The comparison with lack of blah at a shelter is telling, don't you think, when you think about how shelters are usually a place where people are "doled" out stuff? It is not merely a patronizing suggestion (which the billions of people are already aware of and accustomed to), but it is also taking a lot of people down a path where their choices will become severely restricted in the future. How is that "A Very Good Thing"?
Also, think about what companies start doing when they start failing. And don't make implicit assumptions that these megaliths will never fail or stumble. What would you, as the CEO who is supposed to "maximize shareholder value" do? Are you going to say "Well, we could do some shady things to exploit the data we have and buy ourselves some more time, but it is a better idea to declare bankruptcy and close the company"? Imagine a company like Facebook nearing bankruptcy. You can bet on your life that they will offer the appropriate third parties greater control of their data mining prowess in return for a bailout. Is that also overall a Very Good Thing?
Also, notice how the 2008 financial crisis unfolded. None of the offending parties got anything more than a slap on the wrist, because they had the keys to an engineering construct of extraordinary complexity (the financial system). It was just "heads I win, tails you lose". The way our lives are becoming intertwined with these tech behemoths is no different, and I don't see it playing out any differently if there is a similar crisis in the tech sector. How can that be overall a Very Good Thing?
Is it? Because it seems to me that they are having plenty of issues with gaining the trust of advertisers too. Considering that advertising is the bread and butter of their business, this would normally be something of a mini-crisis.
A quick search for "do advertisers trust facebook" gives me
Of course, no one actually believes anything Facebook says with regards to privacy, and probably never did.
I would seriously doubt if there is anyone who actually looks at their practices who doesn't think they conduct large scale psychological experiments on the human lab rats who continue to use FB.
In other words, seems like there are enough ingredients here for an implosion. Something has to give.
facebook has a certain level of monopoly over people's attention. i don't think a little snafu like this is suddenly going to make advertisers think they should stop advertising on facebook.
Not disagreeing, but I would certainly like some references if you could provide us any. In fact, it would be genuinely troubling if you cannot find any good sources. Here is why: this notion of fingerprinting seems to be an invention of the legal wing, to be brought out as a CYA when these requests were inevitably going to be demanded.
Time for some math:
Since it is only a 0.01% chance, it means you need 10000 discrete pieces of information collected on a single individual before there is a chance of error. If a company indeed has that many pieces of information on you, you first of all need to know that for a fact.
There is a chance the company will counter that this is aggregated probability, as in, with an uneven distribution of errors. If it is indeed aggregated probability, the companies which advertise on these platforms need to demand their money back because for all you known, none of the folks they are targeting are actually correct fits for their ads. Fingerprinting puts the burden of proof on the shoulders of the company that they are indeed allowing advertisers to target the audience they want. How can they be so sure if the errors are unevenly distributed?
In any case, everyone should demand the information anyway, and let us start using this fingerprinting theory as an excellent opportunity to get deeper into the practices of these companies.
Oh, come on! Why did you have to ruin the fun? Don't you know we can have a ton of fun chuckling sarcastically to ourselves when we see folks like GP keep making these kind of shockingly delusional statements?
This was exactly my point a while back. That the default option should be to get explicit permission for each piece of data you collect AND infer, even if the inference is being done in situ as the code executes (otherwise it will become another out clause). Of course, the geeks who get all delirious by seeing a mountain of data to analyze would not want that kind of friction in the process.
I wonder what would happen if someone would spend the time to completely dissect and reverse engineer exactly how lookalike profiles are being generated. My guess is that it will expose data collection practices which will confirm our worst fears.
Moral: of, relating to, or concerned with the principles or rules of right conduct or the distinction between right and wrong
I think it is "clearly wrong" that Facebook creates shadow profiles, because it is violating the freedom of people who have not signed up for their service, in the same way that it is clearly wrong for me to take away your favorite pet for ritualistic sacrifice against your wishes, even if "everyone" in the community agrees that it has been a consistently effective method for pleasing the Gods.
Of course, you know these analogies are tenuous, and you will eventually go into very precise definitions of words (or worse, you will actually start taking my pet sacrifice analogy and dissecting it). Perhaps you could tell us about something you think is clearly unethical, and we will try and draw the connection for you.
I doubt that he doesn't understand what "unethical" means. The question is how does what Facebook is doing qualify? You've said it is because it violates the freedom of people Facebook is making inferences about who are not users of Facebook's services.
That just shifts the question to how does it violate their freedom? That is not at all obvious to me. (NOTE: this does not mean that I'm saying it is OK...just that I don't see how it is a freedom violation).
My computer desk at home is near a large window, which I often look out while I am using the computer. From this window I can see people from my street walking dogs. I can see kids going to and from school. I see cars coming and going. My street is a dead end street about 1 km long, and I'm about 200 meters in. The street bends a little way past my place, so the last 700 meters or so are not visible from my place.
By casually observing people walk by, I've gathered data to make several inferences about people who live beyond the bend. I've figured out when some people are having house guests (by seeing people I've never seen before walking dogs that I recognize).
I've inferred sibling relationships among some of the children who walk by (by noticing dress and equipment patterns that clearly indicate that the same person is shopping for both).
I've figured out what kind of cars the parents of the some of the children drive (by seeing those cars stop when passing the children on the way home, and the children getting in, or seeing a strong correlation between days when particular children who walked by to school in the morning do not walk by in the afternoon and days when particular cars drive by in the afternoon).
Am I violating these people's freedom by making these inferences from what I see out my window?
If not, what is the fundamental difference between what I'm doing by observing people that walk or drive by on my street and what Facebook does by observing what its users do on its site?
You would be more like Facebook, if you 1) would publish your observations or otherwise provide it to third parties 2) sit at nearly all streets all the time, e.g., observing whatever those house guests are up to the rest of their time.
Imagine, you share your observations with, say, a PI who was hired by a paranoid spouse or by someone's employer.
Facebook is like a vast and far reaching network of nosy neighbours of whom you do not know who they are chatty with. Maybe someone who likes to jump to conclusions?
Answer is, that its not clear cut. What is the difference between a private investigator (working for a single party) and the government investigator (working for the city, state or federal level)?
I would think, that advertising in the local press or, having a sign outside the window to the effect that you were able to sell personal and assumed to be private information about the people who lived in the street would provoke an unpleasant reaction.
Doing something purely for your own benefit that you know will cause significant distress to others is sociopathy I think. Perhaps 'unethical' is the wrong word. 'antisocial' definitely covers it though it might not be strong enough.
I used the private investigator here as a middleman, a third party. Just like law enforcement or a data broker would be. My concern (in this argument) is less that of the ethics of each single act, but rather the consequences of setting up such a service. You don't know what you are enabling.
Imagine a gentleman decides to follow you for the rest of your life. He is always wihtin a distance but when you leave your home, there he is and see you him with his pen and paper recording your every move. You get it you car, he gets in his and follows. You stop by your lover's home. There he is the back recording. You go pick your child, save. You go to the grocery store, there he is recording again. So on and so forth.
Would you say there is absolutely nothing wrong with this?
> If not, what is the fundamental difference between what I'm doing by observing people that walk or drive by on my street and what Facebook does by observing what its users do on its site?
The expectation of privacy. The window analogy may seem very clear to you, but a lot of people see Facebook as a sort of postal service carrying their enveloped messages to their friends, and they have to trawl through a pretty large document of legalese to find out how it isn't. Facebook is more like one-way mirrored glass.
Not OP, but I think the fundamental difference is that you are, presumably, not selling everything you know to potential stalkers that wish to know everything about the people you mentioned.
It's not just that. GP's analogy would only make sense if one of your neighbors was a superintelligent alien whose larger motives are hidden from you, whose livelihood lies in having an intimate understanding of your psychology and how to manipulate you, and who never misses any detail or forgets anything. Ever. It's fucking creepy.
I can't claim it's wrong because I'm not a good ethicist. But I can say anecdotally that I feel upset and disgusted by the idea that even though I don't have Facebook, they may have a dossier on me. Simply because friends use my name or share photos including me.
It's upsetting because I don't know what I can do about it. How do I protect my privacy in this world? Do I stop having friends? Do I wear a mask everywhere?
It's like finding out that the Stasi had an extensive file on you, even though you never travelled to the GDR or were an interesting target. The only connection is that friend of your's who once visited their uncle on the other side.
The difference is, the GDR is gone and none of this has any consequences anymore. However, the consequences of Facebook et al. are yet to be seen.
> I can't claim it's wrong because I'm not a good ethicist.
Even the best ethics expert in the world would just be one who knows how to describe a bunch of ethical systems and ideas that exist currently and historically. Other than that, they can help you exactly zilch with such decisions. I'm not a psychologist, but I'll claim if it makes you feel upset and disgusted, that means you did decide you consider it wrong. And if it helps, I agree.
As for how to change things, well, ask the EFF for example? There's things you can do which, apart from being a real help, also help you with the dread of this free floating vague blob of worries that you sometimes look at but as you said feel you can't do anything about.
One thing you can always do, is that not giving in. It just takes one person to prove the claim that everybody accepts or wants X wrong. When being that person seems scary, personally, when looking around, I'm not convinced at all that the people who fight no or trivial battles are less scared. It's not actually safer on the side of thugs, generally speaking, and life isn't more fun at mindless parties either, only those who don't have the comparison would think that. I'd rather say that's all built on sand, on holes that have to be temporarily filled with more and more material.
So keep on hanging on, because there might come a point where you feel less upset, more grounded, and the people who drift along will become more and more confused. Real things can hurt, sometimes badly, but real things also have longevity, they bring their own means and nutrients for growth.
At least, that's how I answer these questions for myself, that's how it ended up working out, and while I know that can't be generalized, sometimes it does get darkest before dawn. Don't let it drag you down (Sophie Scholl's outlook = best outlook).. but what you can shoulder, do shoulder. The only way out really is through, ultimately.
If worst comes to worst, don't get crushed when the screeching narcissism machine attempting to eat the planet drives itself and billions of people against the wall and implodes. Easier said than done, but change will come one way or the other. I'm not convinced it would leave spots of unscorched Earth, but that hope dies last, anyway.
Well, your moral principles are very different from mine. I don't feel like I (or the state) should have a say about what goes on inside of Facebook's servers, they can do whatever they want with the information they have as long as the don't use coercion (to me, freedom is the lack of coercion).
That said, I do believe that there's a practical problem, but it's us that must try to solve it, we must educate people, we must ask our friends not to post our photos or personal info on social media, etc.
> they can do whatever they want with the information they have
What if they decide to publish online your computed profile? Maybe they know you better than yourself.
> as long as the don't use coercion
Isn't influence or suggestion a kind of coercion? Why do you think they spend so much resources on profiling everyone?
> That said, I do believe that there's a practical problem, but it's us that must try to solve it, we must educate people
My country used to have over 6000 people killed on roads out of about 60M people. The state tried to "educate" people about not driving while drunk, not driving fast, using seat belts, etc. But in the end, what actually worked was more policemen on the roads.
You say freedom is the lack of coercion but you fail to realize that you are coerced into being part of FB, and your only opt-out is drastic measures like using a blocker.
FB probably has more intelligence capabilities about mere people than any past or present intelligence agency of any country ever had. That raises a lot of questions, the first of them being to make sure that they don't use it against people.
I'm not being coerced to use Facebook, there's not threat of physical violence involved. I choose to use the web, if some site has fb trackers I can disable cookies, I can disable JS, I can do whatever I want with my computer in order to not give them my info.
Yes, there is influence, and I would certainly prefer it to no be like that, but freedom of people to use a lousy service as fb is still freedom, and freedom is more important than my feelings.
The state is the collective will of a relatively small group of people with money and power. Most people have no influence at all. That's how it always has been. I think the only way to maximize freedom is to support small, local governments.
According to Max Weber, Something is "a 'state' if and insofar as its administrative staff successfully upholds a claim on the 'monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force'. I am not part of the state, the state is the president, the congressmen, the taxman, but not "us".
> because it is violating the freedom of people who have not signed up for their service
That's your interpretation of their reasoning, Facebook's interpretation could assume that they haven't signed up for service yet.
Also, how exactly is their freedom violated? Let's say they could do a certain set of actions on a given day prior to Facebook violation. So if a government violated their freedom (e.g. by putting them under house arrest), a certain subset of those actions, like walking to a store or a park, would be impeded.
What would be an example of actions that would be impeded by Facebook's violation?
>> We really need someone to fight for our privacy and neutrality.
Well said.
I certainly hope it is not a PR stunt, but WordPress is probably the other big player in the fight for the open web. It might actually benefit all of us if Automattic starts making a lot of noise about privacy.
And ultimately, its not as if anyone wants any of these tech giants to completely fail (well, maybe Facebook). What we want is to not have the nature of the web changed to suit the whims of a handful of companies.
At the moment, there are only two kinds of employees at Facebook. Those who care and are getting irritated each time these issues are raised on HN (see here [1]), and the dregs who bury their heads in the sand. I bet there is someone who works there who is reading this and realizing that either they will have to change their attitude, or soon the company will turn into another Enron. We don't still have Enron in our midst anymore, do we?
Once one company goes down, it is only a matter of time before the rest fall in a domino sequence because people will start wondering about the practices of its peers. I would like to think that these companies are a little more sensible than to imagine they are somehow infallible, its better for them to change now before it gets to the point where they are made to.
This may be a case where the savings (i.e. money from selling data in return for a big pile of cash) are actually passed on to the customer - e.g. transaction costs are lower for Visa/Mastercard for merchants, which is why they sometimes don't accept Amex and Discover.
It would be interesting to see if Visa and Mastercard have some clause which prevents Google from buying data from AMEX and Discover (competitive advantage for them because then Amex and Discover's transaction costs aren't subsidized) in return for agreeing to part with their data. Said another way, what's preventing Google from also getting data from Amex or Discover? Its not as if Google is going to say no.
Also, think about what companies start doing when they start failing. And don't make implicit assumptions that these megaliths will never fail or stumble. What would you, as the CEO who is supposed to "maximize shareholder value" do? Are you going to say "Well, we could do some shady things to exploit the data we have and buy ourselves some more time, but it is a better idea to declare bankruptcy and close the company"? Imagine a company like Facebook nearing bankruptcy. You can bet on your life that they will offer the appropriate third parties greater control of their data mining prowess in return for a bailout. Is that also overall a Very Good Thing?
Also, notice how the 2008 financial crisis unfolded. None of the offending parties got anything more than a slap on the wrist, because they had the keys to an engineering construct of extraordinary complexity (the financial system). It was just "heads I win, tails you lose". The way our lives are becoming intertwined with these tech behemoths is no different, and I don't see it playing out any differently if there is a similar crisis in the tech sector. How can that be overall a Very Good Thing?