
Facebook Gave Some Companies Access to Additional Data About Users’ Friends - radicaldreamer
https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-gave-some-companies-access-to-additional-data-about-users-friends-1528490406
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anigbrowl
I'm starting to feel like the only person out there who didn't have access to
this data.

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newscracker
The chant, from Facebook and even some commenters on HN and elsewhere, was
always "Facebook doesn't sell user data, that would be stupid. Facebook guards
user data very well and uses it to target ads."

With this and previous revelations, we now know that those claims are
completely false. The reasoning, as to why Facebook did it, doesn't matter.
The fact is that they sold user data. Even if they gave it at no monetary
cost, it was given to benefit the company, and hence the data was sold.

I suppose now we just have to wait for another report on how Facebook sold all
its user data to data brokers around the world.

~~~
Panini_Jones
> With this and previous revelations, we now know that those claims are
> completely false.

I don't see how Facebook is selling data. What do you mean?

~~~
craftyguy
[https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-gave-some-companies-
ac...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-gave-some-companies-access-to-
additional-data-about-users-friends-1528490406)

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Bucephalus355
Wow, this says the data sharing was after 2015. This directly contradicts
Zuckerberg’s congressional testimony does it not?

5 days ago the magazine The Baffler made the argument that Zuckerberg, at his
core, is a nice guy. It’s just that he isn’t that intelligent.

As the American Studies professor being interviewed says in the article:

>“And he continues to use words like “community,” a word he does not
understand in the least. This is what I mean when I say he’s uneducated.
Because he keeps using terms like community, which are complex, fraught
concepts, and he doesn’t stop to think what that means. He doesn’t stop to
think about the dynamics of a community, the effects of a community, the
limitations of a community, and even the very definition of a community. _You
know, if someone’s going to use community as the core goal of a multi-billion-
dollar company, maybe a couple of days of reading would help._ ”

[https://thebaffler.com/latest/the-zuckerberg-follies-
denison](https://thebaffler.com/latest/the-zuckerberg-follies-denison)

~~~
gowld
The Baffler is a great name for a website that hosts thinkpieces written by
people who have no idea what they are talking about.

~~~
lostlogin
Have you got a rebuttal for that quotes section?

~~~
anotherDumpster
Oh, there's plenty to refute. Uneducated is plainly false. Not that smart is
also clearly a non-starter.

Willful misuse of the word community is different from blundering misuse. Like
much of facebook's practice in the black art of dark patterns, malice is
suspect well before the presumption of incompetence. No time for Hanlon's
razor here.

Emotional blackmail is deeply engrained into facebook's user interface, and
serves as a driver of profits. So deeply pervasive this principle seems to be,
that it would be unsurprising to find the infectious premise of such a
persuasive tactic permeating Zuckerberg's general demeanor and subliminal
mannerisms.

Still I'd suspect that calculating organizational malice doesn't preclude an
individual still mostly being a nice guy, but with an apparatus like facebook
being as huge as it is, beyond any single human, it matters less whether one
is simply "a nice guy" at all, but rather a nice guy at what level, and to
whom?

Does Mark Zuckerberg regard different types of strangers differently from one
another? Which ones? When and why? How do strangers compare to employees,
friends on a first name basis, or family members? Not all of these things are
likely to be held in equal regard.

~~~
paganel
I was also taken aback by the author's insistence on Zuckerberg "not knowing
the sense of the word community". Can't the author see that the majority of
people nowadays have formed communities on Facebook? What does he/her expect,
for us to go back to forming zadrugas?
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zadruga](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zadruga))

------
somerandomness
Wow, in particular, "The whitelist deals, with companies including RBC Capital
Markets and Nissan Motor Co. , were struck with advertisers or Facebook
partners that were valuable for other reasons, according to some of the people
familiar with the matter."

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jimjimjim
They really are that terrible.

Back when Facebook started and people worried that they were giving info to
Facebook, most thought the worst that could happen is that Facebook would be
the one using that info. Not this dystopian scenario where they give it to
everyone else to exploit.

~~~
AlexandrB
This was inevitable. Even if Facebook didn’t share this info intentionally, no
human system is perfect and sooner or later there would be a leak. The only
way to keep info safe in the internet age is dead trees or just not collecting
it in the first place.

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kerng
I guess now its official that Zuckerberg lied at the hearing. What are
ramifications of such lies?

~~~
colejohnson66
None. IIRC, he wasn’t under oath.

~~~
bencollier49
But you don't have to have been under oath to be held accountable for lying to
Congress.

[https://edition.cnn.com/2017/07/24/politics/penalty-for-
lyin...](https://edition.cnn.com/2017/07/24/politics/penalty-for-lying-to-
congress/index.html)

~~~
craftyguy
$5 says they won't prosecute him. The only example the article gives of
someone going to prison for this is Reagan's national security advisor, not
some billionaire.

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alexmorse
Why are we giving such a pass that it took till 2015 to even start walling off
that information?

Prior to 2015 any facebook app developer could make an app that had a vague
one-prompt ask for permissions that gave them nearly everything, and a ton of
information on friends.

~~~
lord_ring_11
Probably because some employee could not justify “impact” on this. If anything
it will lower some key metric that was getting measured, because not giving
all friend info will lower app adoption growth numbers. Most levels at
facebook is filled with metric obsessed robots (because of how incentives are
aligned).

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gmueckl
So how comes that all these revelations come in such a quick succession after
years of relative silence? What changed?

~~~
ribosometronome
Financial companies need a distraction from their massive leaks of data that
you didn't voluntarily hand over to them?

~~~
vegetablepotpie
I think you make an important point. The media got into a frenzy over Facebook
and Cambridge Analytica and we continue to get reports on it, yet I haven't
seen many follow ups on Equifax. This is despite that having your SSN, DOB,
Address and Drivers License stolen has higher consequences for you than a
political campaign having your Facebook data. Priorities are misaligned.

~~~
bertil
Oh, it’s even more compelling than that: Cambridge Analytica didn’t rely on
Facebook data, but Axciom, Experian and Infogroup to target US voters.

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1024core
Archive link: [http://archive.is/jiO8k](http://archive.is/jiO8k)

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justicezyx
"Let's kill the contract with Chinese companies, and make it a headline"...

While behind scene do all kinds of money-making contracts with anyone with
enough price...

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radicaldreamer
Text-only: [https://pastebin.com/t4hBTAig](https://pastebin.com/t4hBTAig)

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andrzejsz
What a shame

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taneq
Why are people acting shocked? THIS IS THEIR BUSINESS MODEL. It's in their
privacy policy! "Your data may be shared with ... our affiliates" or words to
that effect.

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sbhn
HN leaks my data, just press my user name, look at all the comments I made,
see which other users I’ve interacted with, and have similar interests, also
see my submissions. I looked at all your usernames already.

~~~
pwinnski
False equivalence. HN makes no claims, explicit nor implied, that any of that
information is in any way private. They never have.

The same is not true of FB, not at all.

