Facebook shuts out NYU academics’ research on political ads | Hacker News Reader

Facebook shuts out NYU academics’ research on political ads

apnews.com

177 pointsactually_a_dog34 comments

>But Facebook said the browser extension was programmed to evade its detection systems and vacuum up user data, creating privacy concerns.

The supreme irony of this statement coming from Facebook. That's your business model lol.

For context[1], the 'unauthorized data collection' in this case that Facebook claims is happening is the data about the advertisers, not the participants in the study, who actively install an extension that collects information about what political ads are shown to a user, stripped of personally identifying information. This sounds like getting a political campaign ad in the mailbox, reporting that to a local study and then getting terminated by the mail company for violating the campaigns privacy, that's some real bizarro world shit

[1]https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/4/22609020/facebook-bans-aca...

I'm just waiting for some clever European company to argue in US court that, since companies are people, the company should be protected by GDPR.

> companies are people

They're not

In U.S. law, corporations exist in a bizarro-world state where they are people for some purposes where it's advantageous (to take advantage of free speech, for example), but not people where it's disadvantageous (for liability and punishment, for example; there is the meme "I'll believe that a corporation is a person when Texas executes one!"). I believe that is what GP is referring to.

It's not just us law. Most countries have the ability for corporations to act as their own entity under the protection of the law. This is because companies need to sign things, like contracts, that can't be secured by any one person.

Corporations can be held liable and punished, they can be forced to declare bankruptcy and forced to dissolve. I would call that execution.

The entire purpose of Corporate Personhood is to apply these disadvantageous purposes to a corporate entity. It is also to limit liability on the stakeholders, so that if you start a company, and the company goes south, your creditors can't destroy your life by taking all of your personal assets.

But when there is actual criminal activity, the liability protection of the corporation can be completely ignored and individual bad actors can be pursued in the courts. This is called "Piercing the corporate veil"[0].

Legal personhood is a legal fiction that has been granted to innumerous "entities" including the environment itself (see, for example, the Ganges River's personhood[1]. Furthermore, it does not grant full personhood for obvious reasons. A legal person cannot vote or be represented in government.

I'm a liberal democrat, but god do these "Corporations aren't people" memes make me cringe. Things like limited liability and corporate personhood not only allow for incredible economic growth through financial innovation, but also provide benefit to individuals harmed by the corporation. If a corporation didn't have legal personhood, how else could a victim sue the entity and receive a settlement? The only "people" they could sue would be individual stakeholders.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piercing_the_corporate_veil [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_person#Examples

FWIW, I think most of the real complains about legal personhood is that the punitive aspects aren't applied enough. Yes, there is "corporate death penalty", but it's hardly ever given out. And when the corporate veil is being pierced, it often seems the people stabbed are scapegoats placed in front of the blade by those who were truly responsible, and who get to still hide safely behind the veil.

I agree with that, 100%, but that's valid criticism, not CoRpOrAtIoNs ArEn'T PeOpLe.

Also, the group of people who actually are the corporation ate free to go do the same things again.

Fiduciary equivalent of qualified immunity.

“Things like limited liability and corporate personhood not only allow for incredible economic growth through financial innovation…”

“Nonsense layered on nonsense layered on nonsense enables people to trade goods and services!”

Because we did not have those natural abilities before these laws.

The past literally happened. But similar to how America decided they were not British anymore, there’s little natural reason to LARP 1900’s capitalists except to kowtow to politically approved assessment of our agency.

Maybe it made sense when the average person could not read or write, but we’re a bit beyond that point.

> “Nonsense layered on nonsense layered on nonsense enables people to trade goods and services!”

We traded before the invention of currency, too, but not very much because it wasn't very efficient.

We started companies before the invention of financing, too, but not as many because it was hard to fund a company unless you were rich.

So no, fictitious legal frameworks for economics are not nonsense, they are innovations, and allow for more economic growth and prosperity. They are "financial technology" in a very real sense.

As I said, they made sense in the past. We’ve also moved on from social constructs before. Our biology pushes us to forget the past innately; we need to update our cognitive software.

Economics is a meta-analysis of natural human behavior. It’ll be true that we behave that way without the analysis. The value in that analysis is for behavioral management, not people.

We need not empower “economists” politically, or enable protectionism as a result of their insights, which enriches a minority unfairly, and provides them means of to participate in political corruption (see Yellen getting money from banks and being all anti crypto).

We absolutely have no natural or legal obligation to capitalism, as we’re actually a socialist system, where negotiations make the decisions; it’s just they’re gated and flow to industrialists.

We moved on from rotary phones and horse n buggy as science and technical discovery enabled it. We can certainly move on from favoring ephemeral currency being our economic motivator.

This forum is all “disrupt!” and I keep seeing the same few coming out on top. Keep disrupting.

The GDPR explicitly states that only natural persons have data subject rights, not legal persons.

Just because army is government's business doesn't mean they should allow any group to arm up and fight.

‘Don’t steal, the government doesn’t like competition’

Leaving aside the thorny question about whether measures should be taken to block scraping tools, it's deeply concerning to me the extent to which services like Facebook and Google are embedded into the social and economic fabric of our world, yet individuals can be unpersoned by having their personal accounts banned over issues like this.

It is this kind of "scraping for me but not for thee" that turned me off of social networks.

They used to make my account discoverable, which was the point of having a social network. Publicizing my experiences.

But now they all hide it behind a loginwall. No thanks. I made my own website.

The emperor has no clothes. The more the public learns about how FB operates the less likely it is FB is allowed to exist in its current form.

The idealistic future is one with much more censorship but of much smaller communities (~150) limiting the blast radius. Of course authorities much prefer having centralized actors which they can exert power and control through.

The realistic future is Chinese social media companies (and by proxy Chinese govt) ruling the internet instead of Facebook and Twitter :)

"The idealistic future is one with much more censorship"

Hopefully this can be made into a bumper sticker.

I think reasonable thing will be for the researchers to “admit responsibility, say they will do better” and keep going as if nothing happened. Like Mark Zuckerberg does.

Facebook is contractually obligated to ban scrapers as part of their agreement when given the $5bn fine

All this sensational fb bashing is boring. What company allows scraping? Most of them play this cat and mouse game. Digg might have still been alive if they would manage to block it.

What exactly is sensational about it?

Read the article first. This was logging activity in the browser, not scraping.

At what point does logging thousand of web response not become scraping? I would call collecting a dataset scraping. It's a legit question, I'm not trying to be snarky here.

The normal meaning of scraping is that you have to be automating bulk access to the site, which isn't happening here.

And even under a different definition that would count normal browsing activity, the researchers still aren't doing scraping here. And each user is only collecting a few data points.

You are right, this is scraping. But I argue it is manual scraping - the data gets transferred even in the case of a regular user, just not saved.

As far as I interpret it, only automated scraping is against the ToS:

https://www.facebook.com/apps/site_scraping_tos_terms.php

> You may not access or collect data from our Products using automated means (without our prior permission) or attempt to access data you do not have permission to access.

https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms/update

It's probably because Facebook touches more people daily than "most of the companies"? (1.9 billions daily and 2.89 billions monthly according to their latest quaterly report[0], and that's for the Facebook website only, not the whole family products).

The website can also have an influence on many people lives since a lot of people use it as one of their main source of information etc.

[0] : https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2021/q2...

How many times is this going to be posted

I still seriously doubt we would have another Cambridge Analytica situation if the research was allowed to continue, but maybe FB really is that scared of another 5 billion fine

Do you mean, we won't have another situation, if FB continues its hard stance towards unauthorized data collection?

Cause otherwise, I don't see how they could have another Cambridge Analytica situation if what they're doing is sharing _less information_.

future historians are gonna have fun with facebook.

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