
Zuckerberg set up fraudulent scheme to 'weaponise' data, court case alleges - Malarkey73
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/may/24/mark-zuckerberg-set-up-fraudulent-scheme-weaponise-data-facebook-court-case-alleges?CMP=share_btn_tw
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makomk
"Six4Three lodged its original case in 2015 shortly after Facebook removed
developers’ access to friends’ data. The company said it had invested $250,000
in developing an app called Pikinis that filtered users’ friends photos to
find any of them in swimwear. Its launch was met with controversy."

So basically this company tried to do something creepy and invasive with
users' data, were stopped by Facebook, and now they're taking advantage of the
fact that the press is pissed off at Facebook and will uncritically
regurgitate any negative claim about them in headlines as leverage in their
court case against them, likely in the expectation that it'll be cheaper for
Facebook to settle than deal with the PR fallout.

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tzahola
250k?????

I bet their engineer to manager ratio was quite low.

~~~
gowld
2 manager and 4 devs for 1 month to make an app.

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jasode
In this particular article, _" weaponise"_ doesn't mean private data as a
weapon against the users (like Richard Stallman critiques of Facebook[1]).
Instead, the journalists and the lawsuit are talking about desirable user data
as a _weapon against the API developers_.

The article has interwoven 2 themes in a disjointed way and I had to read it
several times to separate the components of the dispute.

The 1st theme is that the company Six4Three wrote an app to find photos of
friends in bikinis using Facebook's platform API. Facebook later pulled the
rug out from under them. In this sense, this is similar to other stories about
platforms changing the terms/accessiblity of API usage (e.g. Facebook demoting
Zynga games, or Twitter closing off 3rd-party clients, etc). If a platform
entices programmers to use an API and then later restricts it (or kicks
programmers off it), the claim is being made that it is _" fraud"_. Facebook's
counterclaim is that blocking programmers from using its API is exercising its
editorial control and therefore _" free speech"_.

The 2nd theme that's mentioned in passing is the Six4Three bikini API dispute
as a _forensic discovery_ into how the Cambridge Analytica abuse was
deliberately engineered into the platform in 2011 and was approved by Facebook
senior management. I think this is the more interesting angle that the
Guardian writers should have focused more text on.

[1] [https://stallman.org/facebook.html](https://stallman.org/facebook.html)

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_jal
"Editorial control" as justification for selective access is interesting, and
seems in tension with their need to remain considered a "platform" instead of
a publication. (They aren't a platform; utility surplus from user
participation doesn't flow to the users.)

> wrote an app to find photos of friends in bikinis [....] Facebook later
> pulled the rug out from under them

In this case, I think I'm just rooting for injuries.

~~~
jonbarker
I agree with Bill Gates' description of platforms as companies which provide
tools which are used by other entities to generate more economic value than
the value of the owners of those tools. How you measure said economic value is
another story and one I am grappling with. And I think social media companies
are ultimately aggregators, not platforms. What I think should come out of any
regulation is an obligation for aggregators at a certain scale to 1) stop
calling themselves neutral platforms, because that's not accurate, 2) be
required to disclose in verifiable, auditable detail how they are prioritizing
content from an algorithmic perspective, how they are compensating generators
of both paid and organic content from a both monetary and "in app currency"
perspective (likes, etc), and 3) when they do exercise their editorial
judgment and kick 3rd party apps off their APIs, explain how and why they came
to such a judgment, not in a storytelling kind of way, but in a parametric
(they hit this number, so we took action) kind of way. And if there is a human
in the loop, that human needs to have certain competencies, which would
resemble professionalism like that of lawyers and doctors. These three
requirements would have to be agreed upon like international standards of a
sort. Now, I am aware that everything I am requesting is also likely to be
infected by 'bureacracy' and that is something I'm not sure I have a way to
solve for.

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jakelazaroff
Only tangentially related, but the second image in the article [1] — the one
with all the cameras right in Zuckerberg's face — is _crazy_. What a strange
and surreal experience that must be.

[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/may/24/mark-
zuck...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/may/24/mark-zuckerberg-
set-up-fraudulent-scheme-weaponise-data-facebook-court-case-alleges#img-2)

~~~
eridius
It's almost like a physical representation of how Facebook tries to capture
every nuance of your activity online.

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platz
Statistics: Weaponized pattern recognition.

Gothic High Tech: Consciously weaponized bullshit.

Gollumization: The impoverishment of a system through ephmeralization and
weaponized attention.

Bullshit: 1\. Data (often a firehose) produced by someone who is indifferent
to the truth or falsity of what is being said. 2\. Data that appears to
contain more information than it actually does. 3\. Noise randomly tagged with
truth-values to give it apparent legibility. 4\. Non-requisite variety.

Legibility: the apparent absence of noise in data.

Data: Any collection of information, bullshit and noise.

Information: Data that has been judged to be true or false through comparison
with observed reality at a given point in time.

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textmode
This article is a bit short on details.

Back in December 2016, Six4Three ("643") created a website
[https://www.facebooksappeconomy.com](https://www.facebooksappeconomy.com) to
raise awareness about Facebook's business practices.

"... Facebook started threatening to shut off friend data to companies in late
2012 unless they made extravagant, unrelated purchases in Facebook's new
mobile ads product. Zuckerberg did this in order to keep Facebook's
advertising business from collapsing because it had been built exclusively for
desktop computers."

It has more details on what 643 is hoping to accomplish with the help of other
app developers, including a timeline as well as a documentary video.

When 643 contacted Facebook to let them know about this website, Facebook
threatened 643 with trademark infringement.1

1\.
[http://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...](http://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2339&context=historical)

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bertil
I have read it three times. It doesn’t make sense. I have no idea what is
being alleged.

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tomtimtall
Facebook abused their position against developers. Kind of like if Apple gave
developers full access to all details of every iPhone owner to convince them
to develop iPhone apps, then when they get developers onboard they start
cutting access randomly to devs, and offer some devs lowball offers to sell
with the implied threat of “or we’ll cut you off entirely”.

~~~
bertil
I can’t imagine that “randomly” makes sense, or that they have proof of
anything like that. “Arbitrarily” means that Facebook gets to decide how much
of a creep is too much. It’s very confusing to have the same talk about an
offer to sell their company: creeps are the last thing Facebook wants on their
payroll.

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Verdex_3
The first half of this title sounds terrible ... until you see the second
half. "Court Case Alleges" Well, this is the COURT we're talking about, so
maybe this is legitimate information. Until you realize that this actually
reduces to: "Some guy says (because he think it will get him money)".

