Facebook's seized files published by MPs

> Facebook email 24 January 2013

> Justin Osofsky – ‘Twitter launched Vine today which lets you shoot multiple short video segments to make one single, 6-second video. As part of their NUX, you can find friends via FB. Unless anyone raises objections, we will shut down their friends API access today. We’ve prepared reactive PR, and I will let Jana know our decision.

> MZ – ‘Yup, go for it.’

>Michael LeBeau – ‘He guys, as you know all the growth team is planning on shipping a permissions update on Android at the end of this month. They are going to include the ‘read call log’ permission, which will trigger the Android permissions dialog on update, requiring users to accept the update. They will then provide an in app opt in NUX for a feature that lets you continuously upload your SMS and call log history to Facebook to be used for improving things like PYMK, coefficient calculation, feed ranking etc. This is a pretty high risk thing to do from a PR perspective but it appears that the growth team will charge ahead and do it.’

>Yul Kwon - ‘The Growth team is now exploring a path where we only request Read Call Log permission, and hold off on requesting any other permissions for now. ‘Based on their initial testing, it seems this would allow us to upgrade users without subjecting them to an Android permissions dialog at all.

This is huge, doesn't this make google guilty as well?

>‘It would still be a breaking change, so users would have to click to upgrade, but no permissions dialog screen.

EDIT: formatting

Correct. But we're not talking about people here, we're talking about a corporate entity as a whole. It's a bit more complex than a person. It has an incentive model and a set of norms (culture) which enables people to do good/bad based on the situation to maximize their personal gains (whichever those are - personal, material, spiritual, you name it).

If this consistently enables people to do what is perceived externally as unethical, we have a problem.

Nice spin on it, but Facebook is still a bad actor (despite what you say). I held this opinion since the beginning, before all the leaks and all the scandals but nobody believed me. Very smart people were incentivized to join using the entourage (come work with other smart people) and money, then slightly brain-washed in a cult-like manner (us vs them, wartimes, etc..). This enabled them to ignore blatant unethical behavior. I've seen all of these first-hand and it's bad. Bad bad bad.

From the ad campaign run by Facebook in 2018: "...From now on, Facebook will do more to keep you safe and protect your privacy, so we can all get back to what made Facebook good in the first place: friends. Because when this place does what it was built for, then we all get a little closer."

To anyone looking closely at the actions of executives and living outside the SV echo chamber, this statement is laughable.

While the actions of the many inside the company have been noble, they too have been taken advantage of just as those who used the platform for so many years.

...and because treating them differently based on their actions may cause good people to apply their skills to endeavors other than growing Facebook’s wealth of private data?

Some people have determined that Facebook is an organization that's producing some bad results. Socially shaming employees, removing the status they might have hoped to acquire and spiking attrition are tools being deployed to change Facebook's behavior and the behavior of Facebook's competitors.

You might claim that this pressure will never work, or that it will cause Facebook to shut down the "Are You Safe" feature, or gut the charity tools, or avoid developing these kinds of projects in the future. But we should avoid hand-wavy claims that Facebook and the people who work there are just too complicated to influence.

So if we're nicer to facebook, maybe it'll decide to not spy on people quite so much, undo the engineered-for-addiction notifications and feed, and curb it's anti-competitive practices (but not give back any market advantage it has already gained through them, of course)? The executives will voluntarily decide to make the company earn less money, so they can be more ethical?

Is there any precedent for a large corporation acting in this way?

Is Facebook universally bad? No. It's done lots of good things. And lots of good people work there. But Facebook is also doing lots of bad things. Your policy chief hired a PR firm to push antisemitic conspiracy theories about George Soros. "People are complicated" isn't an excuse.

Also, the Napoleonic Wars killed 3 to 6 million people.

Facebook as an entity might be run by great people who love their families and support their communities, but the entity has done tons of very sketchy things and anyone who willingly or knowingly takes a part within that, especially for personal benefit is responsible for the actions of the group as a whole.

Humanity might transcend class and social status, but it doesn't excuse anything.

Is this not potentially an optimal outcome?

If companies who have a track record of doing unethical things suffer for it by being depleted of all employees who are not either unethical, incompetent, or both, this should dramatically compromise the effectiveness of the company. If this happens repeatably, it provides a disincentive for unethical corporate behavior.

As opposed to when? When you worked there? When was this period that Facebook was a beacon of ethical behaviour?

> to explicitly dehumanize them for the sake of making the world simpler.

Like aliasing people into a point on a social graph and a wallet? Dehumanising behaviour and monetising that is the main ethical problem with Facebook. It's a bit rich to accuse opponents of over simplification.

>It is a poor model

FB market cap seems to disagree. Pidgeon-holing people for profit is an exceptionally lucrative model.

> Projects like charitable causes have raised a lot for charity

And the trains in Italy ran on time!

You worked there for five years and never had a clue. Maybe you're not the right person to provide a judgement on judgement.

At best it's invisible, at worst it just kicks people out with no recourse, because some troll reported them, and because they're not a FB employee or a celebrity. These people are people, too. You barge into the public and drag it onto your platform, and then you don't just dehumanize people on it, you completely remove them. The rest either is friend or not friend, blocked or not blocked, posts are liked or not liked. Yes, it's a very poor model -- don't assume everybody else is using it, too.

> It makes me really happy to see my friends thriving.

That's the equivalent of "it's fun with friends" for game reviews. Every multiplayer game has that. Every site that allows sharing of photos and text has that. Because people have that.

> With people, by compartmentalizing some unsavory perspective someone has, you have the ability to change it later on through discussion.

When later? When was Facebook ever up for candid discussion? How come you blame it on those who, in absence of any say, ever, now think badly of Facebook?

To take a person and alias them into being "good" or "bad" based on an action or a series of actions is to explicitly dehumanize them for the sake of making the world simpler

Baruch Spinoza more or less invented the concept of ethics in the 17th century, which (partially, and simplifying) is premised on the effect of "an action"[1] being good or bad. If this doesn't reach, let's go back 2,000 more years to Jainism, in which karma is comprised of particles in the universe that stick to a person through their actions (good/bad/undefined).

tl;dr: If your argument is that a person's actions should have no bearing on a sense of "good" or "bad," know that significant parts of the entirety of recorded history contradict you. [insert your own Godwin reference here]

Point being, calling someone "bad" or "good" only speaks to the preponderance of evidence one way or another, and it's absolutely within all of our rights to have an opinion on what FB/Zuck/SS have done with the aspects of our lives to which they have had access, down to discrete decisions. I mean, I don't think anybody would say that FB has obviated the concept of reputation, and having an effect on society doesn't only refer to the good. And really, I don't see anybody saying "Zuck = bad" nearly as much as I see "Zuck = good" and "Zuck has done bad things and made bad decisions." He's the face of the company, this is how society works when you're not moving fast and breaking things.

It's not about people being complex, it's about people shitting in the world's PII sink at the party. Specific people, with witnesses. These were actual choices made under consultation with many people, all of whom are extremely highly-compensated, to reduce the control you have over information about your actual life (what focus groups pay big money for). It's not outlandish to say that the ability to trade pictures with and keep up with people has not been a fair trade.

Forgive me if I discount the hosting of online charity facilities (and really: [3]), and the supplanting of phone calls and neighborly phone trees in times of disaster or crisis, but in the words of Nelson Muntz, "If you hadn't done it, some other loser would have. So quit milkin' it,"[4] and maybe that other loser would have protected their users more. (and please don't insult us with anything along the lines of "personal information doesn't have value until someone sells it")

To conclude with an even larger shadow, FB has made a shitton of money from these policies, money they use to hire people and pay them enough not to work at other companies that also pay a lot, and this money has been used to drive up housing prices and rent for their employees' convenience (nobody overbids for fun). Thus this infrastructure of data scams affects the ability of teachers to live near the schools in which they teach, police to live among those they patrol, and low wage workers to not have to commute 2+ hours each way.[5] I don't know if working at FB inures you to these examples, but it seems clear that FB leadership does not display the maturity that I personally would like to see in those who have the ability to make these decisions. Zuck didn't personally raise rents, but he built machinery that did so. But hey, it aiin't his fault his exploding knife-gun hurt someone, he painted it pink!

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conatus

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karma_in_Jainism

3. https://www.wired.com/story/nonprofits-facebook-get-hacked-n...

4. https://www.simpsonsarchive.com/episodes/3F22.html

5. https://www.curbed.com/2018/3/6/17082570/affordable-housing-...

>>To take a person and alias them into being "good" or "bad" based on an action or a series of actions is to explicitly dehumanize them

The only reliable method for evaluating someone’s values is to assess the choices they make. What values do their actions suggest? Do these choices affect your ability to trust these people?

I fundamentally disagree that it dehumanizes to do this, and I also fundamentally disagree that anyone intends to dehumanize them with this approach. I find it troubling that anyone expresses such a black and white assessment of people trying to determine where others should fit in the herd.

Put another way:

the only way to judge someone’s ethics is by evaluating their action and comparing it against their words.

Compartmentalization is part of the problem, not the solution. It's why some people can exploit and hurt a hundred thousand other human beings in the morning, enjoy their lunch break, fuck up the environment a bit more in the afternoon, and come home to a happy evening with their spouse. We shouldn't be encouraging more people to separate their private happiness from their interactions with society.

> ... in groups: if everyone good leaves organizations because they're "bad," well, those organizations will just be filled with the worst of us soon enough.

The hope is that if enough people leave, the organization won't be able to keep functioning. Or, if it survives and becomes an evil-people-filled cesspool, it'll be easier to direct regulatory actions against it and just shut it down.

Also, Napoleon was famous, but not exactly a paragon of morality.

An interesting analogy... The 10th amendment to the Bill of Rights was intended on allowing each state to be diverse in its laws. If people in state x want the laws in state y to change, a constitutionalist would say that you should move to that state and work in changing the laws from the inside, via the 10th Amendment and the state's own Constitution. If you don't want to put in the work of changing the state from the inside, and would rather change the laws from the outside (i.e. via federal authority) then you're probably an authoritarian.

I guess the only point I'm trying to make, is yeah, it's hard. Thanks for your contribution.

And then the organization becomes bad enough that it crumbles and dies.

>>I've seen the Are you Safe feature reduce so much stress during disasters.

Not exactly charity, it gets people to use FB more.

FB's problem (for the world) is that it is big and as such it can be used to manipulate opinions or mess with people's psychology. Either by others or by FB for $$$. Same would happen if Fox News or CNN were watched by a billion plus people. They would have the power to move certain people to a different direction. Google is another one, a little bias on search /news results and maybe millions of votes would move one way or another.

This is just complete rubbish and it appears you are still rationalising the time you spent working for the company. If you are trying to achieve 'good' inside a company like Facebook then you are a complete sucker or, as Zuckerberg would say, just a 'dumb fuck'. You're being played. Facebook is not interested in doing good; that has been abundantly clear since almost day 1.

Late Edit: I must add to that list admission of ministerial responsibility. The last resignation with honour, rather than for political point scoring, was Lord Carrington resigning as Foreign Secretary in 1982. Since then it's a dead concept.

But does that follow that publishing them is OK too?

From the outside, it looks like these politicians are frustrated that a foreign CEO ignored their demand to appear before them (because he has no legal obligation to do so), and have decided to retaliate by releasing embarrassing private internal documents obtained during an investigation in the hopes that Facebook will be politically and financially damaged.

I get that people hate Facebook, but does that justify any level of bad behavior as long as it harms them?

$200 billion, and a review in 12 months time?

That's 5 years revenue. $100 per user, sounds reasonable. Facebook can put in an easy "claim your $100" button on their site. Would that just be a "cost of doing business"?

> Facebook used data provided by the Israeli analytics firm Onavo to determine which other mobile apps were being downloaded and used by the public. It then used this knowledge to decide which apps to acquire or otherwise treat as a threat

Checking out your competition is pretty standard among all businesses, as is buying out the ones you can't beat.

> there was evidence that Facebook's refusal to share data with some apps caused them to fail

Sharing or not sharing data with another app is likewise not an unusual decision. FB is not a public utility - they can not work with other apps for any reason, or no reason at all. And this is a particularly ironic thing to point out, considering that the main thrust is complaining that they _did_ share data with other apps. So it's bad if they do share data, but also bad if they don't?

It's not clear what this means. Is it an API that returns '403 forbideen' or more of a case of lack of competitive information

Your first point and most of the others others may or may not be illegal. If they are legal, what the MPs need to do is their jobs.. make laws. But, most are not directly related to company size and/or market share.

Your second point does sound like a trust and I think you're right to link this to the WhatsApp sale.

But... Regardless of the FB/WhatsApp conclusion, that is a one-off that won't lead to much systemic change whether it's a fine or an order to de-merge.

What we need (imo) is a whole new approach to antitrust that doesn't hinge on a definition of monopoly.

Companies beyond a certain size should just be put under a different set of obligations than smaller ones. They should be assumed to have market power by merit of their size.

When it comes to gdpr and such, these need to be written differently for large companies. Basically, no more equality before the law for companies. What we get in return is rule of law.

If you want make Farmville with FB login go ahead, but if you try to make "FB 2.0" with FB Login and all friend connections preserved but keep all the ad revenue yourself obviously Facebook is gonna put their foot down.

Depends how big you think. FB had revenues of $40bil. So let's fine them $50 billion.

Accurate?

To be clear, I'm not saying that they can't seize and investigate or even punish if the law was broken. That's the job of government. But this just seems like a petty attempt to embarrass. However, I'm American and haven't been following the story closely, so I may be missing context.

By the way, these emails were not obtained via hacking/phishing, so the Wikileaks comparison doesn't make any sense.

Note that I don't read this as "let's get devs on board and then yank the rug out from under them later". Rather, it seems like they're trying to find a way to make it win/win, where devs can either pay for the platform directly, or use it for free if they can do so with a business model that helps Facebook make money elsewhere.

Facebook owns Onavo.

That said, companies are free to choose who they will do business with, so a data provider could always decide a certain customer is too risky for future deals. I wouldn't necessarily call that liability, though.

Everyone needs to work somewhere, you know, and not everyone has much of a choice about where.

No shame in putting food on the table for your family.

Here's one finding

> Facebook used Onavo to conduct global surveys of the usage of mobile apps by customers, > and apparently without their knowledge. They used this data to assess not just how many > people had downloaded apps, but how often they used them. This knowledge helped them to > decide which companies to acquire, and which to treat as a threat

Here's Onavo's wikipedia page last edited in October

> Facebook has leveraged Onavo's analytics platform to monitor the performance of its competitors, > target companies for acquisition, and make other business decisions.

> Media outlets classify Onavo as spyware.

It's garbage. Companies should employ them and pay a fair wage, but they don't.

Does it apply to the people using its products, softwares, services?

What's the ethical threshold for using reactjs for example in this scenario?

I can't quite tell you what digital literacy is, but I know that responses along the line of "do you know how a modern microprocessor works in detail?" are silly, because many people can read and write without being historians or etymologists. And even people who can't read or write often can speak and understand a whole lot. Contrast that with some priests mumbling in Latin, with people being subject to things they aren't allowed to understand.

So maybe knowing what files are, what memory is, what a program is, having their own webspace and email, stuff like that would be a great start. And the start to that is to stop pretending that's unattainable, or that "people don't want that". If they knew what it entails in the long run, most of them would want that. And people do much more complicated things than running a website. People raise children, they drive cars, they raise and train dogs, they work in the garden, they remember all sorts of stuff about sports, and so on. Most jobs require a lot of complicated edge-case knowledge, too. So knowing what an URL or a file is, and maybe some HTML, is trivial compared to that.

If people could get 20% off on all T-Shirts for the rest of their life if they had their own website, most people on this planet would have a website before the end of the year. I exaggerate, but by how much I'm really not sure.

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that we can neatly divide tech workers into good and bad. Likewise for companies. All categories are non-empty, and certain to remain so. What's the optimal assignment of workers to companies? Is it never beneficial for a good person to work at a bad company, perhaps making it less bad? Is it never harmful for a bad person to work at a good company, perhaps making it less good? Is it better to have all of the bad people concentrated at a few companies, or distributed throughout the industry?

Once you start thinking about it, I think you'll see that the Manichaean "entirely and immutably good or entirely and immutably bad" model just isn't very useful. Maybe we should talk about good vs. bad behaviors instead of demonizing (or for that matter idolizing) people - especially large groups of people in aggregate.

I think that's a bit harsh. You may think Facebook is terrible, but it's not so clear that everyone ought to agree with you.

If someone was working for organised crime, everyone should agree that's real social ill and should be discouraged. There's enough evidence on the table, over many years, about it.

The FB story is still unfolding. We're still in the process of hearing exactly what was done, and arguments about how good or bad it was.

Changing jobs is a somewhat big decision. Let people have a little think about things before you shame them for not making the leap when you - a guy with no skin in that game - decide FB is untouchable.

Most ads are normal ads from legitimate businesses including a lot of small and local businesses who find it very valuable for reaching their customers and growing their business.

The recent rhetoric and news coverage acts as if Facebook is entirely full of fake news and echo chambers and political manipulation when the truth is while that stuff is happening it's a minuscule percentage of the billions of posts per day.

Slimy, corporate lawyerese 101.

You’d think.

This is not a statement you can just throw out there.

For example

https://www.wired.com/story/how-facebooks-rise-fueled-chaos-...

You need to understand that this is a highly unusual situation.

Part of the UK Parliamentary system is that there are "Select Committees"on MPs, whose job is to review and hold to account the performance of government bodies and departments. They may also review areas of national interest within their remit, and invite witnesses to give evidence to them.

For example, there have been significant problems with a rail timetable change recently, and the Transport Select Committee invited the heads of various rail companies to give evidence. You don't not turn up - an invitation from a select committee to give evidence has the same sort of weight as a court summons to give evidence.

So Zuck was invited to give evidence to the Digital Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee (DCMS), investigating the impact of Fake News on politics. Twice (at least). Both times he sent a minion.

DCMS then set up a Grand Committee hearing, with parliamentarians from a bunch of other countries (Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, France, Ireland, Latvia, Singapore and UK), and invited Zuck. Again, no show.

So basically, since Zuck gave a whole bunch of governments the finger, the Uk government used its powers to collect relevant evidence.

I would suggest that unless you are a) the CEO of a Unicorn, or b) Currently suing a Unicorn and c) that Unicorn is giving the finger to a government

You need have no fear of doing business in the UK

Brightness is good - you can see, it's usually warm, etc. Hence whitelist.

But like I said, total off-the-cuff guess, take it for what it's worth.

I can’t tell if this is satire. Which means it’s either really good, or sad times we’re living in.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-and-white_dualism