Facebook wants to 'normalize' the mass scraping of personal data
vice.com
vice.com
[1] https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2019/03/05/facebook-critici...
Get people used to the truth? Shock, horror!
I mean, certainly Facebook rose to it's position through a sort of opposite claim, that a user could be "public" (visible to a wide circle of friends-of-friends-of-etc) but not public (visible to Russian hackers, Brazilian botmasters or whoever). This claim is kind of a fairy tale, something that no only isn't true but couldn't be true. "This information is public to anyone who creates an account but not public en masse to the world". Still, the claim made an average FB user feel safer (and lot of people "got on the Internet" in a big way through FB circa ~2010). And it's got a lot of traction now. But since the situation is fundamentally porous, now that FB is large, it seems it's in their legal interest to drop the bullshit and just say "if it's public, it's public, what the hell else do you expect".
And yeah, the exploitation of public data arguably lead to all sorts of bad effects and it would have been and would be nice to head this off in some fashion. But imagining you can this off by maintain a "quote-public versus totally-public" distinction isn't one of those ways.
If the database has value then perhaps it should have a regular cost?
Who knows what data is out there? My experience with just my credit reports was that the files about me were full of errors. At least I was able to correct them.
I also discovered a bunch of linkedin-scraped data about me that was posted on various contact sites. Multiple errors.
And nearly every website already warns me they're going to collect data. With you're step, the next thing is signing away that rent.
Or, if your plan involved rent that can't signed away, well, no one would host anyone for anything since they wouldn't want to pay that.
Certain regulations only consider meaningful freely given consent (all your popups mean nothing), and you still need to implement the option of no unnecessary data.
If they put monetary value on data, then they must have an option of paying out any extra, no? Of course they will try to weasel their way through cracks in laws, but they can be fixed, if (and only if) there is support.
Don't publish information you don't want to be part of some database publicly on the internet. I wish schools had some sort of tech literacy class where they explained this stuff to people…
Which are "these" numbers? I thought that in fact, the numbers that were leaked in this batch were set public by the users at some point, and the ones which were not, were not leaked.
https://haveibeenpwned.com/ indicates my phone has not been leaked, nor my @facebook address.
Every website you visit wants more and more of your data. Facebook played a huge role in making this level of data sharing widespread.
There is a logical reason for this: one of the toughest things is knowing what your users actually want and what their actual pain points are. In advertising there's an analogous problem often summarized as: "I know I am wasting 80% of my ad spend, but I don't know which 80%."
Every single incentive on the business side incentivizes data grabbing. This will never change unless users vote hard with their wallets or unless there is protective legislation.
Hopefully someone writes a better protocol with no third party cookies and heavily restricted javascript.
> heavily restricted javascript
Is basically impossible. Any useful subset of javascript would be turing-complete, and therefore enough to do whatever's necessary to track the user. Literally all you need to be able to do is make an HTTP request and bam, you can track.
> all you need to be able to do is make an HTTP request
Precicely. Inability to do this is (part of) what > > heavily restricted javascript means.
It seems like Facebook is now large enough that they're effectively owning up to the unavoidable truth - there's no way that information made available to all subscribers of some largish social network isn't going to be public to the world.
And sure, I don't give every gruesome detail in the rise but I'd still claim that the overall situation is that Facebook is large enough and it's model porous enough that a variety of actors have scraped it, are scraping it and will scrape it. And given this, Facebook has to start owning up to an inevitable situation. Keep in mind, The Cambridge Analytica scandal was predicated on Facebook's claimed data model (which I'd claim isn't just false but also "can't be true"). Sure, the easiest way to scrape it is having API access, which it's hard not to give to your advertisers. But if Facebook gave no one API access, various actors would be directly scraping.
And overall, I'd say The Cambridge Analytica scandal was the thing that wasn't a good framing of the broad problems of Facebook and privacy.
Edit: "But in the face of the news about recent leaks, and the Cambridge Analytica scandal in particular, they have had to switch to a more active PR strategy to quell the concerns people have about their product(s)."
And I'd say, this is again actually the wrong frame. Facebook is at the center of the storm, no doubt. But there is no large social network possible that wouldn't be subject to the general privacy problems of Facebook. Facebook created the fantasy definition of privacy, Facebook violated that definition but no one could satisfy it.
A great example is M&M’s dye choice became controversial due to customer confusion over which red dyes where harmful. So, the company couldn’t simply change the dye because what they where using wasn’t problematic. In the end they had to flat out stop selling red M&M’s for over a decade, and their reintroduction was surprisingly controversial.
I would speculate, in fact, that Facebook acting now make the obvious point that of course people are going to be scraping the data of their site because after X many scandals, it's becoming obvious that people will do that, that they will do that to any site like Facebook and that they'll have much clearer cover if they "normalize" thing that are ... fricken normal.
I'd further speculate that they couldn't act when Cambridge Analytica was fresher because then they'd be seen as being self-justifying and then they had to be seen as humble and apologetic.
Never heard of that; is that cochineal?
Don't upload stuff on a public website if you don't want it scraped/harvested.
I believe it is this.
I thought they meant this, as the phone numbers were 'scraped' trough one of their public facing features (I think it was contacts import this time, before that a lot of phones were leaked trough the search bar / forgot password).
I think they're misusing 'scrape' here intentionally as if to say they did nothing wrong.
I'm much younger however, and am/was unsure if that's just me being an edgy teen ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Facebook does not want the public, outside of "the industry", to have the same public data that Facebook has collected. If everyone can potentially have the same data Facebook has, data collection potentially becomes democratised and the world does not need Facebook nor "the industry" anymore. These advertising services companies no longer have any special value.
The problem with Facebook, and "the industry", is data collection, not lack of "anti-scraping" competence. Once the sensitive data is collected by private industry on a massive scale, then liability is created. The data is not any safer than if a government had collected it. In some jurisdictions it is less safe, because there are restrictions on this type of activity by government that do not apply to companies. This liability is why some people take the position that the data collection Google or Facebook does to further its "business" is neither harmless nor "acceptable".
Facebook is framing this liability problem as one of "scraping", not collection. It is not trying to further the interests of users but instead to further its own interests. Facebook wants the courts and regulatory authorities to see mass quantities of public data about internet users as Facebook's semi-exclusive asset, to be protected as if it was "private" data. Facebook is arguing mass public data "leaks" are not acceptable and that's why "the industry" must step up its "anti-scraping" measures.
However "scraping" the internet for public data is not the problem, it is only a symptom. Massive data collection initiated by these companies about internet users, for the purpose of selling advertising services, is the problem.
Scraping facebook is an operation. One I wish to make happen one day :D
People are very worried about what it and isn't public, but these in-between areas where a platform puts up hurdles still aren't private.
The only thing kind-of-like-privacy that exists on the Internet is "encrypted messages sent to well-vetted actual friends" and anonymously posted things well-scrubbed of identifying information. Everything else is just something to make people feel better. And most people's stuff doesn't come out and create a scandal because most people's stuff is boring and unimportant, that's the main protection the average person has.
Lol, no it doesn't. This is some strange, un-self-critical shilling for Facebook driven by an impulse of what seems only to be contrarianism.