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Comment by pesenti | Hacker News Reader

This is the clear history feature that was announced a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16969325. See also the engineering post that explains some of the challenges in implementing this: https://engineering.fb.com/data-infrastructure/off-facebook-...

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This comment is by Jérôme Pesenti, VP of AI at Facebook.

Since no one else has asked yet: You seem like a nice guy who could probably get a job elsewhere easily. Why are you still at FB?

Maybe the position of VP of AI at other FAANG companies was already taken, and there were no other alternatives at the similar level of prestige and compensation in the job market.

>>similar level of prestige

Assuming this isn't sarcasm, this is how the word prestige is defined - "denoting something that arouses widespread respect or admiration".

Facebook lied to ad buyers (customers) about video views

https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/17/17989712/facebook-inaccu...

Facebook lied to users about their spying app

https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2019/03/02/facebook-...

Facebook lied to regulators about its ability to combine user data

https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/7/18215143/facebook-whatsapp...

Facebook lied to journalists about the CA issue

https://www.vice.com/en_in/article/qv777x/facebook-lied-to-j...

They don't mind doing mood manipulation experiments

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/every...

They have absolutely no qualms stooping low enough to steal money from kids

https://www.consumerreports.org/privacy/facebook-friendly-fr...

Based on the definition above, there is only one prestigious job left at Facebook. Whistle-blower.

> Assuming this isn't sarcasm, this is how the word prestige is defined - "denoting something that arouses widespread respect or admiration".

"Prestige" in terms of the scale of technical challenges that very few other companies can match at the moment. For many career-focused individuals that is the only thing that matters.

I am at FB completely by choice as I don't need to work any longer. FB is an amazing company - best talent I have ever worked with combined with some of the most interesting challenges I have ever faced. And it gives you the means and autonomy to pursue really bold projects, like PyTorch. Yes it made some serious mistakes but it's genuinely trying to solve them. I know me just saying it won't convince you that it's the case, would be hard not to be skeptical given the press and the way it's portrayed on HN, but on the inside it's pretty clear.

>>given the press and the way it's portrayed on HN

You forgot to add the most important reason which should be at the beginning of that sentence - track record.

And also, hiding important financial details e.g. the so called "friendly fraud" case is not a serious mistake, which implies that somehow it all "just happened" and could have "happened to anyone". It was deliberate, a lot of people were complicit, and it is exactly the kind of issue that crosses the fine line between what is merely a "serious mistake" and goes and sits squarely in the realm of "intentional, systematic and deliberate fraud" to pump up the company pre-IPO. And the fact that this came to light about 7-8 years after the actual incident suggests that we have only yet seen the tip of the iceberg on these kinds of issues.

But let us suppose you are actually right that it was just a "serious mistake".

My view is that right now there are a lot more shady things going on inside FB even as you come and write this.

"Well, how can you be so sure?" is what people generally ask. That's exactly what people who were defending FB were asking as early as 2016 on these forums. But over the last 2-3 years, the skeptics have been vindicated, and those folks who were previously defending FB are nowhere to be found on threads which discuss Facebook. As the saying goes - their silence is now deafening.

This is at best disingenuous - you are a VP at facebook and should preface a comment that tries to claim FB is respecting people's privacy with a comment to the effect of:

"I am a VP at Facebook and my income is based on how effectively we track and abuse the privacy of the general public, whether or not they are user's or have agreed to any contract with my employer"

I do add a disclaimer when I express an opinion. I didn't mean to imply anything here, I was just really pointing people to extra information. But I guess if that came across differently, it would have been safer to add the disclaimer anyway.

It's like how the scale of Google forced them to come up with Spanner to solve their engineering challenges: Facebook collects so much data it's now having to develop new systems and ingenious methods to allow users to delete said data.

Why is it no longer a "clear history" feature?

money? Or maybe just Facebook is at its core opposed to the idea of not misleading their users.

I mean it's also worth noting that to access the misleading "clear history" feature you have to create an FB account so they can track you more.

Respectfully: if your employer (for as I understand it you are a Facebook employee) encounters "challenges" to treating people decently and not running a panopticon on humanity at large, it is hard to see a reason why your employer should be allowed to continue as a going concern.

> challenges

rm -rf /var/tracking_data/jforberg

> challenges

"How do we delete the data, and still profit from it?"

If it’s challenging to make a feature treat users with respect then maybe you shouldn’t have built the feature in the first place?

It’s like designing a dangerous rollercoaster with no concern for safety, and then when people start dying complaining about how hard it was to make it safe.

Nasty, unethical, criminal and morally bankrupt company. There are no other words to describe it.

Did you read the article? If you read between the lines is really tells you what they think of user's privacy. Apparently their systems was never designed to allow deletion of data, and they had to do investigations just to figure out what the different teams were doing with it. There is no way they found everything.

If I was investing a a GDPR complaint, this article contains a lot of information that would be useful when asking questions to FB.

I think you are either completely unaware of the whole situation with Facebook and their business model or you have ulterior motives.

When I read between the lines I see just a nasty attempt at PR to keep naive users & clueless regulators happy by offering the illusion of choice and control over your data.

The reality is that they designed malicious infrastructure akin to a spyware’s command and control center (but at scale, while the other spyware usually gets by with brittle PHP scripts dropped on a hacked shared host) and are now offering you tools to (supposedly) opt-out from a threat they created in the first place.

I don't know why you suggest I'm unaware. I'm completely in agreement with you.

You might have thought I was making excuses for them. On the contrary, they clearly never designed a system to delete data because the mere idea of actually deleting information associated with a user is so alien to them that they never even thought of it.

Apologies - I guess I was in the wrong state of mind when I read it yesterday as now it appears completely clear what you meant.

Actually, when I read my original message, I can see how it can be mistaken for making the opposite statement.

I usually try to be as clear as possible, but when it comes to that company I just don't see how anyone could be apologetic for them, so I never read my own post from that perspective.

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