I feel like someone should also give Zuckerberg the memo that it's only a matter of time before an insider also goes rogue and abuses data access (edit: or otherwise; see below). Facebook fundamentally seems to trust itself way too much, and it worries me that it thinks the only threats are external entities... to me, this is another silently ticking time bomb.<p>EDIT: And don't forget that going rogue is just one scenario. Another is just a bigger attack surface: the more insiders have broad system access, the more credentials there are that can be phished by/leaked to/stolen by outsiders. Really, it would be completely missing the point of security to have arguments about <i>how exactly</i> insiders' credentials might get compromised.
Facebook's Board of Directors is a remarkable collection of silent-yet-complicit heavyweights:<p>-Marc Andreessen;<p>-Erskine Bowles ("President Emeritus of the University of North Carolina" and "White House Chief of Staff from 1996 to 1998");<p>-Ken Chenault ("Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of American Express Company");<p>-Susan Desmond-Hellmann ("Chief Executive Officer of The Gates Foundation" and former "Chancellor at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) from 2009 to 2014");<p>-Reed Hastings ("Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the board of directors of Netflix");<p>-Jan Koum ("co-founder and CEO of WhatsApp"); <i>and</i><p>-Peter Thiel [1].<p>Might not be a bad idea to pen a letter to their Board [2] with your state attorney general [3] and perhaps a U.S. Senator [4] copied.<p>[1] <a href="https://investor.fb.com/corporate-governance/default.aspx" rel="nofollow">https://investor.fb.com/corporate-governance/default.aspx</a><p>[2] <a href="https://investor.fb.com/corporate-governance/?section=contact" rel="nofollow">https://investor.fb.com/corporate-governance/?section=contac...</a><p>[3] <a href="http://naag.org/naag/attorneys-general/whos-my-ag.php" rel="nofollow">http://naag.org/naag/attorneys-general/whos-my-ag.php</a><p>[4] <a href="https://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm" rel="nofollow">https://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_...</a>
Can someone explain to me why the Cambridge Analytica story is making people so much angrier than the later revelation that Facebook was scraping call+text info? That seems to be the larger problem to me.<p>Somewhere at Facebook there is a team of people who wrote software to scrape, store and analyze the personal call+text data that users didn't explicitly mean to give to Facebook.<p>The data that Cambridge Analytica attained (from Facebook's API) doesn't seem surprising at all. Isn't the Cambridge Analytics headline really just, "Group doesn't follow website's terms of service from five years ago".
I respect Facebook and their engineering chops as much as the next person, they are truly world class programmers, but how the holy hell is everyone daydreaming that they don’t work for an advertising company?<p>You sell and use people’s data to get money: this is the business plan. Full stop.<p>Connecting people can definitely be lucrative and useful in other ways but facebooks particular implementation is impression based not action/outcome based.
Facebook is an enabler for individuals to successfully undermine our democratic mechanisms. It shouldn't feel nice to work for a company that has to explain itself in front of the government. The employees of Facebook should be aware of what monster they are building.
I hope anyone worth their weight in salt leaves Facebook as an employee and as a user. Employees should already feel shame since the election. They all know what Facebook is built on and what they've done and what they're doing.
>> One of [the Facebook employees] said he had avoided a trip home to see his family last weekend because he did not want to answer questions about the company he worked for.<p>Wow, some people/families are way too media-sensitive. It's just hypocrisy. Facebook is fundamentally the same company as it was last week, last year and 5 years ago. Everyone knew this, especially Facebook employees.<p>Facebook today is mostly made up of two kinds of employees; money-hungry sociopaths and hypocrites.
Seriously, I don’t have much respect, if any, for those working for Facebook...unless they’re working on and can implement drastic changes in how privacy, tracking and profiling are handled for the betterment of humankind. But Facebook being an advertising company that thrives on such details, I doubt if employees would have much say on these aspects or can do anything.<p>There ought to be a #quitfacebook topic to get many employees to quit. But I don’t believe that would get much traction due to the attractiveness of compensation/benefits and probably some challenging work. If someone working at Facebook believes that things will get better, I’d say they’re just deluding themselves. It cannot happen with the current management.<p>P.S.: Since this post is about Facebook, I’m not going to talk about other companies.
>"There was a feeling, said one of the people, that Facebook wanted to take aggressive steps to make sure it could regain user trust. And over all, he said, confidence was up."<p>I'm curious what might be the source of this regained "confidence."? The idea that this will all just blow ever in a few months?
I don’t really understand the outrage. Just what do you expect when you share things with hundreds of people (your FB friends) online? For it <i>not</i> to be used? The only reasonable assumption is that anyone and everyone can read whatever you share on FB.
Recommended read to add to this[1]. Employee was shocked with the amount of data they have access to without clear business need.<p>[1] Might be behind paywall:
<a href="https://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/mar/17/ex-facebook-employee-rips-mark-zuckerbergs-secret-/" rel="nofollow">https://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/mar/17/ex-facebook-e...</a>
On the plus side, it's good to know that Facebook has employees who care about being ethical citizens of the Internet ecosystem. Hopefully they can exert pressure on the upper ranks in some way to bring things under control. Facebook has the opportunity to be a force for good, while also accomplishing its business model, but it won't naturally lean in that direction.
Someone I know closely worked at Facebook in its heyday, but it has been a while since he left. I asked him around 2014 (he had just left the company) "So what do you think about the way Facebook handles privacy issues?" His response was not defensive at all. Rather, it was a very curious "FB is one of the most open cultures you can ever work in. Any employee can ask any question of anyone at the highest levels and expect to get a honest answer". My thought was "So you didn't have <i>anything</i> to ask questions about?". He was actually a pretty nice fellow, so I stopped asking anything else at that point.<p>But I remember thinking that it was a very funny, cult-member like response. And you can test this too. Ask your friends who work at FB and I bet you will get some pre-programmed response very similar to that.
"KW: Mark, can you give us a sense of the timing and cost for this? Like, the audits that you're talking about. Is there any sense of how quickly you could do it and what kind of cost it would be to the company?<p>I think it depends on what we find. But we're going to be investigating and reviewing <i>tens of thousands of apps from before 2014</i>, and assuming that there's some suspicious activity we're <i>probably</i> going to be doing a number of formal audits, so I think this is going to be pretty expensive. You know, the conversations we have been having internally on this is, <i>"Are there enough people who are trained auditors in the world to do the number of audits that we're going to need quickly?"</i> But I think this is going to cost many millions of dollars and take a number of months and hopefully not longer than that in order to get this fully complete."<p>Source:
<a href="https://www.recode.net/2018/3/22/17150814/transcript-interview-facebook-mark-zuckerberg-cambridge-analytica-controversy" rel="nofollow">https://www.recode.net/2018/3/22/17150814/transcript-intervi...</a>
Honestly, I am not very worried about rouge data analytic companies or Russian trolls on facebook.<p>I am worried that questionable semi-private German entity can block me (e.g. 30 days ban) on facebook at will. I am an US citizen and don't live in Germany. This is outrageous.
How fast can I kill all my karma by pointing out that the 3 of the top 4 articles on HN are some realization that Facebook does not give an ef about anybody's privacy?
Let's cut to the chase. Would you work for Facebook in your dream role, at industry leading pay.<p>The answer, for most of us is an emphatic 'yes'
These performances by CEOs before their employees to “calm” them reminds me of Jonestown or some other cult.<p>Everyone kind of knows the leaders are corrupt liars and false prophets. It’s all a scam. But they’ve invested so much of their lives and identities into the ideology, there’s not really any turning back. It’s like some “When Prophesy Fails” inflection point for the whole industry.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Prophecy_Fails" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Prophecy_Fails</a>
Are we going to talk about the fact that a whole bunch of these employees are former elected officials, or related to one? Which is part of why Zuckerberg isn’t actually concerned about the political fallout?