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Comment by disgruntledphd2 | Hacker News Reader

OK, so your position is that Meta (nee Facebook) are bad, and that they've been doing scandalous stuff for years.

Can you give me a list of the things that they did that you felt were particularly egregious?

Note: I worked there for five years, but left 8 years ago (but up till the recent layoffs, had 170+ LI contacts still there).

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Profiling people for advertising, building shadow profiles, buying 3rd party user data, tracking people across the web, devices and geographically, psychological experiments, optimizing for engagement, limiting post reach without pay... generally prioritizing profit over people.

https://www.techpolicy.press/is-it-ethical-to-work-at-facebo...

Ok, I'm going to assume that you're somewhat technical given where we are.

First off, if I estimate a series of numbers on you and those result in you being served a set of ads, is that wrong? If so, can you help me understand what's wrong with that?

Shadow profiles are mostly bullshit, yes data was collected for non users due to how the SDK and pixel worked. This data was all assigned to one user ID and was filtered out by basically everyone using that data.

I'm a little confused as to why buying third party data is wrong, the problem with this is that it's legal to collect and sell the data.

Speaking as a psychologist can you clarify what's wrong with psychological experiments?

I think your point about optimising for engagement was definitely a mistake, given the downstream consequences. However, they needed to find some way of ranking feed after Zynga almost killed them (a chronological feed would have been all Farmville all the time for a number of years) and they picked likes.

They also optimized for time spent but people complained about that so they started optimising for comments and shares which made everything worse, sadly.

Limiting post reach for pages was a legitimate business decision, particularly given the ranking constraints.

Got any more problems with them?

See their partnership with Cambridge Analytics.

Also, is manipulating elections and contributing to third world genocidal riots enough for you? I'm surprised you know so little about this stuff.

What partnership with Cambridge Analytica?

Like if you look into what that company actually did all the data stuff was a smokescreen for their speciality of getting your opponents caught in compromising positions.

Fundamentally, neither the Big 5 traits nor friend data is particularly useful for ad targeting (internally neither approach was successful).

Can you please be specific about the manipulation of elections?

I presume we're talking about Myanmar and the genocide. Personally I generally place responsibility for bad actions on the people engaging in genocide rather than the communication mechanisms involved. Should we have banned radio after the Rwandan genocide?

Hitler used radio very effectively, should we have banned that?

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