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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

>Flo gets the largest blame but meta needs to show they did their part to ensure this didn't happen. (I would not call terms of use enough unless they can show they make you understand it)

Court documents says that they blocked access as soon as they were aware of it. They also "built out its systems to detect and filter out “potentially health-related terms.”". Are you expecting more, like some sort of KYC/audit regime before you could get any API key? Isn't that the exact sort of stuff people were railing against, because indie/OSS developers were being hassled by the play store to undergo expensive audits to get access to sensitive permissions?

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Facebook chose to pool the data they received from customers and allow its use by others, so they are also responsible for the outcomes. If it's too hard to provide strong assurance that errors like Flo's won't result in adverse outcomes for the public, perhaps they should have designed a system that didn't work that way.

>Facebook chose to pool the data they received from customers and allow its use by others, so they are also responsible for the outcomes.

"chose" is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here. Suppose you ran a Mastodon server and it turned out some people were using it to share revenge porn unbeknownst to you. Suppose further that they did it in a way that didn't make it easily detectable by you (eg. they did it in DMs/group chats). Sure, you can dump out the database and pore over everything just to be sure, but it's not like you're going to notice it day to day. If a few months later the revenge porn ring got busted should you be charged with "intentionally eavesdropping" on revenge porn or whatever? After all, to some extent, you "chose" to run the Mastodon server.

Transmitting messages between users is a functional property of Mastodon that is of course visible and valuable to the users. Transmitting protected health data from Flo users to anyone with a dollar to buy some ads is not a functional property of Flo itself or a mobile ad product, and likely surprising to both Flo and Flo's users. Facebook has discretion on how they use that data. If this is a rare and unavoidable consequence of their business model Facebook should be comfortable paying the settlements as judgements occur.

Details matter. Sometimes blocking as soon as you are aware of it is enough, sometimes enough. Those "systems to detect and filter out “potentially health-related terms.”" need to be examined in depth - are they enough, were they done only after the fact when they should have been more proactive?

Not knowing those details (they are probably available but I'm not interested enough to read the court documents) I'm going to defer to the courts on this. Understand that depending on ongoing appeals I may have to change my stance a few times. If this keeps coming up I may eventually have to get interested and learn more details so I can pressure my representative to change the laws, but for now this just isn't important enough - to me - to dig farther than the generalizations I made above.

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