nelsonic commented 8 years ago

des-des commented 8 years ago

yes

joseluisq commented 8 years ago

😈 👍

garmjs commented 8 years ago

@des-des 😂

nelsonic commented 7 years ago

https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-doesnt-tell-users-everything-it-really-knows-about-them Is this helping Facebook to ...

"give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected. People use Facebook to stay connected with friends and family, to discover what’s going on in the world, and to share and express what matters to them."

facebook-mission

See: their "mission": https://investor.fb.com/resources/default.aspx

Also: http://qz.com/874394/we-already-have-a-muslim-registry-its-called-facebook/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/12/facebook-should-delete-the-muslim-registry-it-already-has/

And lest we forget:

Does it frustrate anyone else to see their friends/family pouring their time into Facebook knowing that Facebook's actual "mission" is to:

"amass everyone's personal data & sell it to the highest bidder"

sirmews commented 7 years ago

As a developer, I say Yes.

As a marketer that uses Facebook data for targeting, Yes.

As an evil scientist that loves playing with data gathered by Facebook Pixel, Ummm No.

jedwards1211 commented 7 years ago

As a full-time React developer who loves using it, I felt really conflicted when Facebook recruiters contacted me 😄 I basically just told them I would love to work on open-source tools like React etc. but would not be willing to work on Facebook's core product.

des-des commented 7 years ago

Also we should all delete whatsapp and use signal / something like riot. (asap)

@eliascodes ?

eliasmalik commented 7 years ago

@des-des probs. I believe Signal is currently recommended by most security peeps. Telegram, not so much. Haven't heard of riot.

Adamantish commented 7 years ago

My biggest fear is less whether facebook is evil right now but the unmonitored manipulative power they are amassing for whoever happens to own them in future. If we have watchdogs to watch newspapers why is the far more powerful newsfeed algorithm under less official scrutiny? Do they manipulate elections? Deliberately, accidentally as a side effect? If they don't now, how would we know on the day that they decide to?

This chrome extension is worked on by volunteers here in Berlin to try and fill that gap. The idea is that upstanding citizens allow the extension to let a node app scrape their newsfeed so we can reverse engineer with an open, anonymised dataset and spot when facebook make big, manipulative changes.

If anyone has good design and copywriting skills I bet they'd welcome help making their promotional pages more attractive at the least. They're open to contributors.

nelsonic commented 7 years ago

@coudrew sounds like Fb have a pretty tight grip on your community of friends... 😞

gregtandiono commented 7 years ago

I really like the use of github issues as a discussion thread. Best part about it is that it weeds out the trolls, since we're all engineers (but then again I've had my fair share of entertaining dev trolls from time-to-time)

:)

nelsonic commented 7 years ago

Is anyone surprised by this...? 👥 < 💰 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/13/whatsapp-backdoor-allows-snooping-on-encrypted-messages And yet "the People" are unlikely to stop using WhatsApp because they either don't understand the implication to their long term privacy or they **dont care*** 😩

AlainPilon commented 7 years ago

I personally think that people (including a few of people on this thread) are overreacting to the privacy thing. Refusing to use FB would be like staying home because you are too scared to be filmed by traffic cameras.

While I agree with the impact FB and other social media can have on crowd opinions, I hardly see why people are so concerned about privacy. I am way more concerned about fake news than editorial filtering.

For some context, I worked at Fetlife, a social network where people talked and consumed "deviant" sexual content and topics. There privacy was critical since for some people, a coming out could mean losing their job or even getting killed. So I know a lot about the importance of privacy.

But Facebook? Technically, everything you create on FB is ment to be seen by someone else you know, so nothing is really private. Basically, my perception is that if you are using FB in a way that should not be made public, maybe FB is not a the platform that you should use.

Concerns regarding tracking pixels is totally justified, but I think it should be moved outside of the FB debate because this is done by pretty much everyone in the web space and should thus be discussed on a broader scale.

Obviously, all of this is my own opinion but there are way scarier privacy issues out there (Uber, I am looking at you!)

Disclaimer: I own FB stock.

nelsonic commented 7 years ago

@AlainPilon while I agree in principal that what most people share on FB is "meant to be public" to their friends/family, however I'm fairly certain most people don't realise that what they are sharing with their friends is actually being "mined" to create a profile that is sold to advertisers. What people think is reasonably "private" (visible by friends-friends) is used to sell them stuff like sugary drinks, and get-rich-quick-schemes: https://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/25-bad-facebook-advertisements facebook-get-rich-quick-scheme Also, what people explicitly share is not the only data FB is harvesting. FB collects data on all your "sentiments" on all the other websites you visit which use the "FB" API or "Social Plugins": https://securehomes.esat.kuleuven.be/~gacar/fb_tracking/fb_plugins.pdf summarised in: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-34776191 they mine all "private" conversations across FB Messenger and WhatsApp even though they claim it's "encrypted" or "private" and the data they are collecting is not limited to your messages: http://gizmodo.com/facebooks-messenger-app-logs-way-more-data-than-you-rea-1633441673 Then they source "offline" data on their users in order to build a more "complete" profile of their users in order to package it up and sell it on...

security researcher Jonathan Zdziarski summarised it best: “Ultimately it comes down to whether or not you trust Facebook not to take advantage of their position on your device to snoop on you.” ... “The technical capabilities to do so are certainly there.”

To be clear, it's pretty obvious to anyone who stops to think about this that Google has considerably more data on it's users given the fact that they have access to all Search history, Location Data via Google Maps and Biometrics via Android, etc. But while Google let's Advertisers target people based on interests (what they search for) Facebook let's advertisers target people based on their personal data: https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-lets-advertisers-exclude-users-by-race

Owning FB stock creates an unavoidable cognitive bias which is not your "fault". Your FB stock will continue to appreciate because "average non-technical" or privacy-naive people will continue to use FB and "Gen-Y" will keep using Instagram for the foreseeable future. 👍 and with Oculus Gamers will get a whole new level of immersive instant gratification!

While some technology might sound "really cool": http://uk.businessinsider.com/facebooks-building-8-working-on-brain-computer-communication-platform-2017-1 if it's used to "mine-and-sell-data" it's never going to be in the "best interest" of the people...

Purely from an investment perspective, FB is a solid bet because they have an army of highly intelligent social & computer scientists systematically working to produce a deliberately highly addictive product which induces "FOMO" in it's users.

Also, Uber... agreed. creepy amounts of tracking going on there even/especially while app not in use. But for now they appear to be using it for their own "app-improvement" purposes rather than selling it on to advertisers ... but I expect them to "monetise" it somehow...

nelsonic commented 7 years ago

Whisper Systems Replied: There is no WhatsApp 'backdoor' http://hn.premii.com/#/article/13394900 Which, is carefully worded and appears to retort The Guardian's "claim", However, from personal experience of watching hundreds of people use Apps in UX Tests and observing my non-technical family and friends, and considering "social engineering" tricks are still the easiest way to compromise security, I'm still inclined to think that WhatsApp isn't as "secure" they would like everyone to believe. And let's be clear, this is a closed-source binary distribution native application. They can put what ever "analytics" code he want to "help improve the performance and reduce battery consumption" into the App which can "phone home" with Private Keys at any time ... For a company that paid $19bn for a service https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/10/28/facebooks-21-8-billion-acquisition-lost-138-million-last-year/?_r=0 that barely covers the cost of its staff there has to be a "payback" for FB else the investors would have tanked their share price. I would personally love to believe that FB is a cute cuddly kitten company run by people who care about the privacy of their users but it's simply not the case. They are a for-profit tax-avoiding multinational https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/oct/09/facebook-uk-ends-up-11m-in-tax-credit-despite-global-profits-of-5bn And despite many attempts to prove otherwise they have demonstrated a penchant for abusing their power. I agree that the "fake news" and "election swaying" that resulted from their "we'all take anyone's money for eyeballs" business model has a much more devastating impact to the world in the short term than their data collection activities. But... when combined these facts are even more worrying.

nelsonic commented 7 years ago

Further explanation of the vulnerability with demo video: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/16/whatsapp-vulnerability-facebook or "How Facebook are getting their ROI for WhatsApp by mining people's conversations..."

Also, Bruce Schneier addressed the issue: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/01/whatsapp_securi.html but the most interesting part is reading the comments below his post. Ultimately, anyone who cares about Privacy/Security should use an Open Source messaging client like Signal https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Android

jedwards1211 commented 7 years ago

@AlainPilon For me the privacy concern is more about hypotheticals: what an evil government/leaders could do with access to all of that data. Given that governments have killed people with certain political beliefs, and how visible our political beliefs may be online, I would rather it not be so easy for the government to find out such things.

AlainPilon commented 7 years ago

@jedwards1211 this is a very valid point. Then again, removing myself from social network has a cost which I am not willing to pay in relation to the risk. But that is a personal choice.

bradreeder commented 7 years ago

To be clear, it's pretty obvious to anyone who stops to think about this that Google has considerably more data on it's users given the fact that they have access to all Search history, Location Data via Google Maps and Biometrics via Android, etc. But while Google let's Advertisers target people based on interests (what they search for) Facebook let's advertisers target people based on their personal data: https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-lets-advertisers-exclude-users-by-race

"what do i do if i'm feeling suicidal", etc etc. I could think of loads.

Perhaps I'm missing the definition of personal data, but I find it hard to argue that personal data could not be collected on you from a search engine. In a way it's more personal, it has the capacity to be your own private confessional box of the internet (that's secretly made of glass 😉 ). There are things you might search for -- sexual habits as @AlainPilon said, as an example -- that you might not even share with others (except Google thou omniscient).

Even if we argue that one is a tiger and the other is a kitten, or that both are kittens, the danger is that either are poised to become tigers. The amount of information they have on us is far too much power -- that concerns me far more than questions of whether one is evil or not. Even if they don't abuse it, I'm unable to trust that that will always be the case. My Google search history could easily be framed to put me on a government watch-list.

nelsonic commented 7 years ago

Logged into FB because got a notification about my Aunt's birthday party event and wanted to say "can't make it"...

Got this Ad in my "Timeline"...

how-do-they-know I wonder why React.js is the "Most Popular" Project on GitHub...?

Oh that's right, React.js is the ultimate Recruitment Tool made by the Marketing Machine ... 🙊 I wonder whose job it was to create the "bot" to get all the "likes" for FB "Engineering"... Or if "Zuck" built himself...? 🤔

Fact is Facebook is inextricably linked to Mark. And I wouldn't trust him to hold my water bottle.

Which of these two is doing more to give people their Human Rights...? https://www.privacyinternational.org/node/54 man of the year

Granted Julian has his issues: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Assange#Allegations_of_anti-Semitism and Edward called his team out:

But I would still sooner sign into a service run by almost anyone other than Facebook!

Watch it: https://youtu.be/XEVlyP4_11M

So many good memes: https://www.google.com/search?q=zuckerberg+meme&tbm=isch 😜

privacy http://www.collective-evolution.com/2016/07/04/this-is-how-mark-zuckerberg-protects-his-privacy-from-hackers

also ... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-18/this-team-runs-mark-zuckerberg-s-facebook-page loving the soft-focus photo op "official" photos... 👍

wildcard commented 7 years ago

You should consider https://keybase.io/ as a commuincation tool

jedwards1211 commented 7 years ago

@nelsonic I think you're over thinking this... React is not a conspiracy, it's just a very powerful and well-designed tool. It came from Facebook because they tend to pull brilliant devs, much as I hate it, not because it was part of some devious plan. Also FB had the clout to get tools like Babel to support JSX early on... It would be harder for a smaller org to make such a major change to the language.

nelsonic commented 7 years ago

@jedwards1211 I "over-think" things a lot. 🤔 but prefer over than under thinking (the "norm") ... 😉

I agree that React is "powerful", but it's not the best at anything it does. Elm is way better than React/JSX in every measurable dimension and http://www.ractivejs.org and pre-dates React so FB could have just supported what already existed ... but because they could not "own" the existing work, they just "borrowed" the good ideas and re-branded it.

Don't confuse Facebook's Open Source with grass-roots efforts. They have a commercial interest in everything they put out. And by heavily marketing their tools (sponsoring meetups and lavish conferences) they are systematically trying to recruit the best "talent" to work for them. It's not a "conspiracy" it's a business strategy just like Microsoft giving "Office" to schools/universities ensured people would continue to use/buy their products when they entered the workforce ... The product is not the best, but the marketing execution is excellent.

jedwards1211 commented 7 years ago

I'm surprised you're comparing Ractive.js to React...I don't see much similarity. Curly-brace substitution certainly isn't all that special. The concept of reactive updates is not new, in fact it is decades old (and Meteor also does it in a completely different way than React, and with a template syntax more similar to Ractive.js). Ractive.js doesn't seem to have some of React's main features: 1) generating a virtual dom from templates created in javascript and then syncing those to the real dom, 2) extending JavaScript syntax to include a DOM template language, 3) doing reactive updates at the component level, rather than at the curly-brace level, which is not necessarily as performant but simplifies a lot of things. I'm not sure React was the first have any of these features either, but I bet it's far more elegant than anything that predated it. I think its popularity didn't come solely from FB's promotion, but also from its inherent strengths. (After all, Google, an behemoth, has been promoting Angular for longer than React, but look how popular it is in comparison).

You have a point though about FB's goals from promoting React. I thought you were saying the whole reason they created React to begin with was to recruit talent, which I don't believe is true -- I believe it initially just came out of some dev's head as a way to make things easier.

Elm may be way better than React/JSX for every single one of your needs...but if it were for my needs, I would be using it :wink: There are no absolutes in programming except the desired behavior. If there were absolutes there would be a lot more agreement among programmers rather than the huge diversity of tools available these days. I definitely appreciate Elm's beauty and influence though.

nelsonic commented 7 years ago

@jedwards1211 agreed. Ractive.js might not be a "best" example. Let's stick with Elm as a comparison ... http://elm-lang.org/blog/blazing-fast-html I don't know the reason for the "diversity" in the development community other than a lack of communication for what already exists which leads people to create similar things ...

It used to frustrate me that FB get "credit" for Virtual DOM etc. but now I'm just happy to be using Elm which I find easier to learn and more productive than React, Redux, Immutable, Babel, etc.

There isn't much point debating the technical merits of FB or their "stack". it works for them and the many people they have managed to market it to. and that's cool. I think what matters is what we build and how useful the apps/tools we make are to the people using them ... 👍
(oh and that we aren't selling user data to advertisers...) 😉

jedwards1211 commented 7 years ago

@nelsonic another reason for diversity is mere convenience for what a developer's comfortable with or what works with other existing code and tools. Take Laravel, a modern PHP framework, for instance -- in my opinion PHP sucks, even my friends who have done a lot of PHP think it sucks. But for people who don't want to spend a lot of time learning another language, or want to use existing PHP libraries, Laravel helps them be more productive.

Same case for Redux...Dan Abramov liked concepts from Elm, but wanted to have similar capabilities in JavaScript.

jedwards1211 commented 7 years ago

On a similar note about privacy, I hate how a lot of Google's most convenient services (e.g. setting reminders via voice) only work if you sacrifice a lot of privacy. I wish they would put effort into making equally convenient services that work with app data stored locally/synced between your devices rather than stored in the cloud. Also, I wish they made storing your history in the cloud opt-in instead of opt-out.

nelsonic commented 7 years ago

http://www.truthhawk.com/is-facebook-a-structural-threat-to-free-society/ PDF Snapshot: Is Facebook A Structural Threat To Free Society_ - TruthHawk.pdf

jedwards1211 commented 7 years ago

wow, I hadn't read about shadow profiles before...~~hard to tell whether that's speculation or not~~ (nevermind, it's definitely happening: http://www.zdnet.com/article/anger-mounts-after-facebooks-shadow-profiles-leak-in-bug/), but that's messed up. I always wish I had time to write bots that feed misinformation about people into the global information machines.

nelsonic commented 7 years ago

What was the role of Cambridge Analytica and psychographics in the EU referendum? http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-40423629

des-des commented 7 years ago

This is a good piece on Cambridge analytica: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/07/the-great-british-brexit-robbery-hijacked-democracy

nelsonic commented 7 years ago

@des-des good article. 👍 Given that Cambridge Analytica are suing The Guardian for it, saved a PDF snapshot for when it disappears: The-Great-British-Brexit-robbery-how-our-democracy-was-hijacked-The-Guardian.pdf

eliasmalik commented 7 years ago

https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-hate-speech-censorship-internal-documents-algorithms

:trollface:

nelsonic commented 7 years ago

https://thenextweb.com/contributors/2017/08/11/big-brother-name-facebook

nelsonic commented 7 years ago

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n16/john-lanchester/you-are-the-product

discovered this article on HackerNews: Don't know where it "peaked" but it was at #15 when I saw it ... HN Discussion/Comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15029960

To read the full article, use any RFC 5322 compliant email address e.g: abcde@gmail.com (which BTW is a "real" person's name see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abcde but probably isn't a "real" gmail inbox ...)

PDF snapshot:

John Lanchester reviews ‘The Attention Merchants’ by Tim Wu, ‘Chaos Monkeys’ by Antonio García Martínez and ‘Move Fast and Break Things’ by Jonathan Taplin · LRB 17 August 2017.pdf

Selected Quotes:

"Facebook has no financial interest in telling the truth"

"anyone on Facebook is in a sense working for Facebook, adding value to the company."

"Its news feed directs traffic at you based not on your interests, but on how to make the maximum amount of advertising revenue from you."

"If I want to reach women between the ages of 25 and 30 in zip code 37206 who like country music and drink bourbon, Facebook can do that. Moreover, Facebook can often get friends of these women to post a ‘sponsored story’ on a targeted consumer’s news feed, so it doesn’t feel like an ad."

"even more than it is in the advertising business, Facebook is in the surveillance business. Facebook, in fact, is the biggest surveillance-based enterprise in the history of mankind."

"I’m not sure there has ever been a more complete disconnect between what a company says it does – ‘connect’, ‘build communities’ – and the commercial reality."

"Facebook has done a huge amount to lower the quality of public debate and to ensure that it is easier than ever before to tell what Hitler approvingly called ‘big lies’ and broadcast them to a big audience."

"To sum up: there is a lot of research showing that Facebook makes people feel like shit. So maybe, one day, people will stop using it."

nelsonic commented 7 years ago

Facebook "Engineering" ("legal") shows true intentions to tech community: Read the HN comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15050841 and issue thread: https://github.com/facebook/react/issues/10191 PDF Snapshot of issue: Consider-re-licensing-to-AL-v2.pdf (given that the issue is "locked" by Fb, the only way it will change is if Fb deletes comments from "dissenters"... which has happened before.)

tl;dr: "poisoning the open source ecosystem"

@j127 said it best in: https://github.com/facebook/react/issues/10191#issuecomment-315807794

So What?

The Licensing / Patents issue does not appear to "affect" the average developer. But it's a clear indication of Facebook's intent. They want to continue copying everyone else's ideas and if those ideas happen to be built using any of Fb's "Open Source" code, they effectively have a "free pass" to use anyone else's ideas.

consider the following:

Scenario

Your team builds a an app that has a useful "social" feature. The feature you built was so innovative that you were able to secure a Patent for it. (we can discuss the (de)merits of software patents at length at a different time, for now let's imagine that the feature combines a "real world" physical feature which makes it a "traditional" i.e. mechanical patent)

The team chose to use the Facebook's "Technology Stack": React, Immutable, Flow, GraphQL, etc. (all the most popular elements of the Fb stack have the "Patents" clause in their License)

A year goes by and your app becomes popular. Popular enough for Facebook's "ideas" department to take notice. The best features of your app appear in one (or more) of Fb's "product(s)". Fb have made no effort to "disguise" that they have directly copied the feature(s) from your app.

As you see usage of your app declining someone in the "legal" team suggests suing Fb for "intellectual property" infringement.

If you send Fb a lawsuit for copying the feature you invented/developed, you automatically forfeit the right to use any of Fb's "open source" components and are thus in breach of their Copyright/Patent(s). i.e. Suing Fb guarantees a counter-suit if you have used any of their "open source" code. And given that React is increasingly pervasive in the "Open Source" community, there's a high likelihood that something in your company is using Fb's code.

Facebook's Reply (Blog Post)

https://code.facebook.com/posts/112130496157735/explaining-react-s-license/ PDF snapshot at time of writing: Explaining-Reacts-license_Engineering-Blog_Facebook-Code.pdf

Fb confirms why the clause exists:

Fb reiterates that they aren't going to change/remove it: (obviously)

Fb calls inbound lawsuits "meritless ":

Real Life Case: "Collaborative Digital Photo Albums"

Consider the following patent: https://www.google.com/patents/WO2014040157A1

Then read: https://venturebeat.com/2013/08/26/facebook-kills-100-startups-with-new-collaborative-photo-album-feature and: https://medium.com/cluster-ideas/cluster-competition-b4e424bd8873 (long look at the many photo sharing apps that existed before Fb copied the feature...)

It's bad for democracy in the "test" countries and Facebook knows it.

Just like Fb are well aware of exactly how many people saw "misinformation" (adds) in the 2016 Presidential campaign ... https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/30/facebook-russia-fake-accounts-126-million Fb are just counting on their docile user-base to not revolt and their PR team to make it "go away".

arielelkin commented 7 years ago

Fb are just counting on their docile user-base to not revolt

So.. you're gonna do the revolting for them?

nelsonic commented 7 years ago

@arielelkin nah ... Fb users can make up their own minds. Though it would not surprise me if "unfavourable" articles like this are mysteriously missing from the "Timeline" 🙄

I just want to be a farmer how about you?

deadcoder0904 commented 7 years ago

@arielelkin Let me quote Uncle Ben here

With great power comes great responsibility

nelsonic commented 7 years ago

Does anyone else see the flaw in this plan: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/11/08/facebook-asks-users-nude-photos-can-block-revenge-porn-later/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-41913740

😕

Give us your "intimate" photos so that we can "protect" you ... This is like giving the "school bully" your locker keys so that they can keep them "safe" for you.

Obviously having WhatsApp Fb already have a lot of people's "intimate" photos. Only the naive people actually believe that Fb are using end-to-end Encryption in WhatsApp without a "Man-in-the-Middle" actively "mining & indexing" all messages to target people with adds! https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/25/whatsapp-to-share-user-data-with-facebook-for-ad-targeting-heres-how-to-opt-out

"The Onion" outlined their goal best: https://github.com/evancz/guide.elm-lang.org/blame/8371d78cb8534d10a9953d1baadc488ed5961d5b/error_handling/maybe.md#L28 Their objective is to mine as much data as possible for the CIA ...

jedwards1211 commented 7 years ago

@nelsonic they should also let you upload nude photos of your partner so that if it detects your partner posted nude photos of you, it will automatically retaliate on your behalf

nelsonic commented 7 years ago

Fairly certain that systematic discrimination is evil ... https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-advertising-discrimination-housing-race-sex-national-origin

nelsonic commented 6 years ago

lol. 🤣 another-facebook-recruiter When will these @fb recruiters learn how to search GitHub...?