Silicon Valley Disrupts Its Own Ass

[Painboy]

I really want a bit more precision about what exactly they did. The NYT article is apparently lumping "allowed third-party client access to Facebook services" in with everything else, which makes it hard to figure out what they actually did.

(As in, I would be very upset if Pidgin were _not_ allowed to both read and edit my messaging history. That's the whole point).

But some of this stuff could also be really bad, but the reporting isn't clear enough for me to feel like I know what's going on.

This is my mind as well. Are they using anonymized data? There is a big difference in "FB is letting people read John Doe's personal messages" and "FB is letting people read personal messages culled from a specific large demographic." At least from my experiences most businesses just want data and don't want to actually know anything specific about an individual. Partly because it's not really useful and partly because it can get you into all kinds of (costly) legal weirdness.

[nicole]

I really want a bit more precision about what exactly they did. The NYT article is apparently lumping "allowed third-party client access to Facebook services" in with everything else, which makes it hard to figure out what they actually did.

(As in, I would be very upset if Pidgin were _not_ allowed to both read and edit my messaging history. That's the whole point).

But some of this stuff could also be really bad, but the reporting isn't clear enough for me to feel like I know what's going on.

This is my mind as well. Are they using anonymized data? There is a big difference in "FB is letting people read John Doe's personal messages" and "FB is letting people read personal messages culled from a specific large demographic." At least from my experiences most businesses just want data and don't want to actually know anything specific about an individual. Partly because it's not really useful and partly because it can get you into all kinds of (costly) legal weirdness.

It's definitely not about anonymized data because the integrations were ways for people to connect their own activity on other sites to their own activity on Facebook.

Plus, it is DEFINITELY individual data that people want in Facebook's industry.

[Mo]

Yes, I know that companies like Facebook get annoyed at legacy companies with much stricter data usage an anonymization practices.

[nicole]

We have a FB advertising thread right if we want to get into it

But eg lots of the ads you see on Facebook/Insta/FAN sites are targeted specifically to you personally based on your email address and other individual identifiers.

[Painboy]

We have a FB advertising thread right if we want to get into it

But eg lots of the ads you see on Facebook/Insta/FAN sites are targeted specifically to you personally based on your email address and other individual identifiers.

Yes but the company sending you the ads only knows you as a3k0g9u22t06d9il2na5 or some other identifier. They can't actually identify you personally right? To them you're just a series of descriptors that they are paying FB to put their ad in front of.

When I was still working in games, on one title I worked the telemetry side of things where we tracked a number of player behaviors. We could see how they played and what parts they spent the most time on, and other things. From there we could send them ads or special offers tailored to the way they played. Each player account had an identifier so we could track their purchases and save their progress. But we had no way to identify who specifically owned the account unless they called customer service and someone had to look it up to make changes to the account.

Is FB doing something different than that?

[nicole]

We have a FB advertising thread right if we want to get into it

But eg lots of the ads you see on Facebook/Insta/FAN sites are targeted specifically to you personally based on your email address and other individual identifiers.

Yes but the company sending you the ads only knows you as a3k0g9u22t06d9il2na5 or some other identifier. They can't actually identify you personally right? To them you're just a series of descriptors that they are paying FB to put their ad in front of.

That is sometimes the case. It is also frequently the case that the company that wants to reach you has your email address and essentially feeds that into Facebook (or lots and lots of other places) to reach you, specifically, there.

In the cases where you are not personally targeted by the company, the company is still trying to identify you personally if you are served an ad as part of a more broadly targeted campaign, because they are going to be trying to tie that ad impression back to any other contact you may have had with the company (other ad impressions, email subscriptions, in-store visits, purchases via any channel, etc.).

When I was still working in games, on one title I worked the telemetry side of things where we tracked a number of player behaviors. We could see how they played and what parts they spent the most time on, and other things. From there we could send them ads or special offers tailored to the way they played. Each player account had an identifier so we could track their purchases and save their progress. But we had no way to identify who specifically owned the account unless they called customer service and someone had to look it up to make changes to the account.

Is FB doing something different than that?

Yes. They're doing that and tying it all specifically back to your name and other PII, so that the targeting and analytics can be done across all online and offline touchpoints. That's the ballgame for all of this stuff.

[Mo]

Also there are a lot of links to credit history information. I know that we’ve had to tell them to slow their roll. So FB can do things like link email to credit history and get income/demographic/other info about you.

Experian/Transunion have a shitload of info about you, limited consumer facing business and zero qualms about sharing all your info. I still wish Congress brought the hammer on them for their breech.

[Jadagul]

Right, yes, I understand that there's a lot of individual targeting.

But I read some reporting that said that the NYT is (deliberately) conflating that with "Facebook made it possible to access Facebook information through other services you're using", which is ethically very different. And I don't know what the mix is, and don't/can't trust reporting that doesn't make that distinction.

One general interesting thing about the current Social Media Regulation Wars is that people have two different concerns: the privacy invasion and the monopolization. And you can address the first with privacy regulations, and the second with data portability stuff; but a in a lot of cases the privacy regulations would make the data portability actively illegal. Since data portability means you can take the information in your network and give it to other people.

(In a lot of ways, the Cambridge Analytica scandal was "data portability").

[Jennifer]

Reminds me of 10 or so years ago, when AOL bragged about releasing its search results to marketers, without considering how actual AOL customers would feel Even though they "only" released the search info without people's identities, in most cases just having the searches tells you who it is -- people will often search for their own names to see what comes up, after all.

[Jadagul]

Okay, so this article seems to answer my questions.

As more people have looked at it, it increasingly appears that the NY Times reporting on this was really, really bad and contributed to the hysteria, rather than improving understanding. The companies that had access to Facebook messages involved software integrations where those third party apps allowed you to directly access Facebook Messenger from those apps -- in the same way that if you want to use Facebook Messenger on your mobile phone, you have to give that phone access to your messages so that... you can use FB Messenger.

In general, there's a real serious tradeoff here that people don't want to grapple with. I mostly come down on the side of "Cambridge Analytica is exactly how thinks should work", but I acknowledge that's a minority position. But a lot of people want to argue for maximal data portability and also maximal privacy, and you can't have both of those things.

(But you could probably have more of both than we currently have, and let people make more individualized choices about their own preferred mixes).

[Mo]

Data portability can mean a lot of things and some are better than others. Like Spotify should only be able to read/delete/edit messages that were created by the app (IIRC, the integration was being able to tell people what you were listening to or sending them links to playlists). My party organizing messages shouldn’t have come into it. FB defenders make the specious comparison of linking you email to you device email. But there’s a big difference between getting it on your device and Apple holding all your data on their servers. I know you don’t care about privacy J, but if Mozilla held and stored all your FB data, when you thought they were just delivering it to your machine, that’s a breech of trust.

[Jadagul]

I mean, I would assume that any account that's connecting to my messenger account is connecting to my messenger account, and has full access to it.

I _do_ think services should be better about severability of permissions---I kinda like the way that Android does it, where it says "this app is asking for the following seven permissions"---but I would assume that any device that can access messenger can access messenger.

Like, did people really think that a service posting messages to their messenger wasn't able to read the messages in their messenger? I'm not sure the protocol even works that way.

(Actually, my favorite thing about FB messenger, and the reason I've mostly shifted from Google to Facebook for instant messaging, is the way FB propagates my messaging history to any device I sign into it with).

[Mo]

That strikes me as a pretty trivial solve. Spotify can only read/edit messages tagged as Spotify messages. My bank let’s me see my accounts and my joint accounts, and it lets my wife see her accounts and our joint accounts. But it doesn’t let her see my accounts and vice versa.

[thoreau]

The $500/cup space coffee.

[JasonL]

Freshness Preserved through Relativity - Our Moving Beans Age Slowly

Best served in Ember:

[Mo]

Facebook has banned 4 armed groups, as well as all praise for them, off of their platform. However, those groups are ones that the military (which has engaged in ethnic cleansing) opposes, not the groups involved in ethnic cleansing. Heck of a job Zuck.

[nicole]

It's like you don't even think Facebook should support states' monopolies on violence

lol

[JD]

“In an effort to prevent and disrupt offline harm, we do not allow organizations or individuals that proclaim a violent mission or engage in violence to have a presence on Facebook,” says the company’s statement on why Facebook banned the four groups. “This includes terrorist activity, organized hate, mass or serial murder, human trafficking, organized violence or criminal activity.”

And yet the US Army continues to have a Facebook page, despite saying "The Army Mission – our purpose – remains constant: To deploy, fight and win our nation’s wars..." Sounds pretty violent to me.

[nicole]

“In an effort to prevent and disrupt offline harm, we do not allow organizations or individuals that proclaim a violent mission or engage in violence to have a presence on Facebook,” says the company’s statement on why Facebook banned the four groups. “This includes terrorist activity, organized hate, mass or serial murder, human trafficking, organized violence or criminal activity.”

And yet the US Army continues to have a Facebook page, despite saying "The Army Mission – our purpose – remains constant: To deploy, fight and win our nation’s wars..." Sounds pretty violent to me.

yeah they explicitly exempt states

[Mo]

If it was the 60s, Facebook would leave up Klan chapters with local police and take down the SNCC pages.

[Eric the .5b]

If it was the 60s, Facebook would leave up Klan chapters with local police and take down the SNCC pages.

Something something riots everywhere MLK Jr. went.

[Hugh Akston]

This is one of those important distinctions about the use of violence that I keep forgetting about.

[Mo]

If you you’re wondering where Nicole is it’s that she’s masturbating furiously. Also, can we now stop taking Alex Stamos seriously (for non-tech people, he’s the former CSO of FB that supposedly pointed out the Russia stuff was ignored, but continues to defend facebook’s actions).

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/03/fac ... for-years/

[nicole]

Factcheck: true

[Mo]

Wow, a basic IF statement is now considered AI. Does this mean I can now put AI as one of my skills on LinkedIn?