
Statement by FTC Regarding Reported Concerns about Facebook Privacy Practices - Jhsto
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2018/03/statement-acting-director-ftcs-bureau-consumer-protection
======
lumberjack
>Foremost among these tools is enforcement action against companies that fail
to honor their privacy promises

This is the crux of the issue. The problem is that when Facebook asks for
"location information", the consequences of this are not being conveyed to the
user. The user might think, "ah they want my location for the weather
recommendations and event suggestions in my neighbourhood". They do not
realise how something so "innocuous" as location information could be
weaponised against them.

I used location data as an example because you could infer almost everything
about a person just from that. You could know their social circle, their
approximate tax bracket, which banks they use, who is their lawyer, their
accountant and their wealth manager, their familiar situation, how healthy
they eat, how healthy they are, whether they are chronically ill, and what
type of chronic diseases they might have, what activities they engage in, what
are their political leanings, I could go on, I do not think this is anywhere
near an exhaustive list...

The user does not know that Facebook it going to tip off the insurance
provider about the user's unhealthy eating habits or his chronic medical
condition. Or maybe tip off his bank that he has substantial wealth elsewhere.

~~~
fortythirteen
If I had a nickel for every time someone called me paranoid or a conspiracy
theorist for mentioning this before last week, I'd have a ton of nickels.

I should feel better now that people of aware of the nefariousness of this
type of data collection, but I feel worse. The general public is being fed
this as "Russia" and "Trump", and not getting the real, horrifying,
surveillance state truth of what's going on.

I'm less worried that the Trump campaign used CA _(and that the Clinton
campaign used CTR)_ , than I am by Obama saying "it's just metadata".

~~~
SlowRobotAhead
But... don't you remember how _cool_ Obama was? He loved his blackberry!

~~~
freejulian
Obama...that was the president who authorized the FBI to infiltrate the Occupy
Wallstreet movement and paint the protesters as rapists and weirdos, right?
Democrats who think highly of him are no better than Republicans who think
highly of Reagan.

------
hodder
Remember the delete Uber campaign, the Equifax breach, the WFC accounts, the
Bank of America suits, the Intel chip vulnerability? The market doesn't.

The market has a short memory, and FB is not going anywhere. However, there
may be some welcomed changes in data abuse.

With that said, I think the stock is a bargain today.

~~~
mrtksn
Remember Digg? Unlike the companies you listed, FB is user-facing - just like
Digg.

If users happen to decide that a company is not "cool" anymore or dispase its
public figure(Zuckerberg), it may actually go away.

Remember IE(stands for Internet Explorer)? Using Firefox and later Chrome
became a crusade and the almighty brand of the richest person in the world
that holds the monopoly on computers platforms bled to death.

~~~
simias
Digg and IE "died" because there was a real practical incentive to move
towards alternatives. This Facebook thing is mostly ideological at the core,
in terms of day-to-day user experience it's no better or worse than it was a
month ago. Digg also never was more than a small speck of dust compared to
Facebook, even at the apex of its popularity. Facebook's huge network effect
is hard to overcome.

If you want Facebook to die you have to come up with an alternative with
improved usability to convince people to switch over. Now you have do that
with the added handicap of "do no evil" (so less money from targeted
advertising etc...) while fighting to gain market share against some of the
biggest companies in the world. My guess is that if you manage to do all of
that you'll just end up bought by Facebook anyway.

~~~
joering2
> My guess is that if you manage to do all of that you'll just end up bought
> by Facebook anyway.

Of course.. unfortunately you can't say no when some behemoth wants to buy
you. /s

~~~
wmeredith
It's indeed a rare breed that can, especially when the checks come with nine
zeros.

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pmalynin
And the ironic cherry on top is the line right under the report “Like the FTC
on Facebook.” It this a farce?

~~~
cycrutchfield
How exactly is that irony?

~~~
candreasen
Not ironic in the classic sense but it is a humorous coincidence, and it says
a lot about Facebook's ubiquity.

~~~
gberger
Ironic in the Alanis Morisette sense :)

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fogzen
How were any of you damaged by Facebook ads, exactly? Why the outrage now and
not before, when Obama (and everyone else) used targeted advertising?

This whole outrage over privacy is disingenuous. It’s painfully obvious the
outrage is about Donald Trump being elected president, not personal
information used to target ads.

~~~
shopkins
This argument is disingenuous, and not really more than a projected opinion.
Not everyone is this tribal, and people are allowed to be angry when they see
the manifest implications of surveillance capitalism without being partisans.

~~~
verylittlemeat
History is being written right now and people are rightly seeing a case of
selective memory by the media.

Most people agree that social media surveillance is bad. The majority of the
HN comments that bring up Obama 2008/2012 are not trying to justify the
CA/Facebook incident, rather they're pointing out a hypocritical double-
standard.

I want the surveillance to stop _and_ the record to be set straight. We're
dangerously close to public sentiment solidifying around the idea that the
CA/Facebook incident was unprecedented and arguably stole an election in 2016.
I don't think the truth supports that at all and am trying to use comments
like this to keep such false narratives out of textbooks 10 years from now.

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kchoudhu
If Zuckerberg has any game at all, he will welcome this investigation,
'educate' the regulators, and then build a regulatory moat around Facebook
that no one can breach.

The big four banks did this after 2009, and they are even more entrenched and
systematically important than they were before. Expect Facebook to borrow
liberally from their playbook.

~~~
bogomipz
Can you elaborate on exactly how "big four banks" built a regulatory moat that
no one can breach?

~~~
habosa
The regulatory costs of running a bank are much higher now than before the
financial crisis. This means that the chance of an upstart challenging the big
players has actually gone down, even though some of the regulation was meant
to address concerns of "too big to fail".

~~~
vuln
Which is the Trump administration is trying to change that to give smaller
regional banks a fighting chance. It's weird tat people are against this.

~~~
wmeredith
I agree. The tribalism in the current political climate of the US is really
damaging on all sides. Trump has done more than a handful of good things and a
lot of my friends/family don't want to hear it. Just like my Dad (Fox News
watcher, Limbaugh fan, etc...) almost foams at the mouth when you mention
Obama/Clinton; it's crazy. He's been conditioned. It reminds of the effects of
the two minutes hate from 1984[0]. Too many citizens are completely disengaged
from the political process and too many of those that are have bought into
these cults of personality.

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Minutes_Hate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Minutes_Hate)

------
pknerd
Agree with those who says it will not effect Fb much and it's incomparable
with other past apps/social media platforms. The reason is that unlike others
Facebook exploited us, humans in such a way with help of technology and
psychology that there is almost no friction to get into Facebook world. On top
of that the content people see on their feeds make them glued all the time. I
have not been using Facebook for weeks and since then the news broke of
privacy and stalking I shared multiple times with friends and family but no
one gives a damn about privacy(unless one suffers him/herself) so they are
happy to have some _happy moments_ reading religious, political posts or joke.
So, #deletefacebook campaign might work among some tech elites but not among
commons, specially among villagers in long distant areas of Pakistan who use
Facebook to interact with family members in cities.

~~~
pknerd
Not sure why was I down voted? A little explanation could help.

~~~
erikpukinskis
I don’t know either, but it’s against the HN posting guidelines to inquire.
It’s hard to know where sentiment comes from, I’d recommend not dwelling on it
too long. Just keep writing comments you believe in.

~~~
oehpr
The problem is with no feedback, it can be hard to adjust in the right
direction.

And I'm not 100% sure of this, but I think downvotes on this platform have
consequences beyond just hiding one comment.

I've noticed ordering anomalies here where people who posted newer comments
and had > 0 points were ranked below people who posted older comments and had
<= 0 points. There was some intrinsic ranking going on.

------
samlevine
There are a number of ways of paying for a social network. Among them:

\- Ads

\- Subscriptions

\- Loss leader for another product

\- Microtransactions

Facebook does ads.

Subscriptions hurt network effects.

Google+ ran into a brick wall of network effects.

Nobody uses Flattr, and it's hard to imagine people paying a buck for video
filters or other premium features.

It'd be great to solve the problem without building another Facebook, but my
best guess is that if Facebook goes down someone else builds another system
basically identical to Facebook and we all have this conversation again 10
years in the future.

~~~
dfee
There is an interesting anthropological conversation in here: some segment of
the population might be willing to pay for services that protect their
privacy, but due to network effects, an integrated society will tend towards
the lowest common “customer profile” denominator.

Hmm. Maybe that’s not right. Maybe the lowest quality content will be on the
most common denominator platform - maybe that’s what we’re seeing. And maybe
that’s why I’ve effectively left Facebook - the folks I want to share and
connect with aren’t there.

------
orbifold
I really hope that eventually they will get thrown out of the European market,
GDPR is a start. I think their business model has no place in a free and open
society.

------
politician
I'm really amazed that all of this is coming to light less than 2 months
before the GDPR comes into effect. I would've thought that companies,
especially social media companies, would be trying to keep their heads down
and avoid drawing attention from the EU on Day 1.

Everything that Facebook is saying to its American audience, it's also saying
to the European GDPR regulators.

They need to walk a very fine line here and right now I don't think they're
doing a particularly good job of it.

------
bitxbit
I think people are forgetting how much easier it is to scale and build a
network these days. The moat is the network for facebook but it can be
replaced in a relatively short period of time if the right competition enters
the market. Facebook has invested a lot of technology toward selling ads and
the core product for the users has not changed much (for the better) in the
past decade. Classic monopolistic behavior.

~~~
_tulpa
Sure, the technical barrier isn't that high anymore. Social and economic
barriers though...

By subsidising otherwise prohibitively expensive mobile data connections for
Facebook traffic only, Facebook has become _the internet_ in many countries.

Facebook have their app preinstalled by pretty much every Android vendor. As a
system app that you can't remove.

Other services require you to have a Facebook account to login, there aren't
many services that devs trust for this.

Competing with something this deeply entrenched would be difficult, and doing
that with ethical limitations that they don't have is damn near impossible.

~~~
Lionsion
> By subsidising otherwise prohibitively expensive mobile data connections for
> Facebook traffic only, Facebook has become the internet in many countries.

I like to see how much revenue Facebook gets from those countries vs. the US
and Western Europe.

> Competing with something this deeply entrenched would be difficult

I don't think anything you listed makes FB so entrenched that's it's
invulnerable. Facebook's big strengths are network effects and its pile of
cash, but its weakness is that it's a leisure item in a somewhat trend-driven
market. All the money in the world can't keep something fashionable forever.

~~~
_tulpa
> I like to see how much revenue Facebook gets from those countries vs. the US
> and Western Europe.

That's not even the point, even if they're loosing money at the moment it's
almost certainly worth it to capture those new users.

> All the money in the world can't keep something fashionable forever.

Facebook isn't fashionable or trendy, myspace et al took that angle which is
why they're gone now, and also that's missing the point again.

Facebook is a social utility that a crapload of people can't live without. I
have friends who I can't even contact without using
facebook/messenger/whatsapp, and this is in a country where mobile data is
cheap and SMS/phone calls are basically free. Go to a place where facebook-
subsidised connections are the only option that people can actually afford and
your only alternative is basically social suicide.

I don't think many people truly grasp the scale and pervasiveness of Facebook
and how there just isn't anything that is even remotely close to competing.

~~~
Lionsion
> That's not even the point, even if they're loosing money at the moment it's
> almost certainly worth it to capture those new users.

> Go to a place where facebook-subsidised connections are the only option that
> people can actually afford and your only alternative is basically social
> suicide.

It's relevant because a new competitor can target the more valuable developed-
country users. FB being so dominant that it's "the internet" in some
undeveloped countries is _not_ a barrier to that.

> Facebook is a social utility that a crapload of people can't live without.

That's not true. There are very few people who can legally use FB who were
born after it was created. There are also a crapload of people who are totally
off it who get along fine.

> I have friends who I can't even contact without using
> facebook/messenger/whatsapp

I do to, but they're not people who I actually want or need to contact
regularly.

Also, I'm pretty sure if you can contact someone on Whatsapp you can contact
them without it. It's keyed on phone numbers, so you could always go back to
texting.

> don't think many people truly grasp the scale and pervasiveness of Facebook
> and how there just isn't anything that is even remotely close to competing.

I don't agree you can infer longevity from present ubiquity. I don't think the
social barriers that are protecting Facebook are as high as you think they
are. To reiterate my point...

>> I don't think anything you listed makes FB so entrenched that's it's
invulnerable. Facebook's big strengths are network effects and its pile of
cash, but its weakness is that it's a leisure item in a somewhat trend-driven
market. All the money in the world can't keep something fashionable forever.

Facebook can't demand user-exclusivity in developed markets, so its network
effect strengths are vulnerable to attack. If it can't continually acquire the
competitors that threaten to replace it, it will wither and die as its core
app becomes unfashionable and superseded by shinier messaging and social
broadcast platforms.

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collinf
> Like the FTC on Facebook (link is external)

Really got me there, lol.

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rsanaie
I find it pretty hilarious that they're also promoting their Facebook page at
the bottom... "Like the FTC on Facebook"

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myth_buster
> [FTC] has an open non-public investigation into these practices

Not familiar with _open non-public_ legalese but it sounds like an oxymoron.

~~~
random_rr
Open - the status of the case is "open", meaning it is under active
investigation.

Non-public - you already know this :)

~~~
myth_buster
Gotcha, thanks.

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jyriand
I'm just seeing blank page right now.

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swarnie_
Shares off 5% today and still falling. Its really dragging down FNGU as
well...

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soheil
> like FTC on Facebook

the irony

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gesman
This article is an invoice to FB of approximately: ~$1e+10 ... $1e+11

