough to give consent. I suspect there would have been less outcry, and for a different reason, had everyone involved in this issue been above the age of majority.

I'm not sure seatbelts/smoking are the best examples, because the negative consequences are quite clear and understood by most of society. I've never met a smoker that continued to smoke under the assumption it was good for them.

The consequences of privacy violations are much more nuanced; most people don't understand how data they enter onto a website will be used. And it's clear a lot of those companies want to continue to keep people in the dark about it, because it would likely freak them out.

Facebook isn't in hotwater with the public. No one gives a shit about any of this except us nerds. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/30/facebook-us-revenue-growth-o...

I generally agree but a couple times in the last few weeks I have had friends and family make comments about ditching facebook, and neither is at all technically inclined. It's possible that the message is making it to regular people, and once that ship sails there is no bringing it back into the dock.

Everyone I know who is not in tech has already dropped out or only uses Instagram. (I know Facebook owns Insta) I think Mark knows how useless Facebook is to people which is why he is aggressively trying to maximize his profits and still using really dumb PR tactics. He has been milking the idiots and kids for years, whats another 3.

The issue wasn't the app exists and people were using it. It was the demographic this app was targeting.

The app was targeting 13 to 35 year olds. People under 18 has to get parental permission which was literally just selecting a box.

The $20 of free money is a big deal for a kid and they might not have the best idea of what they're giving away with agreeing to this.

It's a really scummy move and possibly illegal to target kids like this.

another perspective: FB's big mistake was paying these users too little.

if FB had paid, say, $2000 a month instead of $20, the users would have been angry at Apple for forcing such a program to stop. FB would look like a force for good.

instead, FB cheaped out.

There are so many places on the world where $2000 a month is more than most people get. Of course they didn't pay that much. I would probably consider it seriously given that currently I get about $800 and that is still considered average.

But that's a great example! If FB were paying you $2000 a month as a participant in this FB program, and then suddenly Apple made it so that FB could no longer operate this program -- would you be unhappy with FB or with Apple?

I still think it would've been an issue to do that for kids as well.

They should've just targeted 18+

But paying such a large amount would certainly draw more attention to the program itself? It might have caused a ruckus earlier and be shut down in the very early stages by Apple. At that point it might not have affected that many people and not so many people would be angry at Apple.

I believe the amount was a way of treading a fine line between being a significant amount for the targeted audience, but not too much to attract too many people.

They did not make it clear that this app could bypass SSL. I've talked to numerous people on reddit who installed the app thinking that they were safe because all their communication was encrypted, not realizing that the whole point of the app is to bypass encryption.

> Have we lost sight of personal responsibility? How naive are people?

How can you blame this on personal responsibility when you need a law degree to understand the terms and conditions? Like many here I am intelligent and educated and I have an extremely difficult time understanding the legalese the T&C are written in. The average person would have an even harder time if they bothered to read it at all. Some lawyers have spoken out that they have a hard time understanding these agreements.

I would argue that there is no way any reasonable person would think the users were properly informed. You can't be properly informed when you have little to no chance of understanding what you're agreeing to without at least one lawyer.

>Facebook paid users as young as 13 to install an app that gave the company access to everything their phone sent or received over the internet.

This is a big part of why they're in hot water.

>Perhaps not, but last time I checked this is still a free country and people can sell their property for as much or as little as they want.

Children? No.

If I had a nickel for every time someone appealed to "won't someone think of the children!" as an excuse to add more regulation and to squash individual rights and responsibility I might be able to afford one of Apple's iPhones.

This isn’t some “think of the children” excuse and regulation already exists here...but I suspect you know that.

This isn't a "won't someone think of the children" moment. Facebook targeted people who are not legally able to give consent and join in a contract, to try and get them into a contract. The same ethical and legal issues would exist if Facebook was targeting severely mentally disabled people who cant legally consent to a contract

> Children? No.

OK, this is completely off topic, but I just came across an interesting fact about children and consent.

For most medical procedures in most states, a minor needs parental consent. But suppose the parent themselves is also a minor?

In 30 states that minor parent can consent for their child, even though they would not be able to consent for the same procedure for themselves!

In the other 20 states what would happen is unclear, as this is covered neither be policy or case law.

As an EMS provider, the parent part trumps the consent part. It's a little different for us, as "emergent care" is certainly different from elective care.

> In 30 states that minor parent can consent for their child, even though they would not be able to consent for the same procedure for themselves!

That's definitely the awkward part!

I don't think most people would have truly understood how much control Facebook had over their phone with the access given. It's not as simple as "the user clicked 'I consent,' so it's ok." For better or worse, we have become conditioned to clicking "I agree" because we are bombarded with hundreds of pages of legalese to use anything these days. I don't think this absolves companies from acting ethically.

https://9to5mac.com/2019/01/29/facebook-paying-teens-vpn/

Someone from BBC showed just how much of a joke this consent form is anyway:

https://twitter.com/DaveLeeBBC/status/1090528627005902848/ph...

> Have we lost sight of personal responsibility? How naive are people? If you are getting something for free from a large corporation you're not getting it out the kindness of their heart. They are making money somehow. That is how the world works.

We can argue about this particular instance, but I think your argument is pretty flawed; it seems to imply that if I agree to a deal with a company, I can't be upset about ANYTHING slipped into the T&C. It really depends on what it is.

Yes, these people expected to trade some information for money, but it isn't naive of them to expect some reasonable limits to what they were collecting.

Although you may be technically correct, it doesn't matter.

People don't read T&C, and they don't like having companies spy on them like this. If companies won't be up front about their data collection (and burying the notice in a T&C isn't being up front) they'll just have to suffer the consequences when people find out.

Being glib, maybe Facebook and its employees (not the users) should stop being so naive. People aren't going to be happy when they fully understand what's been happening under the cover of "you agreed to the T&Cs", and it's Facebooks own fault. That's why this sort of news makes people happy in a perverse way. Facebook is a net negative to society, and it's funny watching bad things happen to the company.

I don't understand why this is all that controversial either. Is it really any different than what Nielson does with set meters to capture people's TV watching behavior?

I mean, doesn't it depend on what they are collecting? If it turns out that Nielson slipped something into their T&C that says they can turn on a listening device and listen to conversations in the house, it would be just as troublesome.

There are limits to what is reasonable in these sorts of deals, and if you are asking for something that most people would think is unreasonable, you better make it very clear when someone is signing up. You can't bury it in the T&C.

Yeah, I guess it all depends on whether or not the participants knew what they were signing up for. If Facebook said install this we will pay you to monitor your location, internet traffic, and app usage then there really shouldn't be an controversy (other than the Apple terms violation). Do we know for a fact that this info actually was buried in their T&C though?

FB has opened themselves up to a world of hurt in this endeavor. The copious privacy issues aside, the is an easy question of 'what happens when...' that I cannot fathom how their legal counsel overlooked.

For example: One of the persons that they were closely monitoring decides to harm themselves or others in a somewhat 'newsworthy' way. Think the plethora of young people with access to certain classes of firearms. A contrived set of circumstances could exist where that young person could have been stopped by the monitors at FB, yet was allowed to continue all the same, through the sheer stupidity/negligence of FB. Though this is only one scenario, there exist many others; I think anyone can come up with at least a dozen in under an hour.

Yes, the T&Cs 'cover' their asses in these events (morality be damned), but there are loopholes upon loopholes that can be quickly found when the camera crews start swarming and saying 'oh, but the kiddos!'.

Whatever legal counsel is at FB these days is too cavalier; they may be thinking that they can just throw a firm's worth of lawyers at any problem and bankrupt the opposing party. This is a very grave mistake. I suspect that any competent/moral lawyers have up and left by now, leaving only the amoral/incompetent attorneys that are just fine suckling off of FB. The evaporative effect is in full force at FB now (the Elves have left Middle Earth [0]).

[0] https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...

>Have we lost sight of personal responsibility?

Implying that individual people can keep up with legalese written in an intentionally misleading way by teams of lawyers is crazy. Especially when seemingly every single company and sale is treated like that.

It is effectively impossible for an average person to understand every agreement you need to make to be part of modern society, and that is by design of the companies

> people can sell their property for as much or as little as they want

This is correct, and when you figure out a way for people to sell only their data to FB/whoever, I will be right onboard, but while companies like FB are sucking in as much data about me as they can, in ways I can't control, I will have to disagree with you strongly.

I don't buy the personal responsibility argument here - most technology companies (Apple included) have extremely dense EULAs or T&C documents that are often designed to confuse, rather than clarify. Root access might be something that most people on HN understand without explanation, but my teenage sister likely doesn't.

> If you are getting something for free from a large corporation you're not getting it out the kindness of their heart. They are making money somehow.

Facebook always lead with how they're a "community". They make their money from ads. But that never leads. Facebook isn't sold as a place where you see ads - it's a place where you "connect with friends." There's a sophisticated business that 13 year olds might not inherently understand.

> Have we lost sight of personal responsibility?

Yes. FB have.

It's related to what we already know about Facebook: They are willing to bend the rules and engage in questionable behavior.

They were happy to violate the terms of Apple's enterprise development program. Yet another display of disrespect. So how can the public trust Facebook with their data?