
Facebook Says Russian Firms ‘Scraped’ Data, Some for Facial Recognition - electic
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/12/technology/facebook-russian-scraping-data.html
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Ahmed90
How come this is an "oh nose!" or even unexpected to anyone? Why is this even
a news... I mean it's public data anyway, yeyeye FB policies blablabla

It's not like it's hacked or anything its data scraping. are you telling me
the US(FBI/NSA/CIA), or foreign government China, for example, are respecting
web privacy policies eh? China has App store rating farms filled with manual
labor giving people 5 stars all day, do you think creating accounts and
harvesting pictures and metadata would be that hard if it was sponsored by the
government?

the fact that FB linked the scrapping to a company, says it not really that
much of a government operation

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beart
I don't think you can take it for granted that most people who use Facebook
spend time thinking about privacy issues. I also don't think it's helpful to
dismiss things for being obvious - The theory of gravity comes from the 17th
century but people were falling to their deaths for quite some time before
that.

~~~
Ahmed90
Not really dismissing it, but if people are too stupid to understand that if
you put something in public someone will make use of it in a way or another.

I believe the reason why we see this kind of news is because of the ML/AI/big
data gold rush, it's finally affordable and everyone wants data so ofc they
want the cheapest way and the most useful data is personal data and on and
on...

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prolikewh0a
You can certainly use these neo-mccarthyist PR articles for beneficial
purposes after a major security breach just happened. Facebook is the good guy
again to the public.

Facebook makes this data easily accessible to literally anyone. Everyone is
using it. Facebook is surely at fault for making it that public and easily
accessible. It means anyone else could've, and everyone else isn't rainbows
and gumdrops clean.

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dev_dull
> _It had removed 66 accounts, pages and apps linked to Russian firms that
> build facial recognition software for the Russian government._

Who’s the enemy here? The Russian government scraping Facebook, or the company
that’s making such things possible?

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mikeyouse
If their intention is to subvert American democracy, then yes, the Russian
government is the enemy in this case.

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cft
Has American democracy been contacted out to Facebook? FYI Google created
search by scraping sites.

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threeseed
Google never created search. According to Andreessen they were the 23rd
company he saw. And by then there were established controls to stop Google
from indexing your sites i.e. robots.txt.

These Russian companies are not following the rules Facebook has set so it's
not really analogous to Google.

~~~
cft
Not obeying robots.txt is at most a civil matter, such as Craigslist vs. 3Taps
(largely unsettled btw, because internet is public by design). My question
still stands.

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deytempo
What’s bad is the next stage is this data set becomes available for people to
use in their own apps. Smartphone apps that can identify people you don’t
know.

~~~
jobigoud
AR glasses apps where every individual you meet has a bubble on top with its
unified internet karma and credit score.

