Re:Ask HN: Did Facebook really do something wrong?
by mshook on Tuesday March 20, 2018 @11:36AM
(#16629468)
I remember reading this couple of years ago and I guess the graph was more eloquent than anything else:
http://mattmckeon.com/facebook-privacy/
What's also interesting is to read comments about privacy from 8 years ago...
Re:Ask HN: Did Facebook really do something wrong?
by arrythur on Tuesday March 20, 2018 @02:06PM
(#16630995)
I don't think it's fair to put the blame on the company because users are naive enough to think that candy is perfectly fine and healthy to eat. People aren't clueless to the idea that companies are selling their information and their behavior is constantly be tracked. Was it Facebook's responsibility to display to show "Are you REALLY SURE you want to agree to this?"
If it already warned them prior to taking the quiz and they still said yes, I don't understand how they shouldn't be held accountable for this too.
Re:Ask HN: Did Facebook really do something wrong?
by anilshanbhag on Tuesday March 20, 2018 @11:01AM
(#16629129)
I sort of agree. However note that when you pull data about friends, you don't get information about friends who have a higher privacy setting. Also, you can't get personal information about these friends through the api, however you could just web scrape it for many.
Re:Ask HN: Did Facebook really do something wrong?
by Lx1oG-AWb6h_ZG0 on Tuesday March 20, 2018 @11:17AM
(#16629272)
“Higher privacy setting” is kind of meaningless when Facebook seemingly goes out of its way to make the settings page hard to use. You pretty much need a PhD at this point to understand what all the toggles do, and even then it’s not enough because they automatically opt you in to any new feature. I remember at some point in the beginning when they kept resetting all my privacy settings because they refactored their features but didn’t preserve my old privacy setting... I just gave up at that point and stopped bothering.
Re:Ask HN: Did Facebook really do something wrong?
by danso on Tuesday March 20, 2018 @11:20AM
(#16629301)
When CA was operating, the API allowed access to data that you allowed your friends to see. Which is a pretty common data setting as most of us are on FB to share info with our friends: https://www.google.com/amp/s/techcrunch.com/2015/04/28/faceb...
Most users are non-technical and have no idea what this really means. To users it means “if you don’t approve you won’t be able to use this”, so they do. It’s like giving candy to someone who doesn’t understand nutritional facts — all they understand is it tastes good, not that it’s also bad for you. Facebook and other companies know and take advantage of this.
Also, it’s my understanding the Cambridge Analytica app also pulled data about friends of people who used it, so even if you hadn’t consented to the app you were still scraped. At the very least Facebook is at fault for having a system that allows personal information of non-consenting users to be taken by third-parties.