markyuckerberg

There was a time when patio11 was going through a phase calling out Zynga as one of the shadiest companies around.

I remember thinking "If Zynga is that bad, then what about Facebook?"

Facebook's ability and willingness to manipulate just about everything in sight - WhatsApp ad policies, privacy policy changes, arbitrary censorship of content, providing clear misinformation to legal entities for e.g. the promise to EU that they cannot infer/merge user profiles, the absolute shitshow that is shadow profiles - in line with corporate profits is starting to make Zynga look angelic in comparison.

Rational thought, yes. Critical reasoning, a little doubtful, especially these days. Oral traditions are so inefficient at transmitting multiple viewpoints, at collecting multiple viewpoints, at codifying multiple viewpoints, and eventually at balancing multiple viewpoints that human society desperately sought and successfully figured out written ones. For example, great orators with really bad messages could easily sway people down all kinds of wrong directions. I am yet to see a great writer who achieved anywhere near the same effect (without also being able to articulate the same message just as well orally).

For example, think of the first time you read a comment on HN which you impulsively disagreed with. If you gave it a second and a third chance, sometimes you come away with an alternate viewpoint, and sometimes you actually agree with the statement. That is the power of writing.

Now imagine what happened the last time you verbally disagreed with someone. Chances are, you soon branded them an idiot, and then slowly stopped talking to them. I would say a part of it was simply because the message was conveyed orally, with all kinds of meaning ascribed to intonations. And unlike reading a piece of text again carefully, its not as if you have a mental tape recorder you can use to replay the conversation. There is just too much distraction in oral communication.

Great. The most concerning issue - the question of trusting all your data with a for-profit entity which doesn't get directly paid for the services it provides - gets a token mention as the very last point ("just in case, let me throw in a casual mention about this somewhere at the bottom"). I am fairly sure that announcing projects and then cancelling them, on a scale of 1-10 for burning user trust, will get a score of 0. In comparison, here are some higher scores for issues which are actually 'burning concerns':

8 - the kind of tracking data which was presented in the Waymo case

9 - the kind of data mining which happens when you combine the most popular email service + highly popular browser + most popular website analytics tool + most popular mobile OS

10 - the efforts to get into providing 'free' internet just in case a few bits and bytes escape into the ether, and attempts to acquire companies which may be collecting/assembling harder to reach datasets

And then the rest of the folks here wonder, "Do people inside Google actually spend any time thinking about whether they might be burning their user's trust?" Based on your response, I would say that it gets about the same level of token acknowledgment inside.

As Mark Twain once famously predicted - It is better to let people think you suck at innovation than to patent troll Android and remove all doubt.

What you are saying might be true, except:

There are too many idiots who go and "tag" photos with people who are not active on Facebook and help create a shadow profile.

There are too many idiots who willingly give Facebook the permission to mine their address book to triangulate the phone number + name + email address + misc. contact info of people who are not active on Facebook and help create a shadow profile.

There are too many idiots who don't think one extra second about filling up the messages they send to other people who are not on Facebook with all kinds of sensitive information and help create not just a shadow profile, but one which can be mined in ways that the idiots don't ever want to acknowledge.

Oh, and there are too many idiots who think that their "right" to use Facebook also gives them the right to send the personal information of other people to Facebook, whether or not those other people consent to such abuse of trust.

So yes, it is just another site. The smart folks who are concerned about tattling on their friends have mostly left. The remnants are mostly idiots, and damn it, I just can't find a way to stop these idiots from being so idiotic other than filling up internet comment threads with not-so-subtle hints about how these idiots are fucking up my life. Do you have any suggestions for how I can stop these idiots from acting in such an idiotic way?

As the old saying goes, you will eventually run into someone who doesn't give a fuck who or how powerful you are. Meet your Daddy, Facebook. He is called Automattic. :-)

As for people who think the exodus out of React was "imaginary" - I wish FB had actually completely dropped the ball and stayed with the old license. That would have forced Automattic to not merely drop React, but also anoint a competitor which would have probably overtaken React in no time.

> Free Basics puts no obligation on its users to visit or use Facebook at all.

Here is a list of possible ways Facebook can triangulate information about people who are not active on Facebook even without controlling access to the internet:

1. User telemetry based on your browser when you visit any page which has a Like button

2. If you have ever used WhatsApp and deleted it, seeing who has your phone number on their contacts list

3. If you have ever used WhatsApp and deleted it, seeing who has your phone number on their WhatsApp app

4. Being tagged in a photo (that your friend captured) based on a Facebook account which you don't even actively use

5. Seeing where they tagged you if that info is easy to infer from the image's metadata

6. Seeing where they tagged you based on the check in location

7. Seeing where they tagged you, based on the comment they might leave on the photo

8. Seeing who has your email address on their contacts list and associated a name to it

9. Inferring your name from someone's contacts and matching it to the phone number so that

10. They can check if a second person has the same phone number or same email address under the same name or a small variant.

11. Learning about life events which concern you based on other people's WhatsApp conversations about you since they usually mention you by name

12. Text mining of WhatsApp conversations for a list of names which they don't yet have in their database and possibly inferring the relationship type

Now they basically have a "shadow profile" of a (person's name + phone number) even if that person has never gone near Facebook their entire lives. If there are additional details about you in someone else's contacts, imagine how much easier you just made it for Facebook.

12. If you agree that the shadow profile is fairly easy to create once the apps controlled by FB (FB, Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram) reach a sufficient critical mass, you probably understand that they will collect every piece of information they can and associate it with the right shadow profile.

My guess is, I don't cover a fraction of the techniques they use already (simply because at a certain scale, I bet they identified even bigger patterns that we cannot even see), and the list is already too uncomfortable for someone who doesn't want to have anything to do with Facebook. As a programmer, you probably know that most of these are trivial to implement. Your problem will be "too much noise", definitely not "too little signal". No worries. An eager horde of people are everyday helping Facebook to cut down the noise and increase the signal to noise ratio of their shadow profiles.

Now, imagine what happens when Facebook becomes the primary means to access the internet for an entire region.

So you are simultaneously saying that the cut throat competition of the telco sector is keeping the data and call rates at global lows (a good thing), and saying that we need not have the same competition when the infrastructure for rural India is built out? If competition acts the way it normally does, someone is certainly going to figure out how to connect rural India in an economically viable way and profit immensely.

Or the mathematics won't pan out, and the company dies. And the government will probably step in to fill the breach. And it will probably do an awful job (remember the mathematics never panned out?)

Both of these are good outcomes. Compare this to handing over the control of such vital infrastructure to a megacorp which has a consistent track record of violating the trust of everyone - the users (random privacy rule changes), the advertisers (fake video views), those they acquire (e.g. the comedy show called WhatsApp ads), the jurisdictions they operate in (arbitrary censorship of content to make sure they kowtow to the public flavor du jour) and last but not least the legal system (claiming that they cannot/will not infer a WhatsApp user profile based on FB user profile knowing the pitifully tiny effect of the punitive damages).

With such a track record, it is a surprise that they even have the temerity to still approach governments around the world to propose FreeBasics.

> users will be confused and angry

What an ironic statement, considering that that combination can be lethal to a company.

Besides, have you ever heard anyone say why they prefer to use Facebook even when they are aware that it is tracking their every move? Usually the answer is "convenience". By the same token, not getting confused or angry is also a great convenience to the user. Very few Wordpress users actually care about the baselessness or meritlessness of using one JavaScript library over another. They just want Wordpress to work.

> I'd really like to know why it's better for me to have no internet at all than some but not all?

Because under the pretext of giving you internet, Facebook is creating shadow profiles about me.

Now I would like to know why it is more important for you to get stuff for free than my privacy?

All you need to do, of course, is get Facebook to promise me that it won't create these shadow profiles about non-users. At that moment, you should (hopefully) have a little bit of an "aha!".

If that free internet were actually provided by the government, and was funded by taxation, "we the people" (however comical that notion is these days), actually have the legislative and ultimately the executive power to stop our government from doing shady things with that internet. What is your recourse if the same thing is decided behind closed doors inside a corporation? I will answer that question for you based on how these things usually turn out: whatever the corporation eventually agrees to will turn out to be better for them, because it will be worse for their competitors. Think: audit of all data collected, having onerous laws around financial reporting, having to agree with a million different compliance issues etc. At the end of it all, someone will look back on it and wring their hands: "If only the people had been a little wiser and stopped the giant corporation from having their way, things could have been so much better".

Think, for a moment, about the farcical fines these megaliths are facing. If you were an executive at any of these companies, would you actually lose sleep over them? If the fines are not acting as a deterrent, why even bother with the fine? Again, where is your recourse?

I am all for public shaming of FB employees, because if they were to stop counting their bank balance and just look themselves in the mirror for a little bit, they know they have completely earned this shaming.

At this point, the large compensation package offered at these places is starting to look like hush money to keep your mouth shut and to turn a blind eye towards anything that looks from the outside like some kind of systematic manipulation (e.g. of public opinion, suppression of disconcerting viewpoints).

Create an anonymous account on Twitter.

Use the tags #firstname #lastname #fb and add public personal details about someone you know who works at Facebook.

Here is how:

1. Go to LinkedIn and search for people who work at FB 2. Go to Google and find everything you can about the person (bonus points for finding some embarrassing stuff) 3. Go to Twitter and use the tags and post the info

If enough people do it, it will give the folks who work at FB a real taste of what it feels like to be on the receiving end of such disconcerting revelations.

But it gets better - you can now use the tags to find intimate personal information about other people! Just search for folks who work at Facebook and go and look them up on Twitter. If you don't find anything juicy, then why not take a few minutes to add something? Since Mark himself has declared that we live in the age where "privacy is over", I am sure everyone he would be overjoyed to watch this unfold.

Besides, the aggregation of such information at a single place will allow us to slice and dice the data in interesting ways. Maybe we can ask the very smart fellas who work at FB to provide us some kind of open source tool to mine that information. I even have a suggestion for the name of such a tool: OpenDox

> Welcome to the over-reaction party

Hmmm.. in that case the people who actually need this advice even more would be the maintainers of ZSTD who seem to have hastily changed the license after seeing the backlash from the Apache policy change. Care to stand by this opinion and leave your comment on the thread which discusses the license change over on GitHub?

https://github.com/facebook/zstd/issues/775

Welcome to the "folks who miss the forest for the trees" club.

This is like saying people who are defending FB have some agenda where they don't like seeing criticism against it. For example, you could be someone who coaches freelancers who might hang out on HN and also be coaching them on using FB ads. Remember that when you point out that others may have agendas, there is always the issue that you could be subject to the very same suspicion.

In any case, the real issue isn't that Zuckerberg thought his users were "dumb fucks" when he was young. The issue is that he keeps acting as if he believes it, till today. Take the example of the WhatsApp acquisition. A lot of people, even here on HN, rooted for the WhatApp mantra of "no ads, ever". Now they have clearly been cheated. Interestingly, the usual response to those who complain about this spectacular bait and switch is - "it isn't FB's fault if WhatsApp users were 'too dumb' to trust the words of the company's founder". The lack of ethics amongst these founder types has somehow now become a burden to be borne by the "dumb fucks" who pay for these services with a lack of privacy.

Someone once asked here what is wrong with shadow profiles - that is, why are they actually illegal. The answer was prompt and quite clear - "because those who don't have accounts on FB but have shadow profiles have never explicitly agreed to the ToS". I think if anyone is willing to dig deeper into this issue, it will lead to the same conclusion at a much larger scale - there was nothing "legally wrong" going on, except a large mass of people acting like "dumb fucks" by say, not reading the ToS carefully. Hey, what do you know, supply people with mass quantities of undecipherable garbage called the ToS, and most people are too "dumb" to understand its implications. The assumption of dumbness amongst your users, it turns out, can take you very far - even towards trillion dollar valuations.

Recently, there was this story about the EU fine of 1% of turnover if FB was found guilty of misleading claims. "Those dumb fucks", Zuckerberg probably thought,"the price of providing misleading information is just 1% of the turnover? Who put these dumb fucks in charge?"

I would be very happy to supply more examples if you ask for it.