>Facebook gave Amazon extended access to user data because it was... partnering with the social network on the launch of its Fire smartphone.
So is this yet another case of the media being incapable of distinguishing between transferring of data to third parties and displaying data on devices as an agent of the user, i.e. for the purpose of providing an integrated facebook experience? Until the media shows itself to be capable of making that distinction, I can't take these articles seriously.
Every other time the issue has come up, it's turned out that "access to user data" meant that the third party was allowed to ask the user for access to their data.
In principle this could be the first time Facebook actually just tossed database dumps at Amazon, and in principle Amazon might have abused the access to steal user data for themselves. But neither of those possibilities seem likely or are supported by the described evidence.
The only real one I can remember off the top of my head, where facebook giving access to data didnt turn out to be userbase hands over data on themselves and friend, was the Netflix and some others getting access to private messages. And even there, it wasnt nefarious, it was facebook trying to extend people features, like being able to send their friends spotify songs.
Every other time the issue has come up, it's turned out that "access to user data" meant that the third party was allowed to ask the user for access to their data.
Allowed to ask the user? Can you unwrap that for us?
To use most user-data-serving Facebook APIs, you need both authorization from the user whose data you’re reading and approval from Facebook itself for your app. Facebook has been accused of bad behavior when approving and denying apps, but they haven’t (as far has been reported) released any APIs to get user data without first asking the user.
at least there's always a tldr (you know what exactly you are handing over in a few bullet points), especially when you think of all the contracts/fine prints/ToS you accept in life..
Is there any reason to think the companies given access didn't slurp up the Facebook data for themselves? Have any of them denied it or tried to qualify what they did with their access to the Facebook API?
Back in the day, I was part of a team that built an app that used Facebook Connect/what they were then calling the "Graph API" for login, and our app certainly saved all the data that Facebook made available back into our own database.
> You may use Account Information in accordance with your privacy policy and other Facebook policies. All other data may not be transferred outside your app, except to your service provider (per, Section 3.7) who needs that information to provide services to your app. With the exception of Account Information, you may only maintain user data obtained from us for as long as necessary for your business purpose.
I imagine some smart lawyers worked pretty hard on that. I imagine that most companies have their own smart lawyers who write "[their] privacy policy" to say "we can do whatever we want with your data...to provide you better service." I assume that your app's backend is the "service provider" in question.
IANAL, but I read that as saying it's kosher with FB for your app to push data up to the mothership.
The phrase "for as long as necessary for your business purpose" sure sounds like "indefinitely" to me. Maybe my business is still hoping to make some money from that data?
If you go and look at all the sites that have implemented Facebook Connect and their beacon you know there was a quid pro quo there. You don't know however the nature of the deal. But Facebook seems very generous with sharing your data with other large companies... as the data itself is worth pennies but scarfing much more of it from partners is worth billions.
It's so fucking aggravating that Facebook says "Don't worry, 3rd parties won't abuse the data, because that would be against the rules.".
A friend of mine wanted to remove her name from all social media, she said there's one site left that seemed to just mirror FB, and my name was on it too, it seemed the creator managed to download all the data accessible to apps and he even claimed making that site wasn't against FB's agreement...
UK Parliament's report has a sample agreement that Facebook had with companies that whitelisted them and gave them extended access to user data when they publicly represented that the APIs had been deprecated
"The facts are clear: we've never sold people's data." - Paul Grewal, VP and Assoc. Gen. Counsel, Facebook
Yeah, but that is not what is being alleged.
What is being alleged is that you sell access to people's data.
This constant recitation of "We do not sell users' data" is like being in late stage litigation where each party's lawyers have chosen their respective arguments. They will cling to them no matter what happens, repeating them ad nauseum until the end.
Facebook's argument is "We do not sell people's data".
The issue however is not selling people's data. As such, this is not an argument. It is just misdirection.
The issue is selling access to people's data.
Maybe we could call this "licensing"? Maybe it is more desirable for Facebook to license access to people's data than to sell it.
"People's data" might be their friends list, or whatever they have uploaded or contributed to Zuckerberg's website.
Facebook's lawyers will not address the issue of selling access to people's data. The reason
is clear: they do not have a winning argument.
Then we have the matter of metadata. Facebook will let a user download their data, but not their metadata. All that data on her usage patterns on facebook.com and across the web that Facebook collects 24/7/365, e.g. via "Like" beacons and "Sign-In with Facebook".
If a user downloads her data from Facebook it does not tell her anything she didn't already know. It is simply the data she submitted to Zuckerberg.
But of course he has much more data about her that she is not allowed to see. The question is, "Why not?"
I agree Facebook is playing word games, but I think that misses the larger point. That is, Facebook is not selling access to people's data as understood by the lay person.
The average person interprets "Facebook sells access to your data" as meaning that someone can pay Facebook to access your individual data. e.g. What sites did 3xblah, specifically, visit last week?
This isn't how Facebook's ecosystem works. Advertisers can only target users in large groups. And, there's no way for advertisers to query Facebook's servers for the personal data of a specific user.
If you explain exactly what Facebook is doing to the average person they simply don't care (even if you explain all the potential risks to their personal security).
(You are addressing the advertiser ecosystem while the focus here is the app ecosystem.)
The "word games" may not be aimed at the "average person". They might be intended to mislead those who have a concern with what Facebook might be doing. For example, it might be part of their job. The FTC is an obvious example, but there are many individuals and groups who are interested in Facebook's activities relating to privacy.
Incidentally, how do you know these things about the "average person"? Is there a citation to some studies you have read?
Accessing data and selling data are the same thing. For example; “I’m going to give you access to the answer for a math equation”. When you use your access to view the answer, you have the data and you don’t need access any more! “Ok great, 1+1 equals 2, you can take your calculator back now and I’ll call you up if I need access to it again”.
Isn't that a principle relating to proving ownership?
If yes, then no, that is not what I meant, although I think I see what you are getting at.
What I meant was, "Is there a jurisdiction where a company cannot license (permit) access to data contigent on prior assent to an agreement with conditions on use, duration of use, transfer, etc. such that the licensee does not get the same rights as the owner of the data?"
It's not a principle relating to proving ownership. You cannot own contraband, for instance.
"Is there a jurisdiction where a company cannot license (permit) access to data contigent on prior assent to an agreement with conditions on use, duration of use, transfer, etc. such that the licensee does not get the same rights as the owner of the data?"
I, uh...do you mean...nevermind, I can't figure it out. Can you rearrange the question into a less pseudolegal form?
"Is there a jurisdiction where there is no legal distinction between selling data (transferring ownership) and providing access to data for a fee (licensing)?"
I thought perhaps you had a jurisdiction in mind where there is no difference.
Needless to say, in the US and in many other countries where Facebook conducts business, there is a difference.
Users own the copyright to the stuff they share with Facebook ("users' data"). Facebook acknowledges this explicitly in its Terms.
Does FB have sufficient rights to "sell" copies of users' data? Unless the owners of the data give FB permission, FB cannot sell something FB does not own.
> “As we’ve said many times, Six4Three — creators of the Pikinis app — cherry picked these documents from years ago as part of a lawsuit to force Facebook to share information on friends of the app's users,” Paul Grewal, vice president and deputy general counsel at Facebook, said in a statement released by the company.
> “The set of documents, by design, tells only one side of the story and omits important context. ...”
Seems like an easy problem to solve. Release the documents that provide the "important context". Unless they're even more damning or don't exist...
They've already made it clear that (they claim) the overall framing was user privacy. Maybe they're lying, but if they aren't I don't know what further context they could provide.
There has been so much lying on these topics (not only from Facebook) that what the companies claim means little unless they can support the claim with evidence.
If someone from the media is reading along here: it would be nice to mention every now and again that the "grumpy old progress hating nerds" have a pretty good track record at condemning fb/google. This entire branch of news that I would maybe call "dystopia gawking" just provokes a huge "told you so" in parts of the tech community, and that would be a good thing to keep in mind during the next gold rush.
I wonder why people were so unwilling to accept Zuckerberg's own sentiment ("dumb fucks") about their data for years. It seems like that's basically the attitude at Facebook from the top down. Everything else is PR spin.
I am not, and have never been, a user of Facebook.
But I have to say, that statement means nothing. Mocking people for their poor choices may be in poor taste, or unfair, but it does not mean one is willing to take advantage of them.
It's all he has done since that reveals that he is actually willing.
“Dumb fucks” is more overplayed than “Google is going to shut down <service>”. It’s FUD. Zuckerberg said that when his tiny website was open to his classmates and a few others, and hasn’t been representative of how the company functions.
I seriously cant believe that it’s still a meme people use to justify their hate for Facebook.
What has Zuckerberg done since it was a tiny website to demonstrate his views have changed? I have yet to see anything. In fact, to my mind he has billions of dollars of revenue that reinforce that view.
The whole business model of Facebook is to collect personal data and sell it for profit. It should surprise no one that they are doing that. Furthermore, it shouldn't surprise Americans that there are zero regulations protecting their non-health related data. Free stuff on the internet doesn't run on fairy dust.
Something doesn't have to be surprising for people to legitimately protest against it. The existence of Facebook isn't a result of some democratic consensus, it's some dude's get-rich scheme that's happened to have popped off.
The consensus was set by electing politicians who don't work for the common good. Facebook is nothing new. Our privacy has been systematically degraded by the data broker industry which has existed since before ARPANET. Congress protects that industry and Facebook reaps those benefits.
So what exactly is the point you are trying to make? Are you saying that none of us should care about privacy or the actions of Facebook because we've failed to elect appropriate politicians or failed to get the general public to understand what Facebook is doing?
The only way to get people to start thinking about these problems and implementing change is by publicizing stories like this. Seems like a very defeatist and unproductive attitude to just say "this is how it is" and leave it at that as your comments seem to imply
> Zuckerberg said that when his tiny website was open to his classmates and a few others, and hasn’t been representative of how the company functions.
How can you claim that in the context of the revelations from this article? Seems like the company functions exactly like we're all "dumb fucks". And why do you think his attitude would change to be more egalitarian as his success and power increased?
Edit:
> I seriously cant believe that it’s still a meme people use to justify their hate for Facebook.
It's not a meme. It's the founder and CEO of a company that holds the private data of >2B users telling us exactly how he feels about his users' expectations of privacy. Since then Facebook has only experienced growth and success. What event in Mark Zuckerberg's professional life could have significantly challenged this attitude do you think? It's been all positive feedback loops until recently.
>It's the founder and CEO of a company that holds the private data of >2B users telling us exactly how he feels about his users' expectations of privacy.
No. It's a (literal) teenager thinking aloud, making comments in jest to a friend about his student project becoming viral and getting hundreds of users, to his own amazement. He seems to be noting how little people seem to care for their privacy.
And that's about it. There's much to say against Facebook these days, but it's a preposterous thing to say these comments accurately reflect the current views of their leadership at a completely different scale.
What are you on the record saying when you were 19 ?
Ah look, another facebook/ex-facebook employee. Interesting how on this site the only people that consistently defend facebook are people who have or are financially benefiting from it, and yet they never mention this in their comments
It has been perfectly representative of how the company functions. Collecting and monetizing data from the "dumb fucks" with little to no regard for anything other than profits and getting people addicted to their apps
edit1: Guess I made some facebook engineers upset as I'm being downvoted. Looks like dymk is likely a facebook engineer, as his comment history has lots of comments seemingly supporting facebook, data collection, and ads, or at the very least arguing against those that oppose them. Reframe it however you want, Zuckerberg, Facebook, and its engineers are immoral and not concerned with the privacy or security of anyone's data. The people that knowingly continue to work their are complicit in the net negative impact facebook has on society
edit2: dymk is no longer a software engineer at facebook, but he was until early this year
This is a continuing problem on this platform. Facebook engineers disguising themselves as regular joe defending Facebook, when they have a personal interest. Silently downvoting or flagging comments. This isn’t the first time someone has mentioned this problem. They should be upfront about it and say they are a Facebook engineer and why they disagree.
> Collecting and monetizing data from the "dumb fucks" with little to no regard.
I doubt humans are that simplistic, but at the end of the day, it seems they all have a price, and for that price they can invent lies so they can sleep at night thinking they're decent people.
And until this headline I thought they (and Zuck in particular) still had a code of honor when they say they won't abuse the trust their users had, but, well, apparenly that also has a price.
It's still a meme because it is clearly still how Zuckerberg thinks.
His words and actions are those of someone who gives zero fucks about his user base as long as he gets to continue exploiting their private information.
There is a world of difference between literally selling user data to whoever for money, and providing API access so that users of other platforms can chose to share their own data with that platform.
The journalists lately are doing us all a huge disservice by conflating the two.
I haven't seen any evidence at all that FB was selling user data.
I've posted here a couple times on this issue, having been personally involved on the other side of the table in one of these 'deals' - and it was only ever a matter of getting our app integrated into FB so that our users could access their own data. We didn't use any of the data, though some 3rd parties would then have access to that data and do whatever with it, but only with it with the permission of the users.
The article doesn't provide specifics, but from what I can gather, this really is about 'special API access', and shouldn't be frame as 'FB sharing user data'. This is simply unfair to FB however we might think of them because it misrepresents the issue.
In short: FB has publicly available APIs which 3rd parties can use to allow their users to do some integration. Some of those APIs provide quite a bit of access, and so there's reasonable discussion about 'who' they should give access to. It's also perfectly reasonable that FB wanted to sell access to such APIs, or to have some kind of reciprocity.
VISA, Mastercard and AMEX are out there selling your data (on the aggregate, down to the zip code) to whoever wants to buy it, which is far worse and in many cases may theoretically compromise your identity.
FB has a lot to answer for, surely, but the information needs to be more clearly communicated. Sometimes, I'm not even sure if the journalists understand what is going on.
To get crisp, selling data is selling the keys to the kingdom, it would remove FB's need to exist. There are strong economic motivations to not go out of business.
Some of these documents have been made public before late last year. All of them seem to still be related to the Six4Three lawsuit:
> The documents stem from a California court case between the social network and the little-known startup Six4Three, which sued Facebook in 2015 after the company announced plans to cut off access to some types of user data. Six4Three’s app, Pikinis, which soft-launched in 2013, relied on that data to allow users to easily find photos of their friends in bathing suits.
I do appreciate how their “Director of Platform Partnerships” was also apparently in charge of killing platforms FB thought had become too popular. Great folks to do business with, I’m sure.
You joke, but, if a user can't spend time making something pretty then complaints are probably inbound. I think its a silly tradeoff for privacy. People associate emotion with everything though, and a communication app seems like a logical place people would want to set the mood.
> How many of the commenters here still use WhatsApp? Did you try switching you & friends to Signal?
I no longer use WhatsApp, and I have switched most of the people I text with over to Signal. I don't know if they use it with others, but they certainly use it with me.
This sort of personal vitriol will get you banned on HN regardless of whom you're attacking. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, follow the rules, and make your points without stooping to that, regardless of how right you are or feel.
You may not owe better to Zuckerberg or Facebook, but you owe much better to this community if you want to keep posting here.
It’s a false conclusion. The OP is making a moral/ethical statement, and says that prison time is the only way to motivate the wrongdoers to conform. That’s different than asserting that a crime under current laws has taken place.
The Facebook killing democracy meme is flattering for technologists but imo too simplistic. In America there are a number of “democracy killers” or “this is why we have trump” in the mainstream narrative: Russia, Racism, FBI, Facebook, electoral college, etc.
Let’s not forget people tilt towards economic or cultural nationalism for a reason, and it’s in our power to address those reasons directly, not chase band aid solutions.
A quip I read says: "Of course it's totally Putin's fault that Trump won, because actually everyone in the USA loves neoliberalism deep at heart!".
But Facebook became an effective tool for a "voter hacking", if you believe the coverage about Cambridge Analytica: data-mine the Facebook profiles to determine the targets (apparently as little as several thousand people in the swing states), and then use FB's targeted advertising to influence these people with videos you know will get them emotionally. Boom. Hacking elections/voting machines is illegal, but no one ever said anything about hacking the voters, right?
Maybe, but unlike hacking voting machines (which remove voters) this scheme relies on rallying real people to go and vote. It would have been achievable with traditional campaigning methods, just more expensively.
But why aren't we addressing the underlying issue of why these several thousand people in swing states thought to vote in this way? How come the mainstream response is to say "gee I wish those people hadn't voted"?
I think addressing the underlying concerns would be more effective. I get that politics can be zero-sum at times but campaigning in swing states and targeting issues that those voters find important should be part of every campaign.
"The this is why we have Trump" blame keeps shifting as long as Liberals are unable to acknowledge their own lack of empathy for their compatriots and their own failures to provide solutions that work for what ails their country.
Please read this. This isn't just another routine news that Zuck lied and Facebook is evil. They had access to more than 4.000 previously unreleased documents.
Democracy is at stake. Facebook and its subsidiaries are destroying our societies. The problem is global. Not because it is happening in a far away country you shouldn't care. You can already see the increase in Amazon deforestation due to Bolsonaro election in Brazil.
You can't blame Facebook for the rise of right wing leaders.
It's been happening in US, Italy, Israel, Poland, Hungary, Phillipines and now Brazil and the trend will continue whilst those leaders offer strength, populism and can point to immigrants as the cause of society's problems.
Yes, and a corrupt left-wing leader could use the exact same techniques. Like the guns they put on the back of Toyota trucks in third world countries, this tracking stuff has no particular allegiance.
Promoting negative emotions is a lot easier than promoting positive emotions. To a very large degree the platform of the right is currently heavily weighted toward provoking fear and anger, negative emotions easy to stoke in people.
This might change and we may have an ascendant party on the left with a primarily negative message eventually. And I'm not saying the current left never does this. But at the moment the right's playbook fits existing social media better.
I hope to avoid a political debate, but the left has plenty of negative messages too. The rich are too rich and don't have to pay taxes, the poor are too poor, racism never completely went away, the corporate world is unfair to women, and so on. I doubt there has ever been a political movement without any negative messages. I should add in support of your point about social media having a propensity to negativity, these negative left-leaning messages tend to spread faster than the positive ones, just like on the right wing.
> but the left has plenty of negative messages too. The rich are too rich and don't have to pay taxes, the poor are too poor, racism never completely went away, the corporate world is unfair to women, and so on.
Those are hardly negative, and to equate their tone with far right rhetoric is textbook false equivalency. They are if anything just positions that one may or may not agree with about the just distribution of wealth and opportunity.
None of them are even in same ballpark or kind as the current toxic rhetoric on the far right, such as "[Mexicans] are criminals", "Muslims are trying to impose Sharia law in the US", "blood and soil", "we can't rebuild our civilization with someone else's babies" (that one is paraphrasing from a sitting member of Congress).
That is the rhetoric of racial and ethnic nationalism, which is almost totally a far right phenomenon on social media. There is no equivalent on the far left today, and that's not to say that it can't develop. But to do so with literally require a complete change of the people who make up the left.
You don't have to dig very far to find some stupid kids on Reddit going off on that "eat the rich" stuff - but the thing is, your "stupid kids" are their "horrible violent mob," and their "stupid kids" are your "horrible violent mob." In reality they're both a little bit violent and definitely both stupid. ;)
Social media and regular media both contribute to this perception because everyone wants to forget about their own bad associations and focus on the bad associations of others. So, if you want to find out about nationalists you read left-leaning publications and if you want to find out about radical-to-the-point-of-silliness leftists you have to read right-leaning publications.
> You don't have to dig very far to find some stupid kids on Reddit
> Social media and regular media both contribute to this perception
3 of the 4 examples of right wing rhetoric I quoted were uttered publicly by right wing elected officials (including the highest current elected in the land), not by people entertaining themselves on Reddit. The fourth was shouted publicly by crowds in Charlottesville.
The difference between right and left rhetoric is one of kind, not degree. Ethnic nationalism is not a motivating factor on the left today.
Class tensions and frustration over the distribution of opportunity and wealth - yes, those are prominent left-wing issues and that rhetoric is often expressed via insensitive metaphors targeted at the very wealthy, but again, it's not even comparable to the rhetoric of ethnic nationalism.
The far-left routinely castigates "white people", blames unrelated individuals alive today collectively as the sole villain of history, and does not allow people to participate in discussions and debates based on the color of their skin. They say that race needs to be the main factor when restructuring the country with mass property redistribution. Isn't that inflammatory ethno-nationalist rhetoric?
There's enough hate, anger and other similar emotions on the left, that memes like these get made by other people on the left to combat it (with not much success, from my own experience).
I would also like to remind that among the many pages removed from the very same Facebook because they were inciting hate and anger as part of the Russian propaganda ops, quite a few were targeting left-leaning audiences.
In general, populists of all stripes are going to appeal to those emotions precisely because it's much easier to evoke them. So whichever side has a stronger populist faction at any given moment is the one that benefits most. In some places (like US) it's the right wing currently, in others, it's the left.
> You can't blame Facebook for the rise of right wing leaders
Facebook absolutely bears some culpability in this, but they're not the only reason that this is happening. Facebook cannot successfully control the hateful toxicity of their platform, which is now global.
All along the way, Facebook has lied, concealed, and deflected as much blame and responsibility as they could. This is unacceptable.
Facebook launched internet.org to get the 3rd world online (and more specifically, facebook), and wound up cancelling the project after the UN blamed Facebook for failing to control toxic speech against the Rohingya, who were mass murdered and displaced as a result[0].
Folks should check out this article that explains how Facebook intentionally did not pass along privacy metadata to developers. Shows how a lot of the so called "breaches" happened. Hint: they weren't breaches, it was privacy violation by design. https://medium.com/@six4three/deceit-by-design-zucks-dirty-s...
So is this yet another case of the media being incapable of distinguishing between transferring of data to third parties and displaying data on devices as an agent of the user, i.e. for the purpose of providing an integrated facebook experience? Until the media shows itself to be capable of making that distinction, I can't take these articles seriously.