Facebook’s Surveillance Machine

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

by imartin2k • 8 years ago

677 232 8 years ago

when talking about Cambridge Analytica we should also discuss Palantir

from 5 years ago: https://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2013-06/mysterious...

Palantir ‘wields as much real-world power as Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple, but unlike them, Palantir operates so far under the radar, it is special ops.’ https://channels.theinnovationenterprise.com/articles/is-pal...

Yes, that's the same Thiel who is suing Gawker for outing him while developing predictive analytics that disproportionately target minorities.

See: Peter Thiel’s Palantir wins $876 million U.S. Army contract https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-09/peter-thi...

https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/27/17054740/palantir-predict...

not just facebook but Silicon Valley has in general a total disregard for privacy. You can't hate on Facebook from another corner of the swamp. Also we should be thinking about what's ahead in IoT (Turning IOT sensor data into behavioral insights) https://www.sentiance.com/

Not to mention the gazillion IoT devices with poor factory reset which is the web's equivalent to delete-account function which only disables a users login but retains the data.

apologies for my emotional tone, this obviously has hit a nerve.

kaybe3• 8 years ago

Wow, sentiance is super creepy.

ccozan5• 8 years ago

wow+1. Truly creepy.

But this is possible because we let them use this data. Thankfully, in EU the GDRP makes this almost impossible.

On a side note, working on a platform that is similar to sentiance in data aquisition, but for totally other purpose and zero effect on privacy, due to a transparent anonymization.

TeMPOraL• 8 years ago

Holy fuck. After watching the video on their site, I agree.

oblio• 8 years ago

And people keep whining about the GDPR.

ParanoidShroom• 8 years ago

I was recruited to work there, since they are from my local neighborhood I know them some time already. They have a history of analyzing data with financial support from Samsung. They are a smart bunch, don't have bad intentions towards people. That being said, their goal is indeed ... Well not something I value personally. But they are all good guys that are eager to make an amazingly powerful product. I agree that the result can be abused. That being said, there should be a middle ground where both parties should benefit. I normally don't comment, but I don't want to see them look like a villain. They are excited engineers.

danso• 8 years ago

From the theinnovationenterprise.com article you linked to:

It is essentially an interface that sits on top of existing data sets and displays data to users for analysis, helping to identify connections otherwise impossible to find. Users do not have to use SQL queries or employ engineers to write strings in order to search petabytes of data. Instead, natural language is used to query data and results are returned in real-time. It is not designed to do any single thing, its main strength is that it is flexible and powerful enough to accommodate the requirements of any organization that needs to process large amounts of both personal and abstract data. This makes it more useful for managing HUMINT, or intelligence from human sources, than SIGINT, or intelligence from signals.

The problem with Palantir is that everything it is said to be doing is so vague that it could just be colorful dashboards based on not particularly great or new data. For example, this is how the Bloomberg story you linked to describes it:

Founded in 2004, Palantir is used by dozens of federal, state and local law enforcement agencies to aggregate far-flung data, find patterns and present results in colorful, easy-to-interpret graphics. Its use by police in Los Angeles, Chicago, New Orleans and elsewhere has raised ethical concerns about the potential for unfairly targeting minorities.

I'm not arguing whether Palantir is living up to its contracts. Just that it doesn't seem to produce or have the unique and expansive kind of data that Facebook, Google, and Amazon have. Though I guess there's nothing that prevented them from doing a massive data pull from FB's API, in the same way CA managed to do it.

FWIW, not everything about Palantir is necessarily a secret. You can see some descriptions of what they offer and at what price via various FOIA requests that have been done: https://www.muckrock.com/foi/list/?q=palantir&status=done&us...

g099802• 8 years ago

If the task is "taking datasets and making them more searchable," it seems like that company gets the heat simply for making the task easier. Excel, SQL databases (or, heck, huge CSV files) don't get as much attention even though they could be used for the same purpose, even if very awkwardly.

simula67• 8 years ago

Thiel did not sue Gawker, Terry Bollea ( known professionally as "Hulk Hogan" ) did, Thiel only bankrolled the suit. Gawker going down was their own fault, they defied a court order in a very explicit manner : https://web.archive.org/web/20130428130143/http://gawker.com...

DyslexicAtheist3• 8 years ago

you're right yes. I should make clear that I shed no tears for gawker. good riddance. but Thiel's position on everything (from voting Trump to supporting surveillance capitalism) is still noteworthy.

ensiferum• 8 years ago

I think it's time to finally close the FB account, move on to Firefox and disable 3rd party trackers and start using VPN routinely.

ccozan5• 8 years ago

But careful with the VPNs.

They are leaking and selling data too. Can't find the article at this moment, but there was on HN not long ago.

DyslexicAtheist3• 8 years ago

yepp, VPNs are really just shifting the trust from ISP to the VPN.

mirimir2• 8 years ago

Sure, there's no way to know.

But it is possible to distribute trust across multiple VPN services, such that none of them alone can compromise you. You just nest one VPN inside another. It's easy using VMs. Most simply, connect to one VPN provider in the host machine, and to another in a VM. Using pfSense VMs as VPN gateways, you can chain more deeply. It's the same idea that's behind Tor using three-relay circuits. But less anonymous, because routes are static.

wepple3• 8 years ago

Algo solves this: spin up your own. Heck, be neighbourly and share yours with a few friends. Gives you coverage of other traffic too.

https://github.com/trailofbits/algo

sjapkee• 8 years ago

move on to Firefox

I can't trust them after the case when they installed the extension as an advertising company of the TV series. 21st centery, you can't trust anyone.

rnhmjoj• 8 years ago

It certainly cannot be trusted given stuff like this happens on a regular basis. See the next one coming: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1446404

CaptSpify5• 8 years ago

Who would you trust then?

I agree that Mozilla has been horrible in how they treat their users, and people should be much more critical of them. But from what I've seen, they are the only ones who are even trying.

gerbal• 8 years ago

It's worth looking through Zenyep Tufekci's other op-eds [1] and her fantastic book "Twitter and Teargass" [2]. A lot of her analysis borders on prescient. She's someone to pay attention to.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/column/zeynep-tufekci

[2] https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300215120/twitter-and-te...

hendler• 8 years ago

Agreed. TED talk was good too. https://www.ted.com/talks/zeynep_tufekci_we_re_building_a_dy...

4h53n• 8 years ago

A realistic dystopia, lovely.

rtx• 8 years ago

We have to decide if people should have powers like this.

"Build tools that measure the rate and spread of stories and rumors, and model how it works and who has the biggest impact. Tools can tell us about the origin of stories and the impact of any venue, person or theme.

Connect polling into this in some way. Find a way to do polling online and not on phones. Analytics and data science and modeling, polling and resource optimization tools. For each voter, a score is computed ranking probability of the right vote.

Analytics can model demographics, social factors and many other attributes of the needed voters. Modeling will tell us what who we need to turn out and why, and studies of effectiveness will let us know what approaches work well. Machine intelligence across the data should identify the most important factors for turnout, and preference.

It should be possible to link the voter records in Van with upcoming databases from companies like Comcast and others for media measurement purposes.

The analytics tools can be built in house or partnered with a set of vendors."

Edit- Source - https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/37262

mattbierner• 8 years ago

Seeking advice: how do I tell friends and family about the negative aspects of Facebook without coming across as all “I don’t even own a TV” or “meat is murder”? Is that even possible?

kaybe3• 8 years ago

Right now I'm considering to just show them the video on sentiance's homepage.. (https://www.sentiance.com as linked above)

mr_spothawk2• 8 years ago

instead of deleting my account, i wrote an email which i bcc’d to my “real” friends: i’m deleting our facebook friendship, i love you and expect we can stay in touch just fine without.

then i deleted all my fb connections, and left a public account with no friends and a publi message about how to find me.

if i want to spam a post to my people, i use the bcc email

bgarbiak• 8 years ago

It's not only Facebook though. If you look for a restaurant at Google it will show you a link to that restaurant's website, opening hours, etc. but also: how popular the place is at any time, and how much time people spend there. All thanks to tracking phones.

In case of Google you can disable that in the phone's settings (and trust that opt-out works), but you can't really do that with your phone operator. Or with the apps that do the same but don't brag about it.

To answer your question directly: I showed a search result page to my friends, and showed them how to disable location tracking. Some were terrified, but - sadly - most of them didn't and don't mind being tracked.

antocv3• 8 years ago

Some were terrified, but - sadly - most of them didn't and don't mind being tracked.

For those friends, I ask them if they can just carry this nickle of mine for me, it will track them and Ill know where they are if I need them. They all refuse to be tracked by me.

Then I ask them if they want a raspberry pi or a router from me, with ads blocked and personal access to my virtual private network with access to all my movies music etc, but dont worry of course _I_ will see every domain-name your computers lookup, Ill even warn you, friend, if I notice bad-name lookups, and I pinky promise not to remotely access the router.

They all act like I am a creep and refuse. But, google, an entity they dont even know or have a relationship with - thats fine to let them into their house and know what time they watch porn and how long.

When the surveillence is put into context like this, it usually works, friends smirk and think one more time.

moduspol• 8 years ago

I'm not sure the negative aspects are considered that bad, even by people who know about them. I really think techie sites just have an overrepresentation of online privacy advocates that steer conversations in that direction.

I think you'll have trouble not coming across that way because it almost inherently suggests your values (importance of the privacy of your data) are better than theirs (enjoying Facebook and that it is free).

developer2• 8 years ago

This is the truth. The average person does not care about data mining. It's a non-issue for them. And no, it's not a matter of intelligence, or that they need to be educated on the matter. Leave them be. Ignorance is bliss - in a positive sense.

If you're going to teach others anything about the perils of the internet, focus on the truly serious things: how to avoid phishing scams targeting bank accounts, fake virus warnings, etc. Everything else sounds like tinfoil hat material because, for most people, that's pretty much what it is.

zby• 8 years ago

Physicists became aware about the ethical implications of their work after the A bomb - with information science there will not be any such sharp censure - but the implications might be even more profound.

g099802• 8 years ago

Am I understanding correctly is that the primary blame on Facebook is in enabling apps (via API) to collect data?

This stuff has unfortunately existed for years, no different from an Android "beautiful waterfall wallpapers" app that also happens to ask for permission to access your contacts/messages. People consent to their data being public (sometimes in second-degree through their friends), data gets collected. And what about all those helpful Chrome extensions that want access to all of your browsing tabs?

I never authorize third-party apps on my accounts (or even install non-local Chrome extensions), but I'm likely in the minority.

mfrommil• 8 years ago

In many cases, industry self-regulation can be a good solution to protecting customers from being wronged. PCI is a great example- there can be huge fines on merchants that don't meet strict regulations for handling customer financial transactions according to the strict standards set by PCI.

What has become extremely clear from this situation is that we are far past the point of self-regulation being the answer for protecting personal data. Facebook knowingly enabled a 3rd party to pay $1-$2 to 300k people to acquire facebook data that may have been marked private/don't share for 50 million users. Roughly $500k for 50 million people's personal data, or in other words, a penny per person. This data is connected to influencing the election of the POTUS. There needs to be significant overhaul of how personal data is protected or this will continue to happen.

Juliate• 8 years ago

In many cases, industry self-regulation can be a good solution to protecting customers from being wronged.

PCI is a self-regulation by self-interest: not to protect the card holders, but merely to protect the card issuers first. Because legislation made issuers responsible for most mishaps in payments.

What are documented examples of industry self-regulation in the interest of customers? (true question, I'm genuinely wondering about it)

lostlogin• 8 years ago

The trick is to have customers that aren’t users.

CaptainZapp• 8 years ago

In addition: You need reasonably trustworthy entities if you want them to self-regulate and self-certify.

Facebook, with their behavior over the years, have lost any benefit of a doubt.

This may not be a popular opinion here, but given their behavior, their evasions and their lies it's time for the law to crack down on them; hard!

CaptSpify5• 8 years ago

As someone who has worked with PCI compliance, I'm not sure I'd say it's a great example.

Sure, it's better than nothing, but it's also relatively trivial to bypass, and is done so regularly. I think the governing organization should have much sharper teeth.

That's not to say that self-regulating won't work, but I don't think PCI is a great example of it in action.

sidcool• 8 years ago

Technology has yet to face its A-bomb moment that physicists faced decades ago.

hellofunk3• 8 years ago

I wish quite badly that the benefit of deactivating FB would outweigh the inconvenience, but FB has become such a mainstay that I'd lose touch with lots of people I really have no other way of contacting. I could say "good riddance," if there is no other way to contact them then perhaps they are not important enough to my life, but that's just not true. Or what about all the local forums (FB groups) in my city that have lots of immediate help about all sorts of things -- I'd immediately lose access to all that. I wish there was a better way, but I can't see myself getting rid of FB without a notable disruption to my life. #sad

wepple3• 8 years ago

If you haven’t already, I encourage you to try without it for 30 days: if you truly can’t find a way around it, fine, check it every second day. You might be surprised how unimportant it ends up being

tasssko• 8 years ago

Yes I do this as well. I don't use facebook for platform, news or ads. I use facebook every other day to comment on what friends are doing and its useful for my local community news, events via groups or are they pages not sure. I don't trust Facebook and don't upload or share my personal information.

paulie_a2• 8 years ago

I've slowly stopped using it because the quality of content is just so incredibly low. Facebook has created a negative feedback loop for me, the more "suggested" bullshit they attempt to push the less I care. I when every third post is that sort of thing it becomes less useful. I've personally been blocked from "hiding" ads on numerous occasions.

roadbeats3• 8 years ago

What is the point of staying in contact only in Facebook ? If someone is important for me, I'd be in contact with them in real life or another platform.

Also, lots of people seem to be unaware of that you can delete your Facebook account. They don't have a link to the delete page from settings menu though. It's here: https://facebook.com/account/delete

ashman5• 8 years ago

Page not found

robteix• 8 years ago

It's actually https://www.facebook.com/help/delete_account

gotofritz6• 8 years ago

This is one of those 'soooo obvious but untrue' statements

I use it to keep in touch with far away or unimportant people. Second degree aunts, ex schoolmates, etc. Without FB it's a nightmare keeping in touch the few times I want to (people change email addresses all the time). Also, many groups are useful

ahussain2• 8 years ago

You can deactivate your FB account and still use Messenger (and hence keep your contacts). You would lose Groups and Events though

denzil_correa2• 8 years ago

You'd still have to go give up your phone number. In the end, you might give up your FB profile but you've not quite achieved the objective of giving up your FB profile.

paulie_a2• 8 years ago

Why would anyone want to use messenger, it is such a low quality app to be beyond useless.

popee• 8 years ago

I've never used fb, so it's scary to see comments like this.

tjr225• 8 years ago

Right? As if those of us who haven't used facebook for years are living these inhospitably inconvenient lives? I have friends all over the world and we keep in touch...we don't really need a central platform to do so either. I can honestly say that I could really easily drop any of the platforms that I do use (telegram, snapchat, flickr, hackernews) in an instant and it would probably have such a minimal impact in my life that I could care less. Is it these companies' impetus to trick its users into thinking they can't live without them? I think so.

struppi• 8 years ago

I deleted the Facebook and Facebook Messenger apps from my phone two months ago. I love how well that works for me.

I can still contact people (just have to open my computer) and read FB groups. But I don't really post to FB anymore and don't browse the feed at all.

And I don't feel like I am missing anything. (YMMV)

w_t_payne• 8 years ago

I deleted it three or four months ago when I realized that it was just making me unhappy.

anonu2• 8 years ago

What happened to good ol' emails? Serious question... Can't you organize amongst friends with emails? I hate to suggest Slack as well... But there are alternatives is the point...

What about Meetup.com for bigger groups?

gotofritz6• 8 years ago

How old are you? I am asking because I remember full well the pre-facebook days when people would send around 'funny videos' to groups of friends, with no chance of opting out, getting your email address shared with people you don't know, filling your inbox with crap, etc... Something like FB is hundreds times more convenient

notacoward• 8 years ago

Any UX expert can tell you that every little bit of friction counts. I see that mentioned or assumed every day here on HN, but somehow in discussions about using vs. abandoning Facebook it gets thrown out the window. I might be comfortable with email, you might be comfortable with Slack, but my uncle or my high-school friend who's a massage therapist might not be. Also, they and a couple of dozen other older, younger, or less tech-savvy friends are already on Facebook and comfortable doing things there. Getting them to switch to a different platform is a hard sell even if it's more convenient, and if it's even marginally less convenient then forget it. Ease of use and network effects are both real things.

hellofunk3• 8 years ago

Email addresses come and go all the time, get changed, deactivated, or people start using different emails and never check the old ones. But FB messages are always seen. Email is just not a reliable long-term "address" for someone.

gambiting• 8 years ago

I only go on facebook to talk to other car enthusiasts for a particular brand. Some of them are on some online forums, but most aren't. They are also not my friends - so I don't really want to share emails. The group is also non-English speaking - so services like Meetup or Slack are out of the question. It's a tough one. I think reverting back to standard post-based online forums is the best, but they have more friction and they are hard to discover for some.

ionised• 8 years ago

It seems like a big problem until you just do it, and then you realise you didn't need it anywhere near as much as you think.

JustSomeNobody• 8 years ago

Are you unable to ask those people for alternative contact information?

hellofunk3• 8 years ago

Many dozens or even hundreds of people, not to mention the thousands on the groups that are helpful strangers? And even if I got all that contact information, email and other contact stuff changes pretty quickly, easily a lot of it would got out of date within a year or two. But people keep their FB accounts active so you can always contact them through there.

swaggyBoatswain• 8 years ago

This is what I do to keep facebook from being annoying

1. Delete (disable) facebook app on phone 2. Stop all notifications from facebook from browser 3. Use email notifications to see updates to conversations 4. Use a seperate browser (phone and desktop) to login into facebook to reduce privacy tracking

If you want to check up on a specific friend, just go to their facebook profile.

ashelmire• 8 years ago

You know, I thought the same thing. But honestly I rarely used those forums. And the people I can't keep in contact with, well... I don't really miss them. I have phone numbers for the people that matter and have resumed exchanging phone numbers with people, which I hadn't really done in several years.

I am part of an organization that uses fb as the primary means of communication. The people that at the top have been pretty obnoxious about me not being on it anymore. But frankly, I see their attitude as pretty toxic and think they should move to a professional method of communication (they are a pretty amateurish / small org).

Sometimes disruption is a good thing. I've been studying a lot more (as a professional dev taking online classes) in the past few months since leaving fb.

newnewpdro• 8 years ago

The only reason this stuff is being reported on in this way is the president they successfully got elected sucks.

None of this is news. Facebook has _never_ been regarded as some kind of privacy-respecting entity. Users have been willingly participating in the exchange of privacy for convenience as far as I can remember.

Azeralthefallen2• 8 years ago

Maybe i am misunderstanding something about this whole issue, but was there an exploit or a bug that allowed this to happen on Facebooks end?

I guess my confusion is that whenever someone grants third party access to your facebook, you can query that users list of friends (which i have seen used for things like games and high scores, etc). But you didn't get the full friends profile, instead you got a small subset of it. Did they find some way around that and managed to retrieve the full user profile?

If not then isn't Cambridge Analytica at fault here for misusing someones data? Facebook provides an API and users consented to allowing a third party to access their data. I guess you could remove the friends list, from the API.

wepple3• 8 years ago

I don’t think there was any exploit. My understanding is that a third-party app asked for access, and people gave consent, and CA mined data.

I’m the last person you’d see defending FB, but this just seems like the same thing everyone has been doing on FB as a platform since FarmVille launched years ago?

rovek3• 8 years ago

A major part of Facebook's culpability here is that they knew for 2 years that tens of millions of their users were being profiled as part of a political propaganda war on their platform and their response was practically nothing.

Edit: FB also knew the data was collected under an academic license and was being processed, outside that license, for financial gain.

chiefalchemist2• 8 years ago

I believe that's correct. People gave concent to X but Y used the data. Perhaps that's a violation of FB's ToS for apps?

That said, (personal) data gets brokered all the time. And, btw, sometimes the buyers are gov agencies. Who needs surveillance when people willing hand it all over, often in public.

Perhaps not the public will finally begin to understand why the phone meta data "intrusion" was so bad.

denzil_correa2• 8 years ago

My understanding is that a third-party app asked for access, and people gave consent

Did people consent to use their data to be mined for a political campaign? Currently, consents are meaningless and vaguely worded that can include anything under the sun. Sooner or later, we are going to go the "Informed Consent" way [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informed_consent

IshKebab• 8 years ago

It used to be that you could get more information than just the friends list but that hasn't been the case since 2015:

https://techcrunch.com/2015/04/28/facebook-api-shut-down/

Perhaps the academic involved was given special access under the condition that he didn't give the data to any third parties, and he did.

titzer4• 8 years ago

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

― Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked

Facebook and Google are not evil. They are made up of ordinary people with ordinary likes, dislikes, biases, histories, failings. Those people don't have to be evil or wrong or even misguided to give rise to this situation. No matter how much they try to (and want to!) do the right thing, they are just trying to make money. Everyone's economic incentive is to make more money. The shareholders demand it!

Economics is what underlies all of this, and it is completely inescapable. The market is rewarding those who track users and profile them in order to predict their behavior, jam ads in their face, or sell them stuff. Entities that do this make more money than entities that don't. Like, a lot more. $100billion/yr more. So. You are going to get more companies finding more ways to track and profile people to figure out how to make more money. Facebook and Google and Twitter and ad networks and everyone else can be absolute angels in their hearts, but the sheer mathematics of economics is like a pervasive wind that just keeps pushing them in this direction.

You either push back, HARD, with your feet and with the law, or you suffer the consequences along with everyone else.

arvinsim• 8 years ago

I agree. In the end, incentives is what drives behaviour, not ideals.

hudon• 8 years ago

Facebook and Google are not evil. [...] Everyone's economic incentive is to make more money.

I don't buy the claim that everyone just wants more money above all else and you seem to agree if you're claiming that people can "push back, HARD". We all have the capacity to place ethics above money. Never questioning the impact of your actions--especially when it affects the lives of millions--and simply doing what greed dictates, is indeed a form of malevolence, or "evil"... the 20th century is a testament to that.

Furthermore, if a company's leadership is filled to the brim with these unethical and greedy people, I believe it's acceptable to call the company evil as well.

Tech just needs to stop building tech for tech's sake and start thinking deeply about humans... and holding each other accountable.

titzer4• 8 years ago

Furthermore, if a company's leadership is filled to the brim with these unethical and greedy people, I believe it's acceptable to call the company evil as well.

I think that's fair. My point was that Facebook and Google and others don't have to be evil to give rise to this situation, economics just does. That, of course, doesn't mean they aren't.

Furthermore, a company's leadership swearing up and down that they "aren't evil" does mean a hill of beans if they give rise to evil through their own economic actions.

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC• 8 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banality_of_evil#The_banality_...

toss12• 8 years ago

"The road to hell is paved with good intentions."

Just because you can do something, does not mean that you should do it.

People must apply the same creativity, intelligence, and forethought as they apply to designing & building of their technology to considering the consequences of it's existence and use.

And then take appropriate actions to prevent bad consequences and/or misuse. This must include some decisions to not build it in the first place.

titzer4• 8 years ago

Didn't really expect downvotes. Perhaps it wasn't entirely clear from what I wrote, but what I meant was:

Facebook and Google don't necessarily have to be evil for this to happen.

My point that this is a consequence of economics, and statistically speaking, no matter how nice of people you put in these positions, they are going to tend towards making more money. Surveillance makes money. So surveillance is what you get.

That is orthogonal to the question of whether they actually ARE evil.

zhyder• 8 years ago

It's interesting that we have 2 big scandals in tech right now: one with Uber's self-driving car killing a pedestrian, and the other with Facebook revealing too much data about users and their friends to third-party apps. With Uber, we're asking for data (telemetry leading up to the accident) to be recorded and access to be more open. With Facebook, we're asking for access to be more closed; ironic that we usually criticize Facebook for being a walled garden.

Assuming data needs to be recorded in the first place to make the products work better, what's ethically better, open access or closed? Is it better for a few big tech companies to wield so much power with their troves of user data, or is it better to distribute it across numerous companies/governments who can be even more unscrupulous (e.g. Cambridge Analytica, Russia)?

EDIT: even now, with full benefit of hindsight, should Facebook allow accessing friend lists with user permission (would lead to more cases of abuse by third-party apps), or not (would perpetuate their walled garden and monopoly on social media)?

n4r9• 8 years ago

I'm not sure that's a useful binary. In both cases we're asking corporations to handle their data in a responsible way. Neither open nor closed is absolutely more ethical, it depends on the context.

js8• 8 years ago

In addition to what n4r9 said, we organize our moral code around freedom of individuals, and not freedom of other entities. So it's morally acceptable to ask for privacy of individuals, yet ask for things and institutions to be surveilled by society at large.

twsted• 8 years ago

"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."

_That_ is the problem.

chiefalchemist2• 8 years ago

I read "Dragnet Nation" shortly after it came out.

http://juliaangwin.com/dragnet-nation-available-now/

And a couple years later "Chaos Monkeys."

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/06/29/business/dealbook/revi...

Obviously there are others, as well as articles in between.

In terms of FB et al, we are the product. They know this. We know this. And the prevailing (USA) cultural wind is "Privacy? Who needs it?"

If there's a surprise, it's that its taken this long for this issue to get any significant attention. Let's see how long it lasts. If it lasts.

camillomiller2• 8 years ago

Here in Germany online privacy is a social value, and Facebook is gonna have a even harder time from now on. I don't see it happen in the rest of the world. I give this three months: when the news cycle will have died out, for Facebook it's gonna be business as usual. Zuckerberg is in such a denial about the real mission of his creature, that I don't see how it will ever be able to steer the boat, even if he wanted to. Does he ever lie in bed at night, staring at the ceiling, asking himself "what the fuck did I create"? Will he ever?

1over137• 8 years ago

Why do you think Zuckerberg is in denial? (Honest question.) Seems to me he knows exactly what he's doing.

nomercy400• 8 years ago

How convenient for Facebook that large dubious data collection practices like this are exposed only two months before the European GDPR privacy law comes into effect.

bambax3• 8 years ago

Facebook makes money, in other words, by profiling us and then selling our attention to advertisers, political actors and others. These are Facebook’s true customers, whom it works hard to please.

And you just figured this out now? This is like saying "wow, who knew we would get so fat by feeding only on pizza, hamburgers and coke, aren't those companies evil".

Well, yes, companies are evil. They don't work for you; they either sell something to you, that is usually bad for you (why else would you want it), or take something from you, that they can then sell to somebody else.

Should we all just leave Facebook? That may sound attractive but it is not a viable solution.

Of course it is. It's the only solution. If you think Facebook's management care about anything else except the number of active users, you're crazy. The only way to have them change their ways (maybe) is to make that number go down. It's also good for you, like drinking water instead of soda.

antocv3• 8 years ago

Change is upon us, join patchwork at secure scuttlebutt. The social network is the network, no central services, federation or global anything.

littlepinkpill• 8 years ago

Thanks for this pointer--if enough people adopted something like this FB would eventually wither away. I wondered when someone would use this model for social networking.

3chelon2• 8 years ago

You're absolutely right we should all leave FB. It's the only way to make them change. I've been seriously considering it for a while - I'd lose some exposure in my hobby groups, and my mother would miss the kids' photo updates, but I could just about live with that.

shard972• 8 years ago

You could use Diaspora. I haven't used either FB or Diaspora in quite a few years know but I would have to imagine it still exists.

jackstraw142• 8 years ago

If they announced a totally different business model, you would trust them and go back? I’m just asking because that’s an interesting thought, making Facebook change. How can you trust them enough after quitting in protest?

If we expect to have any success, people need to remove this idea that they need social media in their lives. All this is hypothetical too — last I checked Facebook brought in more cash than the 15 lowest GDPs or something like that. Making Facebook change just isn’t realistic. When you quit Facebook, you join a protest against for-profit social media, and as long as Facebook is a blind money machine it will always be part of the problem.

watertom• 8 years ago

what you can't email your mom pictures? IF she can use Facebook she can read email

harryf• 8 years ago

Of course it is. It's the only solution.

One viable alternative is legislation, such as the EU has been doing to some effect. Of course the laws lag the technology by some years and we have a wide range of political views on things like "the right to be forgotten" but more consumer protections seem to be needed, perhaps also factoring in "dumb" consumer behaviour e.g. not reading Terms & Conditions.

braythwayt2• 8 years ago

Some things are impossible to solve by independant actors. Imagine trying to boycott cars in the 1940s because they were manifestly unsafe, or in the 1950s because they polluted the world with lead.

Only legislation changed these things... albeit not enough. Same for workplace safety, child labour, and so on.

Some systemic problems require systemic solutions.

braythwayt2• 8 years ago

Look, my parents were interested in environmental issues like pollution in the 1960s. They demonstrated against racism.

These are not new issues.

But still, if somebody writes an essay saying that we are polluting the earth and that racism is a pervasive, structural force woven into the very fabric of our society, let's support them.

Sure, they're only now realizing what some or perhaps many people have known for literally half a century, but every person coming to that realization is another element of resistence against malevolence.

No, it's not a stunning revelation for you or I that FB is a digital cancer. But yet... Every voice saying this is a lamp, regardless of how late it came to light.

HenryBemis• 8 years ago

In my eyes, this phrase is the big problem:

"an all-too-natural consequence of Facebook’s business model"

And as long as FB is making billions out of this model, it will not change. The only think one can do is remove themselves from being the means to FB's profitability and leave the FB employees sharing their own data.

In a similar spirit, anyone who has my name & phone number in their contacts, when they decide to use any application that 'wants access to contacts' inherently performs the same violation of my private information.

gt_2• 8 years ago

That is not the only thing one can do. Our governing bodies could be disentangled from private interests and put to task protecting the vulnerable members of our society for the better of the whole. This idea anything but new. Have you not thought of it before? If not, what do you think has prevented your awareness?

capnrefsmmat• 8 years ago

And you just figured this out now? This is like saying "wow, who knew we would get so fat by feeding only on pizza, hamburgers and coke, aren't those companies evil".

No. Zeynep Tufekci (the author of the article) has written about this for years, including a book about social media in political movements (Twitter and Tear Gas), a popular TED talk (https://www.ted.com/talks/zeynep_tufekci_we_re_building_a_dy...), a series of New York Times op-eds, and more besides.

A more productive answer to someone saying something you agree with is “I agree”, not mistakenly berating them for not agreeing sooner.

dominotw2• 8 years ago

Timing is important. Oped and Ted talk is not the same as frontpage.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-the-obama-campai...

mark_l_watson3• 8 years ago

Thanks for the video link. I am going to share that with friends and family who are sceptical that there is a problem with Internet super-companies collecting data and using it to change our behaviors to make money.

thanatropism5• 8 years ago

I just said this in another comment but it so belongs here, I'll try to say it in just one sentence: there was a feel-good narrative to Obama that's just impossible now.

bambax3• 8 years ago

You're right. What upset me though was the conclusion that it's "impossible" to leave Facebook. Everything is possible, including walking instead of driving, not eating meat, etc. Some things are more inconvenient than others, but if convenience trumps everything and you can't accept to make any sacrifice whatsoever then maybe you deserve to be taken advantage of.

fortythirteen• 8 years ago

Should we all just leave Facebook? That may sound attractive but it is not a viable solution.

Leaving not just Facebook, but Twitter, Instagram, and all other social media of its ilk is an extremely viable solution. It's like quitting smoking. For the first month or so you feel off-kilter, but, after a while, you can't imagine going back. Life is quantifiably better without it.

Realizing that I don't need up to the minute updates on literally everything has done amazing thing for my mental health in the last year.

mark_l_watson3• 8 years ago

Right on. Another thing that works for me is not watching any news at all on TV except for occasionally NPR. Instead, I like the text only feeds of NPR and CNN, and I try not to read those every day.

I do still look at Facebook once a week for about 10 minutes. I do so in a private browser tab, and routinely try to delete FB cookies.

scarecrowbob• 8 years ago

There is a certain amount of second hand smoke in the room, though.

1) I can quit my social media, but people are still creating a lot of content with me in it that is being used. I don't need to take a poll about which potato I am if all the posts my friends tag me in are mined for data.

2) While social media is in itself great for cloistering my own community, it's still the case that vast numbers of my compatriots are involved with it and it will continue to be affected by it.

"Just leaving" isn't going to solve either of those problems.

I wholly agree, by the way, that leaving it is a personally good thing. I still use, but I heavily filter it and I have several 0-tolerance policies for unfollowing / blocking / etc. I probably ought to quit, but the crushing loneliness and disconnection of being a 40-year-old, divorced, atheistic remote worker who is quitting drinking make it about my only social interaction short of buying groceries.

52-6F-62• 8 years ago

Funny, I quit smoking and Facebook around the same time a few years ago. My life has been enormously better for it.

I miss neither.

pksadiq• 8 years ago

Quitting Facebook isn't as easy as it might seem. The same way as it's not easy to escape from the effects of smoking. Not because you can't, but there is always a chance of passive smoking.

So, as long as we have some relation with some society of which some one is connected, we will have some passive effects due to that.

Say like, if some one need to stop your car, they don't need to stop yours, but someone ahead of you.

smt883• 8 years ago

Your life might be better, but mine wouldn't be. I use FB to keep up with loved ones and discover local events. That's it. It's not toxic or upsetting to me. All news is filtered out of my timeline.

The privacy issues are my only motivation to quit, and between Google, LinkedIn/Microsoft, and FB, my privacy is irreparably fucked anyway, so it feels futile to try to fix it now.

thanatropism5• 8 years ago

This is one of the better side-effects of Trump.

We wouldn´t be having this conversation if Hillary or Bernie had used these powerful resources to tilt the odds and get elected.

Because almost no one with a platform likes Trump, it gets exposed. If this happened under Obama (like, uh, Assange and Snowden and Manning and massive data centers in Utah happened), it would be completely swept under the rug in favor of a feel-good progress narrative that's completely impossible in current conditions.

---

Maybe this was Thiel's true play: a shit government is a watched government, a hostilized-against government, a true Libertarian's government.

ohbleek• 8 years ago

I'm not sure I agree that it would be swept under the rug, seeing that you can mention those earlier issues without explaining them. Outrage and discussion occurred the same way they are now, and just like in those cases, not much is going to happen concerning facebook and its use of personal data. What I'm saying is that your assertion that it has anything to do with progressive/conservative narrative is false, because the result is going to be the same.

Pokepokalypse3• 8 years ago

"massive data centers in Utah" was absolutely a Bush Administration thing.

If Obama didn't stop it, it was due to the toxic political climate and congressional domination by TeaParty/GOP. The current Democratic Party lineup, and over the past 15 years, has also been shifted pretty far to the right, but that has been a result of the effort by the extreme right since the Clinton presidency; since Newt Gingrich, and FoxNews to slant the electorate to the right.

I doubt that most Republicans or any Democrats would have supported that kind of horrible breach of the 4th Amendment in the 1990's or 80's. And trying to hang that around Obama's neck is ridiculously dishonest.

deft• 8 years ago

So Thiel is playing 5d chess too? How about this: He has shitty political opinions and enough money to put them into action.

Your wishful thinking is just delusional.

thousandautumns• 8 years ago

I’m have to disagree strongly with the blanket statement “companies are evil”. Companies don’t “sell something that is usually bad for you”. That’s ludicrously naive. Most companies are able to exist because of the net positive they have on individuals and society. I can’t build my own house, produce my own food, make the clothes I wear, or create the medicine I need when I’m sick. Companies publish and distribute the books I read, the entertainment I enjoy, and can can fly me anywhere on the planet if I want to expand my horizons. And yes, they make money off of all of those things, but there is nothing evil about that.

Perhaps the smallest part of some of those things would be possible in a world without companies, but the vast majority of it would not be. Facebook is an exception, is a net negative in my opinion, and we would be better off without it, but that doesn’t mean we have to go back and reinvent the last several hundred years of human history and progress by labeling all companies as evil entities.

zzzcpan• 8 years ago

It's the only solution.

How is this a solution? Leaving Facebook doesn't remove ad industry's, political and state surveillance incentives. Literally anyone who wants to participate in a market economy or any political system fuels surveillance incentives. I don't think it's possible to remove such incentives, but theoretically could be possible to limit the scope of surveillance capabilities by distributing and disallowing concentration of power and wealth, capping the size of corporations and so on.

bogomipz• 8 years ago

"And you just figured this out now?"

You realize this is an editorial piece correct? Note the section header at the top of the page. And the format of of op/ed piece includes a layout objective explanations. This is not meant to be a regular reporting news piece. See:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/03/insider/opinion-op-ed-exp...

zeth___2• 8 years ago

The media piling on top of facebook is payback for how much facebook has screwed them over with the changes to the news feed. If anyone is interested I'll look for the original sources but in 2012-2016 something like 50%+ of all views on some news sites came from facebook. Then facebook tweaked their front page and now all that traffic is gone.

Someone should have read Machiavelli more: if you are hated, the second you show weakness everyone will try and put you down.

3chelon2• 8 years ago

Some employers and landlords demand to see Facebook profiles

I may be wrong - please correct me if I am - but I'm pretty sure that's illegal?

prepend2• 8 years ago

The positive outcome of this could be society’s shift away from marketing to meaning.

This isn’t unique to Facebook. It’s true of many large media companies that rely on advertising (Comcast with NBC, Disney with ABC, NYTimes, Google, etc).

Facebook is just among the best at advertising’s extreme optimization.

The election is high attention now, but I’m looking for research on whether society is worth off from drinking Coke and sitting for hours watching video.

therealmarv• 8 years ago

Close a FB account is no option... ever lived in a country where FB is essential? It's maybe not USA or many bigger Europe countries but if you go to smaller countries (where Google Maps is even bad) you will loose a lot (groups, buying/selling, advices).

Jyaif• 8 years ago

You are repeating what is in the article.

TheCoelacanth• 8 years ago

Just because you don't have a Facebook account doesn't mean they don't have data about you. They create a shadow profile for people whose existence they have inferred from other people's accounts.

cyphar2• 8 years ago

Should we all just leave Facebook? That may sound attractive but it is not a viable solution.

It's the only sane response, and has been the only sane response, for the past decade. The only counter-argument given by NYT is that in some countries Facebook has a stranglehold. I don't see how that's relevant to people who don't live in those countries. As for organisers of political groups exclusively using Facebook (which is just a terrifying idea for a number of reasons), just pull a Stallman and email them explaining the problem with Facebook and ask if there's another way of staying abreast of the group. You can't fix the problem if you don't even try.

By not exercising your ability to protest against systemic and deep-seated abuse of user privacy, you're just making the world worse for the people who don't have that option currently (because it just tightens their stranglehold).

gt_2• 8 years ago

“Protest” by way of market choice is such a tired fallacy. It’s really amazing so many HN readers are so ready to take such outdated philosophy to the grave.

cyphar2• 8 years ago

I am in very strongly favour of GDPR and other similar regulations. I just also think that enabling giants like Facebook to abuse you by admitting that you are unable to function without them is a bad strategy. Diversify if you can, and regulate to protect those who cannot. Nobody said you cannot approach something like this on more than one front.

castle-bravo• 8 years ago

“We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change."

- Mahatma Gandhi

Chardok2• 8 years ago

It seems incredibly bizarre to me that the author says that.

She lists all the privacy and user trust violations, future social health concerns, but then says leaving Facebook isn't viable?

I have little faith in the US government regulating Facebook's privacy and data mining and even less faith that Facebook would take any action on behalf of its users privacy. Leaving Facebook is the only viable solution.

freehunter7• 8 years ago

"Leaving" Facebook is close to impossible. They track you and keep a profile on you no matter what.

Other than that, there's no competitor to Facebook that exists in the same market. My favorite stores and restaurants downtown have events and sales and information that is only on Facebook. Saying "just quit Facebook" is like saying "just stop making phone calls" or "just get rid of your mailbox" or "just stop reading emails". Entirely possible, sure. But depending on your life situation, you might be giving up more than you're getting back.

Like it or not, for some people there are things on Facebook that are only on Facebook, can only exist on Facebook, and have only been enabled by Facebook. Anything else can replace it, but currently nothing like that even remotely exists.

rufugee• 8 years ago

They collect browser histories? Shouldn't that technically be impossible unless they're using their ad partners across multiple sites?

dictum• 8 years ago

No need for ad partners; their share button scripts are enough for this task. (Google Analytics is the leader on this technique, compounded by secondary tracking inside Google search results, but FB is one of the leading third-party request destinations in the web)

astura• 8 years ago

I thought it was fairly well know those Facebook "like" and "share" buttons you find places were also trackers. At least I recall reading that several years ago, things may have changed.

gotofritz6• 8 years ago

This is good because it might make people question what they read on FB, but the reality is that (a) the whole digital economy is based on that. FB are no better than Google or Apple (who know where you are, right now!) or a miriad others (b) FB serves some purposes (my old aunt wouldn't be able to work out email, but FB is easy enough for her, for example) and (c) it seems that the trend is away from 'public' platforms like FB and towards non publicly accessible groups such as WhatsApp groups (also owned by FB..) or Telegram or Snapchat etc, so an anti-FB backlash may not achieve much in terms of a "healthier public discourse"

Also, it all depends on how you use it. I subscribe to a lot of food based groups and art events groups, and share next to nothing about what I do. OK, some AI can infer that if I like Lebanese AND Mexican I am probably left leaning. OK, now what? What are they going to do with that info?

mark_l_watson3• 8 years ago

Better than average article about long term dangers posed by Internet super-companies like FB and Google. The author is a professor of information and library science.

The only way, I think, that we in the USA can solve this problem is to pass user rights and privacy laws similar to those in Europe. Given our corrupt political system this will be difficult but I think possible if enough individuals keep contributing to the EFF, ACLU, FSF, etc. It takes money to fight back.

inanutshellus• 8 years ago

Given our corrupt political system

This is an unhelpful "truism" that encourages us all to lose faith in a system entirely built on trust. It's a sentence easy to bandy about--especially unqualified--and impossible to counter (in any government).

It also fails to bolster your argument. Your post without those words would be just as effective.

Please reconsider.

joering2• 8 years ago

If someone thinks about building a new, better and more mature social network where users data wouldnt be sell to the Facebook’s tune, this is your time!

You dont have to have your startup listed on stock exchange and answer to shareholders how you squeezing out every possible penny out of your users; you just need to show enough ads to keep servers running and paying for salaries. And now you dont have to show off to everyone that you so nice tou only make $1 salary per tear — keep a cool million bucks annul to yourself. Thats a small percentage of ads shown and small percentage of dollars collected that Facebook is harvesting right now, to be able to run similar size of enterprise. And you be on your way of helping out our civilization in truly noble way.

gfodor3• 8 years ago

I was one of the co-founders of an early social VR startup and observed first hand the technical capabilities that these applications will afford bad actors to use for surveillance. You can easily capture voice, body tracking, and interaction data, and basically record a full view of the world through the eyes of another human being. It's quite remarkable being able to record and play back a copy of yourself in seconds from a remote server, but the potential for abuse is immense.

Facebook's made a move, probably the biggest move of any company, into VR. They bought Oculus for $2B while everyone else was scratching their heads. Social VR is their focus at Facebook proper, and they are leaving the entire rest of the VR ecosystem to their subsidiary Oculus. Isn't it obvious why? VR, if it becomes the dominant form of human communication, will make their current surveillance machine look like a joke. Facebook would be in a position to be an intermediary for every human interaction on earth that doesn't take place in physical space. It's nice to see the public become aware of what they've done before they are able to take it to the next level of nearly being inside of our heads.

This is the primary underlying motivation for why we are working on building an alternative open communication platform for Mixed Reality at Mozilla. We're heads down building stuff now but you can expect to see us shipping things soon.

https://blog.mozvr.com/enabling-the-social-3d-web/

mliker• 8 years ago

VR hasn’t taken off as promised and the hype is dying down now. The headset is too clunky in its current incarnation. People view it as a novelty item rather than a useful tool, so I’m inclined to believe this won’t be the massive surveillance tool VR proponents think it’ll be.

gfodor3• 8 years ago

Untethered standalone VR devices are likely a prerequisite to any mainstream adoption and are shipping this year. Your guess is as good as mine if they will reach mass appeal, but to assume VR is not viable before these devices are available at low prices is probably wrong.

The one to keep your eye on is the Oculus Go which is a self contained device for $199. (Also a Facebook product, probably going to have all this social functionality burned in. My guess is this is their first big play.)

washadjeffmad• 8 years ago

The commercial products aren't representational of the limits of the form, just what's currently economically feasible to produce and sell.

You've got to have a market first, and affordable entry-level VR is damn good way to generate interest.

neospice• 8 years ago

VR is still early but it's convincing. Have you tried a very good VIVE setup? I've only used it once but that's all it took for me to understand that VR is the future of immersive entertainment. Based on that experience it seems apparent to me that the only thing stopping it from becoming mainstream is the clunkiness you describe. However, we should all know that it's only a matter of time before that clunkiness is replaced by a better engineered form factor.

3pt14159• 8 years ago

Eh, it's still in the palm-pilot phase. They'll figure it out quietly over the next 10 years. Machine learning will help figure out what to pull into the headset (things you're about to walk into) or it will intelligently make the game world similar enough in your immediate surroundings to where you don't hit stuff. I could see people hanging out at parks or beaches with these things on. Even going for a swim if the headset is waterproof enough. It will just take decades of work to get there.

zerostar07• 8 years ago

why not just support the open source Highfidelity.io platform instead?

tn_• 8 years ago

Not that this would ever happen..probably, but if Amazon were to offer users a $20 amazon store voucher to get users to disable their FB account and port all their pictures to a social media solution they build, I could see myself doing that. This platform would only be accessible to users with Amazon Prime accounts and that would be a way for them to keep it ad-free.

owly• 8 years ago

Serious question, to where are companies who were previously dependent on FB moving their advertising and marketing?

freehunter7• 8 years ago

That's a very good question. As a business owner, as far as I'm concerned I'm tied to Facebook. As someone who writes a local blog, Facebook is where I get most of my information about my city.

The Internet (and this thread) is full of people telling you to get off Facebook and go to something else, but especially for businesses, what else is there? I have thousands of followers on Facebook and Facebook drives 90% of the traffic to my site, meanwhile my email newsletter has 6 subscribers.

When I'm walking, I like to know where my next step is before I take it. Without that, shutting down Facebook means shutting down my business.

A lot of people here are telling me to take the step, but can anyone tell me where my foot is going to land when I do?

kossae• 8 years ago

In that case I would recommend pushing as many subscribers over to your e-mail newsletter as possible. I'm sure this has already been attempted to some degree on your part, but e-mail marketing is very effective when done right and could potentially displace some negative impact from if/when Facebook decides/regulates that your business is no longer needed on their platform.

Nitramp• 8 years ago

I think it's worth noting that there's a big difference between (1) allowing advertisers to display ads on your platform based on user profiles (e.g. matching certain demographics etc) on the one hand, and (2) handing out arbitrary user data on the other.

With the former, you stay in control and are able to enforce access and use, including the guarantees you gave users on how their data is handled. With the latter model, you're handing over the keys to the castle to random and possibly quite shady third parties that you cannot have the slightest chance at controlling.

It seems rather reckless to do (2), both regarding your responsibility towards users, but also economically – if a bad actor exfiltrates all user data into their competing ad service, you have little to keep them from doing that.

zeveb• 8 years ago

This isn't limited to Facebook. Yesterday I saw that PUBG just came out for Android. I've heard great things about it, so I looked for it on the Play Store and took a look at the permissions. It demands the ability to read my phone's logs & see running apps. What possible reason could it have for that?

It's a free app. While I know that there are in-app purchases, is Tencent also selling information about me if I install it?

No thanks — I chose not to install it.

The modern web/app/software platform is built on users trading their privacy & security for value, rather than trading money for value. I'd really rather just pay.

stordoff• 8 years ago

It demands the ability to read my phone's logs & see running apps. What possible reason could it have for that?

Possibly anti-cheat?

ahartmetz• 8 years ago

It is interesting how much traditional media likes to bash Facebook - they are competing with it for advertising dollars after all... The only thing that surprises me is that it took them so long. Maybe they had to wait until they could do it without opposing public sentiment too much.

That said, I vastly prefer traditional media over Facebook. You can do propaganda on both, but only Facebook has and exploits everyone's personal data. On traditional media, campaigns also need to be balanced to avoid alienating the general public, while on Facebook, extremist ads can target extremist people with no downsides.

Ancalagon• 8 years ago

All these articles coming out now definitely feel like a smear campaign against facebook. Im not saying I agree with facebook's actions, or that I even enjoy the site. But is anyone really surprised by any of this?

Teracotage• 8 years ago

Let's not forget that Alteryx sells the data of 123 Million American Households. That data Was Exposed Online https://www.upguard.com/breaches/cloud-leak-alteryx "the data was part of a product - the Alteryx Designer With Data - that sells for around $38,995 per license. In its own marketing for the Experian service, Alteryx notes that the database contains "consumer demographics, life event, direct response, property, and mortgage information for more than 235 million consumers." 'It included an extraordinary range of personal details on residents, including addresses, ethnicity, interests and hobbies, income, right down to what kind of mortgage the house was under and how many children lived at the property. In total, there were 248 different data fields for each household, according to the researcher who uncovered the leak data this week.

Whilst there were no names exposed, Chris Vickery, a cybersecurity researcher from UpGuard, told Forbes it was simple to determine who the data was linked to, either by looking at the details or by crosschecking with previous leaks. He found the data was sitting in an Amazon Web Services storage "bucket," left open to anyone with an account, which are free to obtain." https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2017/12/19/120m-...

cja• 8 years ago

"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."

I have a Facebook account so that I can participate in groups used by clubs I belong to and so that I can follow musical artists. My account has no friends and I have entered no information about myself.

Problem solved?

Facebook’s Surveillance Machine

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