iyo did facebook ruin the internet?

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

Like bill hicks on anti-marketing marketing... "guys, this new climate of fear and suspicion of our company... this could be a huge revenue generator for us"

“was persuaded to stay through August to oversee the transition of his responsibilities and because executives thought his departure would look bad”

sigh

If you delete your Facebook account at this point, do they claim to delete all your data? Given everything, I wouldn't believe them for a second even if they did say that, so it seems a somewhat useless gesture after years on there.

They will after GDPR goes into effect

maria spent all last week translating legal documents from the big belgian case against facebook and it was very interesting! every country should sue them. all the time.

Scott - might want to delete this?

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

― El Tomboto

so facebook wanted stamos to stay... "forever"?

deepest apologies

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/03/how-change-your-facebook-settings-opt-out-platform-api-sharing

I have never used these features but realized this morning I'd never turned them off.

"Scott - might want to delete this?"

you think? i'm not a lawyer. i don't think it was anything top-secret.

and i didn't read any documents. i just didn't know a lot of public facts that she explained to me. the third-party stuff.

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.

― pplains

oh, come on, nobody fucking reads personal blogs. i'm well aware i used facebook "wrong" and that it should only be used for pictures of pets/children/food (these categories should never overlap), but facebook basically was the social internet. i posted there for the two or three people who were interested in that sort of thing, because disclosure of data to advertisers and hostile foreign governments notwithstanding it did afford a reasonable degree of privacy that helped mitigate my fear of being sacked or targeted by an online lynch mob for saying something stupid (a habit of mine), and because it was piss-easy to ignore me there if you didn't like it (i still haven't figured out how to work the killfile around here).

three days on i do find that i was probably, for want of a better word, "addicted". i find it really difficult for me to live my everyday life without checking it. and hence i'm relying more on this board, probably. fortunately i have a vacation coming up (i draw a hard line at social networking on my phone) which might actually help in this case.

xp

Depends on her status/context of the work, but most litigation work has stringent confidentiality requirements.

took a break for a month there last year and after the initial fomo, it was a bit of a relief tbh. the only thing was i couldnt use spotify as it was linked to my FB account which was a balls

"but most litigation work has stringent confidentiality requirements."

really all she told me was that if you go on any website with a facebook icon on it that facebook collects data from whoever visits that site. whether they have ever gone on facebook or not. which i don't think i knew. but that was probably common knowledge for a lot of people.

i don't really keep up when it comes to the data wars.