Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

> The researchers (w/ the help of others) are responsible for a browser plug-in called Ad Observer, which allows FB users to voluntarily share very limited and anonymous data about the political ads that FB shows them. You can read about Ad Observer here:

https://adobservatory.org

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Absolutely preposterous takedown demand. Facebook doesn't get to dictate what software I run on my own client devices, including browser plugins, or even what browser I use. If I want to install a plugin that sends a screenshot or data of every advertisement I receive, to a third party of my choice, that's up to me. Or maybe I want to install ublock origin and see no ads.

It sounds like they're complaining because they have no way of detecting this or preventing it on the user client end, thankfully, because of the way browsers are architected to prevent a website from screwing with the software on your computer. The only way fb could detect or block this would be to force users to install their own fb-written browser plugin, with extensive permissions required.

Obviously fb has a high level of motivation to get every user to use their officially app-store-published android or ios app, where the whole experience is centrally controlled, and such a plugin is impossible to use. Rather than having the user browse facebook in Firefox or Chrome or Edge.

If I can display something on my own computer screen it's my right to choose to share it however I damn well please.

A lot of people felt Facebook should do more to proactively stop people from scraping and aggregating data from their site after the CA debacle. Which is what they are doing here, and you are labeling “absolutely preposterous”.

Which way is it? Should they let people do whatever they want with their accounts as you suggest, and risk a repeat of the CA fiasco? Or try to proactively stop it like they are now?

> Should they let people do whatever they want with their accounts as you suggest, and risk a repeat of the CA fiasco?

Yes.

This looks like a strawman dressed in false dilemma. With Cambridge Analytica debacle, as I understand it, it was a facebook quiz hosted by facebook and the data collected from facebook directly and used for nefarious purposes.

This is a an extension developed by researchers asking users to install it on their machines and used exactly as advertised: scrapes advertisement data that facebook shows them.

CA data was from a quiz, developed by a researcher at Cambridge University, hosted by that researcher, which scraped FB APIs after being authorized by a user.

This data is from a browser extension, developed by researchers at NYU, hosted by those researchers, which scrapes the FB site after being installed by a user.

IMO the situations are pretty analogous.

The situations are in no way analogous. CA gathered data on users who did not opt in. They paid 270k users to take a quiz, and gathered information on 87MM of their Facebook friends who never consented to sharing their information.

No kidding, the difference between opt-in and secret-opt-in is obvious.

In CA scandal the data collected was about users.

Here data is collected about what Facebook does, what a corporation does.

They don't seem similar.

> Which way is it? Should they let people do whatever they want with their accounts as you suggest, and risk a repeat of the CA fiasco? Or try to proactively stop it like they are now?

No, they should assume all the data they serve about people is being collected and indexed by all the people they serve it to, and then restrict what they serve accordingly. Suing people for asking their computers to record what Facebook served them is insane.

What Cambridge Analytica fiasco?

https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2020/10/06/1602008755000/ICO-s-f...

The more I learn about CA and this so-called "fiasco", the more I realize other companies know far more and actively did far more than CA did.

They were an easy scapegoat for Hillary Clinton losing what should have been the easiest Presidential election win in American history.

The fact someone made a few hundred thousand - million off a documentary is even more pathetic.

"Everyone else is doing it" and "these other people are worse" is hardly a justification.

>A lot of people felt Facebook should do more to proactively stop people from scraping and aggregating data from their site after the CA debacle. Which is what they are doing here, and you are labeling “absolutely preposterous”.

Maybe not the best usage of the word scraping.

CA had access to the data without having to scrape the front end.

For this extension, it is by consent of the user

For scraping, I agree. Facebook should try their best to stop people accessing personal data of people they don't know. They do make reasonable attempts, it's less than trivial to set up fake accounts on scale but not impossible. Their "bulk uploads" feature is designed in such a way that it doesn't link email addresses to profiles (or at least as easily), unlike LinkedIn and Twitter. Saying that, it's up to the user to set their privacy settings but I would much prefer the defaults (if they still aren't, I don't use FB) were automatically set to non-public. I've seen an implementation that used headless browsers and thousands of FB accounts to scrape millions of profiles.

They harvested the data about users without their consent. This is about users wanting to protect against said data collection, so I think your angle comes from the wrong perspective and the juxtaposition (Which way is it?) is wrong.

> Should they let people do whatever they want with their accounts

That CA didn't have the consent of users was the scandal.

sounds to me like they dont want to be held accountable by a third party.

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