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Comment by mephitix | Hacker News Reader

>> I've never worked at a company that takes data protection as seriously as FB, or has the caliber of people protecting data.

I don't doubt this, but I think Facebook has a flawed culture that allows and encourages employees to use this mindset as a rationalization for unethical things like:

- run emotional experiments on news feeds

- silently logging all Android users' calls and texts

- allow proliferation of fake news

- allow buying of propaganda ads from state actors

- zero safeguarding of data to ensure it wasn't sold by app creators/devs.

Data is central to facebook's business model and the ability to collect, analyze, and sell lots of data (a natural result of the 'big data' hype) became an infatuation for facebook employees.

The Boz memo supports my point - except he cleverly hides it as 'grow at all costs' rather than the underlying 'collect/analyze/sell data at all costs'.

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"run emotional experiments on news feeds" > I believe this happened once, for the advancement of science. Personally, given that FB is the only place where such real social science can happen, I wish they'd do it much-much more. I don't think any social scientist can perform an A/B test outside of Facebook.

"silently logging all Android users' calls and texts" > I also don't like this.

"allow proliferation of fake news" > I think the "allow" part is disingenuous. It's not like FB people are able to guess all the bad vectors in advance and have advance alerts set up. Also, remember, 2B people are on FB, so there will be a lot of shit, because that's what people are like. I actually think they reacted pretty quickly, after the first time there was a credible attack.

"allow buying of propaganda ads from state actors" > Not sure what you mean? US elections are okay to use ads, right? You're saying other countries shouldn't, if you don't like the gov't? This is a lose-lose on FB I think, either people like you bitch that they're enabling a bad gov't, or they're seen as a censor. Believe me that a lot of smart ppl are trying to figure out what the "least wrong" thing to do is on things like this.

"zero safeguarding of data to ensure it wasn't sold by app creators/devs" > bullshit, they stopped this is 2015. But I agree, the way it worked before was really broken and asked for this to happen.

>> "zero safeguarding of data to ensure it wasn't sold by app creators/devs"

> bullshit, they stopped this is 2015. But I agree, the way it worked before was really broken and asked for this to happen.

> I've never worked at a company that takes data protection as seriously as FB

Before or after 2015? Because a couple of years does not quite make up for the preceding period starting in 2007 (if I recall correctly) during which FB clearly didn't care.

I worked there in 2016-2017. I was a Data Engineer so I was pretty close to this. It was taken very seriously, to the point it was annoying (tables with PII get anonymized, which then means extra work, etc). Also, the sheer amount of effort that went into this [the tooling/infra that was already there for this when I arrived] was impressive.

I'm not claiming FB couldn't have / can't do a better job, you can always do a better job, hire even more people for this, etc. But it was definitely taken very seriously, much more seriously than you'd think from all this bad press. And if you go and work there, you'll be impressed, I guarantee that.

However, what I'm talking about is data protection, the problem here was that app permissions were explicitly too loose [until 2015]. As I said, I also think this was a bad policy, and people are rightly upset. But there's way too much generalization happening in this thread.

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