
A Q&A with Mark Zuckerberg About Data Privacy - username223
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/21/technology/mark-zuckerberg-q-and-a.html
======
Khaine
What does Zuckerberg know about user's privacy. He does not believe in the
concept[1][2].

I remember when this chart[3] first made the rounds. If this didn't convince
people that facebook is evil. I don't know what will

[1]
[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/jan/11/facebook-...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/jan/11/facebook-
privacy)

[2] [https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/21/facebook-ceo-mark-
zuckerberg...](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/21/facebook-ceo-mark-zuckerbergs-
statements-on-privacy-2003-2018.html)

[3] [http://mattmckeon.com/facebook-privacy/](http://mattmckeon.com/facebook-
privacy/)

~~~
nkkollaw
IMO you are grossily exagerating what he's saying to prove your point.

He's marely saying that compared to when social media didn't exist, it was
unthinkable to have people exposing others to what they were doing and with
whom, what they were eating and how it looked, etc.

He's absolutely right. The social norm HAS changed.

Now, do I think it's good to use user data like Facebook does? Well, it's a
business. It might not be ethical, but are companies that sell cigarettes,
alcohol, guns, etc. any better (or potentially any better)?

We need to stop complaining about how evil Facebook is, and start talking
about personal responsibility. People need to understand what they're doing,
it's not Facebook's fault if people don't know their data will be used for
advertising, like it's not a tobacco's manufacture's fault if the user doesn't
know cigarettes give you cancer.

You don't like how they use your data? Stop using Facebook! End of story.

No one is complaining to the manufacturer about how cigarettes give you cancer
demanding a safer alternative, you just smoke at your own risk.

Personally, I don't smoke, and I don't use Facebook.

~~~
PaulStatezny
> it's not Facebook's fault if people don't know their data will be used for
> advertising, like it's not a tobacco's manufacture's fault if the user
> doesn't know cigarettes give you cancer.

Lawmakers (at least in the USA) disagree with you fundamentally. That’s why
cigarettes have a big warning label telling consumers that it gives you
cancer.

I think comparing tobacco and data privacy is like comparing apples and
oranges. But the common principle stands: if people might reasonably find a
product objectionable because of characteristics that aren’t readily clear, a
reasonable effort ought to be made to educate them.

~~~
nkkollaw
Yes but then you end up having warnings on everything--like in the States.

A knife is potentially dangerous, a rope is potentially dangerous, just about
anything is potentially dangerous!

I think it's fine to expect people have a working brain. On the internet it's
not immediately clear that if you upload a naked picture or post a racist
comment it will stay there _forever_, and might very easily affect you
negatively _for an indefinite amount of time_ (employers can see it or do
background checks, etc.), but that's just how it is.

~~~
apazzolini
You argued PaulStatezny's point for him in your reply. It is "immediately
clear" that a knife is dangerous, and nobody expects a warning label on that.
It's not "immediately clear" however that smoking gives you cancer or what is
possibly being done with your data at Facebook, and thus there should be
warnings.

~~~
nkkollaw
Why would it be immediately clear that a knife is dangerous?

Why is it NOT clear that the contents of a steaming cup of freshly-made coffee
that somebody is handling you may be hot, then?

It's NOT clear that if you marry the wrong person you can end up in lot of
pain, fighting in court for 10 years, losing all you have, etc., so should the
priest or government official read a warning before declaring you married?

When you signed up for Facebook, you agreed to their TOS. Compared to the
knife, cup, and wife someone has told you _explicitly_ what's going to happen
and how, and _you have agreed to that_. What makes it unclear, then?

~~~
jonathanyc
You realize essentially the only social reason for marriages to be solemnized
by a city official or a government official is because it forces people to at
least slightly consider the consequences, right?

Like it or not, there is not yet a similar sort of widespread awareness of the
risks of Facebook. If you asked a random person on the street to explain what
could go wrong with a marriage, they could give you so many examples that
troubled marriages are literally one of the classic sets ups for jokes.

If you asked the average person to explain how the Cambridge Analytica breach
happened, or what Facebook can do with the permission to see which WiFi
network you’re connected to, for example, they would not be able to give a
good explanation.

------
Alterlife
He is a CEO in damage control mode. The cynic in me wants me to ignore
everything he says right now. The ashes of the privacy debate will be swept
under the rug the once the fire is out.

History says making money is more important to fb than being ethical.

~~~
Khaine
Facebook has never been ethical. Zuckerberg doesn't believe in privacy. I
remember that from from inception to 2010 every move facebook did eroded the
default privacy settings of users[1].

[1] [http://mattmckeon.com/facebook-privacy/](http://mattmckeon.com/facebook-
privacy/)

~~~
ahartmetz
There is no reason to believe anything he says. Look at his actions, does he
share everything about him with the world?

------
jzl
In response to a question about Alex Stamos leaving: "So we’re going to double
the amount of people working on security this year. We’ll have more than
20,000 people working on security and community operations by the end of the
year, I think we have about 15,000 now. So it’s really the technical systems
we have working with the people in our operations functions that make the
biggest deal."

Huh? 20,000 people? This seems like a wildly misleading number. He's grouping
security and "community operations" together, whatever that is. That must
include masses of people doing manual video and ad reviews, or something like
that. That has nothing to do with the question. It's like you asked the
president about the Secret Service and he said "Between the Secret Service and
US Army we have over a million people and that number is going up this year!"

~~~
overthemoon
How is this even a security issue? This wasn't a "breach", right? This is just
Facebook pleading with CA to not do naughty things with their data, and CA
refusing.

~~~
wu-ikkyu
It's security theater.

------
htaunay
"Now, the good news here is that these problems aren’t necessarily rocket
science."

"If you had asked me, when I got started with Facebook, if one of the central
things I’d need to work on now is preventing governments from interfering in
each other’s elections, there’s no way I thought that’s what I’d be doing"

These are just two examples, but quite a few quotes from this interview are
verbatim from the CNN interview. Where has Mark been the last days? Probably
rehearsing.

~~~
roymurdock
CEOs presidents and actors have a lot in common. Much of their job is
performance/comedy/tragedy/entertainment. I wouldn’t expect anything
substantive to ever surface in a public facing interview

~~~
privacypoller
So I guess that makes Trump one of the worst improv actors I've ever seen?

------
thinkcomp
Mark has known about this issue since I fought with him over it in 2005.

[https://twitter.com/AaronGreenspan/status/975957889767505920](https://twitter.com/AaronGreenspan/status/975957889767505920)

[https://twitter.com/AaronGreenspan/status/976331044084264960](https://twitter.com/AaronGreenspan/status/976331044084264960)

As I have said time and again, Mark is not trustworthy and never has been.

~~~
spitfire
So that's very interesting. For any future litigation it establishes a clear
timeline of when he was aware of these issues.

So if it turns out he has any liability for the data breaches they don't have
much to stand on.

------
nikofeyn
i just can’t believe facebook’s telling of the story. they are essentially
saying that one of the most powerful companies in the world basically just
asked pretty please for an offender to delete data amongst other requests and
then just took their word for it.

they’re painting it as if they did their darnedest, but i think they just
don’t actualy care or something more serious. this entire interview is
basically zuckerberg just spewing damage control and explaining that facebook
doesn't understand how people are using and abusing their data, with regards
to developers, governments, etc. that latter point is either just pure neglect
or willful ignorance in turning their head until it hurts them.

~~~
zinckiwi
If you sent me a file and then insisted I delete it, how exactly would you
expect me to prove that I had?

~~~
asveikau
Should have put it on Stories. Deletes in 24 hours.

------
canoebuilder
Here's a question, Cambridge Analytica gets 50 million of these highly robust
personal data profiles, and that's a "scandal"!

But facebook has something on the order of a billion of these (even more)
highly robust personal data profiles, and that's, not a scandal but a multi-
hundred billion dollar corporation?

Can it be said the collection of these profiles is a net positive for the
world?

Or is this mass societal exploitation for private profit?

Note this isn't asking about the existence itself of facebook, just the
collecting of these profiles, fb could function in some way without collecting
these profiles.

------
harry8
Was this access to Zuck why the NYT silently changed their story to make
Sandberg look less culpable yesterday?

It worries me.

~~~
artemisyna
The NYT's report update was becaese Alex Stamos tweeted pointing out how they
were wrong.

[https://twitter.com/alexstamos/status/975926737111367680](https://twitter.com/alexstamos/status/975926737111367680)
[https://twitter.com/alexstamos/status/976175174314635264](https://twitter.com/alexstamos/status/976175174314635264)

You'd think the news sites would maybe be a little bit more transparent given
all this fake news rabble, but they can't even bother to update with primary
sources apparently...

~~~
mliker
I actually find it disturbing that Trump is kind-of right: NYTimes is
#fakenews. :( What an age we live in.

~~~
azemetre
Newspapers and agencies issue retractions on stories all the time. Claiming
that they are all fake news is massively disingenuous where you have other
major media companies that don't make retractions at all.

------
brylie
This is a good opportunity to join and/or recommend friends to join
decentralized networks, like Mastadon:

[https://joinmastodon.org/](https://joinmastodon.org/)

[https://instances.social/](https://instances.social/)

------
forgotmypw
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?

Zuck: People just submitted it.

Zuck: I don't know why.

Zuck: They "trust me"

Zuck: Dumb fucks

~~~
jd20
That IM exchange was mentioned in a news article (I knew it sounded familiar):
[http://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg-
ims...](http://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg-ims-wont-
help-facebooks-privacy-problems-2010-5)

When I signed up for Facebook (back when it was just Harvard-only) I made up a
new never-before-used password, because going thru other students' passwords
was just the sort of thing I'd imagine Mark doing in his spare time...

~~~
PaulStatezny
> When I signed up for Facebook (back when it was just Harvard-only) I made up
> a new never-before-used password, because going thru other students'
> passwords was just the sort of thing I'd imagine Mark doing in his spare
> time...

Did you know Mark personally? What gave you that impression?

~~~
jd20
Not personally, I just don't think I would login using my real password on any
website running from another student's dorm room.

------
paulus_magnus2
He's in damage control mode / managing expectations.

Come on, when your data is _the_ product, who do you think will buy it and
what can/will they do with it other than bad things. I can't think of a
legitimate use for such detailed profiling of people.

~~~
paulie_a
Apparently the legitimate use in 2018 is to provide incredibly targeted and
but amazingly low quality ads.

------
creo
He's not doing shit. Year after year he's making the same comment over
privacy. What is Facebook suppose to do? Stop collecting data? Ridiculous its
the core business model of every branch of that disgusting data leech. It's
not about the Cambridge Analytica or russian manipulation campaign. It's about
our basic right to privacy, that is constantly violated every time You look at
that page or any other connected to it.

------
standardcitizen
I’m completely at a lack of words as why people think giving their data to
someone means it’s safe or won’t be used for harm.

Anything I post on social media, I assume the worst.

I’m unsure how anyone else can assume any different.

~~~
TaylorAlexander
I would imagine these companies put great effort in to assuring users that
their data is safe. The privacy protections Facebook implements _look_ secure
to a lot of people.

I’m right there with you that I assume everything I say on these platforms
could be made public, but you and I are more informed on data security issues.
For many people, they just want to share photos and chat with friends. The
deep privacy implications are beyond most people.

------
sAbakumoff
Now Mr. Trump is indirectly bragging about exploitation of Facebook data [1] :

"Remember when they were saying, during the campaign, that Donald Trump is
giving great speeches and drawing big crowds, but he is spending much less
money and not using social media as well as Crooked Hillary’s large and highly
sophisticated staff. Well, not saying that anymore!"

Ok this guy is out of his mind, but Murky Marc should probably go and hand
over the company to Sheryl. She knows what to do.

[1]
[https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/97677061942456320...](https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/976770619424563200)

~~~
cynicalreason
Had to triple check it's not a satire account .. nope, it's real

~~~
sAbakumoff
Yep, the media is now busy with another message of Mr. Trump with which he
attacked Mr. Biden[1], but soon they will discover the social media thing and
it might cause more unpleasant questions for Facebook.

[1]
[https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/97676541790877696...](https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/976765417908776963)

------
akerro
you put some content into a service, whether it’s a photo or a video or a text
message — whether it’s Facebook or WhatsApp or Instagram — and you’re trusting
[you dumb fuck] that that content is going to be shared with the people you
want to share it with.

------
creato
> The point of what we’re trying to do here is to create a situation where we
> have a real person-to-person relationship with any developer who is asking
> for the most sensitive data.

Why is Facebook so dead set on sharing data at all? People keep lumping
Facebook in with the rest (Google/Amazon/Microsoft?/other data mining
companies) but my impression was that these companies do not do this. It seems
reckless to the point of absurdity. Some other event like this _will_ happen
again in the future as long as they continue to insist on this, it is
inevitable.

~~~
M_Bakhtiari
>Why is Facebook so dead set on sharing data at all?

What else are they supposed to do to keep their massive infrastructure
running?

People would clearly rather invite the likes of CA into their private lives
than pay even the tiniest little fee to keep their contacts and pictures in
the cloud together with those of their friends.

I unsubscribed from Facebook years ago, because it just didn't seem like a
good deal to me.

~~~
creato
What I thought Facebook and every other data company did: build tools to sell
ads based on the data, but not actually share the data itself.

------
mch82
This interview was much better than I expected. Some confidence restored (long
way to go)... will be interesting to see how the questions and answers evolve
over the next few weeks.

To me, there is a difference between buying targeted advertisements on
Facebook without having direct access to private data and exporting private
data for use in military-style information operations. This interview seems to
indicate Facebook plans to stick closer to on-platform targeted advertising in
the future.

~~~
gt_
What about it gives you that indication? Are you just reading it at face
value?

------
JoshMnem
> "Whenever there’s an issue where someone’s data gets passed to someone who
> the rules of the system shouldn’t have allowed it to, that’s rightfully a
> big issue and deserves to be a big uproar"

That statement describes Facebook itself. Most users don't understand what
data they are sharing, so they are not able to give permission.

------
pitt1980
Where were these worries four years ago for the much larger and arguably more
manipulative effort by the Obama campaign?

Instead of using a personality quiz, the Obama campaign merely got a portion
of its core supporters to use their Facebook profiles to log into a campaign
site. Then they used well-tested techniques of gaining consent from that user
to harvest all their friends’ data. Sasha Issenberg gushed about how the Obama
campaign used the same permissions structure of Facebook to extract the data
of scores of millions of Facebook users who were unaware of what was happening
to them. Combining Facebook data with other sources such as voter-registration
rolls, Issenberg wrote, generated “a new political currency that predicted the
behavior of individual humans. The campaign didn’t just know who you were; it
knew exactly how it could turn you into the type of person it wanted you to
be.”

The level of data sophistication was so intense that Issenberg could describe
it this way:

"Obama’s campaign began the election year confident it knew the name of every
one of the 69,456,897 Americans whose votes had put him in the White House.
They may have cast those votes by secret ballot, but Obama’s analysts could
look at the Democrats’ vote totals in each precinct and identify the people
most likely to have backed him. Pundits talked in the abstract about
reassembling Obama’s 2008 coalition. But within the campaign, the goal was
literal. They would reassemble the coalition, one by one, through personal
contacts."

Today’s Cambridge Analytica scandal causes our tech chin-strokers to worry
about “information” you did not consent to share, but the Obama team created
social interactions you wouldn’t have had. They didn’t just build a
psychological profile of persuadable voters, and algorithmically determine
ways of persuading them, but actually encouraged particular friends — ones the
campaign had profiled as influencers — to reach out to them personally. In a
post-election interview, the campaign’s digital director Teddy Goff explained
the strategy: “People don’t trust campaigns. They don’t even trust media
organizations,” he told Time’s Michael Sherer, “Who do they trust? Their
friends?” This level of manipulation was celebrated in the press.

How did Facebook react to the much larger data harvesting of the Obama
campaign? The New York Times reported it out, in a feature hailing Obama’s
digital masterminds:

"The campaign’s exhaustive use of Facebook triggered the site’s internal
safeguards. “It was more like we blew through an alarm that their engineers
hadn’t planned for or knew about,” said [Will] St. Clair, who had been working
at a small firm in Chicago and joined the campaign at the suggestion of a
friend. “They’d sigh and say, ‘You can do this as long as you stop doing it on
Nov. 7.’ ”"

In other words, Silicon Valley is just making up the rules as they go along.
Some large-scale data harvesting and social manipulation is okay until the
election. Some of it becomes not okay in retrospect. They sigh and say okay so
long as Obama wins. When Clinton loses, they effectively call a code red.

[https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/03/cambridge-
analytica-s...](https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/03/cambridge-analytica-
social-media-panic/)

------
belorn
I did not expect that New York Times would do this, but how wonderful would it
not be if they had asked directly if either of the political parties in 2016
was given access to use Facebook data in order to create social graphs and use
it in their campaigns.

------
duxup
That first question is a good one. Not that it got an answer.

Considering the data is what is valuable to them I would find it hard to
belive they didn't know how much they had been sharing in the past.

------
tobmlt
Here's a piece of speculation. If you have no time for these harsh words, I'm
sure you have your mouse at the ready. I am sorry you cannot crumple the page
and toss this into the wastebasket if you'd like. Anything except more hand
wringing on the internet. Without further ado...

The US propaganda machine has been telling everyone who will listen that "the
Russians influenced the election" endlessly for the past year. Are there hard
statistics on this? Is there a methodology, mechanism, or theory describing
how effective this manipulation has been, and exactly how we get from a survey
to a Trump? I am asking honestly. Because please, please, let's focus on what
is quantifiable, if we focus on anything there.

Lose talk, anecdotes, and accusations are not sufficient, nor even necessary,
if there are hard statistics on the mechanisms of manipulation. Let's talk
about those, then, and cease this glib gab and mindless anger at what we
already know is a pretty shitty business. (Facebook)

My guess is that there are no hard facts. If Facebook didn't want regulation,
they might argue forcefully this way - that the troll C.A. did not effectively
do much of anything to influence the election. My guess is that Facebook wants
to be regulated. It will gain cultural validity, put up a barrier to entry
against competitors, and cement for the history books this story that
"unregulated social media"/"the unregulated internet" "used to allow bad
actors to influence our democratic process."

From then on we will have one social network, Facebook, and everyone will be
taught from high school to law school, that such regulations are necessary to
protect our free society from undo influence. Few will question this. The
machine will grow. It feeds on ignorance.

(What I really think is that even if C.A. did effect the election, we still
should not allow Facebook regulatory capture as incumbent. It is worth the
cost of manipulation to have the possibility of Facebook being wiped out in
the future. - And above all, to avoid having it enshrined and regulated at the
same time as a valid, trusted news source. Then it will really reach its full
"potential" ... as a propaganda piece for the US rich and powerful.)

Back to the present:

This Cambridge Analytica (C.A.) story breaks, and almost nobody is talking
about whether or not it had any measurable effect on the election at all.
Wired ran a companion piece that I can no longer find - a sideline story,
stating that "it" (C.A.'s actions) basically had no effect on the election,
but this story was not marketed or highlighted. What was marketed was this
"big story" that C.A. took user data. The fact that it did nothing of
consequence (that I have seen) is a tiny link at the bottom. I can no longer
find it in the barrage of stories talking about what happened in broad,
anecdotal, scared up, strokes. (And again, even if C.A. did make an impact,
Facebook regulatory capture and validity enshrinement is the one of the worst
outcomes imaginable. )

These are war drums we are hearing. And the marching orders are against
freedom of information on the internet generally. Facebook will come out
regulated, "made safer" (and it will in turn become a better shill for the
powers that be) but the real prize is that the rest of the internet is
supposed to be regulated too, and the regulators will have unfettered access
to whatever they want. The NSA has nothing like what it will have once the
hand wringers make the internet safe for democracy.

That is the game plan. New articles on "bad facebook" "bad Russia" and "bad
cambridge analytica" (the last, just next week's scapegoat once facebook is
whitewashed and regulated) is all theater in order to get us there.

I recommend everyone stop talking about, and stop worrying about, this stupid
sideshow and pay attention to what they are trying to really do to us.

To be clear, I can't really think less of Facebook. It's a social hack which
sweeps up data.... for entities that find it useful... But I'd expect it's use
in manipulating elections to go up, with increasing regulation (increase in
perceived validity). The biggest manipulator is and always will be our
political-media machine. Facebook is just going through the process of being
publicly inducted.

Facebook is going to come out stronger from this. The narrative will say
"after fire and brimstone, years in doubt, Facebook goes through the trial of
its life, and comes out smarter, nicer, and above all, more regulated, for the
benefit of us all."

In practice, society will have Facebook as the permanent social media app, and
others basically banned as dangerous. If that is what you want, then keep up
the hand wringing over Cambridge Analytica.

This sort of thing went stale for me a long time ago. If you cry out "fix it"
"fix it" to the government, they will fix it alright. Fixed. As in permanent,
unchangeable, and all powerful. Facebook. The only safe social news platform.
Good luck to you.

------
feelin_googley
"Zuckerberg: We took action immediately at that point. We banned Kogan's app
from the platform, we demanded that Kogan and Cambridge Analytica and a couple
other parties that Kogan had shared the data with would legally certify that
they didn't have the data, and weren't using it in any of their operations.
They gave us that formal certification. At the time, they told us they never
had gotten access to raw Facebook data, so we made that decision.

Zuckerberg: Yes. They gave us a formal and legal certification, and it seems
at this point that that was false."

Does it matter whether CA breached some form of "agreement" with FB?

What is the consequence of that?

CA losing their FB privileges going forward?

Does that really address the harm done?

Does "formal and legal certification" mean anything if FB is not going to take
legal action against CA? (Maybe FB is worried about FTC and violating their
2011 consent decree, i.e. self-preservation.)

If anyone should be requiring "formal and legal certification" that data was
destroyed and that there was no unauthorized usage or transfer, it is the
owners of the data: FB users.

Why are FB users upset with FB. Shouldnt they be upset with CA.

There must be a reason that there is so much focus on FB as the problem and
not only on CA.

What is it?

~~~
kaennar
I'm going to bet Facebook is bigger and everyone uses it and CA is based in
the UK and not in the US. Who the hell even knew Cambridge Analytica before
any of this?

It's fun to hate big companies with recognizable names and blame that big
company for electing someone that Americans are increasingly displeased with.

~~~
mliker
I'm surprised to see someone tell it for what it really is. This is just like
the Uber "scandal" from last year in that things got blown way out of
proportion in some aspects, but positive changes were made.

~~~
TAForObvReasons
In this case, people have, both publicly and privately, warned Facebook about
this issue for years. At some point, after having been warned about the
situation, inaction is in fact a conscious decision.

------
joering2
Who saw the CNN "interview" ? Was it green-boxed?

\- never seen both interviewer and Zuck together in a photo op. News stations
usually do that and show together photo before or after the interview take
place (or during sitting together) so that everyone knows it actually took
place;

\- Zuck eyes were running back and forth like he was reading from
teleprompter;

\- weird pauses felt like he is waiting for teleprompter to update;

\- first time ever seen any interview - not to mention on a so-called
professional news station - that camera angle will be shooting at
interviewer's back of his/her head;

\- journalist interviewing Zuck did not look at his face or his eyes, but
somewhere behind him.

Unless its just my tin foil hat thinking for me...

~~~
loriverkutya
Take off your tinfoil hat, he is on the Autism spectrum, these are traits.

