Sometimes transparency encourages bad actors.
"If you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide" is the lie of the authoritarian. It is naive to think that a bad actor cannot construct a falsehood with a collection of truths.
I have worked on court cases for both individuals and (small) businesses that were innocent, but pissed off the wrong government agency, and got pushed/intimidated into pleading guilty.
Judges are flawed human beings who rule against innocent people and companies ALL THE TIME because court cases are a flurry of biased witness accounts and misleading/incomplete/subjective evidence. Folks in HN should appreciate this most because as I work in IT forensics, the judges appreciation for the technology details of cases is usually very low and they make mistakes. Defense attorneys know that and so they encourage innocent people to strike plead (guilty) deal, even when they have good evidence of their innocence because literally anything can happen in a court room. Prosecutions also know this, and so they throw absolutely everything they can think of in front of the judge, from hearsay to irrelevant data points to try to influence the judge's overall impression of the defendant so the judge will get frustrated with the complex details and rule on other subjective evidence. It's really an eye-opening experience to see people getting railroaded in court.
Few appreciate it until it happens to them, and they are presented with a subset of facts and hearsay that the prosecution has architected to paint a misleading picture in front of the court.
That is just the unfortunate reality of the world. Protecting your own or your company's privacy is the prudent way to behave even when you are completely innocent.
Thus, FB decides to have more transparency, gets a little credit that they want to fix the problem. All good.
Now, FB then revokes that after it leads to criticism (which is the point of being transparent...), so they revert to the previous state, only now there is even more evidence and the problem is worse.
It's the height of irony that a company that profits from selling information about you would ever try to defend itself with a right to privacy. Not only is that not the issue at hand but it speaks to the lack of self-awareness that I can only hope will doom FB to irrelevance or legal destruction.
> It's the height of irony that a company that profits from selling information about you would ever try to defend itself with a right to privacy.
Everyone deserves a robust defense - even the guilty. It is not for their justice - it is to protect the integrity of the system.
Everyone also deserves the right to privacy because bad actors (competitors, disgruntled employees, political activists, etc...) are always happy to twist facts leaked to make a biased case. This happens all the time - there is no shortage of talking heads on spin alley.
You're right in that FB should have probably never tried to be more transparent - and doing so was naive and destined for failure. In the court of public opinion / social media (and eventually probably ACTUAL court someday), you simply cannot successfully voice your innocence. Even apologizing when you're wrong makes things worse.
My advice to clients is always...
#1. Shut up. Do not make public statements. Do not engage anyone publicly. Anything you say can and will be used against you - both in and out of court.
#2. See point above.
In my opinion, the correct strategy for a social media company these days is to be as ethical as possible, and to say as little as possible publicly about ethics or internal policies.
At least a court has lots of rules built in to try and provide some amount of fairness to both sides in a debate. The political and public sphere has no such rules, making it even more vulnerable to such railroading.
Perhaps inside the heads of some. In the actual external world people make decisions based on incomplete information, first impression, secondhand observation, self serving bias and other imperfect influences. Neither you nor I will live to see this reality 'corrected.'
Your Character Is What You Do When Nobody Is Watching
Your chances of having a problem from stuff being leaked is greatly reduced if you aren't doing shitty things to begin with.
Not that I think that's what motivated this "whistleblower".
It is naive to think that a bad actor cannot craft a falsehood from a subset of truths they select that you've chosen to make public.
It can't both be the case that transparency ever has bad effects and lack of transparency never has good effects: pick one of the bad effects of transparency and introduce "lack of transparency" in its place. Isn't that bad effect now gone? Isn't that a good effect of the lack of transparency?
Granted, any time that transparency leads to bad effects, lack of transparency would presumably have led to the lack of those bad effects, and so be good, at least indirectly. A one-time lack of transparency can perhaps be appropriate.
However, a culture of lack of transparency is not the opposite of a culture of transparency, and those are the two poles I really see us discussing. A culture of transparency can lead to problems, but can also lead to good things (or at least to the exposure of bad things so that they can be addressed); whereas a culture of lack of transparency always will lead to problems, and any temporary good results from its imposition will be overwhelmed by its long-term ill effects.
Which isn't to claim that all dissenting views are good. But when you are an industry that is having a hard time with minority views, forcing the minority to take center/public stage at all times is actually somewhat counter productive.
Put differently, if you are going to encourage transparency for communication and decisions, you have to take extra care to not punish good faith mistakes.
So yes, lack of transparency can have good effect.
if you're describing your past experiences, you should definitely level that skill, especially if it makes you uncomfortable.
I'll save you the read. A Google employee downloaded 100k documents from the company-wide available internal wiki, identified all the ones that seemed anywhere from highly-to-mildly offensive to anyone in the world, and then published it all as a book on Amazon. The book has been out for about a year and continues to sell well (not to mention the hundreds of paid media appearances for the author to speak in front of like-minded audiences).
Here's the fun part: Google considered suing, but recognized that this would trigger the Streisand Effect and let him off the hook. Obviously, this was a calculated risk this dude took and that paid off (at least from the legal perspective).
Did Google act ethically 100% of the time? God no! But did it hurt them to have everything out in the open? You betcha.
So clearly there's a market out there for juicy internal documents. I would still say the first step is not to do anything wrong, ever. But once you have enough people working for you and you can't be in every meeting at all times, shit is going to happen, and people are going to want to pay to find out about it.
EDIT: replaced "filtered out" with "identified"
> I'll save you the read. A Google employee downloaded 100k documents from the company-wide available internal wiki, identified all the ones that seemed anywhere from highly-to-mildly offensive to anyone in the world, and then published it all as a book on Amazon. The book has been out for about a year and continues to sell well (not to mention the hundreds of paid media appearances for the author to speak in front of like-minded audiences).
You also have to keep in mind that a "company-wide available internal wiki" is going to be almost entirely full of boring crap that people literally have to be paid to read.
I mean, the internal wiki pages for nearly every system I've worked on in my company don't even describe what that system is supposed to do in terms someone from outside the team would understand.
> So clearly there's a market out there for juicy internal documents. I would still say the first step is not to do anything wrong, ever. But once you have enough people working for you and you can't be in every meeting at all times, shit is going to happen, and people are going to want to pay to find out about it.
It's not a "bad actor" thing to leak things like that. "Shit" that happens at low levels is still shit, even if it's not company policy coming from the top.
It's not like that now - things are so much more locked down. The first time I was there I could basically treat it like a Ph.D that I got paid for, in terms of learning new things. This time, it's a job where I do my tasks and receive lots of money in return. I think this is kind of a shame - I liked the environment much more when most people were there to learn and invent rather than collect a paycheck - but perhaps this is the inevitable result of a company growing past 100K employees.
In some cases, it can be worse. If something happens at a low level that is unambiguously bad and no one at the top does anything about it despite knowing about it, then to the public, it's as if upper-management is condoning the behavior.
Case in point: the Redskins practicing human trafficking with no strong public denouncement from the team's front office.
Well, their strategy worked because I’ve never heard about this book.
I hear this often and find it a bit puzzling. Perhaps it's part of believing that speech is violence - thinking that critical speech or angry feelings are really hurting Google.
So how do you think it hurt them? Did they lose customers, and if so, how many? Did they miss a quarter? Have to lay people off? Cancel product initiatives?
I always go back to my experience at HP when Bill and Dave were still alive: the leadership decision to trust employees was pretty much reciprocated so openness worked just fine.
So lack of leadership skill (especially an inability to "lead by example") is usually what causes this type of situation.
You cannot assume good behavior of literally tens of thousands of employees because you have an overall "good" company culture.
That's just impossible.
#2 in Tribology Mechanical Engineering
#4 in Content Management
#10 in Online Internet Searching
what the hell
Don't confuse this statement with an endorsement - I wish it all worked differently, but this is the reality.
Good. Google should not be able to hide anything from anyone, especially the public whose privacy they invade. The more leaks, the better off we are. Especially the kind of leaks that hurt them. Those are the ones we want most. If they didn't want us to find out, maybe they shouldn't have been doing it, right?
You are suggesting they just go bankrupt.
I'm suggesting they stop surveilling the world's entire population. Until they stop violating our privacy, I won't feel sorry for them when others violate theirs. Total lack of privacy is exactly what these big tech companies deserve.
I'm not on his level, but I have a book and I've done "media appearances" (BBC stations in Berkshire & Bristol). You don't get paid for promoting your book.
Maybe on a TV show, the union forces them to pay you the minimum, which I believe is not very much.
Google's requests for some reciprocity from Facebook, where users would own their own social graph through technologies like OpenSocial, naturally fell on deaf ears. Google walled off their own platform and decided to abandon open standards for proprietary systems a couple years later, and this is a large reason why we can't have nice things.
I believe GDPR enforces the ability to download all your data and both Google and Facebook offer it, but it's practically useless now. GDPR also makes the regulatory burden of starting a new social network impractical, so it's not like we could get an ecosystem of interoperable competitors.
Only data you have provided, both directly (entered name) and indirectly (e.g. page views). Analyses generated by the company based on that data aren't included in the insight right. I would presume both facebook and google have a lot of data that fall in the exempt category.
Not necessarily saying that is the case but if you wanted to steer regulation in a direction....