> Justin Osofsky – ‘Twitter launched Vine today which lets you shoot multiple short video segments to make one single, 6-second video. As part of their NUX, you can find friends via FB. Unless anyone raises objections, we will shut down their friends API access today. We’ve prepared reactive PR, and I will let Jana know our decision.
>Michael LeBeau – ‘He guys, as you know all the growth team is planning on shipping a permissions update on Android at the end of this month. They are going to include the ‘read call log’ permission, which will trigger the Android permissions dialog on update, requiring users to accept the update. They will then provide an in app opt in NUX for a feature that lets you continuously upload your SMS and call log history to Facebook to be used for improving things like PYMK, coefficient calculation, feed ranking etc. This is a pretty high risk thing to do from a PR perspective but it appears that the growth team will charge ahead and do it.’
>Yul Kwon - ‘The Growth team is now exploring a path where we only request Read Call Log permission, and hold off on requesting any other permissions for now. ‘Based on their initial testing, it seems this would allow us to upgrade users without subjecting them to an Android permissions dialog at all.
This is huge, doesn't this make google guilty as well?
>‘It would still be a breaking change, so users would have to click to upgrade, but no permissions dialog screen.
I worked at Facebook for 5 years on Workplace and Internal Tools. I am typically very critical of the company nowadays, but even so find the discussion here difficult to digest.
People are complex. They are more complex than an action, or even a group of actions. To take a person and alias them into being "good" or "bad" based on an action or a series of actions is to explicitly dehumanize them for the sake of making the world simpler. It is a poor model, and in a Dale-Carnegie-way it leads to poor outcomes, as you close the dialog with that person that allows you to change opinions and outcomes. It is the same with groups or companies: some parts of groups do good from some vantage point, some do bad.
I found myself inspired by a lot of what Facebook did. I loved working inside Infrastructure there, I was amazed by what people were innovating on every day. Projects like charitable causes have raised a lot for charity. I've seen the Are you Safe feature reduce so much stress during disasters. I keep meaningful dialogs going with friends I don't get to see often on FB and Instagram. It makes me really happy to see my friends thriving.
One of Napoleon's great gifts was in compartmentalizing pieces of his life. His tumultuous and frankly soul-crushing personal life (which affected him deeply) with Josephine never got in the way of his military victories. I wonder if that's a good model, up-to-a-point for people and groups. With people, by compartmentalizing some unsavory perspective someone has, you have the ability to change it later on through discussion.
... in groups: if everyone good leaves organizations because they're "bad," well, those organizations will just be filled with the worst of us soon enough.
Sometimes, even amidst the Brexit madness, I love our Parliament. Publishing and seizing documents like this is a move that proves politicians have the spine to look after people's interests. Time to get serious, act on this, and break up Facebook forever.
Quick textual analysis: in a pithy 623-word statement, Zuck manages to mention "shady", "sketchy" or "abusive apps" no less than 7 times. 8 times, if you include the time he mentioned Cambridge Analytica without using a sketchy adjective.
Notice the spin as Facebook the White Knight protecting the public from the evils of sketchy apps. Unclear how this will play out given public losing trust in Facebook itself.
[Reference]
1. "some developers built shady apps that abused people's data"
2. "to prevent abusive apps"
3. "a lot of sketchy apps -- like the quiz app that sold data to Cambridge Analytica"
4. "Some of the developers whose sketchy apps were kicked off our platform sued us"
5. "we were focusing on preventing abusive apps"
6. "mentioned above that we blocked a lot of sketchy apps"
7. "We've focused on preventing abusive apps for years"
8. "this was the change required to prevent the situation with Cambridge Analytica"
> Facebook used data provided by the Israeli analytics firm Onavo to determine which other mobile apps were being downloaded and used by the public. It then used this knowledge to decide which apps to acquire or otherwise treat as a threat
> there was evidence that Facebook's refusal to share data with some apps caused them to fail
Stuff like this should trigger the EU Commissioner for Competition to withdraw the authorization that “allowed” FB to acquire Whatsapp and should force a split between the two entities. A fine (no matter how big) will be seen by FB and its investors just as “cost of doing business”. Facebook in its current form needs to be split up back again.
I have no particular love for FB or what they've done with data, but these I don't understand why either of those points is particularly controversial or even unusual.
> Facebook used data provided by the Israeli analytics firm Onavo to determine which other mobile apps were being downloaded and used by the public. It then used this knowledge to decide which apps to acquire or otherwise treat as a threat
Checking out your competition is pretty standard among all businesses, as is buying out the ones you can't beat.
> there was evidence that Facebook's refusal to share data with some apps caused them to fail
Sharing or not sharing data with another app is likewise not an unusual decision. FB is not a public utility - they can not work with other apps for any reason, or no reason at all. And this is a particularly ironic thing to point out, considering that the main thrust is complaining that they _did_ share data with other apps. So it's bad if they do share data, but also bad if they don't?
I agree with the conclusion, but I don't think it should be done through the current antitrust framework.
Your first point and most of the others others may or may not be illegal. If they are legal, what the MPs need to do is their jobs.. make laws. But, most are not directly related to company size and/or market share.
Your second point does sound like a trust and I think you're right to link this to the WhatsApp sale.
But... Regardless of the FB/WhatsApp conclusion, that is a one-off that won't lead to much systemic change whether it's a fine or an order to de-merge.
What we need (imo) is a whole new approach to antitrust that doesn't hinge on a definition of monopoly.
Companies beyond a certain size should just be put under a different set of obligations than smaller ones. They should be assumed to have market power by merit of their size.
When it comes to gdpr and such, these need to be written differently for large companies. Basically, no more equality before the law for companies. What we get in return is rule of law.
A world in which companies are not allowed to selectively withhold proprietary data from some competitors, and form partnerships with others, is a world that suboptimally promotes innovation and economic growth.
Can you really blame FB for not providing API access to competitors?
If you want make Farmville with FB login go ahead, but if you try to make "FB 2.0" with FB Login and all friend connections preserved but keep all the ad revenue yourself obviously Facebook is gonna put their foot down.
That's 5 years revenue. $100 per user, sounds reasonable. Facebook can put in an easy "claim your $100" button on their site. Would that just be a "cost of doing business"?
Just to underline the obvious point the lawmaker is making, perhaps if Zuckerberg would show up to hearings that lawmakers invite him to, then he would be able to provide the context that Facebook says is missing.
Translation: if you turn down our "invitation", we'll misuse our legal power to seize your internal documents and then publish them to embarrass you.
Accurate?
To be clear, I'm not saying that they can't seize and investigate or even punish if the law was broken. That's the job of government. But this just seems like a petty attempt to embarrass. However, I'm American and haven't been following the story closely, so I may be missing context.
> "As you know all the growth team is planning on shipping a permissions update on Android at the end of this month. They are going to include the 'read call log' permission... This is a pretty high-risk thing to do from a PR perspective but it appears that the growth team will charge ahead and do it."
Meanwhile, at the Growth Team™ office: "I think implanting these chips into our customer's brain is high risk, but we're going to charge ahead anyway".
Exhibit 79 – linking data access spending on advertising at Facebook
Email from Konstantinos Papamiltidas [FB] to Ime Archibong [FB]
18 September 2013 – 10.06am
From email about slides prepared for talk to DevOps at 11am on 19 September 2013
'Key points: 1/ Find out what other apps like Refresh are out that we don't want to share
data with and figure out if they spend on NEKO. Communicate in one-go to all apps that
don't spend that those permission will be revoked. Communicate to the rest that they need
to spend on NEKO $250k a year to maintain access to the data.'
I think Facebook is terrible. So I don't use it. I have a choice.
These same MPs would likely howl in fury if their secret communications were stolen and published by an entity like Wikileaks (for example). Be careful what you wish for.
Of course the difference here is that one is "legal".
I don't think your choice to not use Facebook alters by very much the amount of data they collect about you. I think other steps are needed if that is your goal.
Let them howl. When they've been involved in shady stuff that's against the public interest, I will have no sympathy for them, just as I don't when FB is the "victim". I am glad they didn't decide to sit on it because of any fears about "I don't want this happening to me, so I won't snitch".
By the way, these emails were not obtained via hacking/phishing, so the Wikileaks comparison doesn't make any sense.
Exhibit 170 – Mark Zuckerberg discussing linking data to revenue
Mark Zuckerberg email – dated 7 October 2012
'I've been thinking about platform business model a lot this weekend…if we make it so devs
can generate revenue for us in different ways, then it makes it more acceptable for us to
charge them quite a bit more for using platform. The basic idea is that any other revenue
you generate for us earns you a credit towards whatever fees you own us for using plaform.
For most developers this would probably cover cost completely. So instead of every paying
us directly, they'd just use our payments or ads products. A basic model could be:
Login with Facebook is always free
Pushing content to Facebook is always free
Reading anything, including friends, costs a lot of money. Perhaps on the order of
$0.10/user each year.
For the money that you owe, you can cover it in any of the following ways:
Buys ads from us in neko or another system
Run our ads in your app or website (canvas apps already do this)
Use our payments
Sell your items in our Karma store.
Or if the revenue we get from those doesn't add up to more that the fees you owe us, then
you just pay us the fee directly.'
Seems pretty reasonable to me? Especially in the context of tossing ideas around.
Note that I don't read this as "let's get devs on board and then yank the rug out from under them later". Rather, it seems like they're trying to find a way to make it win/win, where devs can either pay for the platform directly, or use it for free if they can do so with a business model that helps Facebook make money elsewhere.
I have been involved with companies that have wanted to do things with Facebook non-personal data (eg. pages) and could never get anybody to talk. Some of these were little companies in the "flyover" states, one of these was pretty good sized in L.A.
When you see them playing favorites you see another thing that S.V. will struggle with for years.
One reason NYC is so important for finance is that people go have lunch and trade insider information without leaving a paper trail.
In the same way S.V. companies circle jerk each other giving each other special privileges, staging fake acquisitions so sons of investment bankers can make it look like they were successful startup founders, etc. Sometimes they even get a stooge to come in from a place like Saudi Arabia or Japan to buy them out so they can tell the people who put money in their fund that they made money. Those folks will lose a lot of their A.U.M. but they probably get paid off in some other way.
S.V. doesn't have any problems that wouldn't be solved by opening offices in the flyover states. But there are two things about those people.
Facebook has released a statement[1] that accuses Six4Three of "cherrypicked" document dump, that is mostly just denials with no supporting evidence. If only they hadn't undermined their own trustworthiness by, a few weeks ago, denying that senior executives were culpable in their relationship with Definers and then doing a news dump right before a major US holiday admitting that they had lied in their first response, then people might believe their unsupported assertions.
I worked for a company that was bought by blackberry and then split up. A large portion of our developers and engineers went to Facebook in Ireland and Seattle/California.
This is my personal experience, so I don't know how widespread this is, but I suspect its common.
I stayed friendly with many ex-coworkers on Facebook for awhile, and saw some attitudes move towards a harsh alt-leftist view and some went extremely violent. Anti-Isreal statements started popping up and some Jewish facebook engineers started to self-censor and talk in personal messages instead of posting, commenting to me if I was also seeing this attitude in posts.
Could just be how divided facebook made people, amplifying echo-chambers and enforcing views that "their side" is correct, but many of my old co-workers show a large political divide and a few just are wildly hardcore political in very violent tones. How this bleeds into their job, only time will tell.
I finally had to make facebook just for family and close friends and removed the app from my phone, and only use it in a web browser. I'm guilty of enjoying a good meme or political cartoon, but things are definitely more divided now. I would not doubt the documents reflect more political views seeping into their products.
The documents[0] contain market research done by Onavo[1]. This data may have been bought from them, and if so it was probably bought under a non-disclose agreement, as is typical for those arrangements (the reasoning being that Onavo can't sell the data more than once if it is released publicly). This could pose a problem for Facebook if Onavo decides that another release like this is likely to happen again. I'd be interested if anyone can weigh in on what the think the liability situation will be here.
Keep in mind this is all punishment by tptb for Facebook execs getting out of line and thinking they had a seat at the table. Not enough dues paid yet.
I think that's a bit harsh. You may think Facebook is terrible, but it's not so clear that everyone ought to agree with you.
If someone was working for organised crime, everyone should agree that's real social ill and should be discouraged. There's enough evidence on the table, over many years, about it.
The FB story is still unfolding. We're still in the process of hearing exactly what was done, and arguments about how good or bad it was.
Changing jobs is a somewhat big decision. Let people have a little think about things before you shame them for not making the leap when you - a guy with no skin in that game - decide FB is untouchable.
Yes, I do work at Facebook. I'm not going to get into some protracted argument about whether that makes me a bad person, or already was, but I'd like to give you something to think about.
Let's say, for the sake of argument, that we can neatly divide tech workers into good and bad. Likewise for companies. All categories are non-empty, and certain to remain so. What's the optimal assignment of workers to companies? Is it never beneficial for a good person to work at a bad company, perhaps making it less bad? Is it never harmful for a bad person to work at a good company, perhaps making it less good? Is it better to have all of the bad people concentrated at a few companies, or distributed throughout the industry?
Once you start thinking about it, I think you'll see that the Manichaean "entirely and immutably good or entirely and immutably bad" model just isn't very useful. Maybe we should talk about good vs. bad behaviors instead of demonizing (or for that matter idolizing) people - especially large groups of people in aggregate.
I don't see anything shocking or surprising here, that said I'm glad I don't have shares in facebook
Here's one finding
> Facebook used Onavo to conduct global surveys of the usage of mobile apps by customers,
> and apparently without their knowledge. They used this data to assess not just how many
> people had downloaded apps, but how often they used them. This knowledge helped them to
> decide which companies to acquire, and which to treat as a threat
Here's Onavo's wikipedia page last edited in October
> Facebook has leveraged Onavo's analytics platform to monitor the performance of its competitors,
> target companies for acquisition, and make other business decisions.
I believe 99.99...% of interactions on Facebook are positive. They are friends and family keeping in touch, posting life updates, organizing events, hobby/support communities etc.
Most ads are normal ads from legitimate businesses including a lot of small and local businesses who find it very valuable for reaching their customers and growing their business.
The recent rhetoric and news coverage acts as if Facebook is entirely full of fake news and echo chambers and political manipulation when the truth is while that stuff is happening it's a minuscule percentage of the billions of posts per day.
This is clearly intended for actual staff, not support position like building support and maintenance. They aren't employees, in fact they rarely are anywhere anymore. It's all outsourced to maintenance companies which are cheaper and not held to the same level of scrutiny for how they treat their employees.
It's garbage. Companies should employ them and pay a fair wage, but they don't.
Facebook and other companies are more like bacteria that infect the wound of digital illiteracy. I think it's time we start seeing that as a wound, not as an unavoidable or even desirable state of things. An information age requires digital literacy, otherwise you will have a priest caste, and that will abuse its power. I see no way around it, and criticizing priests for being bad priests to me enforces the idea that there even should be a priest caste.
I can't quite tell you what digital literacy is, but I know that responses along the line of "do you know how a modern microprocessor works in detail?" are silly, because many people can read and write without being historians or etymologists. And even people who can't read or write often can speak and understand a whole lot. Contrast that with some priests mumbling in Latin, with people being subject to things they aren't allowed to understand.
So maybe knowing what files are, what memory is, what a program is, having their own webspace and email, stuff like that would be a great start. And the start to that is to stop pretending that's unattainable, or that "people don't want that". If they knew what it entails in the long run, most of them would want that. And people do much more complicated things than running a website. People raise children, they drive cars, they raise and train dogs, they work in the garden, they remember all sorts of stuff about sports, and so on. Most jobs require a lot of complicated edge-case knowledge, too. So knowing what an URL or a file is, and maybe some HTML, is trivial compared to that.
If people could get 20% off on all T-Shirts for the rest of their life if they had their own website, most people on this planet would have a website before the end of the year. I exaggerate, but by how much I'm really not sure.
Let's not shame workers at facebook. If you do you have to shame anyone who works at any big tech form for the decisions of the leaders. Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle included.
[+] [-] Trill-I-Am|7 years ago|reply
https://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons-committees/cultu...
[+] [-] tpush|7 years ago|reply
> Facebook email 24 January 2013
> Justin Osofsky – ‘Twitter launched Vine today which lets you shoot multiple short video segments to make one single, 6-second video. As part of their NUX, you can find friends via FB. Unless anyone raises objections, we will shut down their friends API access today. We’ve prepared reactive PR, and I will let Jana know our decision.
> MZ – ‘Yup, go for it.’
[+] [-] fosco|7 years ago|reply
>Michael LeBeau – ‘He guys, as you know all the growth team is planning on shipping a permissions update on Android at the end of this month. They are going to include the ‘read call log’ permission, which will trigger the Android permissions dialog on update, requiring users to accept the update. They will then provide an in app opt in NUX for a feature that lets you continuously upload your SMS and call log history to Facebook to be used for improving things like PYMK, coefficient calculation, feed ranking etc. This is a pretty high risk thing to do from a PR perspective but it appears that the growth team will charge ahead and do it.’
>Yul Kwon - ‘The Growth team is now exploring a path where we only request Read Call Log permission, and hold off on requesting any other permissions for now. ‘Based on their initial testing, it seems this would allow us to upgrade users without subjecting them to an Android permissions dialog at all.
This is huge, doesn't this make google guilty as well?
>‘It would still be a breaking change, so users would have to click to upgrade, but no permissions dialog screen.
EDIT: formatting
[+] [-] bechrissed|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SirensOfTitan|7 years ago|reply
People are complex. They are more complex than an action, or even a group of actions. To take a person and alias them into being "good" or "bad" based on an action or a series of actions is to explicitly dehumanize them for the sake of making the world simpler. It is a poor model, and in a Dale-Carnegie-way it leads to poor outcomes, as you close the dialog with that person that allows you to change opinions and outcomes. It is the same with groups or companies: some parts of groups do good from some vantage point, some do bad.
I found myself inspired by a lot of what Facebook did. I loved working inside Infrastructure there, I was amazed by what people were innovating on every day. Projects like charitable causes have raised a lot for charity. I've seen the Are you Safe feature reduce so much stress during disasters. I keep meaningful dialogs going with friends I don't get to see often on FB and Instagram. It makes me really happy to see my friends thriving.
One of Napoleon's great gifts was in compartmentalizing pieces of his life. His tumultuous and frankly soul-crushing personal life (which affected him deeply) with Josephine never got in the way of his military victories. I wonder if that's a good model, up-to-a-point for people and groups. With people, by compartmentalizing some unsavory perspective someone has, you have the ability to change it later on through discussion.
... in groups: if everyone good leaves organizations because they're "bad," well, those organizations will just be filled with the worst of us soon enough.
[+] [-] hkt|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mindgam3|7 years ago|reply
Quick textual analysis: in a pithy 623-word statement, Zuck manages to mention "shady", "sketchy" or "abusive apps" no less than 7 times. 8 times, if you include the time he mentioned Cambridge Analytica without using a sketchy adjective.
Notice the spin as Facebook the White Knight protecting the public from the evils of sketchy apps. Unclear how this will play out given public losing trust in Facebook itself.
[Reference]
1. "some developers built shady apps that abused people's data"
2. "to prevent abusive apps"
3. "a lot of sketchy apps -- like the quiz app that sold data to Cambridge Analytica"
4. "Some of the developers whose sketchy apps were kicked off our platform sued us"
5. "we were focusing on preventing abusive apps"
6. "mentioned above that we blocked a lot of sketchy apps"
7. "We've focused on preventing abusive apps for years"
8. "this was the change required to prevent the situation with Cambridge Analytica"
[+] [-] misiti3780|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] carapace|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paganel|7 years ago|reply
> there was evidence that Facebook's refusal to share data with some apps caused them to fail
Stuff like this should trigger the EU Commissioner for Competition to withdraw the authorization that “allowed” FB to acquire Whatsapp and should force a split between the two entities. A fine (no matter how big) will be seen by FB and its investors just as “cost of doing business”. Facebook in its current form needs to be split up back again.
[+] [-] breischl|7 years ago|reply
> Facebook used data provided by the Israeli analytics firm Onavo to determine which other mobile apps were being downloaded and used by the public. It then used this knowledge to decide which apps to acquire or otherwise treat as a threat
Checking out your competition is pretty standard among all businesses, as is buying out the ones you can't beat.
> there was evidence that Facebook's refusal to share data with some apps caused them to fail
Sharing or not sharing data with another app is likewise not an unusual decision. FB is not a public utility - they can not work with other apps for any reason, or no reason at all. And this is a particularly ironic thing to point out, considering that the main thrust is complaining that they _did_ share data with other apps. So it's bad if they do share data, but also bad if they don't?
[+] [-] netcan|7 years ago|reply
Your first point and most of the others others may or may not be illegal. If they are legal, what the MPs need to do is their jobs.. make laws. But, most are not directly related to company size and/or market share.
Your second point does sound like a trust and I think you're right to link this to the WhatsApp sale.
But... Regardless of the FB/WhatsApp conclusion, that is a one-off that won't lead to much systemic change whether it's a fine or an order to de-merge.
What we need (imo) is a whole new approach to antitrust that doesn't hinge on a definition of monopoly.
Companies beyond a certain size should just be put under a different set of obligations than smaller ones. They should be assumed to have market power by merit of their size.
When it comes to gdpr and such, these need to be written differently for large companies. Basically, no more equality before the law for companies. What we get in return is rule of law.
[+] [-] btown|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danarmak|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spunker540|7 years ago|reply
If you want make Farmville with FB login go ahead, but if you try to make "FB 2.0" with FB Login and all friend connections preserved but keep all the ad revenue yourself obviously Facebook is gonna put their foot down.
[+] [-] mcintyre1994|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] isostatic|7 years ago|reply
$200 billion, and a review in 12 months time?
That's 5 years revenue. $100 per user, sounds reasonable. Facebook can put in an easy "claim your $100" button on their site. Would that just be a "cost of doing business"?
[+] [-] natch|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryanwaggoner|7 years ago|reply
Accurate?
To be clear, I'm not saying that they can't seize and investigate or even punish if the law was broken. That's the job of government. But this just seems like a petty attempt to embarrass. However, I'm American and haven't been following the story closely, so I may be missing context.
[+] [-] dgzl|7 years ago|reply
Meanwhile, at the Growth Team™ office: "I think implanting these chips into our customer's brain is high risk, but we're going to charge ahead anyway".
[+] [-] throwaway572091|7 years ago|reply
Exhibit 79 – linking data access spending on advertising at Facebook
Email from Konstantinos Papamiltidas [FB] to Ime Archibong [FB]
18 September 2013 – 10.06am From email about slides prepared for talk to DevOps at 11am on 19 September 2013
'Key points: 1/ Find out what other apps like Refresh are out that we don't want to share data with and figure out if they spend on NEKO. Communicate in one-go to all apps that don't spend that those permission will be revoked. Communicate to the rest that they need to spend on NEKO $250k a year to maintain access to the data.'
[+] [-] noarchy|7 years ago|reply
These same MPs would likely howl in fury if their secret communications were stolen and published by an entity like Wikileaks (for example). Be careful what you wish for.
Of course the difference here is that one is "legal".
[+] [-] sixothree|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rchaud|7 years ago|reply
By the way, these emails were not obtained via hacking/phishing, so the Wikileaks comparison doesn't make any sense.
[+] [-] throwaway572091|7 years ago|reply
Exhibit 170 – Mark Zuckerberg discussing linking data to revenue
Mark Zuckerberg email – dated 7 October 2012
'I've been thinking about platform business model a lot this weekend…if we make it so devs can generate revenue for us in different ways, then it makes it more acceptable for us to charge them quite a bit more for using platform. The basic idea is that any other revenue you generate for us earns you a credit towards whatever fees you own us for using plaform. For most developers this would probably cover cost completely. So instead of every paying us directly, they'd just use our payments or ads products. A basic model could be:
Login with Facebook is always free Pushing content to Facebook is always free Reading anything, including friends, costs a lot of money. Perhaps on the order of $0.10/user each year.
For the money that you owe, you can cover it in any of the following ways:
Buys ads from us in neko or another system Run our ads in your app or website (canvas apps already do this) Use our payments Sell your items in our Karma store.
Or if the revenue we get from those doesn't add up to more that the fees you owe us, then you just pay us the fee directly.'
[+] [-] ryanwaggoner|7 years ago|reply
Note that I don't read this as "let's get devs on board and then yank the rug out from under them later". Rather, it seems like they're trying to find a way to make it win/win, where devs can either pay for the platform directly, or use it for free if they can do so with a business model that helps Facebook make money elsewhere.
[+] [-] PaulHoule|7 years ago|reply
I have been involved with companies that have wanted to do things with Facebook non-personal data (eg. pages) and could never get anybody to talk. Some of these were little companies in the "flyover" states, one of these was pretty good sized in L.A.
When you see them playing favorites you see another thing that S.V. will struggle with for years.
One reason NYC is so important for finance is that people go have lunch and trade insider information without leaving a paper trail.
In the same way S.V. companies circle jerk each other giving each other special privileges, staging fake acquisitions so sons of investment bankers can make it look like they were successful startup founders, etc. Sometimes they even get a stooge to come in from a place like Saudi Arabia or Japan to buy them out so they can tell the people who put money in their fund that they made money. Those folks will lose a lot of their A.U.M. but they probably get paid off in some other way.
S.V. doesn't have any problems that wouldn't be solved by opening offices in the flyover states. But there are two things about those people.
They don't listen They won't listen
[+] [-] mandevil|7 years ago|reply
[1]: https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/12/response-to-six4three-d...
[+] [-] IronWolve|7 years ago|reply
This is my personal experience, so I don't know how widespread this is, but I suspect its common.
I stayed friendly with many ex-coworkers on Facebook for awhile, and saw some attitudes move towards a harsh alt-leftist view and some went extremely violent. Anti-Isreal statements started popping up and some Jewish facebook engineers started to self-censor and talk in personal messages instead of posting, commenting to me if I was also seeing this attitude in posts.
Could just be how divided facebook made people, amplifying echo-chambers and enforcing views that "their side" is correct, but many of my old co-workers show a large political divide and a few just are wildly hardcore political in very violent tones. How this bleeds into their job, only time will tell.
I finally had to make facebook just for family and close friends and removed the app from my phone, and only use it in a web browser. I'm guilty of enjoying a good meme or political cartoon, but things are definitely more divided now. I would not doubt the documents reflect more political views seeping into their products.
[+] [-] whatshisface|7 years ago|reply
[0]https://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons-committees/cultu...
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onavo
[+] [-] tareqak|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dschuetz|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bechrissed|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rajacombinator|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nakedrobot2|7 years ago|reply
The sooner facebook is controlled and broken up into pieces, the better. They are a massive net negative on civilization.
Do you work at Facebook? Shame on you.
[+] [-] lordnacho|7 years ago|reply
I think that's a bit harsh. You may think Facebook is terrible, but it's not so clear that everyone ought to agree with you.
If someone was working for organised crime, everyone should agree that's real social ill and should be discouraged. There's enough evidence on the table, over many years, about it.
The FB story is still unfolding. We're still in the process of hearing exactly what was done, and arguments about how good or bad it was.
Changing jobs is a somewhat big decision. Let people have a little think about things before you shame them for not making the leap when you - a guy with no skin in that game - decide FB is untouchable.
[+] [-] notacoward|7 years ago|reply
Let's say, for the sake of argument, that we can neatly divide tech workers into good and bad. Likewise for companies. All categories are non-empty, and certain to remain so. What's the optimal assignment of workers to companies? Is it never beneficial for a good person to work at a bad company, perhaps making it less bad? Is it never harmful for a bad person to work at a good company, perhaps making it less good? Is it better to have all of the bad people concentrated at a few companies, or distributed throughout the industry?
Once you start thinking about it, I think you'll see that the Manichaean "entirely and immutably good or entirely and immutably bad" model just isn't very useful. Maybe we should talk about good vs. bad behaviors instead of demonizing (or for that matter idolizing) people - especially large groups of people in aggregate.
[+] [-] isostatic|7 years ago|reply
Here's one finding
> Facebook used Onavo to conduct global surveys of the usage of mobile apps by customers, > and apparently without their knowledge. They used this data to assess not just how many > people had downloaded apps, but how often they used them. This knowledge helped them to > decide which companies to acquire, and which to treat as a threat
Here's Onavo's wikipedia page last edited in October
> Facebook has leveraged Onavo's analytics platform to monitor the performance of its competitors, > target companies for acquisition, and make other business decisions.
> Media outlets classify Onavo as spyware.
[+] [-] spunker540|7 years ago|reply
Most ads are normal ads from legitimate businesses including a lot of small and local businesses who find it very valuable for reaching their customers and growing their business.
The recent rhetoric and news coverage acts as if Facebook is entirely full of fake news and echo chambers and political manipulation when the truth is while that stuff is happening it's a minuscule percentage of the billions of posts per day.
[+] [-] fantunes|7 years ago|reply
Does it apply to the people using its products, softwares, services?
What's the ethical threshold for using reactjs for example in this scenario?
[+] [-] strict9|7 years ago|reply
It's garbage. Companies should employ them and pay a fair wage, but they don't.
[+] [-] PavlovsCat|7 years ago|reply
I can't quite tell you what digital literacy is, but I know that responses along the line of "do you know how a modern microprocessor works in detail?" are silly, because many people can read and write without being historians or etymologists. And even people who can't read or write often can speak and understand a whole lot. Contrast that with some priests mumbling in Latin, with people being subject to things they aren't allowed to understand.
So maybe knowing what files are, what memory is, what a program is, having their own webspace and email, stuff like that would be a great start. And the start to that is to stop pretending that's unattainable, or that "people don't want that". If they knew what it entails in the long run, most of them would want that. And people do much more complicated things than running a website. People raise children, they drive cars, they raise and train dogs, they work in the garden, they remember all sorts of stuff about sports, and so on. Most jobs require a lot of complicated edge-case knowledge, too. So knowing what an URL or a file is, and maybe some HTML, is trivial compared to that.
If people could get 20% off on all T-Shirts for the rest of their life if they had their own website, most people on this planet would have a website before the end of the year. I exaggerate, but by how much I'm really not sure.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] djohnston|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bytematic|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jyaif|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] na85|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] wolco|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrisseaton|7 years ago|reply
Everyone needs to work somewhere, you know, and not everyone has much of a choice about where.
No shame in putting food on the table for your family.