Letter from Acting Director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection to Facebook
ftc.gov
ftc.gov
"While it is not our role to resolve individual disputes between Facebook and third parties, we hope that the company is not invoking privacy–much less the FTC consent order–as a pretext to advance other aims"
It seems like it's spaghetti argument time, ie. throw everything against a wall and see what sticks.
You could argue that the privacy of people could be violated because the "privacy" of an entity that's public shouldn't that public according to facebook. I know, the weak point is that we can't show what privacy aspect is actually violated, but then we could argue this is reason we should investigate this.
If this was the BCP in my country, I could add other arguments about unfair competition and/or monopoly. But I'm not sure this is the purview of the US version of the BCP.
The FTC/BCP needs to follow certain rules, but this doesn't prohibit them from saying: "Hey, we can kinda work with this sort of argument, especially if you reformulate it like this"
[0] https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/attachments/blog_posts/Lett...
The FTC objection doesn't seem odd at all.
1. First the consensus was that Facebook should allow easy data exports 2. Then CA happened and data sharing should be prohibited, now this from the FTC with more flip flopping. 3. Facebook should be E2EE vs the government saying they shouldn't 4. Facebook should moderate content vs not moderate content
These are all complex issues and most of them apply to the internet as a whole.
Here is a direct quote from the FTC's letter:
"The FTC is committed to protecting the privacy of people, and efforts to shield targeted advertising practices from scrutiny run counter to that mission."
How is this "flip-flopping" by the FTC? The FTC wants to protect the privacy of individuals but has no interest in protecting the privacy of large corporations. That is and has been the stance of the FTC.
The Cambridge Analytica event involved an advertising company exfiltrating data from individuals and their friends (under the guise of a "game") in order to use the data to target new ads.
NYU was explicitly asking individuals to share some information about advertisers (corporations) and was entirely up front about everything.
These two events should not be confused (which is what the FTC is explaining in this letter).
Can you show me the FTC in the past defending the privacy of advertisers?
It’s like suggesting Gmail adding IMAP is the equivalent to sending all your emails to anyone for a nominal fee.
Facebook's Open Graph platform simply isn’t a personal data export feature. Exporting your profile should reasonably include lists of friends, but shouldn’t include all of your friends info especially to share to a third party without informing you.
Im not defending facebook, but obviously bound to go wrong eventually if they allow some apps to scrape the data.
Some people are allowed to send you a bill for water and power. Some people are allowed to deliver your mail. Some people are allowed to write you traffic tickets. Others are not.
Will they become part of the machine when economically aligned? Or will they be a formidable voting bloc adding representation before decisions are finalized?
Who knows! This would be in addition to cash.
A glimmer of hope seems on the horizon for the open web and end-user freedoms in the face of corporate encroachment on civil liberties. 'bout time!
They will point you to their 'guidelines' and will suspend you if you trip over their automated account suspension system.
You're free to criticise them, write letters to them, but in the end they will never change.
What they can’t do is ban people from their platform and say “the FTC made me do it”, unless the FTC actually made them do it. Since the FTC didn’t actually make them do it, they got a public nastygram from the FTC saying “we didn’t make them do it”.
They have no obligation to support those researchers, but it sure is a bad look blocking them.
Legally they don't have any responsibility to these researchers. They can ban anyone. The argument is that they shouldn't ban these people. That's why they're getting a polite letter rather than any kind of legal action.
Ideally (another should) moral considerations would always apply. External shaming comes into play when you've managed to outrage the moral sense of enough people, or powerful enough people. Yes, this does ultimately come down to social approval, but mediated by whether you can make a moral argument that people respect or not.
With regard to every previous argument we've had on here about Facebook banning people, it comes down to approval or not of the content, conduct, or actors being banned. Only the most extreme people argue that you should be able to post goatse to Facebook (not actually illegal!) without them removing it.
Seriously don't understand why the private company line of argument seems to hold so much sway for some people
I guess I could see an auto-scroller being used to grab ad impressions, and that could count as click fraud… except without clicks what are you left with, “impression fraud”?