I think if Facebook say they aren't doing this, then they aren't doing it.

No. Denying is the only smart move here.

If they are on android, I tell them to open their system settings and show them how Google Search has just about every privilege on your phone and has had it since they turned it on.

Even if people are concerned they still don't stop using Facebook or android. :/

And it's not just the Facebook apps. The Facebook SDK is widely embedded into many other apps Facebook SDK (it's the most popular SDK on iOS for example, according to data published from Cocoapods - https://gist.github.com/ryanolsonk/e33bf9e89677da9fe8ce ). It's so popular because Facebook is basically the most effective network to run so called "App Install Ads" and embedding their SDK providers marketers essential data for tuning their targeting and ad spend.

The SDK gives Facebook access to a ton of additional usage data which they can link together with anything they already have on your from their apps. It also _potentially_ gives them the ability to exploit any permissions given to the host app which embedded the SDK. Now they publish the source of the SDK openly ( https://github.com/facebook/facebook-ios-sdk ) but it certainly would harm anyone if there was more independent scrutiny given to analysing the source and whether there's anything else we're not seeing that go into the final SDK downloads.

Is it a net gain for society if they're more wary, even if this particular instance is wrong?

Or they will explain how it was "a rogue employee" who put the code there undetected, and caused it to spread to millions of devices.

IIRC they also started off saying it was all algorithmic.

Their investigation found "no evidence of systematic political bias." So, not sure where the very dishonest statement is here.

I think the point is that a casual observer would not have guessed trending tropics were so influenced by human intervention, and might have taken them to be an actual reflection of the Facebook hivemind. Further the statement of "no evidence of systematic political bias" is a bit hard to swallow given reports of Facebook employees asking "what Facebook can do to stop Donald Trump" at their all-hands (one of the top 5 questions in a poll [0] not just a lone employee walking up to the microphone). Further, the people curating these feeds are probably underpaid and young, and hence are probably going to skew left of the average journalist. Bias doesn't have to be explicit to be systematic.

Anyway I find Donald Trump + much of the rest of the GOP field pretty reprehensible politics-wise, Facebook seems to be handling things well [1], and we shouldn't worry about a conflict of interest as much as w/ advertising+privacy [2], but some amount of vigilance seems wise given how much influence these platforms can have over political outcomes [3]. Twitter in particular seems to have made a few fairly illiberal moves lately from my POV.

[0] http://gizmodo.com/facebook-employees-asked-mark-zuckerberg-...

[1] https://medium.com/@glennbeck/what-disturbed-me-about-the-fa...

[2] One shouldn't discount the H1B angle completely though.

[3] http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/how-google-co...

One was shut down almost immediately, one was still up when the video was posted.

Won't name them as I don't want to drag politics into HN but I am fairly convinced it is repeatable (and if anyone is interested in giving it a try I can try to dig out a reference and post.)

If moderation is done by humans, you could simply prove that one moderator had a worse morning than the other, or that through luck of the draw Group A went to a sympathetic moderator while group B did not. That could demonstrate individual bias, but not institutional.

If moderation is automated, how do you control for the weight of keywords, phrases, etc? Maybe Group A was full of statements that almost threw a flag but not quite, while Group B contained mostly innocuous wording but (only) one phrase that actually got flagged.

If both groups were designed to be unpleasant, but various "blacklist" words and phrases are weighted differently, Group A might have achieved "flagged" weight while group Group B was "flagged -1." One might have scored 99 pts vs 100 for the other, but the visible difference is that one remains visible while the other does not.

Thinking out loud, now... let's say that Facebook does have a political bias. How do you prove that Facebook's financial success is despite that political bias, and not because of it?

Is it possible to have a monopoly on digital socialization? If you can't declare Facebook a monopoly, and therefore subject to greater regulation, then your only lever over Facebook is social pressure, presumably in the form of bad press and boycotts, which will reduce their advertising revenue. How do you prove that the existing political bias is leading them to sub-optimal revenues?

Couple of months since I saw this, so can't say for sure but I think a major point of the experiment was that the two "hate groups" were equal except which ethnic group they were directed at.

At least that was the case when the feature came out. I think I read something about android now letting you filter permissions and not blindly accept all that an app asks for?

It's great that you can filter permissions, but when you suddenly can't use basic functionality because the programmers added obligatory geolocation to a feature, then you don't have much choice. Remove the app, or allow it to track you.

That said, this is lazy & irresponsible reporting on what is at best a singlural event.

If it was reproduced, this is clearly a violation of Facebooks terms of service, regardless of if the user has opted to let Facebook listen to the music and TV that's playing in the background.

One of the urban legends was also that USA government agencies don't collect data at bulk and they were lying about it. We know the truth now.

Facebook has been caught with the hand in the cookie jar too many times already and got away with it. Fuck Facebook.

Google for "Facebook privacy European bug", and choose your preferred outlet (wsj, rt, tnw - I prefer the guardian)

The same week we were provided documents signed by NSA/CIA officials claiming that Google is not even forced to do it, they provided extra interface for NSA so they can grab data whenever they want: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-06/12/google-prism-...

Some recent emails with Clinton showed that top Google employers helped with surveillance in Arab countries a couple of years ago, more journalists described that Google is in relationship with NSA. http://www.techtimes.com/articles/6610/20140507/google-cahoo...

Facebook was accused of working FOR NSA to spy on Belgium: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/sep/21/facebook-...

One of Facebook financial founders was PayPal CEO who... supports global surveillance by NSA http://www.globalresearch.ca/nsa-and-facebook-work-together/...

Question: why should I trust what you say?

Didn't the NSA hack Google's own internal fiber? Why would they need to do that if they had the keys to the kingdom anyway?

Yes, google started encrypting the intra-datacenter traffic once it learned what the NSA was doing.

This issue was quite hot on HN a month ago.

Definitely the corporate culture wouldn't allow anything like this. Believe it or not, many FB engineers have some kind of free software / civil liberties background in their past, and most people don't seem to realize that A) they have options, they can and would walk out if they witnessed anything shady B) the company has enough fake scandals wound up by the press as it is, to risk doing something genuinely evil for short term gain, and have a former employee eventually blow the whistle on.

One controversy after the other, during my time at Facebook I witnessed the chasm between the mostly innocent motivations behind a product feature, and what the press / outside world made of it. This experience probably taught me as much about media cycles and conspiracy theory dynamics, as it did about engineering.

I'd like to add "and will not do it in the future"

You work for a company with 1000s of employees. How are you exactly in a position to confirm this doesn't happen?

I'm sure a Facebook engineer COULD find out if Facebook is doing this - but just working at Facebook is not sufficient enough to say for certain it does not happen, you need to actually do the required investigation.

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I don't personally think Facebook is listening in the way suggested here, key word would be _think_ though. And unless you're saying you've audited the code repositories, you're limited to your _opinion_ based on the context you have from working within the company.

You cannot say it doesn't happen with any level of certainty (as you've tried) just because you have access to the code repositories.

There are internal groups where features are discussed and debated all the time, and even all hands Q&A sessions with Zuck (weekly IIRC) where sometimes hard questions are raised.

Someone amongst the many engineers with access to the repo will eventually end up spotting shady code if it exists. They might raise this with a colleague first, or in an internal group, and the matter might even bubble up to the Zuck Q&A if it's intentional and particularly controversial.

This level of internal openness is unusual at this company size, and since there are people joining & leaving all the time (including interns who AFAIK have the same level of access to the code) it would take just ONE disgruntled whistleblower to ignite a scandal that the press will be instantly all over like piranhas smelling blood, this being Facebook.

Therefore, doing evil covertly like you suggest just isn't worth the risk for FB, period. Not happening, won't happen. When you see headlines like "Is Facebook eavesdropping on phone conversations?", Occam's razor is always your best friend.

I can't find it anywhere on Facebook's site. I don't believe it exists, or if it exists it was expunged some time ago. I'd like to know from which website ABC News 10 has located this information!

Genuinely curious as the page he's referred me to seems to document a U.S. only feature you need to specifically turn on when you update your status.

"No, we don't record your conversations. If you choose to turn on this feature, we'll only use your microphone to identify the things you're listening to or watching based on the music and TV matches we're able to identify. If this feature is turned on, it's only active when you're writing a status update."

So, not as bad as the news article suggests, but still extremely creepy.

https://m.facebook.com/help/iphone-app/1499418503612943

Got this from someone else's Google search, apparent it took them less than a minute to find this, their Google-fu is clearly greater than my own :-)

Facebook would need to be collecting all ambient noise, just to identify (listen to) specific sources, no?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...