Meta has Washington in their pocket so this will never leave civil court. The penalty will be less than the money made, meaning somebody gets a bonus for being creative.
The fact Apple and Microsoft services both work in China shows they are a little more trustworthy.
How so?
> The fact Apple and Microsoft services both work in China shows they are a little more trustworthy.
Absolutely not. Companies apply different policies in different countries they operate in. This tells you nothing more than those companies came to a mutually beneficial agreement with the Chinese Communist Party.
Yes. It's a good opportunity for an ambitious state attorney general to prosecute Facebook, of course.
pithy "because they have all the monies" replies not wanted.
As seen by the "Protect America Act" of 2007[0], the government will retroactively cover their own ass and your companies' ass if deemed important enough to the intelligence apparatus. There isn't a chance in hell that Meta would be brought criminal charges for wiretapping.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protect_America_Act_of_2007
https://www.theonion.com/cias-facebook-program-dramatically-...
To answer your specific question, this isn't okay. Both the government and large corporations have been given way too much power and we really have no hope of making any meaningful change until the people reclaim this power and put those in charge out on their ass.
This relates to a much bigger problem of courts upholding contracts even when nobody actually believes they represent an informed and voluntary agreement.
We aren't quite at the Looney-Tunes step of enforcing extra clauses that were hidden in invisibly small print, but things are drifting in that direction.
See also: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/adhesion_contract_(contract_...
As coincidence would have it, this is the perfect alibi provided by a snake oil "cybersecurity" app by one of the world's largest companies.
Every tech company that has promulgated the lie that a VPN operated by a third party provides added security is indirectly responsible for this. Funneling all your traffic through a shady intermediary does no such thing, and in fact often does the opposite.
The comparison with VPNs doesn't hold either, because for all their faults VPNs do not decrypt traffic going through them.
I do know that this is done - in fact worked at a pretty major smartphone manufacturer and never logged in to any personal account on work devices. It was pretty obvious by even just looking at the security info on chrome/firefox that the certificate used was a root signed by the company itself. I used to shout at the top of my lungs to my friends, that hey, _this_ is how your information is vulnerable to the corporate overlords, but I guess they weren't as paranoid as I.
The first thing I checked when moving to my next employer was if they were intercepting SSL traffic like this. (They weren't - they used Falcon)
It’s not really spelled out clearly in the article, but this was a specific program where people had to choose to opt-in in exchange for compensation.
This wasn’t simply Facebook hijacking random people’s traffic because they accepted the ToS or used the Facebook app
Not defending the program, but it’s not what a lot of comments are assuming.
If you lie to someone to get them to sign an agreement, that agreement is voided in nearly any sane jurisdiction on the planet.
Do you have further insights or references on what was the "trigger condition"? This is a new case, separate to the previous litigation related to the VPN app.
The real issue is the NUX, which doesn't look like it made the data collection clear to users.
Besides which, using someone else's computer with an expectation of privacy is the wrong expectation.
they have to watch for data exfiltration and attempts to download malware, etc.
don't use a corporate device for anything you don't want work to see.
use your own. that's not a hard ask.
As written, that means they can secretly enable the camera and microphone to surveil my house, supposedly to check the usage (or non-usage) of the hardware.
Surely that's very "wrong", if not also illegal in most places. Not everything about or near the hardware is fair game.
I wrote one sentence about how "there are ways for companies to go too far", which I think is pretty dang uncontroversial and trivially-true. However that user replied with what is clearly a disagreement, with corporate justifications and placing sole responsibility on employees to avoid the hardware.
This leads to two competing options:
(A) They simply can't imagine any scenario where a company might "go too far" and be at fault.
(B) Their stance is much milder, but for some reason they are replying to a straw-man argument that isn't what I actually wrote.
Of those two ambiguities, I went with (A), but if you think (B) is a more-charitable reading...
No, they shouldn't be flicking on your laptop camera or mic remotely, as these are pretty obviously violations of your privacy.
The situation in this article is completely different.