“This is so disappointing, wonder if there is a way to hire for integrity. We are probably focusing on the intelligence part and getting smart people here who lack a moral compass and loyalty.”
The sheer lack of self-awareness in that statement.
The sheer lack of self-awareness in that statement.
As far as I'm aware, Facebook has never sold personal information to advertisers[0], because that would be giving away its crown jewels. It might leak it, but doesn't hand it out for sale.
EDIT: Downvoters, please point out where I'm wrong. It looks bad for the community to suppress factual statements.
Also, nothing changes the fact that Facebook is clearly harmful to the society in important ways, according to various researches. And they do not care about this fundamental issue, they just want more users and more profit.
The CA scandal did not involve any sale between CA and Facebook. CA sold insights gleaned from data pulled from Facebook's public and free-of-charge Graph API.
> Also, nothing changes the fact that Facebook is clearly harmful to the society in important ways, according to various researches.
I'm not sure how that's relevant here. Arguing that Facebook is a bad company does not make misinformation more correct.
- They use 'personal' as 'private', or 'information about you'. e.g. I have a fetish, I wish no one to know, it's 'personal'.
- You seem to use 'personal' as 'personally identifiable information'. e.g. if I have this data, I can know trace back to its originator.
The ambiguity can be found in many places around. Most people don't make the distinction. Rather, they think anything private is personal. At the same time, the definition you use can be found in official documents, like GDPR, the new EU Privacy Law (https://gdpr-info.eu/art-4-gdpr/).
Facebook allows clients to purchase personal information. What specific personal information is purchased by Facebook advertisers?
Disclaimer: I worked at FB.
I'm speculating here but it may even possible that they have a greater global reach than the NSA as 2.2 Billion people are in their system using their apps on all their devices from watches to desktops. They record all the personal data, track every website being visited, possibly hot mic phones, and record people's locations. Remember those russian soldiers posting photos from inside the ukraine? Yeah, facebook has that data and intelligence agencies of the cold war era would have drooled for this data.
This is easy to fix. Follow the money and change the incentives. And the fix will allow software folks to continue to posture endlessly as they will not have the power to make a decision.
1. Ban micro targeting by advertisers, only contextual text and location can be used.
2. Platforms like Facebook, Google and their chain of contractors, partners etc cannot offer micro targeting.
3. Ban data aggregation with heavy penalties and imprisonment for companies, marketing individuals and their agencies who try this. This will solve these problems in a jiffy.
That removes the incentive for stalking people 24/7, collecting tons of data and making correlation and inferences.
The thing is so many people, especially governments and political players, crave this power that it cannot be done anymore, that's why building surveillance infrastructure is a bad idea. It will always be abused and why the individual ethics of the engineers and society at large becomes critical but we have already failed that test.