
Facebook confirms data sharing with Chinese companies - petethomas
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-privacy-congress/facebook-confirms-data-sharing-with-chinese-companies-idUSKCN1J11TY
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hmhrex
> “Every piece of content that you share on Facebook, you own and you have
> complete control over who sees it and how you share it, and you can remove
> it at any time,”

This sentence has been bothering me because it feels like his lawyers wrote
it. It's specifically worded to not include issues like this one.

Ref:
[https://www.houstonchronicle.com/techburger/article/Zuckerbe...](https://www.houstonchronicle.com/techburger/article/Zuckerberg-
hearings-shed-little-light-on-12827039.php)

~~~
sorokod
So, a question to developers reading this: would you be happy to work
alongside a person who participated in the development of this system?

~~~
mankash666
Trick question. Typically, when assigned tasks at work, one doesn't have the
forbearance or clairvoyance to asses the moral implications of the task.

The fairer question to ask is if the strategy team pitching such work/product
understood the moral implication of the work.

~~~
sorokod
This is Facebook we are talking about. One does not need to be clairvoyant.

~~~
krageon
A fairly large cross-section of big corporations will say things that are
shockingly evil to even moderately critical minds. You work there to put food
on the table, not to make the world a better place.

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adas17
Can someone explain to me a mechanism for having JSON data describing a user
and all their information downloaded and then displayed on the screen of
either an Android or iOS phone without the app or OS involved then having the
ability to send that data to a server later on?

The sentence “only available on the device” makes no sense to me as an
engineer. What?

Did Facebook code review every app and OS they gave this access to? Even then,
would they be able to garauntee that an update couldn’t be made to the app or
some library it relied on to prevent it from harvesting the data?

If that data was encrypted, how did it get displayed on a screen without being
unencrypted first and this made vulnerable to scraping?

I was an iOS and Android applications developer and I can’t think of any way
to do it (at least on iOS) short of (a) keeping it completely encrypted the
entire time (b) only allowing an application signed by Facebook and belonging
to Facebook and controlled by Facebook completely (in iOS, at least) to get
this data since iOS apps are well sandboxed from one another or (c) relying
vaguely on a legal agreement that the other party not be naughty with the data
contractually which means jack shit to the Chinese.

On Android - Jesus, forget about it.

~~~
bo1024
Exactly. All the issues these reporters are up in arms about would still be a
problem if Facebook gave these companies access to their regular API instead
of a specialized one.

In the end, a user is responsible for whom they give their username and
password to. That includes typing it into an app. I hope we can redirect the
publicity around this issue to scrutinizing the security of software,
operating systems, and hardware. And promoting open source!

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mkirklions
>a user is responsible for whom they give their username and password to.

In 2009, when I signed up for facebook, I was signing up for facebook.

Not sharing with political groups and enterprises.

No one reads ToS and at that point, it should be nullified. Everyone loses
their FB accounts because YOU didnt read the ToS. Facebook loses their
business because they lied about people reading and accepting their ToS.

Its important to be reasonable, FB definitely went full corruption and blaming
the billions of customers is laughable.

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ApolloFortyNine
You're blaming facebook because people don't read ToS?

And then you try to tell people to be reasonable? That's like the pot calling
the kettle black, isn't it?

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jkaplowitz
In many countries, like Germany, surprising provisions in consumer terms of
service are unenforceable for exactly this reason (and other reasons).

In my opinion, it's American over-adherence to legal formalism to the benefit
of powerful companies and the detriment of consumers that is unreasonable, not
the German approach. And I say this as an American myself.

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gowld
USA has very similar laws and legal tradition about what makes a contract
valid.

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jkaplowitz
The German (civil law) and US (common law) legal traditions are pretty
disparate, including their approaches to contract law - but in this case the
difference is due to consumer protection rules in Germany and Europe, not
anything longstanding about either tradition.

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weber111
I know very little about US law and even less about German law, but I think GP
was referring to contracts of adhesion, which are less enforceable in the US
too, afaik; even if the laws are far stronger in Germany and have different
historical origins, maybe there's at least some spiritual similarity between
the protections?

~~~
jkaplowitz
While it's true that contracts of adhesion are less enforceable in the US than
other contracts, they're still very enforceable.

In particular, if there's some evidence that a consumer clicked a check box
saying "I accept the terms of service" on a web form before submitting it,
where a link to the full terms of service was offered and the check box was
not checked by default, US courts will uphold far less friendly terms than
German courts will.

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cygned
How annoying Reuters included ads that redirect on mobile to pages informing
me about viruses on my iPhone and an incredible huge lottery win. Too bad,
it’s impossible to read the article on my phone.

edit: mobile

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rad_gruchalski
I think this could be your network operator. Happens quite often to me on 3g
in Germany, never when using wifi.

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cygned
I am in the US at the moment and actually on WiFi, so I guess that’s not the
issue.

But interesting that this happens to you. Never had that in Germany.

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waydowntogo
It's classic.

Only one thing can destroy big company / country etc - inside job.

In my point of view this is beginning of FB's end.

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sharemywin
I pretty much disagree. how exactly would that work? more regulation? so
people just click though more yep, it's creepy but I don't care buttons.

charge them as a monopoly? when you have google and apple?

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mkirklions
I just dont use FB anymore.

I get FB messages, but I dont check my feed.

Occasionally I get event invites, but I check that every few weeks or month.

I dont want to act like I'm 'cutting edge', but was on gamefaqs when it was
cool, FB in 2009, reddit in 2010. I dont use facebook anymore, we moved to
snapchat and niche fourms.

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skinnymuch
You said you don’t want to act like you’re cutting edge which is probably
good, but the years you listed for Facebook and Reddit aren’t that early for
those platforms.

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mkirklions
I was on reddit back when people were liberal on the website.

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mtgx
> “Facebook’s integrations with Huawei, Lenovo, OPPO and TCL were controlled
> from the get-go — and we approved the Facebook experiences these companies
> built.”

They're going to be sorry for admitting to that when we discover that Huawei
or Lenovo had been harvesting that data for other purposes.

~~~
ptero
They might be sorry for admitting this, but they have no choice -- once the
clear question gets asked FB cannot hide the answer. It can lie, but it would
be worse, as the lie will come out quickly and they would be in much hotter
water: not only for doing something bad, but also for lying about it
(effectively admitting they saw it as a bad practice). Pretending that what
they did is not bad is their best option.

And of course Huawei and Lenovo will use data for other purposes -- they
operate under different jurisdictions than FB. They also likely cannot keep
ignore data requests for "national interests" even if they wanted to. And
national interests include economic interests for sure.

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nisten
This is horrible, how do I know a random chinese business won't sell it for a
good markup to a russian agency or Egypt who've used it to prosecute non
religious people and gays. This whole interoperability push is getting
ignorant and lethal

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smallnamespace
You don't.

The simple consequence of globalization and economic integration is that _what
everyone does affects everyone else_ , and the networks of flow in
information, energy, and physical commodities are so dense that it becomes
very difficult to attribute cause and effect (and therefore moral
responsibility) to any one actor.

If it wasn't Facebook, it would've been someone else. That's not to absolve
Facebook of its behavior, just noting that there are strong incentives in
place that encourage interoperability and therefore efficiency that resulted
in its actions, and these incentives affect every organization worldwide.

The only way to prevent this is to build barriers to control the flow and pay
the very high price of loss in efficiency. China is way ahead of things in
that sense.

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aaavl2821
I am not familiar with the terms of these kinds of data sharing agreements,
but I know most US confidentiality agreements include a term that enables
companies to share confidential data with governments if required by law. Most
agreements if not all also contain a clause that companies take reasonable
best efforts to try to resist or narrow such requests. I believe I've heard
that tech companies can successfully do this on occassion

So even confidential company info can be taken by the government. In the US I
think there are practical limits on this and companies have some ability and
willingness to resist. From my limited experience the latter is not always the
case in china, and I'd imagine the former is less true as well

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anonu
I'm kinda thinking of Chipotle's pr nightmare over food safety. This is
similar. Facebook isn't going to die but people will be far less enamored by
it going forward.

Usage metrics have already been ticking down.

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jlebrech
This will be the downfall of Facebook, every country wants them to give them
data while at the same time wanting to protect their citizen from data being
given to other countries. and countries wanting data about their citizens
probably contravenes human rights.

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shashanoid
The first thing that comes in my mind:
[https://media.giphy.com/media/3oEjHCWdU7F4hkcudy/giphy.gif](https://media.giphy.com/media/3oEjHCWdU7F4hkcudy/giphy.gif)

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g0dg0d
So in other words, Zuckerberg lied.

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nraynaud
let's try to replace one word: "Facebook confirms data sharing with Jewish
companies". You see what kind of ideology this is spreading? Being Chinese is
bad?

~~~
deft
anti-chinese sentiment is very common on hackernews. Goes into pure racism a
lot of the time.

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fhood
Hang on though. Lets not conflate China the country, with Chinese the
inhabitants. I can be highly suspicious of China and Russia the countries
without feeling any animosity towards the people who are from there.

