No, they did not. They adjusted the proportion of positive emotional expressions and negative emotional expressions in users' news feeds in order to test for an association between that proportion and emotional expressions in users' posts. There are serious problems with what they did, but "intentionally made hundreds of thousands of people fall into a depression" is late-Slashdot style trolling.
One does not grasp the true harm caused by unethical experiments by reading only the documented (published or non-published) scientific results. Two extreme examples which I am by no means comparing to that of Facebook, but rather as canonical examples of unethical science, include the Tuskegee experiments and Nazi experimentation. Reading only the published results of these experiments does not convey the horrific harm that actually occurred. The same principle applies to referring towards Facebook's scientific data as an argument that these experiements were not unethical. The scientific results only serve to shroud and conceal the actual activity which occurred in the production of these results.
(edited for clarity)
Concrete example: I am in the process of trying to hire people right now. I'm not sure what the exact best way to do that is, so I vary how I interview over time and see how well it seems to work. I record what happens in a spreadsheet, and then later on I look at the 'data' to make some judgments.
Am I experimenting on my interviewees? Am I potentially harming them?
Well certainly if I ask question A in one interview, and question A' in another, and question A' is harder and I don't pass that person, then one might be tempted to argue that maybe that person would've done better on question A; therefore, I've harmed someone by 'experimenting' and making it harder for them to get a job. Rejecting someone can certainly make them depressed.
In principle this is no different from A/B testing an interview process, using real live humans no less.
So do I personally have an ethical obligation to disclose to everyone I interview that I am conducting human experimentation on them? Or is the only difference in power and scale—I am just one person, but Facebook can A/B test on millions of people at once?
> In principle this is no different from A/B testing an interview process, using real live humans no less.
> So do I personally have an ethical obligation to disclose to everyone I interview that I am conducting human experimentation on them? Or is the only difference in power and scale—I am just one person, but Facebook can A/B test on millions of people at once?
Generally, when interviewing, we ask the same questions of each applicant. We adjust the questions from A to A' as positions are hired, and pools are assembled, but for a specific job, each candidate gets the same questions.
It would have to be different for open recruitment not tied to a specific job, but I haven't had to do that.
Four years ago, having talked to some of the same lawyers about the same topic, none of us had any thought that it was a grey area. An a priori interpretation of the law was pretty clear: a more liberal position was (and is) perfectly legal. But the most anxious minds tend to prevail in these matters.
That's a terrific idea.
Of course, which is why the conversation continues. If it was settled at the beginning without nuance, it would be defined in black and white.
I'm not sure how your reply relates, though, since I was merely imploring GP to demonstrate any awareness of the state of research rather than jumping in with a lazy question-comment.
Elsewhere this is expressed by the slogan, "I'm 12 years old and what is this?"
FB - A little negative = meh
FB - More negative = major downer
FB - Totally negative = woah, look at the sorry state they are in now.
Cake - A little laxative = mmm this cake is special somehow
Cake - More laxative = nice cake, special, where is the roll of extra TP?
Cake - Dump it in = people home for days, the shits.
In both cases, not telling them is the ethics problem.
Basically the public trust boils down to people expecting others not to harm them. Depression can become chronic. The shits could damage someone requiring medical help.
Both are clear risks people would very likely avoid, if they knew.
FB - We want to run a depression test. Plz volunteer your feed and see if you get depressed.
Cake - We have a laxative that tastes great, but you might get the shits, plz have some cake.
See the problem?
E.g.: "Starting next week, we'll try to affect your mood as part of an experiment". Or "the new version of our product purposefully tries to depress you a bit" followed by "we didn't like the results of it so we've changed it back".
And, where did the Nazis publish, again?
We certainly need people to responsibly interpret peer-reviewed literature for lay audiences. Responsibly.
Your citations were published ~50 years after the Tuskegee exeripments. A proper analogy would be to compare your citations to the ethical condemntations of Facebook made 50 years from now.
>And, where did the Nazis publish, again?
The Nazis published in all of the front-and-center, mainstream publications after they were brought to the United States under Operation Paperclip (among other operations).
When the findings are published has no bearing on the ethics of the experiments. Ironically, the half century lead time does not impinge on the impact, as much as the chronology strengthens the impact.
I can't answer that as it is generally agreed that this data should not be readily available, however Nazi experimentation was cited for decades, and much has been written over the ethics of this: http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-ethics-of-using-medi...
Since it is likely unavoidable that referring to Nazis will lead to accusations of Godwining, I have edited my above post to hopefully make this distinction extremely clear.
If you refuse to even discuss the nazis and what they did, especially in directly applicable cases like this, how the hell can we ever hope to not repeat their mistakes.
Off topic but that ^^^ is exactly why, after 20 years, I finally gave up on Slashdot and then stumbled across HN and couldn't be happier. I have, in recent times, gone back for a visit just to see what it's like and... realised my decision to leave Slashdot was made probably 10 years later than it should have been.
“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
“That’s the display department.”
“With a flashlight.”
“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'.”
Breach of contract opens you up to civil liability. Having this agreement creates disincentives that wouldn't otherwise exist.
"Prevent" doesn't mean to make something physically impossible or remove the ability to choose. Police can prevent drunken driving by announcing they will have DUI checkpoints on New Year's Eve. It doesn't make it physically impossible to drink and drive, but if people choose not to because they want to avoid the consequences, some drunk driving has been prevented.
How much restitution am I entitled to for an ambiguous violation of an amorphous concept like privacy? And how much is Facebook entitled to from a partner who (might have) violated that agreement, causing non-measurable harm to me?
This is getting a little conspiratorial: contracts are very real, and though I didn't see ours and was not privy to any special user data we might have received, we are very careful about that kind of stuff and liability is a huge, huge deal.
A contract stipulating that data has to be protected in a certain manner is a reasonable protection, depending on the sensitivity of the data.
It's very strange that you'd throw your hands up and say, 'well FACEBOOK didn't do it so you're out of luck.' Facebook did do it by not regulating there third party agreements.
Well, it’s only prevention if it succeeds.... otherwise it’s just a failed attempt.
The real insanity is with the users. FB did the most obvious thing. The user-base somehow magically thought they were providing all those free services because they were nice guys.
It was obvious to anyone since the beginning that FB was a clearinghouse for private data trading. How else could the model remotely work?
I tire of this argument that users should obviously know they are trading their personal information in return for access to a service. They don't know this. It's obvious in a conversation with any (even lightly) tech-illiterate person that nothing about how the modern internet economy works is obvious.
Think back to the emergence of the web as a truly popular medium. There was no Google Analytics, no FB tracking buttons that follow you around on every web site you visit (that one is particularly egregious - FB users are tracked even when they aren't on facebook.com, and we expect users to just know this?), just advertisers buying a banner ad slot from the owner of a web site. Back then social networking was, what, AIM? That was free and they didn't harvest user info for it. The change has been gradual, and the idea that users should have kept up with every development that led us to where we are today is preposterous.
When this has happened in the past the answer has been clear: knowledgable people come together to pass laws that benefit individual citizens who have neither the knowledge nor time to learn.
I consider myself relatively tech savvy, but when - thanks to the GDPR - that hive of scum and tracking that underpins the modern internet was revealed I was really shocked.
Clicking one of those "manage your cookies" links is a truly enlightening experience.
How should Average Q User even begin to grasp the implications of this fucking datasucking hydra?
I was glad having "deleted" my Facebook account some 4 years ago.
Man, I didn't no 10% of the shit that's really going on.
Being party to conversations with C-level sociopaths is what really brings it home.
One example: One employer railed at the injustice (loss of profit) of not being able to share the millions of patient's medical records we'd accumulated with Big Pharma's marketing machine. This employer spent considerable effort trying to figure out how to work around the law (eg plausibly deniable anonymization).
FB may have started out as an invite only thing for technically savvy(ish) college kids, but those days were completely over the minute they got their app so tightly integrated with iOS and Android. So ... circa 2010 maybe?
FBs target audience now is literally the same as or even wider than television. We don't expect granny to understand the economics of her cable box.
She's used to paying the cable bill, seeing a few ads and feeling free to use whatever is on offer. Because she paid for it.
For instance the guide channel is not "free" from her perspective, and she has no expectation that she should need to be suspicious that for insance, the guide channel is tracking her viewing habits and customizing the programming on offer so as to massively sway public opinion and elections.
Average US consumers are used to this model, whether or not the fine print spells out something else. They're going to think "I paid my cell phone bill, therefore I am paying for facebook" ... the question never even arises.
> They're going to think "I paid my cell phone bill, therefore I am paying for facebook" ... the question never even arises.
Your example switches from "I pay <somebody> that enables access to <somebody else>" and you don't even have to go that far.
The guide channel is not tracking her viewing habits, but her cable box certainly is. The industry term is Addressable Media[1], and if she has any modern cable box from any major provider then she's being tracked and targeted for targeted ads just as highly as Facebook would be, despite her paying her cable company for the privilege of watching it. And while it's not customizing the programming itself that she watches, it is customizing the ads she's seeing. It's effectively the same as Facebook, where the she's using whatever is on offer and being subtly influenced by highly targeted excerpts being interspersed into it.
Ever experience weird glitches for commercials that start and end almost immediately, or randomly lack sound or any number of weird quirks that would make you think "man, someone just spent a lot of money for a messed up commercial spot, how did that get passed QA/QC?!"... chances are that was just a hiccup for you specifically as your cable box dynamically inserted an ad, and not hardcoded as part of the wider broadcast.
Cell phones are the same. Even though you're paying the cell company for network access, they're also double dipping by selling targeted audience capabilities based on their data of you based on ads that are seen while using their network.
[1] https://martechtoday.com/addressable-tv-state-cross-device-a...
In fact, so much so that it's been hard to get people to realize that the recent issues haven't been related to ads at all. Facebook itself stills seems to be trying to blur the lines between data collection and advertisement.
To me there's nothing wrong with ads. Even content-targeted ads (if I'm reading about gardening then show me an ad for potting soil or gloves). But the push towards creating profiles that follow you around to target ads to you on multiple platforms based on your previous behavior is just creepy and dangerous (when political ads and control over the data comes into play).
That’s what genuinely baffles me. If I were a manager of a gardening company and I wanted to do targeted advertising I would just buy space in gardening themed publications. The idea of showing people my ads while they’re on other websites and not in a gardening mood anyway makes literally no sense. All this tracking and profiling ads zero value for the ad buyers, so why are they paying for it?
You're extrapolating based on your own actions rather than measuring the result. The results say that if you show gardening gloves to enough people at random, you'll eventually get some sales. Everything else is just narrowing down "random" a little bit.
Brand awareness/clout. A reminder that you need or want that thing.
And even if I like something seeing it repeatedly online just annoys me more than it inspires me to buy their stuff. I think they'd get more bang for their buck by having social media personalities that align with their target market push their product (think: Nike).
If people are likely to be consumers of those things then they'll probably digest media related to those things or other media in the same demographic. This is classic marketing and it doesn't require the level of privacy abuse that Facebook has been trying to justify.
Perhaps someone was also mining the AIM data, but that would never have occurred to me to do. I doubt the tools to analyze and monetize it existed yet in any case. I'm not even sure the tools existed to monetize a social network when Facebook started.
It's a kind of weird conceptual leap to be honest, when compared to thinking about just selling ad space or perhaps targeting it based on people's interests.
Realistically, I think we have three choices:
- We can't have nice things.
- Rampant exploitation of individuals, due to vast asymmetry of information.
- Regulation, with its costs and inefficiencies.
But I think there's very little precedent of real accountability deriving from collective consumer action, even in cases of overt abuse (think Wells Fargo).
But in a society where citizens are represented by elected officials, regulations are "citizen" action. Regulations should not be viewed as any less legitimate than consumer action, they are just enacted through a proxy mechanism, aka elected officials.
This whole bifurcation of regulation vs consumer boycott, and the subsequent push to delegitimize regulation seems pretty artificial, and more importantly, a huge benefit to people looking to avoid any sort of boundaries on their actions.
a) either understand what you are clicking on or b) just refuse to click on it
what is unrealistic is to expect society to babysit you every single time a moderately complex choice is presented to you.
This is a tragedy of the commons that government regulation has been the best solution for so far
Do you read the entirety of every twenty page EULA before using a new app?
In the case of legal documents -
1) the base scenario itself is terrible - attempts to make credit card terms easier to read have resulted in a huge increase in the amount of text required to read it.
2) leaving the base case aside - the moment a company or individual decides that they can get away with preying on customers, sensible options no longer work- no normal person is going to beat the legal team.
Your position is a theoretically sound position but it does not survive contact with very common real world scenarios.
So that point may need to be re-thought.
It's both too early and hard to say that for sure. I would suspect it's had an impact on FB's long term trend line, especially with younger people.
Anecdotally, much of my social network has significantly decreased their Facebook use if status updates are anything to go by. They may be on the site as much as before, but they're not really engaging with it as actively as they used to.
Granted, that could just be a normal fall-off since the 2016 Presidential Election season was a "special" time. But I've noticed even with my cousins abroad they've mostly transitioned fully to WhatsApp. Sure, that is also a Facebook joint, but it sends a real signal to Facebook as to what the market values in a social media platform, and it seems it's not the Facebook model.
I've managed to get my friends and family over to other channel so we are now almost 100% Facebook free except for a few log in with Facebook and the occasional Instagram (also declining I think).
(Disclaimer: I trust WhatsApps crypto since a number of cryptographers have audited it but I still do not want them to have my metadata. I mean, seriously: the crypto can be unbreakable but why do we think Facebook bought WhatsApp and made it free?)
The big impediment left has been Facebook's function as a social space to share photos with all and sundry. If not for it being the place to post photos of kids, weddings, vacations, etc. I don't think people would be spending much time on it. Seeing pictures of their nephews, nieces, kids, and grandkids on there is definitely what keeps the old people plugged in.
There really isn't another service that fills the niche either. Instagram is geared towards individual photos rather than albums or chronicles of events. Flickr kind of did, but it's basically dead now and its narrow focus on photography alone wound up gearing it towards pro or hobbyist photographers and didn't get much buy in from everyday users.
Facebook also seems to be something of a default space to host a bulletin board or community forum. Next-door has been trying to muscle in on that territory but it's been plagued by problems with racist usage patterns. Those would probably go away if it was more common, but it's created some real issues with optics. Also, I have no idea what their security practices are like so who knows if it's an improvement.
This is just hindsight talking. It was hardly obvious from the beginning because it was hardly obvious how big the market for granular private data was going to be.
Facebook, in the beginning, was functionally just a stripped down personal page with a status update feature analogous to AIM. It didn't really ask for any information that you wouldn't have gleaned from a 10 minute conversation with a person and almost everything it got about you had to be volunteered (e.g. favorite music, movies, etc.)
The News Feed didn't get introduced until a few years in and it prompted massive outcry from Facebook users for how invasive it seemed, but even then most people assumed the problem was going to be that it violated some implicit social consensus where people should have to go looking for information about you, not have it sent to them in an notification blast. In other words: "stalking should be hard."
The ad-supported business model at the time didn't rely so heavily on micro-targeting by "revealed preferences," it was assumed they would target based on the declared preferences that you gave them (e.g. favorite movies, music, etc.) The idea that Facebook (or even data analytics as a field) would eventually become sophisticated enough to devour the news media in general and tailor you a bespoke reality based on your implied tendencies and personal weaknesses to manipulate you was, at best, fodder for some speculative cyberpunk fiction in the early days. In fact, Facebook didn't really even make forays into being a news clearinghouse/media aggregator until the mid 2000s when "going viral" became the hot trend in media, which is what ultimately led to the media world putting themselves over a barrel to social media companies by myopically chasing traffic in lieu of building an audience.
By the time I deleted my facebook, no one even saw my goodbye post on their "feed." It was a different internet than the one on which I naively signed up. I, and a host of others, enabled that new internet. I have much less interest in this one.
The day FB was announced was the day I said “this is a bad idea.”
I and many others on HN have NEVER made a FB account, and my life seems to generally have been better for it.
But it was obvious then, and it is obvious now.
Matter of fact it frankly looks even worse today, since there really seems to be no solution, and the granularity of tools and regulation is too coarse to deal with this scenario.
The only real option I’ve seen seems to be to drop off the internet.
The "day FB was announced" it was exclusive to Harvard students and was just a cleaner version of MySpace and Friendster. It's unlikely you would have had strong opinions about Facebook, in particular, that you didn't also extend to those two, as well as AOL and sites like Digg.
And people clearly saw and pointed out the issues with privacy back then.
I had few issues with Aol, but it was still a simple service play - and had/has little at all in common with Facebook.
DIGG was never at the same scale or range - and from what I know it never depended on your real life profile as I recall.
Not pure semantics. It is important to focus on what you're actually talking about when you say "the beginning." Facebook has evolved over time, both in its service as well as its business model. So when you talk about "the beginning" it's important to know the beginning of what?
>DIGG was never at the same scale or range - and from what I know it never depended on your real life profile as I recall.
Nothing was ever at the same scale or range as Facebook. If they were, they'd have been as much of a threat as Facebook is now. That's kind of the point. A lot of the LiveJournal, Xanga, MySpace, etc. stuff from back then was all groping towards a functioning business model and it was Facebook's news feed that actually created one.
But even in the early stages the News Feed wasn't really about extracting data, just about creating a UI paradigm that made it easy to shove native advertising in your face. What really made the big data analytics game take off was when SEO and viral marketing started getting big, which wasn't really on Facebook's radar in the early days.
Advertising is different from Ad Tech. Ad Tech is about more than just Facebook's collection. People couldn't really have predicted the extent to which the media industry (new and old) was going to go whole hog into Facebook's platform. It has been their complicity that elevates Facebook's data collection from being "Wow The Facebook is nosy and annoying" to "Wow Facebook is a threat to the public sphere."
It was obviously privacy invasive and the harm type any of those systems could do was obvious. They didn’t have a business model when they started out - but that’s only because they had the runway to ignore it. Otherwise there was an obvious way they were going to make money and that was Ads. Powered by data harvested about you.
I mean that’s the whole point of the site? What else is it going to do?
This is facebooks business model - it’s also the business model for many other sites. And yes those other sites are also a problem.
Hey, I’m not stating an opinion, I’m stating a fact.
I don’t have a Facebook account and always viewed it as a threat to privacy. I’m not the only one.
All that’s happening now is one of many adversarial uses of this information is being made known to people who Don’t visit slashdot and hacker news.
Facebook was going to use your personal information to make money for itself. It was going to be harmful to you.
This has happened.
The business model for other parts of the web is the same. Those parts are going to cause similar issues but at smaller scales.
Google has the same model, but takes data privacy more seriously than Facebook does. It's disingenuous to conflate any data harvesting with the most unscrupulous and casino-inspired iterations of it.
Arguably, the micro-targeting model of advertising Facebook goes after is more faddish than effective anyway. Google uses the data analytics as much to build more salable products as it does to serve advertising, so the volume of collection serves some kind of function. But facebook's actual business need for most of its data is dubious at best.
>Facebook was going to use your personal information to make money for itself. It was going to be harmful to you.
It's not really the use of personal information that's the harm though. It's the addiction mechanisms they leverage to make you keep giving them personal information and the lack of protections or responsibility they put around it. It's not at all "obvious" that it's going to be harmful to anyone, and arguably it's not even harmful to anyone individually so much as harmful to society and the body politic generally. You can't have those problems at "smaller scales" because those problems don't exist at small scales, they're an emergent property of scale itself.
Further google does far too much as it is. I don’t want my emails parsed to figure out what ads to present, or my uploaded files.
The addiction mechanisms are a separate class of harm, and I recognize them from when games, far more than social media. They came much later, and were not part of business models back when Facebook etc. were created.
The misuse of personal data to harm people and privacy is a known idea. For example, they were warned about back in the day by people such as Huxley or Orwell.
Either way, this is an odd conversation.
These harms were clear and known.
If you are saying You didn’t see it, then that’s fine many others didn’t see it or believe it.
If you are saying I couldn’t see it, well I have long ago acted on what I saw and believed and oppose Facebook and other similarly privacy invading systems. I’m not happy with the old British surveillance state from the 90s - and I’m neither British nor American.
If you are saying the specific detailed break down of the harm to be caused was not known- sure. I cannot tell you which incident will finally trigger X event but I can predict that you won’t have autonomous cars, (since I see people driving in the wrong lane in the opposite direction of traffic very often where I live)
And a final point - the addiction mechanisms are just being cross pollinated from other systems, just like AB testing and other research helps ensure people stay on web pages.
Your deeper problem is that advertising, once a tool, has now become and end in and of itself.
If something's too good to be true it's practically always neither good nor true.
The problem is that via apps you get the user info directly. And their friends' info too. That's how Tinder can show how many mutual friends you and the profile you're looking at have. That sounds nice, but as the data left FB's servers, there's no way that users can control what happens with it.
Those ads are targetable by categories determined from private data, but Facebook doesn't give anyone else the data, that's literally why people would purchase ads through their exchange and not through another exchange.
Google has the same model, they don't sell your data, they use your data to match you with advertisers through a fairly opaque interface that lets advertisers reach the categories of people they want to reach, without revealing the data to allowed them to put someone in that category.
Kind of like how your Mom will set you up on a blind date based on what she knows about what both parties want, but doesn't disclose all your information because she doesn't want anyone to be upset with her.
That's interesting. Do you have a link to source?
However, the claim that they made "hundreds of thousands of people fall into a depression" is pretty exaggerated - FB demonstrated it could influence the mood of users via changes to the algorithm, but the overall effect size was small (Cohen's d = 0.001).
I am very critical of FB and this type of research, but don't know if anyone became depressed over the experiment. It's possible, but wasn't demonstrated.
She was being dry witted about tatting stuff, not recommending human testing.
I never gave my consent to McDonald's for putting up a billboard or changing their menu or their recipe.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/29/facebook-...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/06/28/facebook...
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/technology/facebook-tinke...
https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/scicurious/main-result-face...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2014/07/0...
Here's a news article about it (probably).
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/oct/02/facebook-...
Yes but just two sentences later in the post...
> And our partnership and engineering teams approved the Facebook experiences these companies built.
They're saying they inspected these apps. You jumped to "literally insane" so fast there.
Here's the situation. The user has purchased a device (such as a smart phone) from a device manufacturer (such as Apple). The device runs an operating system (iOS) and a whole boatload of software, including telecommunications equipment necessary to operate cellular radios, the higher level OS, then user-installed applications and such.
If you don't trust the device manufacturer, then that's the ball game. If you assume that the device manufacturer is untrustworthy, then you should assume that it can steal the user's data just as easily from a web browser (when the user visits facebook.com) as it can from a native application.
When the user decides to sign into Facebook (or any website or application) from their device - the manufacturer-supplied device - the user is trusting the manufacturer with their data. Whether the application is delivered through a web browser, or is a so-called 'native' app installed through an app store, doesn't substantially change the trust relationship between Facebook and the manufacturer. If you believe the manufacturer is doing nefarious things, then you should assume the manufacturer will install a spyware web browser that siphons data out of every web page that you visit. Partnering with the device manufacturer to allow them to distribute a Facebook-branded mobile app does not substantially grant them more trust than they would have already.
Why is this, though? How is it different from any other legal agreements?
Suppose I tell you a secret. You promise only to share it with others who will keep it a secret. You share my secret with Bob. Bob promises he won't share my secret. Bob shares my secret.
You broke your promise. You tried not to break it. But break it you did.
Then you face the legal consequences for doing so. Thats what prevents people from breaking them in first place. Unless you are arguing that all legal contracts are useless because they can be broken.
I am not asking about the logistics of leaking. Yes ofcourse its physically possible, I am asking why the consequences of breaking a contract don't matter in this specific case.
Technically speaking, no contract was broken. When users signed up for Facebook, they clicked a button pursuant to which Facebook indemnified itself from everything under the sun. (It is unclear how enforceable those terms are. EULAs, for example, aren't very enforceable in the U.S. [1].)
Facebook did agree not to do these things with the FTC. (It also made some noises to the Congress, but I don't believe those were under oath.) And there are a lot of things it may have done which are illegal. But enforcing the law and consent decrees requires prosecutors to prosecute. We're waiting for that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-user_license_agreement#Enf...
I am referring to this
> These partners signed agreements
not users.
The difference would be ignored if it hadn't been replicated in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. People are reasonably concerned about how much data Facebook is giving these third parties and how diligently it's ensuring they aren't retaining it.
These concerns are heightened by the existence of these agreements contradicting with (a) the FTC consent decree and (b) Zuckerberg's statement to Congress. It may also be material in the ongoing biometrics lawsuit in Illinois.
That sure sounds like a misrepresentation of what happened here. From the article: "These partners signed agreements that prevented people’s Facebook information from being used for any other purpose than to recreate Facebook-like experiences."
I don't think I would represent facebook as "paying" google with user's data just because Chrome has access to user data when a user visits the facebook website.
Contracts motivate you to adhere to some previously-agreed-upon behavior, and the degree to which they motivate you depends on how much the penalty actually penalizes you. In the case of large corporations, seemingly big penalties are often actually negligible in comparison, with the resulting motivation to adhere to the contract being negligible as well. That is one important reason why it is deliberately misleading to use the word "preventing" in the context in which Facebook uses it here. The other one is simply that it's factually wrong, even regardless of the size of the penalty.
How do you show any actual damages?
Data watermarks, small changes (little tiny bits) that allows to track the leaks.
Also audit logs, you know who has what, etc. The topic has been hotly discussed with GDPR as the leaks have rather harsh consequences (beside being dragged through the mud, erm newspapers).
All that presumably is figured out before signing a agreement. Thats the whole point of an agreement vs pinky promise.
The burden is on the plaintiff to prove FB violated the agreement, that violation caused damage, and the value of that damage. The EULA doesn't say the user gets a pay out if FB admits (or is obviously caught) non-compliance with the agreement.
Do you think that Facebook's data is more important than the information banks/health providers share and should not be shared even if proper contracts for its use are in place?
Companies share sensitive information all the time, this is not a new thing, contracts are real things, breach of contracts is a big deal, consequences can be huge.
Both FB and most of the entities with whom they would have shared data are huge, and there'd be way to much risk in not being smart with the data.
So whats the point of any legal agreement then?
Consider also: traffic laws. The punishments make most people obey them. There are still drunks, malicious drivers, just plain bad drivers, and people doing U-turns on the highway when they think no cops are around.
If you want an assurance that you won’t be hit by one of these, you have to just avoid traffic altogether.
If you give someone else an assurance that e.g. their child will never be hit by a car, then you have to never take said child on the road.
Facebook gave an assurance that our data would never cross paths with a bad actor. The only way to do that is to never take the data to where the bad actors might be.
Don't downvote for asking me this, asking in good faith. Where did they give that assurance?
> "Signed agreements do not prevent your information from being used in other ways."
But I guess you now understand why contracts do not prevent it.
I was asking why consequences of breach of agreement is not a strong enough deterrent in this case .
What is your definition of "prevent", like physically stop from doing it?
Once you understand the distinction there, you will understand the answer to your question.
That doesn't help the users much, though.
Your tone is as if to imply that nobody but the company benefits from making 'huge sums of money'. There are employees, vendors (selling goods and services), stockholders (retirees?), governments (taxes) and so on. Why the idea that earning money is somehow not the purpose of a company? It is at the core.
Metaphor is literally dead.
> they consent to having psychological experiments performed on them with no further notice
Sounds like the third parties delivered!
The difference between Facebook and a casino is more about the physical limitations of their storefronts than business models.
They can make regulations on social networks that are infeasible to comply with for any company not making 10s of billions of dollars a year, effectively cementing facebook as the only legal social network. Whether you consider that a harm or not is up to you.
I complain about GDPR because it buttressed Facebook's position [1].
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-europes-new-privacy-rules-f...
Not Facebook scale, apparently.
> These partners signed agreements that prevented people’s Facebook information from being used for any other purpose than to recreate Facebook-like experiences.
That sentence does not make any sense. Signed agreements do not prevent your information from being used in other ways. That's insane, literally.
> Contrary to claims by the New York Times, friends’ information, like photos, was only accessible on devices when people made a decision to share their information with those friends.
In the past, Facebook Legal has stated that once a Facebook user has signed up, they consent to having psychological experiments performed on them with no further notice or direct consent. Facebook has acted on this and intentionally made hundreds of thousands of people fall into a depression, just to see if they could, and then they bragged about it. The sentence quoted above actually means "friends’ information, like photos, was only accessible [whenever and however we wanted to]" as Facebook considers those people to have already "made a decision to share their information with those friends" when they signed up.