Zuckerberg set up fraudulent scheme to 'weaponise' data, court case alleges(theguardian.com)
theguardian.com
Zuckerberg set up fraudulent scheme to 'weaponise' data, court case alleges
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/may/24/mark-zuckerberg-set-up-fraudulent-scheme-weaponise-data-facebook-court-case-alleges?CMP=share_btn_tw
32 comments
I don't care about Six4Three or their motives; I care about Facebook and privacy. It might be unfair to Facebook but from the little I know about their business practices, they hardly have clean hands or deserve much sympathy.
> $250,000
That doesn't sound like much for a years-long lawsuit against a major company with deep pockets; unless they are suing for far more, there won't be much, if any, net profit even if they win. I wonder what else is going on here. Was the Pikini app a test of Facebook's privacy policy and/or ML image recognition, to see how they would respond? To make a point? The description of it sounds tailor-made for controversy. Or did activists later pick up on the case and support or fund it?
> $250,000
That doesn't sound like much for a years-long lawsuit against a major company with deep pockets; unless they are suing for far more, there won't be much, if any, net profit even if they win. I wonder what else is going on here. Was the Pikini app a test of Facebook's privacy policy and/or ML image recognition, to see how they would respond? To make a point? The description of it sounds tailor-made for controversy. Or did activists later pick up on the case and support or fund it?
Honestly it sounds like a developer (or group of developers) through together an app that appeals to creepers and they felt arbitrarily singled out for creating a blatantly creepy app whereas the ones that quietly monetize the same data (via data brokers or something to that effect) get a free pass.
Ordinarily, a developer would bugger off but they (presumably) have alt-right activist leanings and they're trying to make a mountain out of a molehill. Check 4chan on any day and there will be "FB/IG creep" threads where users anonymously upload photos of their female Facebook and Instagram friends in skimpy/swimwear clothing.
Ordinarily, a developer would bugger off but they (presumably) have alt-right activist leanings and they're trying to make a mountain out of a molehill. Check 4chan on any day and there will be "FB/IG creep" threads where users anonymously upload photos of their female Facebook and Instagram friends in skimpy/swimwear clothing.
The hacker known as 4chan strikes again??? I thought they've banned him from Facebook...
What is alt-right? I thought it was people who don't like immigration. Seems to have nothing to do with this.
Edit: Just read up on the term. It's meaningless.
Edit: Just read up on the term. It's meaningless.
Can we skip this ritualistic pantomime? For the record, the other side of the issue is that the term has serious meaning and that the alt-right likes to undermine any allegations against it (of course), even by arguing that the term itself is meaningless and that they don't even exist; it's all a fantasy. A great way of disrupting any discussion or criticism. You can read the alt-right's position in the parent and other comment. With everything said, let's stop here!
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Exactly. Not to start a whole thing, but almost anytime you read alt-right, in context it means “person I don’t like the internet said exists”.
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250k?????
I bet their engineer to manager ratio was quite low.
I bet their engineer to manager ratio was quite low.
2 manager and 4 devs for 1 month to make an app.
That's < 1 yrs worth of an SV engineer's rate (after overhead). Roughly half.
In this particular article, "weaponise" doesn't mean private data as a weapon against the users (like Richard Stallman critiques of Facebook[1]). Instead, the journalists and the lawsuit are talking about desirable user data as a weapon against the API developers.
The article has interwoven 2 themes in a disjointed way and I had to read it several times to separate the components of the dispute.
The 1st theme is that the company Six4Three wrote an app to find photos of friends in bikinis using Facebook's platform API. Facebook later pulled the rug out from under them. In this sense, this is similar to other stories about platforms changing the terms/accessiblity of API usage (e.g. Facebook demoting Zynga games, or Twitter closing off 3rd-party clients, etc). If a platform entices programmers to use an API and then later restricts it (or kicks programmers off it), the claim is being made that it is "fraud". Facebook's counterclaim is that blocking programmers from using its API is exercising its editorial control and therefore "free speech".
The 2nd theme that's mentioned in passing is the Six4Three bikini API dispute as a forensic discovery into how the Cambridge Analytica abuse was deliberately engineered into the platform in 2011 and was approved by Facebook senior management. I think this is the more interesting angle that the Guardian writers should have focused more text on.
[1] https://stallman.org/facebook.html
The article has interwoven 2 themes in a disjointed way and I had to read it several times to separate the components of the dispute.
The 1st theme is that the company Six4Three wrote an app to find photos of friends in bikinis using Facebook's platform API. Facebook later pulled the rug out from under them. In this sense, this is similar to other stories about platforms changing the terms/accessiblity of API usage (e.g. Facebook demoting Zynga games, or Twitter closing off 3rd-party clients, etc). If a platform entices programmers to use an API and then later restricts it (or kicks programmers off it), the claim is being made that it is "fraud". Facebook's counterclaim is that blocking programmers from using its API is exercising its editorial control and therefore "free speech".
The 2nd theme that's mentioned in passing is the Six4Three bikini API dispute as a forensic discovery into how the Cambridge Analytica abuse was deliberately engineered into the platform in 2011 and was approved by Facebook senior management. I think this is the more interesting angle that the Guardian writers should have focused more text on.
[1] https://stallman.org/facebook.html
Agree that the ability to access a user's friend's data (without said friend's permission) through the API, was a deliberate feature (not an abuse as it has been portraied) and is the interesting bit about this. Facebook deliberately abused user's privacy by deciding to monetize that feature. Only later decided to roll it back.
"Editorial control" as justification for selective access is interesting, and seems in tension with their need to remain considered a "platform" instead of a publication. (They aren't a platform; utility surplus from user participation doesn't flow to the users.)
> wrote an app to find photos of friends in bikinis [....] Facebook later pulled the rug out from under them
In this case, I think I'm just rooting for injuries.
> wrote an app to find photos of friends in bikinis [....] Facebook later pulled the rug out from under them
In this case, I think I'm just rooting for injuries.
I agree with Bill Gates' description of platforms as companies which provide tools which are used by other entities to generate more economic value than the value of the owners of those tools. How you measure said economic value is another story and one I am grappling with. And I think social media companies are ultimately aggregators, not platforms. What I think should come out of any regulation is an obligation for aggregators at a certain scale to 1) stop calling themselves neutral platforms, because that's not accurate, 2) be required to disclose in verifiable, auditable detail how they are prioritizing content from an algorithmic perspective, how they are compensating generators of both paid and organic content from a both monetary and "in app currency" perspective (likes, etc), and 3) when they do exercise their editorial judgment and kick 3rd party apps off their APIs, explain how and why they came to such a judgment, not in a storytelling kind of way, but in a parametric (they hit this number, so we took action) kind of way. And if there is a human in the loop, that human needs to have certain competencies, which would resemble professionalism like that of lawyers and doctors. These three requirements would have to be agreed upon like international standards of a sort. Now, I am aware that everything I am requesting is also likely to be infected by 'bureacracy' and that is something I'm not sure I have a way to solve for.
> The 2nd theme that's mentioned in passing is the Six4Three bikini API dispute as a forensic discovery into how the Cambridge Analytica abuse was deliberately engineered into the platform in 2011 and was approved by Facebook senior management. I think this is the more interesting angle that the Guardian writers should have focused more text on.
Is that intentional aspect of the lawsuit or just a side-effect? It would be interesting if a privacy advocate gained control of a defunct entity with standing to sue Facebook over data-related dispute like this, and used discovery to dig into Facebook's privacy practices.
Is that intentional aspect of the lawsuit or just a side-effect? It would be interesting if a privacy advocate gained control of a defunct entity with standing to sue Facebook over data-related dispute like this, and used discovery to dig into Facebook's privacy practices.
Yeah, that article was all over the place. The only thing I could get from a first reading was that Facebook did something wrong - just using the anti-facebook sentiment I guess
Only tangentially related, but the second image in the article [1] — the one with all the cameras right in Zuckerberg's face — is crazy. What a strange and surreal experience that must be.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/may/24/mark-zuck...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/may/24/mark-zuck...
It's almost like a physical representation of how Facebook tries to capture every nuance of your activity online.
Statistics: Weaponized pattern recognition.
Gothic High Tech: Consciously weaponized bullshit.
Gollumization: The impoverishment of a system through ephmeralization and weaponized attention.
Bullshit: 1. Data (often a firehose) produced by someone who is indifferent to the truth or falsity of what is being said. 2. Data that appears to contain more information than it actually does. 3. Noise randomly tagged with truth-values to give it apparent legibility. 4. Non-requisite variety.
Legibility: the apparent absence of noise in data.
Data: Any collection of information, bullshit and noise.
Information: Data that has been judged to be true or false through comparison with observed reality at a given point in time.
Gothic High Tech: Consciously weaponized bullshit.
Gollumization: The impoverishment of a system through ephmeralization and weaponized attention.
Bullshit: 1. Data (often a firehose) produced by someone who is indifferent to the truth or falsity of what is being said. 2. Data that appears to contain more information than it actually does. 3. Noise randomly tagged with truth-values to give it apparent legibility. 4. Non-requisite variety.
Legibility: the apparent absence of noise in data.
Data: Any collection of information, bullshit and noise.
Information: Data that has been judged to be true or false through comparison with observed reality at a given point in time.
This article is a bit short on details.
Back in December 2016, Six4Three ("643") created a website https://www.facebooksappeconomy.com to raise awareness about Facebook's business practices.
"... Facebook started threatening to shut off friend data to companies in late 2012 unless they made extravagant, unrelated purchases in Facebook's new mobile ads product. Zuckerberg did this in order to keep Facebook's advertising business from collapsing because it had been built exclusively for desktop computers."
It has more details on what 643 is hoping to accomplish with the help of other app developers, including a timeline as well as a documentary video.
When 643 contacted Facebook to let them know about this website, Facebook threatened 643 with trademark infringement.1
1. http://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...
Back in December 2016, Six4Three ("643") created a website https://www.facebooksappeconomy.com to raise awareness about Facebook's business practices.
"... Facebook started threatening to shut off friend data to companies in late 2012 unless they made extravagant, unrelated purchases in Facebook's new mobile ads product. Zuckerberg did this in order to keep Facebook's advertising business from collapsing because it had been built exclusively for desktop computers."
It has more details on what 643 is hoping to accomplish with the help of other app developers, including a timeline as well as a documentary video.
When 643 contacted Facebook to let them know about this website, Facebook threatened 643 with trademark infringement.1
1. http://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...
I have read it three times. It doesn’t make sense. I have no idea what is being alleged.
Facebook abused their position against developers. Kind of like if Apple gave developers full access to all details of every iPhone owner to convince them to develop iPhone apps, then when they get developers onboard they start cutting access randomly to devs, and offer some devs lowball offers to sell with the implied threat of “or we’ll cut you off entirely”.
I can’t imagine that “randomly” makes sense, or that they have proof of anything like that. “Arbitrarily” means that Facebook gets to decide how much of a creep is too much. It’s very confusing to have the same talk about an offer to sell their company: creeps are the last thing Facebook wants on their payroll.
The first half of this title sounds terrible ... until you see the second half. "Court Case Alleges" Well, this is the COURT we're talking about, so maybe this is legitimate information. Until you realize that this actually reduces to: "Some guy says (because he think it will get him money)".
So basically this company tried to do something creepy and invasive with users' data, were stopped by Facebook, and now they're taking advantage of the fact that the press is pissed off at Facebook and will uncritically regurgitate any negative claim about them in headlines as leverage in their court case against them, likely in the expectation that it'll be cheaper for Facebook to settle than deal with the PR fallout.