Let's remember that this is because Facebook had an open API that a 3rd party developer abused with the consent of the users.
In case you wonder why nobody bothers to have open APIs for anything anymore. (cf. Twitter 10 years ago and today)
In case you wonder why nobody bothers to have open APIs for anything anymore. (cf. Twitter 10 years ago and today)
Also, even if you somehow believe that users knowingly consented to share the amount of data that they did, they definitely did not consent to data traitor Aleksandr Kogan selling their personal knowledge graphs to Cambridge Analytica.
¹ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/03/facebooks-cambri...
>” Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.”
That said, OP’s response seems a bit harsh, as what you said wasn’t “false”, it just wasn’t their intended meaning.
This is as if my friends sued Facebook because I gave you my password and you used it to snoop on them.
There is a huge difference between you stalking someone else's friends and a company collecting billions of data points to use for political manipulation. The purpose, the scale, the incentives are different. We need to stop assuming that the rules should be the same for an individual and a business just because they use the same loophole.
While I don't know what the prompt exactly said, I bet it was specific enough. The fact that people just click Accept without reading it shouldn't make it less binding, that would be infantilising users.
>There is a huge difference between you stalking someone else's friends and a company collecting billions of data points to use for political manipulation.
I agree. And that company is not Meta. So I don't understand why Meta is paying. In any case all I said was that this is one of the reasons APIs are closed and everything is a silo.
An informed consent from users who's information is going to be collected. In this case it was the friends of the person signing up. Again, that's the only reason Cambridge Analytica was successful. They didn't have that many users, they collected a ton of data on the users' friends.
> I agree. And that company is not Meta.
Meta had an obligation to protect its users' data. It failed at that.
That consent was granted the day they accepted/sent the friend request. Once the friendship was established, the other user had access to the profile information. They can do with that information as they please, which includes giving it to a 3rd party. If it's illegal to do so, the parties at fault are the user who accepted the API access request and perhaps the 3rd party, but definitely not the medium.
>Meta had an obligation to protect their user's data. It failed at that.
If I go to your profile and take a screenshot, has Meta failed at protecting your data? What if a friend gives me their password or remote desktop access to their computer and I look at your profile? Should we fine Facebook?
Hm - no. If I accept a friend request I allow that user to read my profile but I do not authorize any 3rd parties to access it. If you show me any mention of 3rd party access in a friend request - I might change my view.
> What if a friend gives me their password or remote desktop access to their computer and I look at your profile?
You don't seem to make any distinction between a first/second party (me and my friend) and a 3rd party (CA accessing data through an API). In fact there is a difference that's very clearly defined in contract law, user agreements, etc.
Here is a simple example: you posted 3 photos on your FB profile. One was fully public, another one was friends-only, and the last one was only available to you and your relatives (which i am not one of). If i used such a cambridge analytica app and gave permission to my friend info, it would be able to get the first two photos, but not the last one (because I have no access to it myself).