Facebook bans 7 'surveillance-for-hire' companies that spied on 50k users

They had to explicitly pass through the DoD certifications and contracts requirements, and probably had to implement some custom features on Windows for it.

So hes, they are.

Now, the question is: would you rather have lived the cold war without a nuclear deterrent in your country?

It's a harder question to answer.

It doesn't matter where you are on the scale if the scale of "helping dictators with malicious intents".

Don't get me wrong, I don't think facebook or any big tech companies has any kind of moral upper hand, given they all spy on people, lie, engage in corruption, monopoly abuses, and so on. And they all have weapon dealers in their portfolio, which sell arms to the same people using pegasus.

There's quite probably links to actual murders of dissidents by intelligence services, of which Jamal Kashoggi is just the most conspicuous example.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/18/nso-spyware-us...

(To get ahead of the whataboutery: at this stage anyone providing military aid to the Saudi government is complicit in their crimes, including the US and UK militaries and their involvement in the war on Yemen)

Facebook are much much worse.

An NSO, a Candiru or a weapons manufacturer provide tools to governments, who are at least in theory (but usually in practice) accountable to their people. Occasionally governments even act for the benefit of their people.

Facebook only acts for the benefit of Facebook, to the detriment of everyone else in society.

I wonder how often if ever extreme groups eager to recruit use the ads served to them as a source of potential "proto-shibboleths" to look into. If the advertisers with their dearth of data could know, before even you do, what sort of stuff people like you tend to like, you could use them as a bleeding edge to go to events/locations associated with that thing to meet fellow sympathizers who could potentially be activated, or unmet fellow activists who just happened to be around.

I doubt they care about solving it completely, but publicizing this is definitely good PR for them.

> Can you give an example of "the ones they don't like"? FB is in the data harvesting and aggregation business. Anyone using their data - without reciprocity - is unwelcomed. Full stop.

Cambridge Analytica comes to mind. Facebook actively assisted them. Though the scandal caused many, many policy changes at Facebook, it is a historical case of Facebook assisting someone using their data to spy on their users.

facebook used user data as an incentive for companies to build apps on their platform. at one point their ambition was to compete with iphone/android (they got as far as an android skin, but amazon and firefox were competing in this space as well, it wasn’t crazy to think they could do it)

if you want people running your OS, you need a good app store, and facebook’s whole thing was free apps (farmville and the like) - without traditional monetization, how could facebook attract big developers to fill their phone platform with apps and avoid the fate of windows phone?

well, when you use an app on facebook, you give the app permission to read your data, sometimes a lot of your data.

see this illuminating article, “What the fuck was facebook thinking” [0]. facebook can say truthfully they never sold anyone’s data, because they gave it away for free to anyone who would build an app to keep people on their platform.

[0] https://jamesallworth.medium.com/what-the-f-was-facebook-thi...

Drug dealing involves all the same risks without the moral detritus.

Are you quite certain you don't work in public relations for NSO or a similar firm? This is suspicious and weird.

Neuromancer becoming reality. Unfortunately, it was a dystopian future.

Uh.. Do you know that NSO group is widely suspected in helping authoritarian governments to target journalists?

Reverse engineering and staying in IDA all day long is pretty boring

Your like ironic actual point is well taken but I just wanted to note that even without the irony this is actually a very cool thought provoking question and I couldn't answer it at first.

The difference is the spirit of the law but you are correct in that it is technically following the law. But breaking the spirit of the law garners you no public sympathy. So though we see possibly Black Cube didn’t break any laws and therefor are not liable, no body gives a shit that they were kicked off of Facebook.

One is unregulated, the other is sanctioned. Uber found a loophole for bypassing taxi medallion requirements, and following the law is doing it by the book, renting/buying a medallion to ferry people with a vehicle.

Loopholes are common in the US, the spirt is: if nobody says it’s illegal, it’s not illegal (yet). It’s not uncommon for “loophole bypassers” to oppress others who could take advantage, after they themselves have already profited to prevent competition in the form of laws and regulations. This isn’t just a US phenomenon, it’s commonly used like the Indian Jati Varna system, Toyotomi Hideyoshi and classifying people by birth (he was a commoner), and seen now in the US so that only wealthy corporations can afford licensing, standards they set, and other costly additives that government is only happy to tax.

nice tip, thanks.

makes me suspect further thats why those puppets/catfishers try to friend people at random on Facebook and LinkedIn.

because once the initial suckers accept them in, they've breached the outer defenses of the social media web-o-trust. after that, they can try to friend more targets, but then have the benefit of being able to get past the "must be friends of friends" filter.