Zuckerberg Takes Steps to Calm Facebook Employees

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/technology/zuckerberg-facebook-employees.html

by SREinSF • 8 years ago

258 262 8 years ago

mehrdadn23• 8 years ago

I feel like someone should also give Zuckerberg the memo that it's only a matter of time before an insider also goes rogue and abuses data access (edit: or otherwise; see below). Facebook fundamentally seems to trust itself way too much, and it worries me that it thinks the only threats are external entities... to me, this is another silently ticking time bomb.

EDIT: And don't forget that going rogue is just one scenario. Another is just a bigger attack surface: the more insiders have broad system access, the more credentials there are that can be phished by/leaked to/stolen by outsiders. Really, it would be completely missing the point of security to have arguments about how exactly insiders' credentials might get compromised.

gboudrias• 8 years ago

Who says it hasn't happened already? How would we ever know? For that matter, how would Zuck?

zawerf• 8 years ago

Anecdotally I've heard of interns getting fired for just looking at profiles (that they aren't actual friends with) even around 5 years ago. So at least they take it somewhat seriously.

harryh9• 8 years ago

You'd think so, but most companies have pretty strict internal controls for this sort of thing. Access is also carefully logged so a leaker is pretty much guaranteed to get caught at which point they'd immediately lose their job and likely face criminal prosecution.

With so much to lose and so little to gain internal leaks of this sort are extremely rare.

mehrdadn23• 8 years ago

You'd think so, but most companies have pretty strict internal controls for this sort of thing. Access is also carefully logged so a leaker is pretty much guaranteed to get caught at which point they'd immediately lose their job and likely face criminal prosecution.

That's not enough by any means (edit: and as [1] pointed out, I don't even think it's true). There needs to be more to security than mere deterrence. I'm pretty sure at Google, etc. it's simply impossible for a single rogue employee to mess with customer data (except for a few in very privileged positions), and my impression has been that Facebook is not like this at all (unless it has changed recently).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16675494

dannyw• 8 years ago

I hope so, but keep in mind Facebook has a magical password that worked for every account for almost a decade.

tptacek5• 8 years ago

most companies have pretty strict internal controls for this sort of thing

This does not ring true to me at all.

krasin• 8 years ago

Recent news ([1]): Facebook security boss says its corporate network is run "like a college campus"

1. http://www.zdnet.com/article/leaked-audio-facebook-security-...

hinkley• 8 years ago

Facebook is not most companies, though.

hyperpallium• 8 years ago

Unfortunately the criminal charge would be theft of facebook's proprietary information.

jMyles• 8 years ago

so little to gain

wait, what?

There's quite a lot to be gained. Enough to incentivize a very powerful attacker, possibly even a nation-state level actor who can extract the mole and protect / reward them.

The stakes are not low here; I can't imagine why you've said that.

JumpCrisscross6• 8 years ago

With so much to lose and so little to gain internal leaks of this sort are extremely rare

I recently downloaded my Facebook archive [1]. If it were legal, I would certainly pay thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars for certain peoples' archives. I can think of several practical contexts in which an unethical actor would find it profitable to pay a Facebook employee a million dollars for someone's Facebook archives.

[1] https://www.facebook.com/help/131112897028467/

specialist3• 8 years ago

Who watches the watchers?

#1 - There's always a back door. I did some medical records stuff for a while. I looked myself up, just to confirm for myself how trivial it was to do. Yup, there I was. Which is why I insist that all data at rest is encrypted. (I have yet to win this argument.)

#2 - Our "portal" product had access logs for auditing. Plus permissions, consent trees, delegation. The usual features. Alas. We also had a "break the glass" scenario, ostensibly for emergency care, but was more like the happy path. And to my knowledge, during my 6 years, none of our customers ever audited their own logs.

#3 - My SO at the time worked in a hospital and went to another disconnected hospital for care because she knew her coworkers routinely, illegally looked up patient records, and she didn't want them spying on her.

jimjimjim• 8 years ago

proper companies that have been around for a while and expect to be around for a while do this.

companies that move fast and break things don't give a shit.

I want more companies of the first type and less of the second.

patmcc• 8 years ago

In any organization there is some number of people, who, if sufficiently motivated, could work together to pull off a 'data heist' and not be immediately uncovered. At a good company that number is high, at a bad company that number is 1.

What do you think the number is at facebook? At google? At your bank? At your healthcare provider?

ronnier• 8 years ago

to me, this is another silently ticking time bomb.

I agree. It'll eventually happen to some social app or email provider (think Slack, gmail, facebook, etc) where some huge portion of the database is dumped online -- not through a hack, but through a person willing to do it internally because they can and do not fear or care about the consequences. The Ashley Madison hack was a preview of what's to come.

bigiain2• 8 years ago

You're assuming it hasn't happened already - all we know for sure is we haven't (yet) had one with Snowden's type of motivation.

(Or perhaps we have, and whichever trusted journalists they've chosen to share with are franticly poring over the exfiltrated data working out how best to angle the story without throwing the whistleblower and/or innocent FB users under the bus...)

esman15• 8 years ago

FWIW, as a Facebook engineer you have a ton of trainings on how to handle data privacy. And not only is every place where you can touch data actively logged/audited/monitored (this includes DB reads from code, admin tools, etc.), but to access any data you have to explicitly request permission for that specific data.

mehrdadn23• 8 years ago

FWIW, as a Facebook engineer you have a ton of trainings on how to handle data privacy. And not only is every place where you can touch data actively logged/audited/monitored (this includes DB reads from code, admin tools, etc.), but to access any data you have to explicitly request permission for that specific data.

Really? So are stories like [1] complete lies? Or does someone inside just blindly grant these "explicitly requested permissions"?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16675503

throwaway2041• 8 years ago

Correct. There are many stats relevant to the national discussion that a patriotic Facebook employee might leak. One is the effective CPM (eCPM) rate between the Trump and Clinton campaigns. My hunch is there was a massive disparity there, in favor of Trump. Facebook has only released the "paid CPM" rates, which is suspicious. Most Facebook advertisers look at eCPM, which combines paid + "organic" reach, in other words: the net reach per dollar spent.

feelin_googley3• 8 years ago

"Our efforts to protect our company data or the information we receive may also be unsuccessful due to software bugs or other technical malfunctions, employee error or malfeasance, government surveillance, or other factors.

"In addition, third parties may attempt to fraudulently induce employees or users to disclose information in order to gain access to our data or our users' data."

"Although we have developed systems and processes that are designed to protect our data and user data and to prevent data loss and other security breaches, we cannot assure you that such measures will provide absolute security."

"In addition, some of our developers or other partners, such as those that help us measure the effectiveness of ads, may receive or store information provided by us or by our users through mobile or web applications integrated with Facebook. We provide limited information to such third parties based on the scope of services provided to us. However, if these third parties or developers fail to adopt or adhere to adequate data security practices, or in the event of a breach of their networks, our data or our users' data may be improperly accessed, used, or disclosed."

Source: MD&A, 2015 Facebook annual report

ams6110• 8 years ago

Honestly that is all just legal boilerplate that could be found in the annual report of any public internet business.

volgo• 8 years ago

To anyone who actually reads annual reports on a regular basis, this is a copy/paste for basically every single tech company, on every year's annual report

There's like 50 pages of this stuff that covers literally every possible scenario in case of legal liabilities. Has no meaning whatsoever

surferbayarea• 8 years ago

Wait till there is a REAL data leak. Just your facebook profile data is 1% of the data they have about you. Using the cookies they have all over the internet as well as partnerships with offline pos transaction systems, they know almost anything you do online/offline. So all websites you have ever visited, things you buy online, the sandwich you buy with your credit card in a local store etc etc. Imagine all that being leaked.

eurticket• 8 years ago

I would imagine we would hear a lot less information about an internal issue regarding a Facebook employee than an external one as well.

colordrops• 8 years ago

What could they possibly do to fix things that wouldn't destroy their business model?

ihsw2• 8 years ago

Their business model is leaky abstractions as a rule and malicious compliance when exceptions occur -- we (our policymakers) have to know the underlying complexity (of Facebook in order to issue permission for its continuing existence), otherwise it's a foot-gun by default (for constituents of those policymakers), and furthermore when we need Facebook's help to clean up its messes then it's half-hearted and doesn't address the underlying issue.

There's not much they can do other than assume absolute pacifism and absolute neutrality, to a fault. Effectively they must be resolute in their support for the stability of society, and that includes putting down political activists like Antifa and BLM. Facebook must no longer be a platform for activism of any kind, where all content deemed objectionable by anyone is pruned.

heurist3• 8 years ago

Their business model does not rely on third parties accessing private user information.

renaudg8• 8 years ago

Agreed, it's quite the opposite in fact : their business model relies on jealously guarding private user information to remain the only entity in the world who can sell highly-targeted ads

knuththetruth• 8 years ago

These performances by CEOs before their employees to “calm” them reminds me of Jonestown or some other cult.

Everyone kind of knows the leaders are corrupt liars and false prophets. It’s all a scam. But they’ve invested so much of their lives and identities into the ideology, there’s not really any turning back. It’s like some “When Prophesy Fails” inflection point for the whole industry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Prophecy_Fails

drcode• 8 years ago

These performances by CEOs before their employees to “calm” them reminds me of Jonestown or some other cult.

To be fair, the sentence that refers to "calming the employees" was from the New York Times and probably supposed to evoke that sort of feeling. The facts presented in the article are simply that Zuck had a meeting with employees to talk about current issues, which is pretty much standard practice for any company.

suyash• 8 years ago

Zuckerberg should resign at this moment. Facebook needs new leadership if it wants to change the way it has been operating.

tehlike5• 8 years ago

It is pretty easy to call for resignation as an outsider. This is not an elected position, i do not think people get to call this.

SirLJ5• 8 years ago

As a shareholder I do, this kid works for me and it is time to take full responsibility and go home...

gus_massa• 8 years ago

Nah. In a week all of this will be forgotten (do you still remember the helicopter in the river, and the bridge that collapsed?). You and me and a few more people will remember, but we all already know that everything that is posted privately on Facebook will be leaked sooner or later.

I even expect to see a few angry post from people that decided to delete their account now, and when they tried to undelete the account after a few weeks they surprisingly discover that all the old information was missing and Facebook can't recover it because it is deleted.

fake quote > If they used Windows instead of Linux, they could have send the account to the Recycler Bin, and recover it now.

cloakandswagger• 8 years ago

I thought the same a week ago. Nearly bought some FB calls even. But this controversy has surprised me with its staying power.

The real sizzle comes not from the emotional outrage but the calls for government inquiry and potential regulation, which would do structural damage to all of Silicon Valley. This has been a stunningly bipartisan effort, the left supporting it ostensibly because they like regulating big businesses, and the right supporting it because they (perhaps correctly) see Silicon Valley megacorps as adversaries.

vanilla_nut• 8 years ago

I don't think anybody expects this surge of anti-Facebook articles to continue indefinitely. Personally I'm just hoping that all of this makes people dislike the company just enough to shatter the illusion of usefulness. Plenty of people will still heavily use Facebook, but if we can pull even 5% of the technologically-aware, that's a smidgen of influence that Facebook no longer has and a chunk of people who no longer serve as lures for others to join.

It's not going to happen quickly, but if this awareness gains momentum a much more healthy (federated, preferably open source) social media site could have a higher chance of survival. I think that's worth something.

username223• 8 years ago

In a week all of this will be forgotten

Nope -- there are political and legal proceedings underway, and those things take time. In a year? Maybe.

Facebook can't recover it because it is deleted

"Deleted." It's easy for those people to fake up a new account, and remember the lessons they learned the last time around.

dredmorbius• 8 years ago

We're still talking about Snowden.

That was five years ago.

madez• 8 years ago

Facebook is an enabler for individuals to successfully undermine our democratic mechanisms. It shouldn't feel nice to work for a company that has to explain itself in front of the government. The employees of Facebook should be aware of what monster they are building.

sp5272• 8 years ago

No they’re not. They’re in denial. I used to work there as an intern, so I get a front row seat to how a lot of employees are reacting. The word I would use is: indignation.

I’ve seen this us-against-them mentality play out elsewhere in various toxic cult-like organizational cultures. The NSA was a great public example of just how manifestly horrifying things can get with tens to hundreds of decent people willfully participating in corrupt or unethical practices.

The way this all works is terribly fascinating, but the short of it is that you have to become closed off and indoctrinated in order to fit in. Particularly at places like Facebook, Google, and generally anywhere else that provides free on-campus dinners (a good heuristic), employees build their social circles and identities around the company. This, coupled with various other factors, permits an astounding cognitive dissonance amongst a large group of otherwise benign and rational people.

EDIT There’s an interesting additional complication I’ve seen at times: internal spin. The media gets things about companies so wrong so frequently that it’s almost too easy to discount the things with an uncomfortable shred of truth as ‘fake news’.

Karrot_Kream• 8 years ago

Agreed. I've never been at FB, but been at a similarly big "darling" software company (don't want to go into specifics for identification reasons) and it largely is about creating an internal "us-vs-them" mentality and a culture that lionizes the good deeds over the bad.

Don't think of the employees as evil, they are probably legitimately not aware of the entirety of what's going on. Like soldiers in a war, they only know how their battles are going, not the war.

JumpCrisscross6• 8 years ago

I’ve seen this us-against-them mentality play out elsewhere in various toxic cult-like organizational cultures

Wall Street, too, after the crisis. “Of course we bet against our counterparties! They’re counterparties, not clients. If they didn’t read the prospectus they’re morons who deserved to lose their money. We're just the political whipping boy du jour."

stevenwoo• 8 years ago

There is a difference with the NSA, I remember they recruited pretty heavily on our college campus and you are presented with the chance to work for and defend your country with your brainpower ostensibly. Then we throw in this war on "terror" and for me it seems like the questions and answers for an employee at the NSA would be much harder than for someone at a private company where it's much easier to just quit and walk away (if one were not indoctrinated as you describe.)

oliyoung• 8 years ago

I’ve seen this us-against-them mentality play out elsewhere in various toxic cult-like organizational cultures.

Uber comes to mind

bamboozled2• 8 years ago

I've seen the same behaviour, excellent comment and thanks for sharing. It would be great to see a documentary on these companies and their relationships with the companies they work for.

pm90• 8 years ago

I think it also kinda helps that most of the engineers are probably not "rich kids"; they're probably mostly from middle class backgrounds. They've never seen that kind of wealth before, never seen that insane level of benefits. Its much easier to think of someone (or some org) as benign, to give them a second chance, when they treat you personally so well. Its kinda what immigrants feel when they do well in the US as well.

DoreenMichele• 8 years ago

internal spin.

When I worked at a Fortune 500 company during an economic downturn, we were simultaneously seeing endless austerity measures while being plastered with endless positive spin. The free pens and stuff disappeared. The new job listings shrank overnight from pages and pages to a handful. They cut back on janitorial service. There was a pay freeze. Etc.

But all the press releases and news articles being forwarded to our email was about how we flew up the Fortune 500 ranking (iow we were sucking less than other companies during the recession, even though the company shrank, because it's a relative ranking) and our CEO was named one of the biggest wealth builders in the nation and so on.

I was painfully aware of the disconnect. But I sometimes wondered if other employees really noticed or not. I never asked any of my coworkers. I felt like that would be a good way to end up eventually fired. But I wondered how many drank the kool-aid without noticing that it didn't jibe with the austerity measures we were seeing.

sjg007• 8 years ago

Upton Sinclair comes to mind: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

gt_• 8 years ago

Big misconception here.

Private interests incentivize individuals to undermine our democratic mechanisms. If we let them, we are fools to expect anything else.

The only reason many other companies don’t have to have to explain themselves to governments is they are legally allowed to incentivize the opposite with capital. It’s called lobbying.

ExcelSaga• 8 years ago

This is why they’re being “calmed” and kept comfortable. In the immortal words of Pickle Rick, I think it's helped a lot of people get comfortable and stop panicking, which is a state of mind we value in the animals we eat, but not something I want for myself.

Plus they can bury any qualms they have in piles of money and rationalizations.

discordance• 8 years ago

Sounds like Facebook is having their NSA moment

yorby2• 8 years ago

can't wait for the next Snowden

mynameishere• 8 years ago

I still remember the first Snowden, who revealed to a shocked world that the NSA was involved in signals intelligence. I suspect that the next Snowden will reveal to a shocked world that 3rd party databases have a tendency to leak into other 3rd party databases.

thotaway• 8 years ago

Are we going to talk about the fact that a whole bunch of these employees are former elected officials, or related to one? Which is part of why Zuckerberg isn’t actually concerned about the political fallout?

SirLJ5• 8 years ago

Running for president...

Mc_Big_G• 8 years ago

I hope anyone worth their weight in salt leaves Facebook as an employee and as a user. Employees should already feel shame since the election. They all know what Facebook is built on and what they've done and what they're doing.

legostormtroopr2• 8 years ago

Which election are you talking about? The 2016 one where everyone cares about Facebook helping elect the US president, or the 2008 and 2012 elections where everyone was ok with Facebook helping elect the US president?

esturk2• 8 years ago

Why `or`? why not all 3? Because FB's role in all 3 elections has been disgusting and has made modern election into a degenerative state than it once was.

craigyk2• 8 years ago

I've seen this nonsense spouted a few places now. Personally, I think there is a big difference between the two, one focused primarily on cheerleading to get out the vote, the other using inflammatory fabrications to enrage your base (and get out the vote). I see this as a classic example of when "the ends don't justify the means".

heurist3• 8 years ago

This is only the first major company to experience an issue like this. More will follow. If it wasn't Facebook, it would have been another.

tbrock2• 8 years ago

I respect Facebook and their engineering chops as much as the next person, they are truly world class programmers, but how the holy hell is everyone daydreaming that they don’t work for an advertising company?

You sell and use people’s data to get money: this is the business plan. Full stop.

Connecting people can definitely be lucrative and useful in other ways but facebooks particular implementation is impression based not action/outcome based.

debacle• 8 years ago

I respect Google and their engineering chops as much as the next person, they are truly world class programmers, but how the holy hell is everyone daydreaming that they don’t work for an advertising company?

You sell and use people’s data to get money: this is the business plan.

Are people working there really so nieve(sic) as to believe that this is surprising?

KMag3• 8 years ago

Former Googler here. I'm pretty sure the vast majority of Googlers understand they work for an advertising company with a gigantic and generally well-run software "engineering" department. I don't mean that in any derogatory sense. Well-regulated advertising is important in helping consumers make informed purchasing decisions.

et-al• 8 years ago

The money probably helps, especially given the Bay Area cost-of-living.

The FB employees I've met have been fine with explaining away the consequences of their actions with "oh it's just a job", "that's not my team", or "the technology is really interesting".

And as an idealist, I'll invoke Goodwin's Law depending on our relationship.

gaius2• 8 years ago

“Hans, are we the baddies?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn1VxaMEjRU

swyx2• 8 years ago

not too long ago the emphasis was on whether Facebook is a -media- or a -tech- company. Media companies have more responsibility to censor content then tech companies do.

Interesting how quickly the narrative changes.

ramphastidae• 8 years ago

Because they’re paid well. Very well. Everyone I know that works at FB for 2+ years is making 300-500k (including stock) and already owns or is on their way to purchasing a home. That makes it a lot easier to ignore the reality of FB. Meanwhile chumps like me that consider the ethics of their employer will be renting forever. I honestly don’t blame them.

bamboozled2• 8 years ago

Agreed, a lot of cognitive dissonance happening on campus.

JohnJamesRambo• 8 years ago

You can only sell your soul once, the second time there is nothing left.

tbrock2• 8 years ago

To be clear, I'm not criticizing or holier than thou —- I'd work there in a heartbeat without complaint and love it.

The part I don't get is that it seems everyone who does work there is in shock and awe that this is going on. SHOCKED!

It's comical to the point of parody.

softawre2• 8 years ago

already owns or is on their way to purchasing a home

This is insane. I get why some people want to live in the bay area, but I'll take my 4k square feet home in the great neighboorhood with the award winning schools for 300k.

anonytrary2• 8 years ago

Sheryl Sandberg is under the impression that Facebook, quote, "does not sell your data": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1CTHFEcoJc

She is either wrong, or lying, or has her own ideas of what "selling your data" means.

seattle_spring2• 8 years ago

They don't sell your data. Your actions and data are used to put you into categories, and advertisers pay to show their ads to people associated with those categories. No one is given direct access to your data. This strategy is not unique to Facebook-- it's how Google, Yahoo, and other major advertising-based tech companies work.

bogomipz• 8 years ago

"There was a feeling, said one of the people, that Facebook wanted to take aggressive steps to make sure it could regain user trust. And over all, he said, confidence was up."

I'm curious what might be the source of this regained "confidence."? The idea that this will all just blow ever in a few months?

tuna-piano• 8 years ago

Can someone explain to me why the Cambridge Analytica story is making people so much angrier than the later revelation that Facebook was scraping call+text info? That seems to be the larger problem to me.

Somewhere at Facebook there is a team of people who wrote software to scrape, store and analyze the personal call+text data that users didn't explicitly mean to give to Facebook.

The data that Cambridge Analytica attained (from Facebook's API) doesn't seem surprising at all. Isn't the Cambridge Analytics headline really just, "Group doesn't follow website's terms of service from five years ago".

Analemma_• 8 years ago

Because people are really, really bad at understanding threats that have vague, uncertain consequences. For the last 15 years, trying to get people to seriously worry about privacy has had about as much success as getting them to worry about climate change: they claim to care, but their revealed preferences tell a different story. The problem is that the downsides are uncertain and in the future, whereas the upsides are immediate and certain. Our ape brains are horrible at evaluating tradeoffs of this kind.

But the flip side to this is why the CA story has blown up: for once, the consequences— "CA got Trump elected!"— are immediate and graspable, in a way that "Facebook is scraping your text info" is not (even if it's probably not true). When the effects are right in your face and not time-delayed, people sit up and pay attention.

jnbiche• 8 years ago

Probably because of some of the things that Cambridge Analytica stands accused of, or else things they have blatantly admitted to while being secretly recorded: blackmail and bribery of politicians in multiple countries, hacking election results, and even more unethical acts[1,2].

People are upset that their data was essentially stolen from Facebook (it was collected for use in an academic study, then turned around and sold for profit to CA), used by a company with ethical failures as serious as Cambridge Analytica, and then Facebook buried the story. It was two years before it came to light thanks to Guardian journalist Carole Cadwalladr.

Facebook also worked closely with CA during the Trump campaign, even though they would have known by that time that data obtained under the pretense of an academic study had been sold to CA.

1. http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-43528219

2. https://www.channel4.com/news/cambridge-analytica-revealed-t...

tim3332• 8 years ago

Personally: I don't care what facebook does with my data - there's nothing very exciting and I have ad blockers so don't even see the ads. It doesn't effect me.

However the Analytica stuff is about conning the masses into voting for Trump and Brexit and that effects me big time and pisses me off somewhat. In face worse that conning - more initing the mob to hatred through lies and bullshit. See for example the Hillary is Satan ad paid for by the russians and targeted with facebook to the kind of people who vote on the basis of that kind of stuff https://static01.nyt.com/images/2017/11/02/us/politics/02dc-...

fiatpandas2• 8 years ago

By giving access to your data, you are saying it's ok to take that data and pander to your psyche in some fashion. You may not see direct advertising in your browser, but it leads back to how strategists decide to engage your physical community. And even if you block ads, your friends may not. Friends will influence you through your feed, based on the ads they see, based on your data.

machinehermit• 8 years ago

It is this weeks viral thing to be outraged about.

I am buying some FB calls in the morning because no one will care about this "movement" in a month.

stordoff• 8 years ago

I'd imagine it's at least partly expectations - people know that Facebook has their data (even if not the full extent), so adding an additional class of data doesn't change that fundamental understanding or register as strongly. The fact that a third-party can pull your data out of Facebook is less obvious.

The fact that it was used for political ends probably makes a difference as well, both in the amount of coverage it is receiving and that it makes the use of data into a more concrete issue (it's much easier to understand "this is what the data was used for" then "Facebook has your data and that's bad for hypothetical/abstract reasons").

Isn't the Cambridge Analytics headline really just, "Group doesn't follow website's terms of service from five years ago"

That's the act, but I'd say the usage/intent behind doing so is part of the story.

m52go2• 8 years ago

Isn't the Cambridge Analytics headline really just, "Group doesn't follow website's terms of service from five years ago".

I think the the headline people are seeing is more like "Group doesn't follow website's terms of service from five years ago, and ends up helping Donald Trump win presidency."

A big part of the reason this has become so big a story is political.

TAForObvReasons• 8 years ago

"A foreign entity that was not registered as foreign agents collaborated with a multinational corporation to influence the presidential election" is why people are outraged. But it's likely that none of this would have been investigated had Clinton won the election

fatbird5• 8 years ago

Cambridge Analytica’s actions had real world political consequences, so yes it’s political for that reason. But another angle of the CA portion of the story is that they were ratfucking in a very effective way—such as publishing fake news about BLM activists were organizing violent rallies, then broadcasting that to likely Trump voters. In some cases they even organized BLM events with incitement to commit violence, then pushed true stories about the events that suited their narrative.

In other words, CA demonstrated a tremendous vulnerability in our political dialogue to pure propaganda and dirty tricks that social media, in its algorithmic purity, was supposed to make less likely, not more. Some of the fallout of this affair will be a tremendous distrust that any provider of social media is an honest broker of what others use their services for. If my news feed is tainted by a group like CA manipulating it at the algorithm level, what hope can I have that anything I’m receiving over the Internet isn’t compromised? Maybe the stories are fake; maybe they’re true but the balance of stories is altered; maybe the facts are true-ish but slanted or selective. These are all legitimate concerns in the normal marketplace of ideas, but now we find the marketplace of ideas is deliberately compromised by malicious entities.

wdr1• 8 years ago

I think the the headline people are seeing is more like "Group doesn't follow website's terms of service from five years ago, and ends up helping Donald Trump win presidency."

Exactly.

The Obama campaign already acknowledge they did the same thing, but on a bigger scale.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/facebooks-ru...

"In 2011, Carol Davidsen, director of data integration and media analytics for Obama for America, built a database of every American voter using the same Facebook developer tool used by Cambridge, known as the social graph API. Any time people used Facebook’s log-in button to sign on to the campaign’s website, the Obama data scientists were able to access their profile as well as their friends’ information. That allowed them to chart the closeness of people’s relationships and make estimates about which people would be most likely to influence other people in their network to vote.

“We ingested the entire U.S. social graph,” Davidsen said in an interview. “We would ask permission to basically scrape your profile, and also scrape your friends, basically anything that was available to scrape. We scraped it all.”"

dawhizkid• 8 years ago

The CA story is the first tangible example of the societal consequences of exploiting social data for something other than selling you cat litter.

forgottenpass• 8 years ago

Can someone explain to me why the Cambridge Analytica story is making people so much angrier than the later revelation that Facebook was scraping call+text info?

The lie that facebook (and the like) are sold on is that there are zero possible negative ramifications of giving Facebook that data. Of course that's not true. But something has caught people's attention and they're waking up to it.

Now is the time to tell them all the other reasons to not trust facebook. Loudly scratching your head about why people care about Cambridge Analytica is to miss the opportunity you have.

JumpCrisscross6• 8 years ago

Facebook's Board of Directors is a remarkable collection of silent-yet-complicit heavyweights:

-Marc Andreessen;

-Erskine Bowles ("President Emeritus of the University of North Carolina" and "White House Chief of Staff from 1996 to 1998");

-Ken Chenault ("Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of American Express Company");

-Susan Desmond-Hellmann ("Chief Executive Officer of The Gates Foundation" and former "Chancellor at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) from 2009 to 2014");

-Reed Hastings ("Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the board of directors of Netflix");

-Jan Koum ("co-founder and CEO of WhatsApp"); and

-Peter Thiel [1].

Might not be a bad idea to pen a letter to their Board [2] with your state attorney general [3] and perhaps a U.S. Senator [4] copied.

[1] https://investor.fb.com/corporate-governance/default.aspx

[2] https://investor.fb.com/corporate-governance/?section=contac...

[3] http://naag.org/naag/attorneys-general/whos-my-ag.php

[4] https://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_...

swyx2• 8 years ago

probably because speaking out would cause more trouble than its worth. i recall an Uber director decided to open his mouth during the incidents of last year...

hkmurakami2• 8 years ago

Or recall the HP leaks.

chrischen2• 8 years ago

Doesn't Zuckerberg have full control of the board?

JumpCrisscross6• 8 years ago

Doesn't Zuckerberg have full control of the board?

Zuckerberg has voting control of Facebook, in part due to some financial engineering in 2016 [1]. He does not control the Board.

Board members have a fiduciary "duty of care," i.e. "the duty to pay attention and to try to make good decision" [2]. This duty is to the company as a whole, not just its majority vote-holder [3][4]. (That said "American courts simply do not hold directors liable for business decisions, made without a conflict of interest, unless those decisions are completely irrational. The doctrine of noninterference is known as the business judgment rule." [2])

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-04-28/mark-zuck...

[2] http://www.oecd.org/daf/ca/corporategovernanceprinciples/187... page 6

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareholder_oppression

[4] http://www.sgalaw.com/news-and-views/2010/4/27/shareholder-o...

feelin_googley3• 8 years ago

"He's surrounded himself with people just like him -- Silicon Valley entrepreneurs," says Stuart Grant, who deposed the Facebook founder during a lawsuit filed by investors opposed to the company's proposal. Facebook withdrew the proposal last month, just days before Zuckerberg was set to testify in the suit in Delaware Chancery Court.

...

There's a reason for diversity -- it gives you a mix of opinions and ideas," says Grant, partner and co-founder of Grant & Eisenhofer, a Wilmington, Delaware, firm that specializes in securities and corporate-governance cases.

The board's near-uniformity of experience has led to a consensus of opinion that defers to Zuckerberg on all matters, Grant told CNBC. That can stray from what is best for shareholders."

For example, allowing Zuckerberg to reduce his economic interest in Facebook "dramatically" -- by selling tens of millions of shares -- while allowing him to maintain "absolute control" over corporate decision-making was a bad idea that the board should have voted down, Grant argues.

"You never want to divide economic consequences from decision-making," he says.

Zuckerberg's plan would have created three classes of shares, one with no voting rights, and allowed him to maintain voting control of the company even after selling most of his stake."

Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/05/attorney-who-deposed-mark-zu...

(Poll: Do you think it would be interesting to see the video from that deposition?)

Lead up:

"Discovery revealed that Zuckerberg in fact used his relationship with Andreessen to undermine the special committee process. Andreessen leaked Zuckerberg confidential information about the committee members' thoughts and concerns, and coached Zuckerberg through his negotiations with the committee. In one instance, Andreessen and Zuckerberg texted back and forth during a group call with the committee, with Andreessen telling Zuckerberg things like, "This line of argument is not helping. J" and "THIS is the key topic.""

...

"Trial was set for Tuesday, Sept. 26, 2017, with Zuckerberg slated to testify as the plaintiffs' first witness. On Thursday evening, Sept. 21, however, Zuckerberg asked Facebook's board to withdraw the reclassification, which it did. This withdrawal mooted the plaintiffs' litigation and averted the billions of dollars of harm to Class A stockholders that plaintiffs sought to prevent."

Source: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/....

"But Andreessen, a venture capitalist at Andreessen Horowitz and a long-time Facebook board member, is a close Zuckerberg ally. While on the committee, Andreessen slipped Zuckerberg information about their progress and concerns, helping Zuckerberg negotiate against them, according to court documents. The documents include the transcripts of private texts between the two men, revealing the inner workings of the board of directors at a pivotal time for Facebook.

...

Most of Andreessen`s texts to Zuckerberg during the negotiations over the non-voting shares focused on how to talk to the other two committee members. Susan Desmond-Hellmann, Facebook`s lead independent director and chief executive officer of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, also led the special committee and discussed the matter on its behalf with Zuckerberg personally -- a call that Andreessen helped Zuckerberg prepare for.

Bowles, former President Bill Clinton`s chief of staff and past president of the University of North Carolina system, was especially skeptical of Zuckerberg`s proposition, as depicted in the suit. Many of Andreessen`s texts focused on persuading him. Among other things, Bowles worried that one of the concessions Zuckerberg wanted -- to allow the billionaire to serve two years in government without losing control of Facebook -- would look particularly irresponsible, according to court filings. Bowles did not respond to requests for comment.

Andreessen sought to persuade Bowles that if Zuckerberg went into politics, the government would likely require him to give up control of Facebook anyway, so the point was moot, according to the documents. A couple weeks later, Andreessen prevailed, and the vote was brought to shareholders. (The stock reclassification is on hold pending the results of the lawsuit, though.)

"The cat`s in the bag and the bag`s in the river,`` he messaged Zuckerberg. "Does that mean the cat`s dead?" Zuckerberg texted back, not understanding the spy speak.

   Andreessen replied: "Mission accomplished :-)""

Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-08/facebook-...

The deposition must have gone well. Heres what the plaintiffs lawyer had to say before Zuckerberg withdrew his proposal.

"This case is said to mark just the second time Zuckerberg testifies as a witness. He previously testified earlier this year over a lawsuit against Facebook-owned Oculus -- a case Facebook lost.

Stuart Grant, the attorney representing the shareholders in the dispute, didn't mince words. He suggested Zuckerberg's limited courtroom experience puts him at a disadvantage in this case.

"That gives me an advantage because I've been doing this for 30 plus years," Grant told CNN Tech. "If we were sitting down to do coding together, I'd bet on Mark, but we're not coding."

Source: http://money.cnn.com/2017/09/20/technology/business/mark-zuc...

BadassFractal• 8 years ago

On the plus side, it's good to know that Facebook has employees who care about being ethical citizens of the Internet ecosystem. Hopefully they can exert pressure on the upper ranks in some way to bring things under control. Facebook has the opportunity to be a force for good, while also accomplishing its business model, but it won't naturally lean in that direction.

kerng7• 8 years ago

Recommended read to add to this[1]. Employee was shocked with the amount of data they have access to without clear business need.

[1] Might be behind paywall: https://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/mar/17/ex-facebook-e...

stretchwithme• 8 years ago

This one company's unauthorized access to millions of records may just be the tip of the iceberg.

joshjdr• 8 years ago

How fast can I kill all my karma by pointing out that the 3 of the top 4 articles on HN are some realization that Facebook does not give an ef about anybody's privacy?

colejohnson66• 8 years ago

On ArsTechnica, you just need to bring up Obama’s use of FB’s social graph

noxecanexx• 8 years ago

It's been almost a week of this. Actually wondering when we'll get back to interesting tech

jhayward2• 8 years ago

It is attitudes like this that created the problem in the first place.

wildmusings• 8 years ago

I don’t really understand the outrage. Just what do you expect when you share things with hundreds of people (your FB friends) online? For it not to be used? The only reasonable assumption is that anyone and everyone can read whatever you share on FB.

avoidit2• 8 years ago

Someone I know closely worked at Facebook in its heyday, but it has been a while since he left. I asked him around 2014 (he had just left the company) "So what do you think about the way Facebook handles privacy issues?" His response was not defensive at all. Rather, it was a very curious "FB is one of the most open cultures you can ever work in. Any employee can ask any question of anyone at the highest levels and expect to get a honest answer". My thought was "So you didn't have anything to ask questions about?". He was actually a pretty nice fellow, so I stopped asking anything else at that point.

But I remember thinking that it was a very funny, cult-member like response. And you can test this too. Ask your friends who work at FB and I bet you will get some pre-programmed response very similar to that.

helloindia• 8 years ago

Nobody mentions the elephant in the room, because elephant in the room feeds the people in the room.

renaudg8• 8 years ago

I worked at Facebook even longer ago than that.

What makes you assume it's got to be a pre-programmed, cult-member like response and cannot believe that this is the actual work culture ?

avoidit2• 8 years ago

Ok, perhaps you are the best person to ask.

1. What was Mark Zuckerberg's response when people asked him if Facebook might be overstepping bounds in terms of data collection (shadow profiles)?

2. What did the company employees think of the backlash over their beacon project?

3. When Facebook told the EU that they cannot match FB user profiles and WhatsApp user profiles to create a single profile (remembering that they would be fined), what was the general consensus among employees? Did they know that FB had lied? Were they still OK with that? If they were, was there not a single person expressing dissent?

newscracker• 8 years ago

Seriously, I don’t have much respect, if any, for those working for Facebook...unless they’re working on and can implement drastic changes in how privacy, tracking and profiling are handled for the betterment of humankind. But Facebook being an advertising company that thrives on such details, I doubt if employees would have much say on these aspects or can do anything.

There ought to be a #quitfacebook topic to get many employees to quit. But I don’t believe that would get much traction due to the attractiveness of compensation/benefits and probably some challenging work. If someone working at Facebook believes that things will get better, I’d say they’re just deluding themselves. It cannot happen with the current management.

P.S.: Since this post is about Facebook, I’m not going to talk about other companies.

feelin_googley3• 8 years ago

"KW: Mark, can you give us a sense of the timing and cost for this? Like, the audits that you're talking about. Is there any sense of how quickly you could do it and what kind of cost it would be to the company?

I think it depends on what we find. But we're going to be investigating and reviewing tens of thousands of apps from before 2014, and assuming that there's some suspicious activity we're probably going to be doing a number of formal audits, so I think this is going to be pretty expensive. You know, the conversations we have been having internally on this is, "Are there enough people who are trained auditors in the world to do the number of audits that we're going to need quickly?" But I think this is going to cost many millions of dollars and take a number of months and hopefully not longer than that in order to get this fully complete."

Source: https://www.recode.net/2018/3/22/17150814/transcript-intervi...

brrrrr• 8 years ago

And even if anyone ever considers it "complete," the reality is, that it's just going to be white wash and bullshit.

Why waste the fucking money. Quit being sentimental. Just trash Facebook and pivot (lol pivot). Be a real motherfucker, and let Facebook burn. Make something cooler than Facebook. Fuck this audit stupidity.

Come on, man.

jk23232• 8 years ago

Honestly, I am not very worried about rouge data analytic companies or Russian trolls on facebook.

I am worried that questionable semi-private German entity can block me (e.g. 30 days ban) on facebook at will. I am an US citizen and don't live in Germany. This is outrageous.

fenk85• 8 years ago

Whatabout a semi-private German entity?

jk23232• 8 years ago

Take this as a start (I know, Breitbart)

http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015/09/17/german-govt-hires...

I just read about "FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection Regarding Reported Concerns about Facebook Privacy Practices". Since I am an American citizen and was blocked for 30 days on facebook by this dubious organisation, I may actually drop the FTC an email and ask about their opinion on this.

jondubois• 8 years ago

> One of [the Facebook employees] said he had avoided a trip home to see his family last weekend because he did not want to answer questions about the company he worked for.

Wow, some people/families are way too media-sensitive. It's just hypocrisy. Facebook is fundamentally the same company as it was last week, last year and 5 years ago. Everyone knew this, especially Facebook employees.

Facebook today is mostly made up of two kinds of employees; money-hungry sociopaths and hypocrites.

slivym• 8 years ago

There's a big difference between a theoretical "Well technically they have all our data and they could share it with anyone and they could use it to target ads quite precisely"

In fact, that statement is true of the government as well. Most people just think it won't really happen, and if it does happen it'll be something fairly trivial like selling me shaving kits because I'm a man, and that my data isn't really all that revealing.

That is vastly different from:

"This specific data you gave facebook went to this specific company, in violation of facebook's own policies.

The breach of ToS wasn't followed up, and we have video of the CEO bragging about fake news, blackmail and honey traps.

This wasn't even a US company influencing the election.

Your data was directly used to campaign for someone you probably deeply oppose.

Not only that, but this specific targeting was probably highly important because we know the result of the election relied upon victories in specific states that are important to the electoral college whilst losing the popular vote.

It also turns out that what had seemed to be deep real organic discussion topics turned out to be targeted propaganda showing a scary ability to control the public discourse

Oh. And this is all carried out by a company whose CEO openly wants to run for political office and could use this to get himself elected next time."

mankash666• 8 years ago

Let's cut to the chase. Would you work for Facebook in your dream role, at industry leading pay.

The answer, for most of us is an emphatic 'yes'

rimliu• 8 years ago

My dreams exclude anything with "Google", "Facebook" and "Uber". And if the role we talk about involves iOS, then Facebook is even less attractive, because imho their app is an example how not to do an iOS application.

gaius2• 8 years ago

Ask instead who would work for a Big Tobacco company, it’s the same thing. Not me.

Zuckerberg Takes Steps to Calm Facebook Employees

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