New York governor orders probe into Facebook access to data from other apps
reuters.com
reuters.com
I have never worked at FB, but I've worked at a few well known yet somewhat controversial companies (in fintech, marketplaces, etc.) that I sometimes feel uneasy about.
But I still hate it. Still feel like I'm kind of ruined in some sense for not going the really, really hard route to avoid it all. Every day. Some jobs more than others, but even at the best I sometimes go home catching whiffs of something that make me think my soul must have stepped in some dog shit on the way.
But you're a better person for it, don't forget that.
Life's a shitty wooden roller coaster that jostles your neck too much for most of us, but the alternative is not experiencing it at all.
We're pretty fortunate. Start looking for jobs which align with your ideals.
Take a paycut and work at a non profit.
Find an open source maintainer role at a company somewhere.
Find a role at a company building a product you like.
You can do it relatively passively while still working. No harm in looking!
there has to be a field which isn't just about data extraction, mass surveillance (or worse).
I'm so friggin' sick of looking at glowing rectangles (he wrote, looking at a glowing rectangle). Watching all the faffing about with software-enabled workflow insanity and other time-wasters across various industries (including dev itself) I'm even pretty skeptical of the benefits of all this crap.
I have a wholly unverified suspicion that computers and the Internet are very very beneficial in a tiny set of (often very important!) applications, and only potentially but not actually in practice beneficial in the vast majority of cases—and in fact often harmful—such that they're technically a big boon to the economy as a whole but in any particular instance you're likely to encounter are... usually not.
Later, I worked in advertising, helping increase consumption and creation of various plastic trash, sugar-rich concoctions, and other such stuff.
I worked for a company that helped pharmaceutical companies target advertising to people on Facebook and other social networks who were sharing their health issues.
In between, I worked on other stuff, which was not as unsavory, but most of the time it still felt like pushing lots of little squares into square holes, and so on.
Lately, I've decided to just work on my own projects, and not contribute my brainpower to destroying my own habitat.
I am much happier now.
Like I pay for public transportation (I’m Danish, we have great public transportation) with an App, which is nice and all, but the user experience is actually worse than when it was just a piece of paper.
We’ve saved the public billions by making some processes easier, but we’ve also digitised a lot of stuff because there was (is) this general idea that digitisation is always better, and it’s just not. Especially not from a user perspective, if you’re a social worker you now have to know how to use 5-10 complicated and error prone IT systems, on top of your regular job, and we just keep on adding more. I mean,those 5-10 systems are linked to their work on top of that there are another 5-10 adiministrative systems and maybe 50 different digital forms.
None of these systems are necessary mind you, 30 years ago, almost none of them existed and our social workers performed better for less money back then.
Overall digitisation has been a benefit though. We’ve managed to eliminate a lot of repetition, we’ve made the total public sector cheaper and we’ve increased the overall quality of our services, but from a user perspective things have mostly deteriorated.
I have no idea how to fix it either.
Lots of public sector sites also use Facebook and have Google analytics on their site, so they partake in what Facebook does. Maybe not evil but not good either.
The workers are users of those IT systems, but not the end-users of the social services. Those workers' jobs shifted in nature. Their new work is to interact with numerous different IT systems to provide a social service. In the long term, all those workers are currently gathering data that will help to build a new digital social service which won't have those inefficiencies. They work toward the transition to a "better" digital world for the end-users of the social service.
> None of these systems are necessary mind you, 30 years ago, almost none of them existed and our social workers performed better for less money back then.
"better for less money" : According to what sources? What indicators?
> but from a user perspective things have mostly deteriorated.
Same questions, from the end-users perspective of the social services. What indicators are you using?
We could imagine providing a social service without human social workers at all, enabled by digitization, like in all other sectors.
I’m tempted to say “pick one”. Workers are less satisfied, more stressed and less efficient. Citizens are less satisfied and receive a lower quality of service. Financially it depends, on paper it’s better but if you add in the cost of sick days and the impact of lower citizen life quality has on society, then a lot of digitisation has been disastrous.
Not all of it, mind you, just some of it.
If I can chose an indicator, then I pick my personal experience. I live in Europe and I'm happy with the digital experience of social services I have. I'm 28 years old so I experienced a bit of the pre-internet administrative era and digitization is definitively an improvement. Oftentimes, processes are simplified and can be done remotely, which is definitively a net plus for all disabled people.
> Workers are less satisfied, more stressed and less efficient.
Digitization must be accompanied with change management, and the society's laws must be adapted to a digitized society. In my personal opinion, we should develop idea such as Universal Basic Income, and not make "work" as mandatory as it was. I agree with you that operating everyday administrative softwares isn't a fulfilling job to everyone.
Now I'm producing an affordable, detailed video course that teaches ordinary people auto engineering. It's the most satisfying project I ever worked on but I'm very dependent on companies and products that I don't love: Google, YouTube, Facebook. I don't enjoy dealing with things like Instagram and that directly costs me a lot of money.
I think my Youtube stuff is amongst the best out there but I refuse to put yellow text, red circles, and my own grinning face on the thumbnails. I don't waste 30 seconds at the end of every video begging people to subscribe, ring the bell, support me on Patreon, comment, hit the thumbs up. I'd prefer to tell people what they need to know and send them on their way - that's directly at odds with YouTube who want to keep them from actually going out to the garage at all costs.
Unfortunately, even producing quality stuff you still end up taking a daily swim in a dirty sea filled with everyone else's floating bullshit.
It's very humbling tech with an amazing potential to do good and very developer friendly (they have been writing the code since the 60's) and my dev colleagues have been in this field for decades.
I just joined actually, any GIS nerds on HN care to share their experience and what they love/hate about GIS community/tech? Thanks!
Problem is, for all this anguish, I don't know a way out. At least with banks, wall street etc, I can switch to a community bank or something. What exactly is the alternative to Android/iOS, for example?
[10 minutes of deep thought]
Ok, we get it. If someone offers you something of value for free, politely say "no thanks" and run the other way.
Edit: If a for-profit company offers you something of value at no cost, you or someone else will end up paying for it later. Advertisers pay Facebook for your personal data, and you suffer because your privacy has been violated.
You are explicitely asking people to think for themselves and understand what’s going on. From this point of view I think that last bit feels mantra like and going on the opposite.
The same way “if you’re not the customer you’re the product” was relevant in some cases but has started a life on its own and could go continue a long life in a farm upstate I think.
We’re in a world when there is genuine free and extremely valuable things that are not bound to weird schemes. Linux is free, VLC is free, vaccination is free, legal representation for people who can’t afford it is free.
As you point out knowing why it’s free is crucial, and people should take the time to think bout what they want to rely on, instead of following some “don’t talk to strangers” kind of stopgap.
This is not free except in the narrowest sense.
Where does free software fit in this?
Is it really the case that we've forgotten "There's no such thing as a free lunch?"
- If it's from a company that is commoditizing its money-making products' internal dependencies, and it is in your interest for the software to become a commodity (e.g., you're pondering switching to Linux, which has patches from Google), great. Tough luck for those commercializing that software, though - so just make sure that development is sustainable.
- If it's from a company that's commoditizing its money-making products' complements (see https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ if you haven't), think carefully about how that complement relationship works. If it's Red Hat producing a window manager, sure, whatever. If it's Red Hat producing a complex infrastructure platform, and they make money based on support to make that platform work, maybe not so much.
- If it's from a company that's making money in an unclear, unrelated way (e.g., you're pondering using Android, which is developed by Google), look extremely skeptically and figure out what their real incentives are. There is a legitimate explanation for Android and Chrome: it's in Google's interest to promote the web as a platform, because they make money on web advertising. But that explanation might not be totally convincing to you, in which case running the other way is a fine answer.
- If it's from a source whose motivations are not linked to the capitalist machine (e.g., someone with a well-paying day job who's working on a side project on weekends), that's fine. Note that things from companies are almost never in this category.
- If it's from a company that hasn't yet realized that it's beholden to the capitalist machine (e.g., the early years of Ubuntu, or a young company with too much VC money), you might as well take advantage of it in the short term but have some plans about the long term.
- If it's from a source that you can pay, despite it being free, and you can afford to pay for it, do so. Pitch in to that developer's Patreon, buy the paid license for the neat monitoring product your company is using, etc.
The same thing happened to web browsers, though it’s Microsoft’s fault. You had to pay for web browsers back in the day. And then Microsoft bundled IE to leverage its OS monopoly. And then Google made Chrome, an ad supported browser. Now, the browser is just a purpose-built vector for advertising. Even though Mozilla still exists, almost all its revenue comes from Google.
The problem with free software is that unpaid developers can’t really do things on the scale of Android or Chrome. Today, the overwhelming majority of Linux contributions come from paid developers. That forces you to think about how to monetize the software, if you can’t just charge for it. And that leads to advertising, at least on the consumer side. Open source works okay for businesses, where companies like RedHat can pay for development through support contracts. But it’s been a disaster for consumers. The landscape is littered with formerly viable software niches (photo and video editors, word processors and spreadsheets, etc.) that have been decimated by either free software or free web apps which are linked to advertising.
Now imagine running this scheme with everyone you know. Your ex, friends, co-workers, your competitors, you name it. You can learn all their needs and desires by creating dozens of fake ads that lead to a bogus site that doesn't actually sell shit but works as a front for whatever product you want to advertise.
So you have to design a series of ads that are enticing enough to click on, and the victim will click on it. When they realize they clicked on a fake site, they'll exit it. How many people here have clicked on Facebook ads in the last week?
It seems incredibly time consuming, costly, and ineffective. It seems easier just to send some fake emails and check if they opened the email.
As for the rest, sure it's time consuming if you want to target 50 individuals. If you're aiming for one or two it's 10 minutes work.
Here's a relevant thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17110385
https://www.thedailybeast.com/inside-the-secret-facebook-war...
Free in what sense? We need to stop constraining the notion of "free" to monetary value.
Even here on HN so many people do not know what they are talking about when they say "free software".
The problem is all free software comes at the cost of either being made by someone who is doing it out of kindness or someone who is pawning your data. You cannot know which one it is.
What I dislike is all the other evil stuff they do. All the anti-democracy bullshit, the social experiments, the enablement of genocides, anti-vaxxers, the government bot armies and the total disregard for truth.
It may be because I’m European, but I actually think platforms should be held responsible for all the evil they enable.
I didn’t always, but after a decade of Facebook I don’t think anyone should be able to escape responsibility for having supplied a platform it’s users used for genocide.
The problem starts when half of your colleagues accept that "something", and start discussing it on HN. (For example: "React", or any other FB open source project).
IDK seems silly to me or maybe I'm in too deep and can't see the forest for the trees.
[0] at least for android, based on this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0vlD7r-kTc (35C3 - How Facebook tracks you on Android)
edit: add video title
> Facebook is facing a slew of lawsuits and regulatory inquiries over privacy issues, including a U.S. Federal Trade Commission investigation into disclosures that Facebook inappropriately shared information belonging to 87 million users with the defunct British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica.
Cambridge Analytica is not defunct, but rather changed its name to Emerdata. It's too bad Reuters didn't get that part correct.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/05/02/cambridge_analytica...
Not technically correct, but basically the truth. Cambridge Analytica declared bankrupcy in May of last year and the creators of that company created Emerdata and rehired many previous employees of Cambridge Analytica. Their HQ is even in the same exact building.
They're just playing the shell game, really. "Oh no, we're not the bad guys, we are just mostly made up of those old bad guys and do exactly the same thing in exactly the same way with the exact same location as those old guys... But, as you can clearly see, we have different bank account numbers and a different company name, so we're not the same thing at all."
Disclosure: Worked for Andersen Consulting early in my career.
Every story out there is about Cambridge Analytica, only a tiny proportion have been written recently enough to mention the phoenix. Yet they often won't, or give entirely the wrong impression like TFA here (defunct - oh that's a relief it's all over then). The number of old pieces that have had an update is so low as to be effectively none.
So we have to wait for the next scandal.
It does... if countries allow it. There was either some fear that this was happening or deliberate intent to keeping this from happening with the case of North Korea's sanctions - my memory's a bit fuzzy since the class I took where this came up some many years ago.
E.g. Some unethical people would setup a black exports shipping company to ship stuff to North Korea, and then when they got caught, they'd declare bankruptcy, liquidate hardware to some shell or holding company, shut that company down, create a new legal entity, rebuy all of the same equipment from the holding company, and restart the same old behavior. While the courts waste their time chasing defunct companies, the bad actors get to continue their bad behavior. This is just a new version of that game that's even easier since there are far fewer physical assets that need to be shelved or hidden (perhaps even none if the servers are all in someone's cloud).
Countries have largely stopped this kind of sanction-avoidance behavior by arresting the people in charge, ceasing assets to prevent them from being relabeled under the new company, and freezing accounts to prevent recapitalization under these kinds of shell corporations, in addition to requiring strict compliance around interactions with these sanctions countries and business entities.
tl;dr: the CA folks should be sitting in prison right now, and Facebook and Google should be sanctioned and require strict supervision in the way it shares data with its customers, to prevent this kind of microtargeted-electioneering-as-a-service. Laws like the GDPR won't actually stop anyone from collecting onerous data, since it basically only requires people to consent to it, and as we've seen with EULAs, people are willing to click through anything if it gives them the end result of using an application. The time for a law like that would have been literally 15-20 years ago, before companies like Facebook could tell you what someone's likely eaten for lunch or Target could tell when someone's gotten pregnant by their purchase histories. Unlikely we're going to be unringing that particular bell now...
That's not true, I used to work there. Everyone was laid off in July or so.
I haven't heard of anyone joining Emerdata, and I do see those guys now and again. I know where all the technical people work. Emerdata was created before the media shitstorm to absorb all the pointless corporate entities that had been created within the SCL group over the years and were now mostly idle.
A few of the people from Cambridge Analytica (or rather SCL elections) started a new political consultancy under the name Auspex International. So focus your conspiracies there if you must, noting:
- They're pretty open about it being an operating business and having employees from CA
- Very few of the higher-ups from SCL are involved, just one guy from the board I think. (He's a 20-something guy and wasn't even on the board til 2018. Bad timing!)
- They haven't taken on any technical staff from CA; although they did try to early on, no one had any trouble finding a job that would be less of a headache.
Please notice that you have engaged in lazy misinformation-spreading and you're participating a conspiracy theory. It's attractive to think that you're hot on the tail of a shadowy illuminati-esque group, but that's not the case. It was just an ad tech company with a few political clients and some snake oil regarding psychographics.
Your snake oil evidently outperformed the best modern medicine. So, congratulations for that, I guess.
- ineffective (no change in effectiveness if you randomise which "personality" sees which ad)
- never based on Facebook data during my time of employment there -- early 2016 onwards
- not used in the USA presidential election of 2016
To attack me as you have is both completely unnecessary and undermines your position. Indeed, it might even deepen folks' convictions that it is in the public's best interest that CA is well and truly shut down, and its employees closely scrutinized.
However, as someone who felt the need to create an account specifically to make this statement, I suppose that you either don't understand HN norms of respectful conduct or don't particularly care.
Yes, a basic search on "Cambridge Analytica Emerdata" yields reports that paint a conflicting story of whether the operation is indeed dead. Given their deeds and your statements, good riddance.
I realize frivolous comments on HN are frowned upon but frankly this leaves me speechless.
If your ad content is on lots of different web properties, you can "track" a user across each one, inferring data about the user one piece at a time, until you have a large profile. Then you use that profile to target ads/marketing. They never have to directly give you any data, but you can make money off of what you learn.
That's the entire reason "tracking" on the web exists. To build shadow profiles for direct marketing. Nobody thought Facebook was doing it too?
Mind you, I'm not completely naive. I don't trust MZ & SS, but your expectation that every know and understand the inner workings of all the large aadvertising networks feels a bit excessive.
"This just in: Door locks on most buildings can be easily picked, film at 11"
That was fast.
Tangentially related article, with demands made earlier this month, by Germany's Federal Cartel Office (WSJ): https://outline.com/Rwbzv4
>The authority ordered Facebook to make changes to its terms of service and how it collects user data. Data collected by the social network from third-party apps and websites can’t be assigned to a user’s Facebook account without their consent. Data gathered from Facebook-owned apps such as WhatsApp and Instagram also can’t be assigned to Facebook accounts without user consent, and if consent isn’t given, the data can only be used within the scope of those apps.