Facebook Gave Some Companies Access to Additional Data About Users’ Friends

https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-gave-some-companies-access-to-additional-data-about-users-friends-1528490406

195 57 8 years ago

Text-only: https://pastebin.com/t4hBTAig

Wow, in particular, "The whitelist deals, with companies including RBC Capital Markets and Nissan Motor Co. , were struck with advertisers or Facebook partners that were valuable for other reasons, according to some of the people familiar with the matter."

gmueckl• 8 years ago

So how comes that all these revelations come in such a quick succession after years of relative silence? What changed?

ribosometronome• 8 years ago

Financial companies need a distraction from their massive leaks of data that you didn't voluntarily hand over to them?

vegetablepotpie• 8 years ago

I think you make an important point. The media got into a frenzy over Facebook and Cambridge Analytica and we continue to get reports on it, yet I haven't seen many follow ups on Equifax. This is despite that having your SSN, DOB, Address and Drivers License stolen has higher consequences for you than a political campaign having your Facebook data. Priorities are misaligned.

SmirkingRevenge• 8 years ago

This is a great point - one I wish the media, drunk on the prospect of shiny silicon valley companies falling from grace, would pay more attention too.

mtgx2• 8 years ago

One reason could be that the media companies saw there is high interest from the readership on this issue = they put more journalists to investigate all the shady stuff Facebook may be doing.

nonbel• 8 years ago

It says right in this article:

"The revelations come as Facebook is dealing with the fallout in March related to the use of personal data by Cambridge Analytica, a political analytics firm that aided President Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign"

For some reason they thought spying on everyone would only help the democratic party I guess. Seems pretty blind to me...

IncRnd2• 8 years ago

The parenthetical is not a reason but just something added by the writer or editor.

1024core2• 8 years ago

Maybe some internal employees are leaking the information?

If you're an employee with information about this project, and you see your CEO (say) pinky-swearing that they didn't share data at all, then you might be motivated to leak this information to a newspaper.

bertil2• 8 years ago

I suspect from details in the article that the leak is from the external parties, probably former employees of the external parties:

- Facebook employees would not call that number “friend link”: it has another name internally; “friend link” sounds like how you’d explain it to someone who’s not familiar with graph theory;

- the WSJ is anything but exacting, but the article is oddly vague on when the program was terminated. That sounds out-of-character, unless the source left since, and couldn’t confirm if the program was maintained.

JumpCrisscross• 8 years ago

What changed?

It's in the zeitgeist. The Cambridge Analytica scandal gave the public a tangible threat in Facebook's data promiscuity. At that point, the entire system is incentivized to dig deeper. Whistleblowers who previously wouldn't have thought of leaking start getting inquiries; legal teams ask for contracts to be re-assessed; Congressional staffers make calls; NGOs mobilize to start court cases, et cetera.

Similar to what happened post-Snowden in the E2E space.

jessaustin• 8 years ago

I'm sort of hoping there is more of an effect this time around than there was from Snowden... what does "E2E" mean in this context?

ahartmetz• 8 years ago

I think traditional media companies were afraid of Facebook, now they aren't anymore. They are natural enemies. When they fight, there can be only winners from the customer POV.

IncRnd2• 8 years ago

Things are being revealed, because people are now looking at Facebook's actions.

supercanuck• 8 years ago

Donald Trump got elected with the help of a foreign government utilizing Facebook and is now openly helping that government and spurning Western allies.

Up until that point Facebook was a place people could share cat videos and connect with okd friends, now that it has been revealed it can influence a democracy, it is getting more scrutiny.

jimjimjim2• 8 years ago

True

Getting diaper ads because your profile says you fit the category that might have a baby is slightly creepy but ok.

But

Providing a platform for interfering in the governance of another country and denying it is infuriating.

kerng2• 8 years ago

The Groupthink and Normalization of Deviance that all of this is okay got broken out off - there will be more I'd say.

jaytaylor• 8 years ago

It seems like the waves of bad press began after FB refused Billionaire Media Mogul Rupert Murdoch's demands to share ad revenue. Murdoch began complaining of financial struggles in November [0] and has been leading the charge against FB ever since they rejected his proposal [1] [2].

M.A.D.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/nov/16/rupert-murdoch...

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/01/23...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-01/murdoch-s...

1024core2• 8 years ago

Archive link: http://archive.is/jiO8k

justicezyx• 8 years ago

"Let's kill the contract with Chinese companies, and make it a headline"...

While behind scene do all kinds of money-making contracts with anyone with enough price...

sbhn• 8 years ago

HN leaks my data, just press my user name, look at all the comments I made, see which other users I’ve interacted with, and have similar interests, also see my submissions. I looked at all your usernames already.

pwinnski• 8 years ago

False equivalence. HN makes no claims, explicit nor implied, that any of that information is in any way private. They never have.

The same is not true of FB, not at all.

lostlogin2• 8 years ago

I see that you’re posting under a pseudonym - in line with Facebook, HN doesn’t allow that unless it’s the nickname you use in meatspace. Please correct and add location data, psychological profiling and demographics so that your data is worth a bit more when sold/leaked. /s obviously.

Bucephalus355• 8 years ago

Wow, this says the data sharing was after 2015. This directly contradicts Zuckerberg’s congressional testimony does it not?

5 days ago the magazine The Baffler made the argument that Zuckerberg, at his core, is a nice guy. It’s just that he isn’t that intelligent.

As the American Studies professor being interviewed says in the article:

“And he continues to use words like “community,” a word he does not understand in the least. This is what I mean when I say he’s uneducated. Because he keeps using terms like community, which are complex, fraught concepts, and he doesn’t stop to think what that means. He doesn’t stop to think about the dynamics of a community, the effects of a community, the limitations of a community, and even the very definition of a community. You know, if someone’s going to use community as the core goal of a multi-billion-dollar company, maybe a couple of days of reading would help.”

https://thebaffler.com/latest/the-zuckerberg-follies-denison

whatshisface• 8 years ago

As much as that American Studies professor might wish for PR groups to go to them for consulting, the word Community was meant to be received by people who are not American Studies professors (the public, maybe, and also Facebook employees if it's internal-speak). The warm fuzziness of the word choice has already been precisely calibrated.

Zuckerberg's ideal press conference would be some brief tonal warbling that made everybody support Facebook. In lieu of that existing, he talks about community.

gowld• 8 years ago

The Baffler is a great name for a website that hosts thinkpieces written by people who have no idea what they are talking about.

lostlogin2• 8 years ago

Have you got a rebuttal for that quotes section?

joering2• 8 years ago

It’s just that he isn’t that intelligent.

I'm very sure he is NOT a "dumb fuck".

entrypoint0• 8 years ago

Zuckerberg willfully disregards meanings. It was very obvious in his speech during the testimony. If some members of congress could detect it, I heard no evidence. It is curious to me that sometimes the odd language format in facebook's help section are reminiscent of his disregard.

I am no psychologist but I've seen this behavior in two or three other occasions. One case was a teenager, who was just playing but also using it for obfuscation to his advantage in arguments. I had to explicitly call him on it. I had reason to believe it stemmed from insecurity and him having to daily deal with people who were not intellectually on par or of his type.

elorant• 8 years ago

If Facebook isn't a community then I don't know what is. Whether we like it or not is irrelevant, but in my book it's the definition of a community. Aka, a place where people meet and interact. We could argue all day whether it is optimized to work as such, for example discussions in there are limited by the UI, but people go to FB to interact with their friends or meet new people.

And calling Zuckerberg an idiot is laughable. The guy is obviously super smart. His problem is the total lack of ethics, either because he never had them, or because it's required when you have to run a multibillion behemoth.

anigbrowl• 8 years ago

I'm starting to feel like the only person out there who didn't have access to this data.

kerng2• 8 years ago

I guess now its official that Zuckerberg lied at the hearing. What are ramifications of such lies?

vuln• 8 years ago

Eh. Probably none.

colejohnson66• 8 years ago

None. IIRC, he wasn’t under oath.

bencollier49• 8 years ago

But you don't have to have been under oath to be held accountable for lying to Congress.

https://edition.cnn.com/2017/07/24/politics/penalty-for-lyin...

dawnerd• 8 years ago

They’ll just say he wasn’t aware of the deals or the specifics in whatever business agreements they had. He’s got good lawyers, they’ll find an out.

jimjimjim2• 8 years ago

They really are that terrible.

Back when Facebook started and people worried that they were giving info to Facebook, most thought the worst that could happen is that Facebook would be the one using that info. Not this dystopian scenario where they give it to everyone else to exploit.

AlexandrB• 8 years ago

This was inevitable. Even if Facebook didn’t share this info intentionally, no human system is perfect and sooner or later there would be a leak. The only way to keep info safe in the internet age is dead trees or just not collecting it in the first place.

alexmorse• 8 years ago

Why are we giving such a pass that it took till 2015 to even start walling off that information?

Prior to 2015 any facebook app developer could make an app that had a vague one-prompt ask for permissions that gave them nearly everything, and a ton of information on friends.

lord_ring_11• 8 years ago

Probably because some employee could not justify “impact” on this. If anything it will lower some key metric that was getting measured, because not giving all friend info will lower app adoption growth numbers. Most levels at facebook is filled with metric obsessed robots (because of how incentives are aligned).

resu_nimda• 8 years ago

Probably because it was done in plain sight and anybody could have worked through the implications then but nobody cared?

"I didn't realize that one day the media would convince me that this was a really bad thing" is not Facebook's fault.

Most people actually don't care if apps get their "data" and their friend list. But the media worked up a frenzy by vaguely connecting it to the Trump campaign (reminder that nobody blinked when Facebook openly gave everything to the Obama campaign), and now everyone has "realized" that Facebook is to blame for their problems.

taneq• 8 years ago

Why are people acting shocked? THIS IS THEIR BUSINESS MODEL. It's in their privacy policy! "Your data may be shared with ... our affiliates" or words to that effect.

newscracker• 8 years ago

The chant, from Facebook and even some commenters on HN and elsewhere, was always "Facebook doesn't sell user data, that would be stupid. Facebook guards user data very well and uses it to target ads."

With this and previous revelations, we now know that those claims are completely false. The reasoning, as to why Facebook did it, doesn't matter. The fact is that they sold user data. Even if they gave it at no monetary cost, it was given to benefit the company, and hence the data was sold.

I suppose now we just have to wait for another report on how Facebook sold all its user data to data brokers around the world.

Panini_Jones• 8 years ago

With this and previous revelations, we now know that those claims are completely false.

I don't see how Facebook is selling data. What do you mean?

craftyguy2• 8 years ago

https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-gave-some-companies-ac...

mtgx2• 8 years ago

Facebook didn't sell data to data brokers - they bartered it. I believe Zuckerberg himself admitted to it in the hearings or in a blog post around that time. Facebook gave their data to the brokers, the brokers gave their data to Facebook.

JackCh• 8 years ago

a (1) : to give up (property) to another for something of value (such as money) https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sell

Such as but not necessarily limited to.

meko• 8 years ago

Could you please outline a meaningful distinction between bartering and selling?

jdp23• 8 years ago

But no, based on the responses here it turns out that not all HN commenters know it yet - some are still playing semantic games and excusing Facebook's lies and exploitation.

andrzejsz• 8 years ago

What a shame

Facebook Gave Some Companies Access to Additional Data About Users’ Friends

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