iyo did facebook ruin the internet?

Lmao, facebook's libertarian roots showin thru

just a little bit of kid-fucking everyone be cool

What did Cambridge Analytica do with all the data? With whom else might it have shared it? In 2015, Facebook sent a stern letter to Cambridge Analytica asking that the data be deleted. Cambridge Analytica employees have said that the company merely checked a box indicating that the data was deleted, at which point Facebook decided not to inform the 50 million users who were affected by the breach, nor to make the issue public, nor to sanction Cambridge Analytica at the time.

The New York Times and The Observer of London are reporting that the data was not deleted. And Cambridge Analytica employees are claiming that the data formed the backbone of the company’s operations in the 2016 presidential election.

If Facebook failed to understand that this data could be used in dangerous ways, that it shouldn’t have let anyone harvest data in this manner and that a third-party ticking a box on a form wouldn’t free the company from responsibility, it had no business collecting anyone’s data in the first place. But the vast infrastructure Facebook has built to obtain data, and its consequent half-a-trillion-dollar market capitalization, suggest that the company knows all too well the value of this kind of vast data surveillance.

Should we all just leave Facebook? That may sound attractive but it is not a viable solution. In many countries, Facebook and its products simply are the internet. Some employers and landlords demand to see Facebook profiles, and there are increasingly vast swaths of public and civic life — from volunteer groups to political campaigns to marches and protests — that are accessible or organized only via Facebook.

The problem here goes beyond Cambridge Analytica and what it may have done. What other apps were allowed to siphon data from millions of Facebook users? What if one day Facebook decides to suspend from its site a presidential campaign or a politician whose platform calls for things like increased data privacy for individuals and limits on data retention and use? What if it decides to share data with one political campaign and not another? What if it gives better ad rates to candidates who align with its own interests?

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/opinion/facebook-cambridge-analytica.html

ugh
this has been making me sick

Should we all just leave Facebook? That may sound attractive but it is not a viable solution....unless you are in a position of social privilege and your connections don't rely on facebook for promotion :(
not mine

that's exactly why fb ruined the internet. you can say what you want about apple and google, at least they have competition.

"the observer of london"

facebook as an entity owns several of the most popular messaging systems, which is kind of parallel to the data mining but also dizzying

the insidiousness of Facebook is such that if you leave it, it's not even that you feel like you're missing out, it's that you begin to suspect people who rely on it for socializing forget about you if you're not readily available on it.

I quit a couple months ago and it does feel like being erased kinda

I figure if anyone who relies on Facebook for socializing has forgotten about me because I’m not on it, it’s not worth trying to be their friend if they don’t care enough to ever reach out to me some other way.

fb users should know better by now

i think there's a certain (unfounded) expectation of privacy with email that will truly freak ppl out when we learn the details of how it isn't

i quit a few months as well. felt erased but that's kinda what i wanted, i think. i missed seeing everyone's infants so i got back on instagram

Email is sent and stored in the clear and bounced between any number of servers on any number of networks in the process so yeah email privacy is “hope no ISP or mail provider is reading your email”

of course for most people that probably works out just fine

Don’t do a crime over email is what I’m saying

the big thing I use fb for, outside of messenger, is the event stuff. any local publication that had a good round-up of events has dropped that, and trawling through either local events or following venues is kind of the last gasp

fb users should know better by now

anyone who ever signed up for Facebook should have known better by then. what's different now?

Well in 2006 or so it was still just “a website” and I was a teenager, arguably I shouldn’t have known better at the time

the size, scope, and the capabilities of third-party integration?

when I signed up for fb there were no "apps", sign-in via second parties (all the phone and web apps that let you login with facebook or twitter) didn't exist, facebook graph search (which was shuttered but underlies their advertising algorithms) wasn't extant

most of those things exist under the covers and are completely opaque to anyone who doesn't read up on data aggregation and closely read the fine print. and, as evident, some of the services using facebook profile sign-in are violating the contractural conditions on how they can use data gathered on facebook and there's no enforcement of those terms. the facebook *ad guy* was the one waving his arms and saying "well, we terminate third-party access when we find out they're violating conditions" and doing nothing proactive. there should be an entire wing figuring out not just developer support, but policing integrations

a wing of the company, you mean? or maybe they could just be better regulated

pretty much, and I don't mean some content moderation center stuck where wages are cheapest clicking yes/no on whether someone's allowed to use facebook, with profile access, in their integration

there's absolutely no reason 90% of these things should be allowed any more than your name and a unique identifier, if that, but allowing access to the user's profile details is the default

users should be allowed to see the full copy of their own data, exactly as seen by advertisers, with metrics including how much the data has been shared/used by third party companies. that should be a right, not a privilege.

imo
all the information is already there, obv, just add read-access to the person being surveilled

there are pages to see that, it's just relatively vague?

if you go to Settings | Apps it shows you the list of authorized applications, along with who you've allowed the app access to

but "only me" isn't granular enough, and the other schemes are pretty vague. if they get a list of my friends, and it's for finding -- for instance -- friends playing a game, then you don't need my profile and my friend's public profile. you just need the identifier.

then again, that's also crap -- there should be unique user identifiers *per app* because you could throw a slew of apps out there targeting different demographics, then scrape as much from individual profiles and link them via id

to some degree there's a problem in how to represent that to the user in a way that's meaningful to a layperson?

My google account has tons of stuff on me but mostly I just understand that it's 9.38 GB of shit I'm never going to read again but might need some of it at some point. Showing me what else is in there requires first educating me on how the data can be abstracted and represented to miners and researchers and frankly idgaf, I'm not going through the trouble of deleting just the dumb stuff while I keep the pictures of my kid and my frequent flyer number and my shopping receipts. Although I probably should!

trenchant thought: what if facebook began paying end-users for the exploitation of their data by cutting them in on some of the $ from the companies who purchase it, and it was enough to baaarely eke out an existence?

see, that's the thing

the big loopholes that are allowing people to gather data aren't big profit centers, which is why they don't pay any attention to them

the place they're actually trying to milk money out of people is advertising local businesses or their organizations, stuff that's viral like quiz bullshit gets popped off via a few targeted ads and then spread without intervention

it's backward but

paying end-users for the exploitation of their data by cutting them in on some of the $ from the companies who purchase it, and it was enough to baaarely eke out an existence

https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2014/03/05/279669610/post-a-survey-on-mechanical-turk-and-watch-the-results-roll-in

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/01/amazon-mechanical-turk/551192/

can I pay someone on there to share my company's facebook post?

ok, I just figured out how "russian" bots work

wyden has some decent questions:

https://www.wyden.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/wyden-cambridge-analytica-to-facebook.pdf

soghoian having a field day

tbh their facebook shit is a lesser sin if you count fucking around with smaller countries more directly and straight-up doing sex worker extortion scams abroad

it's another variation on the same question, isn't it? what do you do, how do you live your life, when doing the right thing isn't an option? facebook can do whatever they want, up to and including getting indignant about how the death ray they designed was for peaceful purposes only, and they will face no meaningful consequences, because all of the institutions that would hold them accountable are broken. i like ron wyden and i'm glad he's my senator, but i don't believe for a second that congress is going to be able to institute serious enough consequences to keep this from happening again, and again, and again.

i did deactivate my facebook account because the only consequences i'm facing is the likelihood of never speaking to a bunch of my best and longest-term friends again, but it's a token gesture at best.

if you go to Settings | Apps it shows you the list of authorized applications, along with who you've allowed the app access to

I have never once used my FB login to log into another website, comments section, forum, app or otherwise. I figured it was blindly obvious this was data mining at its finest.

Same with all those stupid FB quizzes. Cmon guys you dont care which dorito flavour your starsign is, are you twelve? Advertisers just want yr deets.

I only take the good quizzes

what is great is I had that typed up before seeing Trayce’s post

LOL!

I can't deactivate my account because I use it for my office accounts. It's also handy to use when looking around for company logos or verifying that a mugshot I have in hand is actually the guy we plan on identifying as the subject.

But I gave up on the social aspect of it weeks ago. I'm not interested in finding a lost dog in Wisconsin or what your opinion is of the current president. I'm not going to sign your petition, I'm apathetic to the result of your online quiz. The funny stuff I ever see on there I've already seen either here or on Twitter. Hell, I'm heaps guilty of finding shit here and then going on to Facebook to share it with my second cousins.

I'm in my middle 40s, like most of my Facebook friends. Some of my male friends need to grab the reins a little and realize that Facebook is not some sort of online blog, to transcribe your Hard Harry diatribes. I don't care what you think about the president, the past president, Pokemon or fidget spinners. It's embarrassing for me to read. It definitely does not give me anything I'm willing to publicly participate with or actively react to.

I checked in recently because my wife posted a photo of our dog looking over our backyard fence. Otherwise, getting gone feels great.

i don't get the argument that you shouldn't delete your facebook account. it feels like telling someone they shouldn't be a vegetarian because other people will still eat meat. like if your goal is to end global consumption of meat, simply becoming a vegetarian is not

all

p.s. delete your facebook account.

haha sorry for the dramatic quote that should have been italic

can't delete it. never started. never will.

but I do own a television.

just no cable channels.

Same with all those stupid FB quizzes. Cmon guys you dont care which dorito flavour your starsign is, are you twelve? Advertisers just want yr deets.

OTM

Deleted mine a year ago to combat compulsive checking during stress. Now I just bombard ILX.

I pretty much only look at FB when I get a notification of a message or on the rare occasion that someone posts something on my wall. It's truly glorious to be free from the scourge.

Decent explainer of what we know about what’s going on with Stamos

https://gizmodo.com/amid-mounting-crises-facebook-is-reportedly-phasing-ou-1823905362

Well in 2006 or so it was still just “a website” and I was a teenager, arguably I shouldn’t have known better at the time

but it still said what you were signing up for. I'd accept an argument that nobody under 25 should have been allowed to sign up

most of those things exist under the covers and are completely opaque to anyone who doesn't read up on data aggregation and closely read the fine print.

but it was in the normal print (in 2007 when enough ppl were shouting at me to get on so I looked) that they were mining every thing you liked, typed or interacted about in order to sell that data to literally anybody that wanted it. and it was in the bold, large print that you were (eg) transferring copyright in every sentence you typed, and every photograph of yourself, your friends or your grandmother to them, in perpetuity. those principles are the reasons I didn't sign up then, and also the exact thing that people are getting upset about in 2018.

nothing's different now except that they're absolutely definitely doing everything it seemed that their business model would lead them to do, back then!

I've probably typed the same thing every two years on here tbr

Lol who else keeps getting carole cadwalladr stories pushed in their feed