Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuck: Just ask.
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don't know why.
Zuck: They "trust me"
Zuck: Dumb fucks.
A lot of people actually, even techies. I commented something similar on a different tech website (Ars Technica) highlighting the trustworthiness of the company behind the tool, and that by now people should not be surprised the face eating leopard eats faces. I was met with a lot of implicit defense of Meta and redirecting the attention to "whatabout" Anthropic, OpenAI, etc. (much like sibling reply here makes it an "every tech company" problem). The general agreement in that forum was that the company is not the problem, it's just what AI tooling does.
So either the internet is full of shills, or people are genuinely surprised because they chose ignorance for decades. Or maybe both can be true.
> So either the internet is full of shills, or people are genuinely surprised because they chose ignorance for decades.
I'd be willing to bet that many, MANY of this stuff in forums are not what we normally think of as shills, as in randos paid by a company to defend them, but regular employees who weirdly take criticism of their employers too personally and lash out to white-knight for them, even though it's not part of their job description.
How could they not take it personally? They’ve chosen to work for the scum of the earth for some extra gold. To maintain their sanity they have to justify Meta which means stan’ing for Marky Mark.
Well talk to cybersec folk, it doesnt matter what tech companies do when you have people who set up hopeless passwords, hand off devices to random strangers, click whatever they feel like despite thousands of warnings is, give the server room entry code to the guy who asked for it etc etc
But its reality of dealing with people who understandably dont move at the same pace the tech industry does. That gap exists and keeps growing. And has consequences.
But that reality has nothing to do with the issue addressed in the article or the defense of Meta that the comment you responded to talks about. Irresponsible or ignorant users didn't cause Meta to ignore security basics in their release and it doesn't explain defending that incompetence.
Google Jeff Horwitz a journo who has covered Meta for many years. He says both are happening. Sometimes Meta is irresponsible and sometime people make mistakes or dont know any better. You reduce it to one dimension at your own risk.
Has he written about this incident? What specifically about user behavior applies to this incident? I'm not reducing anything to anything, you just haven't haven't explained what about user behavior contributed to what the post is about.
duh users are sharing private info with publicly accesible links. The person they share it with can reshare it with whoever they feel like. Obviously the user hasnt thought abt what they are doing. You cant protect everyone from their own ignorance all the time. This is what I meant by a growing gap between what an avg user is expected to know and what they actually know.
"Claroc researchers were able to discover the Muse share links because all of them use the domain name cf.metaaiusercontent.com. Discovery is further made easy by the decision to add the conversation name to the URL, along with a long string of text. Simplified examples of such links are home-sale-budget-9f21c8a3.cf.metaaiusercontent.com, q3-revenue-review-7b1e42f0.cf.metaaiusercontent.com, and loan-application-draft-a4c9e2.cf.metaaiusercontent.com. It’s this last design decision, putting the conversation title in the subdomain rather than in the URL path, that makes public discovery possible."
You're saying is that when things are bad, it doesn't matter if someone makes them much worse. I think you're doing it for the sake of argument, and you'll find 1000 caveats why it only applies to what you want it to apply, because there's no possible way you'd go with in in real life. "Sir, you were bleeding anyway so it doesn't matter that we took your kidney".
It matters to the people who don't hand over their phone to a stranger. When someone hands of devices to a random stranger it's an exception and it goes against popular wisdom. When Meta does something hostile towards its users they do it for billions and the practice is normalized.
>Nobody worships Biden or defends his every gaffe or sanewashes his rambling speeches.
Yes, they do.
>there must be an equally bad opposite side or something
Biden is not the opposite of Trump. They're cut from the same cloth: heirs with a chip on their shoulder, largely out to protect the wealthy, and with a documented disregard for women lodging sexual assault allegations. They're not equally bad, but they are both bad. And that's only if you consider Biden's responsibility for the current state of SCOTUS in the most charitable manner.
Trying to draw an equivalence between the two or their supporters is incredibly disingenuous verging on dishonest.
Trump is a convicted rapist. Trump is legally prohibited from running a charity because of the massive fraud he committed. Trump is on tape bragging about sexual assault and committing fraud.
Trump has rallies while he's the freaking president. Trump attempts to discredit news agencies in general by repeating slander remarkably similar to that used by literal hitler.
To be "fair", Zuckerberg is a mendacious little prick with a history
Did the Google guys ever get caught saying that? Or using their power over the company to unsend messages, oh I guess you can't do that with email, but with Messenger you can...
I suspect you are projecting. This is not every tech company, not even remotely close. Maybe the big Silicon Valley companies have misled you into thinking that other software companies don't exist.
There is a gulf of difference between accessing your data to comply with the law and accessing your data (and giving it away to friends!) for no reason, while being so nefarious about it that you call people “dumb fucks” and mock them for even believing you’d treat the data properly and then spend years proving that you’re trustworthy, while at the same time showing complete understanding of the harm you’re causing by being yourself so private that you buy the houses next to yours and keep them empty.
I didn't think that your comment was about data access. I thought your comment was about the callous remarks by zuck. Most of the companies I work with treat customer data with extreme care and sensitivity and don't throw it around like silicon valley ad tech does.
Totally fair to be annoyed/outraged by this. What I argue is that ~every company has that attitude (Zuck just said the quiet part out loud). Like, we're only kidding ourselves if we think most companies' employees can't peek at our data on whim, or that most companies don't share it with third parties, and probably also (possibly secretly) with government.
It's not even about attitude, the regulatory and legal environment in the US essentially requires it, and where this facility is not openly available it is forced via National Security Letter.
The story of Joe Nacchio and Qwest is instructive. Though the current environment was borne out of the GWoT, the principle of extra-legal state access to all US telecommunications was established long ago.
The argument is that most companies have staff who have read access to databases. That is not controversial. I'd estimate 99.5% of companies at least, probably closer to (or above) 99.9%, but I'm not an expert.
Note that this is truthful yet unpopular, which is the opposite of approval-seeking (or trying to "sound cool").
You incorrectly state:
> (the) argument is predicated on condemning every company
yet the argument is that almost every company has at least some staff with read access to databases: "every tech company ... with extremely rare exceptions", "~every" ('~' translates to 'approximately'), and "most companies".
I'm finding out in another parallel thread[1] that you might be right and I might just coincidentally have worked for the few companies that take data protection seriously. I don't think I've worked anywhere since 2009 where rank and file engineers could just go access prod customer data whenever they felt like it, so I started believing that that is outlier behavior done by a few companies with cultures of carelessness like Meta.
It just seems so implausible. As soon as a company is big enough to hire their first General Legal counsel, you'd think that kind of practice would be flagged as highly legally risky and stopped. I'm reminded of the gcreep[2] incident which happened over 15 years ago. What company wants to go in front of a judge and say their policies allowed something like this?
It's not, there are levels of scumbaggery and Meta is one of the absolute worst. Rigging elections all over the world, privacy violations everywhere, actively scheming to get kids addicted to slop media, privacy destroying recording glasses, the list goes on.
The "everyone is bad" argument deliberately ignores degree and scale, and just provides cover for the worst. You don't defend a murderer by pointing to someone else and saying "But he punched someone in the face. Both are bad!" See also: "Both sides are bad" political arguments.
anyone surprised?