There was a time when patio11 was going through a phase calling out Zynga as one of the shadiest companies around.
I remember thinking "If Zynga is that bad, then what about Facebook?"
Facebook's ability and willingness to manipulate just about everything in sight - WhatsApp ad policies, privacy policy changes, arbitrary censorship of content, providing clear misinformation to legal entities for e.g. the promise to EU that they cannot infer/merge user profiles, the absolute shitshow that is shadow profiles - in line with corporate profits is starting to make Zynga look angelic in comparison.
Substantive critique of Facebook is fine on HN. To illustrate the point, I used a moderation mechanism to rescue the OP from being penalized, which is why you see it on the front page now.
That said, you can't do this with an account named "markyuckerberg". We want thoughtful conversation, not cheap shots or personal attacks. Perhaps Zuckerberg needs no protecting when it comes to these things, but HN certainly does, so I've banned this account. If you want to comment on HN, a good place to start would be with a username that doesn't violate the spirit of the site, re which please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html.
Btw, special-purpose accounts aren't allowed here either. We're hoping for good conversation, not pre-existing agendas.
Perhaps Zuckerberg needs no protecting when it comes to these things
Thanks, Dan! But regardless of one's feelings toward Facebook, I think Mark Zuckerberg should be treated with respect here just like anyone else. Not only is it good for the overall tone of the site, but there are enough "public figures" in tech that use this site that a flat "no personal attacks" (without exceptions for fame) seems like the best policy.
I agree completely. But even for people who don't feel that way, there are good reasons for HN to have this rule. Breaking it degrades the community and oneself.
Rational thought, yes. Critical reasoning, a little doubtful, especially these days. Oral traditions are so inefficient at transmitting multiple viewpoints, at collecting multiple viewpoints, at codifying multiple viewpoints, and eventually at balancing multiple viewpoints that human society desperately sought and successfully figured out written ones. For example, great orators with really bad messages could easily sway people down all kinds of wrong directions. I am yet to see a great writer who achieved anywhere near the same effect (without also being able to articulate the same message just as well orally).
For example, think of the first time you read a comment on HN which you impulsively disagreed with. If you gave it a second and a third chance, sometimes you come away with an alternate viewpoint, and sometimes you actually agree with the statement. That is the power of writing.
Now imagine what happened the last time you verbally disagreed with someone. Chances are, you soon branded them an idiot, and then slowly stopped talking to them. I would say a part of it was simply because the message was conveyed orally, with all kinds of meaning ascribed to intonations. And unlike reading a piece of text again carefully, its not as if you have a mental tape recorder you can use to replay the conversation. There is just too much distraction in oral communication.
Oral traditions are so inefficient at transmitting multiple viewpoints, at collecting multiple viewpoints, at codifying multiple viewpoints, and eventually at balancing multiple viewpoints
To these ends I agree that oral traditions wouldn't "scale up" quite as well as written ones - but we're talking about pretty small groups of people, so they're going to have less viewpoints on the whole and therefore less need of a system that helps them manage intellectual pluralism. And as a side note, I'd think you don't really need multiple viewpoints to engage in deductive reasoning, if we're counting that as critical reasoning.
great orators with really bad messages could easily sway people down all kinds of wrong directions
Massive lapses of critical reasoning also affect post-literate Western societies.
think of the first time you read a comment on HN which you impulsively disagreed with...
You can impulsively disagree with someone and subsequently change your mind without the need to write everything they said down. You probably do this every day in casual conversation - especially if you're a software engineer - I'd bet most programmers are no strangers to impulsive disagreement. So I think your blessing here is really self-reflection - not a writing system. I think self-reflection falls under critical reasoning.
Now imagine what happened the last time you verbally disagreed with someone...
When you say that oral discourse has "all kinds of meaning ascribed to intonations", you're making it sound like speech is sort of a richer, more complex style of interchange than something purely textual like an email. Like, a speech act can have all kinds of richness and ambiguity. So wouldn't it then require more critical reasoning to parse out a speech than an email?
Great. The most concerning issue - the question of trusting all your data with a for-profit entity which doesn't get directly paid for the services it provides - gets a token mention as the very last point ("just in case, let me throw in a casual mention about this somewhere at the bottom"). I am fairly sure that announcing projects and then cancelling them, on a scale of 1-10 for burning user trust, will get a score of 0. In comparison, here are some higher scores for issues which are actually 'burning concerns':
8 - the kind of tracking data which was presented in the Waymo case
9 - the kind of data mining which happens when you combine the most popular email service + highly popular browser + most popular website analytics tool + most popular mobile OS
10 - the efforts to get into providing 'free' internet just in case a few bits and bytes escape into the ether, and attempts to acquire companies which may be collecting/assembling harder to reach datasets
And then the rest of the folks here wonder, "Do people inside Google actually spend any time thinking about whether they might be burning their user's trust?" Based on your response, I would say that it gets about the same level of token acknowledgment inside.
There are too many idiots who go and "tag" photos with people who are not active on Facebook and help create a shadow profile.
There are too many idiots who willingly give Facebook the permission to mine their address book to triangulate the phone number + name + email address + misc. contact info of people who are not active on Facebook and help create a shadow profile.
There are too many idiots who don't think one extra second about filling up the messages they send to other people who are not on Facebook with all kinds of sensitive information and help create not just a shadow profile, but one which can be mined in ways that the idiots don't ever want to acknowledge.
Oh, and there are too many idiots who think that their "right" to use Facebook also gives them the right to send the personal information of other people to Facebook, whether or not those other people consent to such abuse of trust.
So yes, it is just another site. The smart folks who are concerned about tattling on their friends have mostly left. The remnants are mostly idiots, and damn it, I just can't find a way to stop these idiots from being so idiotic other than filling up internet comment threads with not-so-subtle hints about how these idiots are fucking up my life. Do you have any suggestions for how I can stop these idiots from acting in such an idiotic way?
At best, their behavior is idiotic. But short of consuming our entire vocabulary with ever-further steps of euphemism, there are few if any accurate alternative descriptions of the set of people who trust Facebook.
"Naïve", perhaps, but that excludes the vast swath of people who trust Facebook for more than a rather short duration of time.
As the old saying goes, you will eventually run into someone who doesn't give a fuck who or how powerful you are. Meet your Daddy, Facebook. He is called Automattic. :-)
As for people who think the exodus out of React was "imaginary" - I wish FB had actually completely dropped the ball and stayed with the old license. That would have forced Automattic to not merely drop React, but also anoint a competitor which would have probably overtaken React in no time.
I still think that projects like Vue will pass React soon. Facebook only did the right thing because they saw the impending backlash. The PATENTS file is still in their other repos.
Automattic, the PHP shop? I don't think they have a great influence on what javascript framework is the most popular. The job market is trending towards React and now it will be even more so, the people who thought the patents was no big deal are now rewarded
So you are simultaneously saying that the cut throat competition of the telco sector is keeping the data and call rates at global lows (a good thing), and saying that we need not have the same competition when the infrastructure for rural India is built out? If competition acts the way it normally does, someone is certainly going to figure out how to connect rural India in an economically viable way and profit immensely.
Or the mathematics won't pan out, and the company dies. And the government will probably step in to fill the breach. And it will probably do an awful job (remember the mathematics never panned out?)
Both of these are good outcomes. Compare this to handing over the control of such vital infrastructure to a megacorp which has a consistent track record of violating the trust of everyone - the users (random privacy rule changes), the advertisers (fake video views), those they acquire (e.g. the comedy show called WhatsApp ads), the jurisdictions they operate in (arbitrary censorship of content to make sure they kowtow to the public flavor du jour) and last but not least the legal system (claiming that they cannot/will not infer a WhatsApp user profile based on FB user profile knowing the pitifully tiny effect of the punitive damages).
With such a track record, it is a surprise that they even have the temerity to still approach governments around the world to propose FreeBasics.
See the point is you don't have the right to impose your preferences on somebody else(here, rural Indians). Concretely, a rural Indian might be okay with privacy violations as long as they believe this benefit outweighs that. They if given a chance might enter into voluntary transaction with FreeBasics, you should not get to stop voluntary interactions.
Why do you get a say on what their preferences are?
What an ironic statement, considering that that combination can be lethal to a company.
Besides, have you ever heard anyone say why they prefer to use Facebook even when they are aware that it is tracking their every move? Usually the answer is "convenience". By the same token, not getting confused or angry is also a great convenience to the user. Very few Wordpress users actually care about the baselessness or meritlessness of using one JavaScript library over another. They just want Wordpress to work.
I fully agree! I think WordPress made the right move, and I would have done the same in their position. But it's sad that we now have baseless taboos in dev land.
>> I'd really like to know why it's better for me to have no internet at all than some but not all?
Because under the pretext of giving you internet, Facebook is creating shadow profiles about me.
Now I would like to know why it is more important for you to get stuff for free than my privacy?
All you need to do, of course, is get Facebook to promise me that it won't create these shadow profiles about non-users. At that moment, you should (hopefully) have a little bit of an "aha!".
If that free internet were actually provided by the government, and was funded by taxation, "we the people" (however comical that notion is these days), actually have the legislative and ultimately the executive power to stop our government from doing shady things with that internet. What is your recourse if the same thing is decided behind closed doors inside a corporation? I will answer that question for you based on how these things usually turn out: whatever the corporation eventually agrees to will turn out to be better for them, because it will be worse for their competitors. Think: audit of all data collected, having onerous laws around financial reporting, having to agree with a million different compliance issues etc. At the end of it all, someone will look back on it and wring their hands: "If only the people had been a little wiser and stopped the giant corporation from having their way, things could have been so much better".
Think, for a moment, about the farcical fines these megaliths are facing. If you were an executive at any of these companies, would you actually lose sleep over them? If the fines are not acting as a deterrent, why even bother with the fine? Again, where is your recourse?
I am all for public shaming of FB employees, because if they were to stop counting their bank balance and just look themselves in the mirror for a little bit, they know they have completely earned this shaming.
It seems that facebook saved information also about people without a facebook account each time they visit a web displaying a sort of 'like' buttons so even if you just browse those webs you may be watched and 'classified' by facebook (without agreing with any terms of contract document with facebook).
For example, lets suppose that you visit your favourite digital newspaper. After reading an article or a howto you see a "like this article?/was this howto useful?/Send us your feedback" button. It seems (I can't confirm it so I could be wrong, just hear it on the TV news yesterday), that facebook was saving silently all this info about preferences from lots of people that aren't neither facebook users nor visiting facebook forums and webs
If we thing about it, wouldn't be much different than to put a creepy guy near the door of a supermarket recording all that you buy to sell all this info later.
Well, _creep_ _shmeep_ (you're just using an ad hominem) you agreed to it when you signed up to free basics. All activities that FB does is according to their ToS and their privacy policies. If you agreed to that, then they are doing it legitimately.
>> Free Basics puts no obligation on its users to visit or use Facebook at all.
Here is a list of possible ways Facebook can triangulate information about people who are not active on Facebook even without controlling access to the internet:
1. User telemetry based on your browser when you visit any page which has a Like button
2. If you have ever used WhatsApp and deleted it, seeing who has your phone number on their contacts list
3. If you have ever used WhatsApp and deleted it, seeing who has your phone number on their WhatsApp app
4. Being tagged in a photo (that your friend captured) based on a Facebook account which you don't even actively use
5. Seeing where they tagged you if that info is easy to infer from the image's metadata
6. Seeing where they tagged you based on the check in location
7. Seeing where they tagged you, based on the comment they might leave on the photo
8. Seeing who has your email address on their contacts list and associated a name to it
9. Inferring your name from someone's contacts and matching it to the phone number so that
10. They can check if a second person has the same phone number or same email address under the same name or a small variant.
11. Learning about life events which concern you based on other people's WhatsApp conversations about you since they usually mention you by name
12. Text mining of WhatsApp conversations for a list of names which they don't yet have in their database and possibly inferring the relationship type
Now they basically have a "shadow profile" of a (person's name + phone number) even if that person has never gone near Facebook their entire lives. If there are additional details about you in someone else's contacts, imagine how much easier you just made it for Facebook.
12. If you agree that the shadow profile is fairly easy to create once the apps controlled by FB (FB, Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram) reach a sufficient critical mass, you probably understand that they will collect every piece of information they can and associate it with the right shadow profile.
My guess is, I don't cover a fraction of the techniques they use already (simply because at a certain scale, I bet they identified even bigger patterns that we cannot even see), and the list is already too uncomfortable for someone who doesn't want to have anything to do with Facebook. As a programmer, you probably know that most of these are trivial to implement. Your problem will be "too much noise", definitely not "too little signal". No worries. An eager horde of people are everyday helping Facebook to cut down the noise and increase the signal to noise ratio of their shadow profiles.
Now, imagine what happens when Facebook becomes the primary means to access the internet for an entire region.
At this point, the large compensation package offered at these places is starting to look like hush money to keep your mouth shut and to turn a blind eye towards anything that looks from the outside like some kind of systematic manipulation (e.g. of public opinion, suppression of disconcerting viewpoints).
I remember thinking "If Zynga is that bad, then what about Facebook?"
Facebook's ability and willingness to manipulate just about everything in sight - WhatsApp ad policies, privacy policy changes, arbitrary censorship of content, providing clear misinformation to legal entities for e.g. the promise to EU that they cannot infer/merge user profiles, the absolute shitshow that is shadow profiles - in line with corporate profits is starting to make Zynga look angelic in comparison.