Facebook Says Russian Firms ‘Scraped’ Data, Some for Facial Recognition | Hacker News Reader

Facebook Says Russian Firms ‘Scraped’ Data, Some for Facial Recognition

nytimes.com

28 pointselectic16 comments

How come this is an "oh nose!" or even unexpected to anyone? Why is this even a news... I mean it's public data anyway, yeyeye FB policies blablabla

It's not like it's hacked or anything its data scraping. are you telling me the US(FBI/NSA/CIA), or foreign government China, for example, are respecting web privacy policies eh? China has App store rating farms filled with manual labor giving people 5 stars all day, do you think creating accounts and harvesting pictures and metadata would be that hard if it was sponsored by the government?

the fact that FB linked the scrapping to a company, says it not really that much of a government operation

I don't think you can take it for granted that most people who use Facebook spend time thinking about privacy issues. I also don't think it's helpful to dismiss things for being obvious - The theory of gravity comes from the 17th century but people were falling to their deaths for quite some time before that.

Not really dismissing it, but if people are too stupid to understand that if you put something in public someone will make use of it in a way or another.

I believe the reason why we see this kind of news is because of the ML/AI/big data gold rush, it's finally affordable and everyone wants data so ofc they want the cheapest way and the most useful data is personal data and on and on...

You can certainly use these neo-mccarthyist PR articles for beneficial purposes after a major security breach just happened. Facebook is the good guy again to the public.

Facebook makes this data easily accessible to literally anyone. Everyone is using it. Facebook is surely at fault for making it that public and easily accessible. It means anyone else could've, and everyone else isn't rainbows and gumdrops clean.

> It had removed 66 accounts, pages and apps linked to Russian firms that build facial recognition software for the Russian government.

Who’s the enemy here? The Russian government scraping Facebook, or the company that’s making such things possible?

If their intention is to subvert American democracy, then yes, the Russian government is the enemy in this case.

Has American democracy been contacted out to Facebook? FYI Google created search by scraping sites.

Google never created search. According to Andreessen they were the 23rd company he saw. And by then there were established controls to stop Google from indexing your sites i.e. robots.txt.

These Russian companies are not following the rules Facebook has set so it's not really analogous to Google.

Not obeying robots.txt is at most a civil matter, such as Craigslist vs. 3Taps (largely unsettled btw, because internet is public by design). My question still stands.

Facebook is subverting American democracy by censoring news that's outside of the status quo. They're now censoring American media as well [1].

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/11/technology/fake-news-onli...

The article is about a foreign government using data sold (or given for free) by an American anti-privacy company to build a facial recognition database. We seem to be plenty capable of subverting our own democracy without anybody’s help.

I was about to say, "you can't be serious," but upon further reflection..

The answer is obviously the Russian government.

Or just a private firm[0], since models need training data and Facebook has a truly staggering amount, all pre-tagged. There is also a small amount of irony in the fact that Facebook's initial incarnations were pre-seeded with scraped data from Harvard student websites.

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0. For example: https://www.businessinsider.com/ntechlab-google-facial-recog...

So what about the American and Western companies whose accounts haven't been removed and are doing this too?

Social media monitoring is a big business worldwide, many of the largest have longstanding government contracts. Facial profiles for the people you are targeting is only an api call away.

What’s bad is the next stage is this data set becomes available for people to use in their own apps. Smartphone apps that can identify people you don’t know.

AR glasses apps where every individual you meet has a bubble on top with its unified internet karma and credit score.

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