
Facebook admits 18% of Research spyware users were teens, not 5% - vinnyglennon
https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/28/facebook-research-teens/
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moosey
Of course it was. From a future revenue perspective, it absolutely makes sense
that facebook would focus on young people, so any research done into the
future of facebook and its revenue _must_ include a decent number of young
people. I imagine that they are having little success in getting young people
to join and interact on facebook, especially because it is being heavily
leveraged for international political pressure.

Given current social and political realities, though, and a series of deeply
troubling news stories coming out of facebook, I think it might have lost a
very large segment of young people that will never join or return. I watch my
15 yo daughter interact with people online, and she has no interest at all in
facebook, and her interest in instragram is waning. Currently, her primary
interaction space is discord.

I've heard semi-private chat rooms are what is going to be popular, and I
expect that we're going to see that kind of thing in facebook soon. I wish
them luck (not really) building a revenue model on it that matches what they
currently expect.

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theNJR
Small groups are for sure becoming popular. I’m surprised that your daughter
is doing that through Discord vs a messenger app. Is she a gamer?

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Shish2k
I think at this point discord is the new IRC, a generic chat platform for
communities, organised by interest - nearly all the same benefits of IRC vs
Messenger apps, with the additional benefit that somebody cares enough to make
it user-friendly. A shame that it's closed-source and centralised though :(

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taurath
Discord is slack for not-work with far better voice chat.

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HenryBemis
Facebook is cheating and lying in every twist and every turn.. every piece of
news that comes out is worse than the previous one. They are evolving to a
true cancer for humanity. That is a pitty and a shame.

~~~
malloreon
The trouble is their employees don't seem particularly bothered by the evil
they do every day. if they did, they'd leave.

~~~
darkpuma
If HN comments are any indicator, they think Facebook is being unfairly
bullied for nothing more than standard industry practices.

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lapnitnelav
Have a friend that was at Facebook for a conference where Miss Sandberg was
speaking and she told the tone used felt quite infantilising.

Ztockholm's syndrome? Drinking the Book-Aid?

Pardon the terrible puns but it seems like strange coming from a company full
of well educated & reasonably smart people.

At least folks in Google and Microsoft seem to have a bit more backbone.

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cheeze
> Whoops, apparently we misestimated before. We're sorry.

This is Facebooks MO. Is anyone surprised at this point?

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odorousrex
I'm surprised it's only 18%.

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kalleboo
18% of participants _admitted_ to being under 18. I know when I was under 18 I
lied on every single internet form and said I was 18+

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tracker1
To contrast, when the XBOX first released, IIRC you couldn't even create an
online account if you were under 18... I'm pretty sure most of the accounts
were lying at that time.

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darkpuma
The damage is already done though. This update will be seen by fewer people
than saw the original story and facebook will face no meaningful consequences
for deceiving people yet again. It's no wonder they lie so often; it pays off
for them to lie.

Another lie that doesn't even get the signal boost of being in the headline:

> _Facebook had also told reporters on January 29th regarding teens’
> participation, “All of them with signed parental consent forms.” Yet in its
> response to Senator Warner, Facebook admitted that “Potential participants
> were required to confirm that they were over 18 or provide other evidence of
> parental consent, though the vendors did not require a signed parental
> consent form for teen users.” In some cases, underage users merely had to
> check a box to claim they had parental consent, and there was no
> verification of users’ ages or that their parents actually approved._

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ok_coo
IMHO they are practically begging to be regulated.

It's too bad nothing has happened yet because some guard rails need to be put
in place or this type of questionable behavior will never stop.

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gordon_freeman
There are various ways to lie using statistics. Let's assume that Facebook's
goal was to reach a total of 1 million teens between 13-18 years old. Now they
definitely don't want to come into regulators' crosshairs by only targetting
these Teens using Onavo/FB Research app so they opened it to everyone
including adults. Now let's say, Facebook got a total of 20 million users for
participation through this VPN app. So they are now saying "Ohh, don't
worry...only 5% of these users were Teens." which is true but on the other end
Facebook did achieve its goal to target 1 million (5% of 20 million) Teens
with this app. Not saying that this is what happened here but this may be the
way they want to defend their act here PR wise.

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burlesona
April 2019 update: “Facebook admits 49% of Research spyware users were teens,
not 18%.”

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beatgammit
April Fool's! Not...

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liquidise
I don't understand the uproar around these numbers. Saying that 18% represents
a clear intent to target teenagers strikes me as intentionally
misunderstanding the math.

Teens, i would imagine, represent at least 18% of recreational internet usage.
If anything 18% feels like it risks under-representing the group if i were
designing research on the topic.

There are plenty of reasons to be upset with facebook (deceit, privacy, bs
marketing, etc) about this very issue. All this hullabaloo about 5 vs 18%
feels like manufactured outrage to me.

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moosey
I guarantee that when all is said and done, that a part of this project, or
whatever it is, will be attempts to alter human behavior in various ways.
Basically, a continuation on the human experimentation that facebook has been
allowed to get away with as long as I can remember. People have gotten so used
to Facebook changing the news feed on a whim to try to change human behavior
and interaction on the site, that we don't think of it as what it is.

Basically, I believe that a curated feed that isn't completely controlled by
end-user rules will be declared illegal at some point in the near future.

~~~
taurath
What is advertising if not an attempt to alter human behavior? When a 4 year
old sees 10 candy commercials an hour they are gonna want candy

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WhuzzupDomal
I’ve expressed my thoughts on this already. And now it wasn’t 5% teens, but
18%?!?! That changes….nothing. Look through the letter from Facebook and see
how many times they were notified they’d be collecting your data. They knew
what they signed up for and they got paid to do it. This is such a non-issue,
it’s insane. What terrible thing has happened as a result of this app? A few
teens made a little extra money by letting Facebook see how they use their
phone? Let’s do another 15 stories on it please TC.

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r00fus
users or victims?

How can a teen be held culpable for understanding their choice? This is a
clear case of predation.

So so glad Apple kicked them out of the iOS App Store and revoked their cert.

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atpanelmelt
Semantics are important here. 'User' connotes more agency than can be
expected. I find that 'subject' is more appropriate than 'victim' but we
should agree that 'user' is the wrong word. The media can do better, and these
companies have to do better.

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diogenescynic
Facebook repeatedly lies and faces no consequences. No wonder it keeps
happening.

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rhacker
The story has been around for 1 hour on HN and only 3 comments.

This is already a dead story. There's no consequence for follow ups. It's
better to lie in the first round. Save the truth for later when the rage dips.

