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Comment by strulovich | Hacker News Reader

So it’s a linguistic issue. You’re lumping integrity as “do people abuse our system” with “does person A follow the same morals as me”.

Specifically, looks like your morals are that products that are free in exchange for anonymously analyzing your data are immoral. (Remember: Onavo gave free VPN to users)

It’s a reasonable position to take, but it’s unclear it’s necessarily true and that everyone who doesn’t agree with you has no integrity, more so, it definitely doesn’t imply they can’t achieve results.

There’s plenty of criticism to give on Facebook’s integrity efforts. I just don’t think yours is helping the discussion.

And as an example, I think the linked article is a great idea and hope the founders succeed.

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This is part of the problem with talking with Facebook engineers.

Most of society is against spyware. It's not a controversial topic- spyware is pretty frowned upon. Spying on people does, to most people, show a lack of integrity. So does much of the other actions Facebook has taken and which are now coming out in these leaks.

If you bring this up with Facebook engineers it turns into a "linguistic" issue. You're told that integrity only applies in the computer science sense of the word, and are then told by the engineer what you "actually" think.

All of this is condescending and distracting from the main point- which seems to be the point.

I’m sorry if my tone is not coming across as I intended.

I think there’s plenty of arguments to be made against Facebook’s integrity effort, and plenty of that work happened on Guy Rosen’s shift.

But your feedback is not nuanced and seems to be avoiding a lot of the context on purpose. It seems to be about getting people enraged through an implied accusation in your first comment.

In reality there’s some things you should consider:

- Onavo started as a “compress your data to save you money app” (I used it back then for a while)

- Seems like they found making money from selling market research data from aggregated users is a more visible business than getting customers to pay (way before FB purchased them)

- customers willingly installed the app, they got value from it, and not one customer actually got hurt (correct me if I’m wrong)

- Onavo was popular in countries with censored internet as a free workaround

- selling or using aggregated market research data is not illegal. It’s practiced by all of FB’s competition at the time (Apple and Google have control of their platforms and I’ll guess use this data). Other equivalents include Uber’s credit card as a way to see where people spend money on what transportation and restaurants.

I’m sorry if you find any of this condescending, this is not my intention. I just wanted to clarify what’s your issue with Guy is. That is all.

Here's an easy test: was Onavo (or, for that matter, is Facebook) upfront with users about the data they were collecting and how they were using it? Or did they hide it behind legalese in the terms of service?

I don’t think even Apple passes this test though. (And I do consider Apple to much better privacy wise than other big tech)

We're not talking about Apple, though. You're presenting the context of Onavo's actions as though people weighed the pros and cons and made an informed decision about whether to use the app. I'm adding another bit of context that suggests people did not realize what Onavo was doing behind the scenes, and that Onavo concealed their behavior because otherwise people wouldn't use it.

that wasn't the question asked.

I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, and assume you're genuinely trying to describe Onavo's value exchange from your perspective.

But it demonstrates the dissonance between a growing proportion of the public and fb. For example:

1. Facebook's use of "Integrity" is duplicitous. I'd wager strongly that the general public would assume the word to have its common-language meaning: that Facebook is operating 'with integrity'. That OP's comment is necessary evidences that the meaning is not as would be expected. To your earlier question, that is the "accusation".

2. "looks like your morals are that products that are free in exchange for anonymously analyzing your data are immoral". This is also duplicitous. It is increasingly clear that the cost of Facebook's products is very much more than "anonymously analyzing your data". Impacting teenage mental health[0] or polarizing political opinion[1] as just two examples.

I suggest you re-read @tedivm's post:

> Most of society is against spyware. It's not a controversial topic- spyware is pretty frowned upon. Spying on people does, to most people, show a lack of integrity. So does much of the other actions Facebook has taken and which are now coming out in these leaks.

Your comments about Onavo might be factually correct, but you're missing the point. The reality of the surveillance economy is slowly seeping into societal consciousness, and it's not landing well. That Google/Apple/whomever also engage in it doesn't legitimise the behaviour.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/sep/14/facebook-...

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-vortex-political-polari...

I'm sorry but you keep trying to act as if Onavo was a high integrity operation but it clearly wasn't. I'm just quoting from wikipedia here-

* In October 2013, Onavo was acquired by Facebook, which used Onavo's analytics platform to monitor competitors. This influenced Facebook to make various business decisions, including its 2014 acquisition of WhatsApp.

* The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) initiated legal proceedings against Facebook on December 16, 2020, alleging that Facebook engaged in "false, misleading or deceptive conduct" by using personal data collected from Onavo "for its own commercial purposes" contrary to Onavo's privacy-oriented marketing.

* In August 2018, Facebook pulled Onavo Protect from the iOS App Store due to violations of Apple's policy forbidding apps from collecting data on the usage of other apps. (Note: this one even meets your definition of integrity above)

* This led to denouncements of the app by media outlets, who classified Onavo as spyware because it is used by Facebook to monetize usage habits within a privacy-focused environment, and because the app listing did not contain a prominent disclosure of Facebook's ownership.

* On January 29, 2019, TechCrunch published a report detailing "Project Atlas"—an internal market research program employed by Facebook since 2016. It invited users between the ages of 13 and 35 to install the Facebook Research app—allegedly a rebranded version of Onavo Protect—on their device, to collect data on their app usage, web browsing history, web search history, location history, personal messages, photos, videos, emails, and Amazon order history.

So every step of the way Facebook and Onava lied to their users, violated terms of services of the platforms they were user, and to spy on people at an unprecedented level. This system eventually resulted in congressional hearings.

No reasonable person thinks that these are the actions of people with integrity.

IIRC, FB “cross-sold” the Onavo app through the main app without any mention that it was not a third-party app, and without mentioning that data was collected. That’s problematic to most people.

Multiple agencies in multiple countries have had the same concerns: “ "The ACCC alleges that, between 1 February 2016 to October 2017, Facebook and its subsidiaries Facebook Israel Ltd and Onavo, Inc. misled Australian consumers by representing that the Onavo Protect app would keep users' personal activity data private, protected and secret, and that the data would not be used for any purpose other than providing Onavo Protect's products," the ACCC said on Wednesday.”

I’m sure you think Guy is an upstanding individual, but then it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

> Most of society is against spyware

Part of this is because "spyware" connotes "malware". To steelman the other: would people willingly make the trade-off* if they knew how the data was used, in exchange for this free service? (AFAICT, the data was used in aggregate, to inform competitive intelligence - not for ad targeting or doxxing or parallel construction).

* (To be clear, there are consent issues that have been covered well in this thread.)

I looked up the poll results after Snowden's revelations because I was curious. Thought others might find the data interesting. (This is not exhaustive - I literally just did a quick search.)

In 2015, "A majority of Americans (54%) disapprove of the U.S. government’s collection of telephone and internet data as part of anti-terrorism efforts, while 42% approve of the program. Democrats are divided on the program, while Republicans and independents are more likely to disapprove than approve." [0]

"Also in 2015, 64% of Americans who had heard of Snowden viewed him unfavorably" [1].

[0] https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/04/21/edward-snowd...

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/05/29/what-americ...

"So it’s a linguistic issue."

Only in the same way that you can dismiss misaligned values as a 'linguistic issue'.

> Remember: Onavo gave free VPN to users

IIRC, it wasn't just a free VPN, it also did extra compression of data like images to speed up site loading on mobile. This eventually stopped working when https became more popular.

If there's any linguistics problems here, it's that the head of integrity's role is not to promote integrity, but rather to be manage user fraud from what I can see.

And here we have an actual real-life example of when that Upton Sinclair quote can be used in a non-snarky way. Because, yeah, it's just a semantical argument.

Were 'anonymously analyzing your data' either true, or the complete extent of the exchange, then you might have a point

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