Facebook Doesn’t Tell Users Everything It Really Knows About Them

Re:Facebook Doesn’t Tell Users Everything It Really Knows Ab... by drunken-serval on Friday December 30, 2016 @11:39AM (#13285235)

> I feel that the IT world is irresponsible in its collection of data, and doesn't treat it as the liability it is.

A lot of that is due to a lack of training. There's two major ways new people come into programming.

1. Go to college, get a computer science or engineering degree.

2. Self taught.

Neither of those prepares you to deal with the ethics of information storage.

I happened to have an entire course on the topic but only because I took an Information Science minor with my Computer Science major. That course wasn't even an optional elective for me otherwise.

A computer science degree trains you for thinking how to do something. It doesn't teach you how to figure if you should do something.

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Re:Facebook Doesn’t Tell Users Everything It Really Knows Ab... by pluma on Friday December 30, 2016 @12:08PM (#13285471)

You can be lucky if a college education in CS/SE teaches you about open source licensing, even more so if it deals with privacy in any way.

IMO every SE curriculum should contain a mandatory course looking into historical precedents how information was used in genocides and oppressive regimes (Nazi Germany and the German Democratic Republic are two of the most obvious examples but there are plenty others).

It's ridiculous how it took Trump to get elected for the liberal techies in my Twitter stream to realise that the US government has the power to do really bad things with all the data FB & friends have been collecting.

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Re:Facebook Doesn’t Tell Users Everything It Really Knows Ab... by clydethefrog on Sunday January 01, 2017 @05:37AM (#13295362)

What literature did the course provide? I would like to teach myself more too. The lack of any so far in my programme is making me really pessimistic.

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