People The Media have been acting very suprised about all the news around Facebook which has been popping up for the last few weeks.
But frankly, I find exactly these reactions the coverage far more surprising. I mean, didn’t everyone already kind of know that this has been going on if you use Facebook? People don’t have to be told that something unusual is going on. Just look at their app permissions (or their business model). What probably shocks irritates most people is the facts that they can’t go on telling themselves that everything is fine.
Edit: I would like to clarify – my issue isn’t who knew what and who didn’t. I am talking about the popular reaction and the narrative in which tese events are being placed, which I belive to be wrong. I don’t understand why people see this as trolling?
I see this sort of comment a lot, and I think it’s wrong headed and counterproductive:
There’s a difference between a general believe that Facebook doesn’t respect your privacy and a very specific “they collected this data, unnecessarily and stored it in perpetuity”
Chastising people for not having been aware in the past doesn’t encourage them to be more proactive in the future, it pushes them to just stop caring entirely. If you want people to be more upset and take action, use this opportunity to push them forwards, not lecture them for having been late to the party.
I’m not blaming Facebook users or trying to act as if I were superior. I mean, I use WhatsApp on a (far too) regular basis, and have a pretty good feeling that it is going on there too And I understand why they are using it.
But in the end, what else were they supposed to be doing with the data? The people I am “concerned” with are those who are talking about this the most, acting as if nobody would have guessed that this could be happening in a million years. If anything, this seems to be the harmful thing to do, since it seems to neglect that Facebook isn’t doing this because they are evil or something, but anyone, any social network with a similar history, size and system of operation, would have to do the same. The crime is intrinsic in the form.
Personally, I don’t know specifically what Facebook or other companies are doing. However, I know that they are in the business of data collection so this is not shocking. What they do specifically depends on what they are able to do technically.*
If they were doing something outside their scope of business, like raise a great old one from the void, then I might be shocked.
** That something might be technically feasible might be shocking, but that’s another story.
E.g., “Facebook scraped call data from Android” vs. “Android leaks call data to third party apps.”
That is kind of what I am trying to say. It isn’t supprising, and this fact should be emphasized. Sadly, @alex_gaynor misunderstood me a bit, in that I want people to understand why this shouldn’t be surprising. It is their buisness model, and no matter who or what, something along these lines happening will have ultimately unavoidable.
What they do specifically depends on what they are able to do technically
And what they have to do as a business to always be a step ahead of their competition! And again, this isn’t anyones individual responsibility, just as nobody is to blame when a player is ahead in Mensch ärgere Dich nicht and others loose.
Maybe a bit snarky, but let me draw some parallels with this take:
“The Big Bang? Why are you interested in it now? It happened 13 billion years ago. It obviously happened, otherwise we wouldn’t be here at all. Why study it? Pretty much everybody knows about cosmology. Add some fundamental laws and, well the current state of the universe naturally follows.”
The point is: not even close to the number of people you think knew knew. Those who knew didn’t know details. Those who had some details didn’t have certainty. Those who knew, had details and certainty didn’t reach large enough numbers to have a public debate about this issue.
People see it as trolling because no one can be certain over the internet if anyone is actually surprised or not. A lot of people feign surprise to puff themselves up. An obnoxiously obvious version of this would be “Not only did I know about this breaking news before everyone else, I was so certain of it that I believed it was universal knowledge! I’m shocked, shocked that people did not understand this as well as me, a genius.” You didn’t write like this, but feigning surprise is common enough that any expression of surprise is received very skeptically.
Ok, I understand that, but I hope I clarified my position in my other responses. Looking back at my original phrasing, I understand the possibility for misunderstanding. “Media coverage” might have been a better word to use instead of “reactions”, which could be understood to be too general.
And despite Facebook being devoid of ethics and morality, despite them abusing their users and their data, people will keep using Facebook by the billions. It’s hopeless; people just don’t care enough.
The network effects are so strong that competition is, for all intents and purposes, impossible. Google Plus is the canonical case study here, though I’m sure there’s an entire graveyard full of them. Facebook’s value is that it has all the people on it, and any competitor will by definition start without any people, which gives it no value proposition to pull people off Facebook.
Unfortunately it’s still the most viable platform for certain things. I use Facebook almost exclusively to buy and sell event tickets at the last minute. In the past 2 years I have bought tickets from the actual ticket vendor for only 2 out of 20+ shows. Facebook provides a web of trust that no other platform can match. I would hesitate to buy a ticket from “edmfan1337,” but some random person with years of photos, a job, a school, and hundreds of friends is way more trustworthy. Often I’ll even have a mutual friend or two for events that are local. I’d love if there were some other platform equally viable, but I am not really interested in technical solutions involving third party guarantees or other “secure” systems. It’s better to deal with real people who can come to agreements and make compromises.
I think there’s something far more sinister going on here. We don’t really have free media in today’s world. It looks free, but there are only a few major players and a lot of major advertisers controlling those outlets. At work we have a CNN feed in the entry way. 90% of the time the word Trump is on the screen. It’s all Trump all the time. Unlike 1984 with its 2 minute hate, for several decades we’ve been living in a 24/7 hate.
These types of stories are designed to keep us scared or to put the population down a certain path. I have a feeling Zuckerberg pissed off someone recently. Maybe it’s someone in the 1% trying to put him in his place after he talked about running for President. Maybe he pissed off some board members at Google. It doesn’t take much. Someone with the means just needs to get one or two publications to start down the path and soon the rest of the media follows because it’s what people want and it sells.
I don’t believe in sinister masterminds controlling things from behind the scenes. And the usage of the word “media” retrospectively didn’t help much to clarify what I intended to say. Maybe “popular discourse” would have been better?
Regarding the points you brought up, I just believe that Trump is a easy to report topic that a lot of people (in some perverse sense) enjoy to hear about. And why should a media network not talk about it, if there’s a “marketplace of attention”? And also, one should avoid falling into cognitive biases. Trump get’s mentioned a lot, one the one hand because his policies are controversial, but also because he is the president of the USA… It’s not like Obama or Bush were minor political actors. And a “1%” is really a void term. It means nothing, and just gives space for ones own imagination. Some things just happen, randomly, and there isn’t a overarching narrative one can coherently place it in.
I don’t agree. It’s personal anecdote, but at every group event I attended over the holidays a non-tech person talked about how they were deleting Facebook from their phones or closing their account entirely. And a more recent survey had 7.5% of Facebook users claiming to have deleted their accounts in respond to the Cambridge Analytica stories. We’ll see what’s in Facebook’s 2018 Q1 10-K at the end of April, but all the signs I’ve seen point to a significant hit and no signs towards grown in user count or engagement.
How did they choose their sample and how was the survey conducted? A red flag that immediately comes to my mind is that these 7.5% of people claimed to have deleted (not deactivated) their account. Either:
Toluna got their terminology mixed up, and these people actually deactivated their account, since the delete account button is hidden.
These people really mean they deleted their account.
I’m inclined to go with 1 because nowhere in the article is there a statistic of people deactivating their account. They only mention deletion and updating privacy settings. Seems kind of weird to me. If I’m correct in this assessment, then this undermines the integrity of the survey. If they can’t get that right, then they probably didn’t pick a good sample to begin with.
Hmmm… I agree that Facebook’s self-serving differentiation between “deactivate” and “delete” is problematic in actually determining people’s responses. But challenging the integrity of the survey seems a step too far.
Shit, Mark himself in the quoted article says they haven’t seen a meaningful number of deletions, which he doesn’t quantify or compare with deactivations. He’s taking advantage of the same fuzziness that they created.
You’re probably right. Many people don’t realize that deactivate isn’t delete. But, presuming the survey-folks are doing their jobs, having that many people INTEND to delete their account is a meaningful measure of sentiment. Maybe not earth-shattering (it’s not 50%), but given how entrenched Facebook is right now, it rings as important to me.
But challenging the integrity of the survey seems a step too far.
I’m sorry, but I’ve been on the Internet way too long to just take what I read at face value. Based on my experience, people/publications (especially relatively unknown ones, like the one that was linked) blow things way out of proportion to get clicks/views. There is no indication as to how the survey was conducted, so I’m going to assume the worst, because that’s usually what it is.
Hey, I used to be a social studies teacher. I’m all about skepticism in sources. I’m not sure I see reason to put zero stock in their ability to call 1000 people, but hey, fair enough.
Edit: Hah, then I duckduckgo-ed Toluna, the company who did the survey (according to the article). Evidently it’s paid online survey-taking. That doesn’t necessarily mean they fudged anything, but I’m sure that’s not representative of the population as a whole. Touché.
What would you suspect that percent of deleters (or maybe including “intend to delete but got unintentionally stuck at ‘disable’”) is then? I’m one of five I know, and the only one in the tech industry.
PeopleThe Media have been acting very suprised about all the news around Facebook which has been popping up for the last few weeks.But frankly, I find exactly
these reactionsthe coverage far more surprising.I mean, didn’t everyone already kind of know that this has been going on if you use Facebook?People don’t have to be told that something unusual is going on. Just look at their app permissions (or their business model). What probablyshocksirritates most people is the facts that they can’t go on telling themselves that everything is fine.Edit: I would like to clarify – my issue isn’t who knew what and who didn’t. I am talking about the popular reaction and the narrative in which tese events are being placed, which I belive to be wrong.
I don’t understand why people see this as trolling?I see this sort of comment a lot, and I think it’s wrong headed and counterproductive:
There’s a difference between a general believe that Facebook doesn’t respect your privacy and a very specific “they collected this data, unnecessarily and stored it in perpetuity”
Chastising people for not having been aware in the past doesn’t encourage them to be more proactive in the future, it pushes them to just stop caring entirely. If you want people to be more upset and take action, use this opportunity to push them forwards, not lecture them for having been late to the party.
I’m not blaming Facebook users or trying to act as if I were superior. I mean, I use WhatsApp on a (far too) regular basis, and have a pretty good feeling that it is going on there too And I understand why they are using it.
But in the end, what else were they supposed to be doing with the data? The people I am “concerned” with are those who are talking about this the most, acting as if nobody would have guessed that this could be happening in a million years. If anything, this seems to be the harmful thing to do, since it seems to neglect that Facebook isn’t doing this because they are evil or something, but anyone, any social network with a similar history, size and system of operation, would have to do the same. The crime is intrinsic in the form.
Personally, I don’t know specifically what Facebook or other companies are doing. However, I know that they are in the business of data collection so this is not shocking. What they do specifically depends on what they are able to do technically.*
If they were doing something outside their scope of business, like raise a great old one from the void, then I might be shocked.
** That something might be technically feasible might be shocking, but that’s another story.
E.g., “Facebook scraped call data from Android” vs. “Android leaks call data to third party apps.”
That is kind of what I am trying to say. It isn’t supprising, and this fact should be emphasized. Sadly, @alex_gaynor misunderstood me a bit, in that I want people to understand why this shouldn’t be surprising. It is their buisness model, and no matter who or what, something along these lines happening will have ultimately unavoidable.
And what they have to do as a business to always be a step ahead of their competition! And again, this isn’t anyones individual responsibility, just as nobody is to blame when a player is ahead in Mensch ärgere Dich nicht and others loose.
Maybe a bit snarky, but let me draw some parallels with this take:
“The Big Bang? Why are you interested in it now? It happened 13 billion years ago. It obviously happened, otherwise we wouldn’t be here at all. Why study it? Pretty much everybody knows about cosmology. Add some fundamental laws and, well the current state of the universe naturally follows.”
The point is: not even close to the number of people you think knew knew. Those who knew didn’t know details. Those who had some details didn’t have certainty. Those who knew, had details and certainty didn’t reach large enough numbers to have a public debate about this issue.
People see it as trolling because no one can be certain over the internet if anyone is actually surprised or not. A lot of people feign surprise to puff themselves up. An obnoxiously obvious version of this would be “Not only did I know about this breaking news before everyone else, I was so certain of it that I believed it was universal knowledge! I’m shocked, shocked that people did not understand this as well as me, a genius.” You didn’t write like this, but feigning surprise is common enough that any expression of surprise is received very skeptically.
Ok, I understand that, but I hope I clarified my position in my other responses. Looking back at my original phrasing, I understand the possibility for misunderstanding. “Media coverage” might have been a better word to use instead of “reactions”, which could be understood to be too general.
And despite Facebook being devoid of ethics and morality, despite them abusing their users and their data, people will keep using Facebook by the billions. It’s hopeless; people just don’t care enough.
The network effects are so strong that competition is, for all intents and purposes, impossible. Google Plus is the canonical case study here, though I’m sure there’s an entire graveyard full of them. Facebook’s value is that it has all the people on it, and any competitor will by definition start without any people, which gives it no value proposition to pull people off Facebook.
Unfortunately it’s still the most viable platform for certain things. I use Facebook almost exclusively to buy and sell event tickets at the last minute. In the past 2 years I have bought tickets from the actual ticket vendor for only 2 out of 20+ shows. Facebook provides a web of trust that no other platform can match. I would hesitate to buy a ticket from “edmfan1337,” but some random person with years of photos, a job, a school, and hundreds of friends is way more trustworthy. Often I’ll even have a mutual friend or two for events that are local. I’d love if there were some other platform equally viable, but I am not really interested in technical solutions involving third party guarantees or other “secure” systems. It’s better to deal with real people who can come to agreements and make compromises.
I think there’s something far more sinister going on here. We don’t really have free media in today’s world. It looks free, but there are only a few major players and a lot of major advertisers controlling those outlets. At work we have a CNN feed in the entry way. 90% of the time the word Trump is on the screen. It’s all Trump all the time. Unlike 1984 with its 2 minute hate, for several decades we’ve been living in a 24/7 hate.
These types of stories are designed to keep us scared or to put the population down a certain path. I have a feeling Zuckerberg pissed off someone recently. Maybe it’s someone in the 1% trying to put him in his place after he talked about running for President. Maybe he pissed off some board members at Google. It doesn’t take much. Someone with the means just needs to get one or two publications to start down the path and soon the rest of the media follows because it’s what people want and it sells.
I don’t believe in sinister masterminds controlling things from behind the scenes. And the usage of the word “media” retrospectively didn’t help much to clarify what I intended to say. Maybe “popular discourse” would have been better?
Regarding the points you brought up, I just believe that Trump is a easy to report topic that a lot of people (in some perverse sense) enjoy to hear about. And why should a media network not talk about it, if there’s a “marketplace of attention”? And also, one should avoid falling into cognitive biases. Trump get’s mentioned a lot, one the one hand because his policies are controversial, but also because he is the president of the USA… It’s not like Obama or Bush were minor political actors. And a “1%” is really a void term. It means nothing, and just gives space for ones own imagination. Some things just happen, randomly, and there isn’t a overarching narrative one can coherently place it in.
This doesn’t change anything, the only people who care about this are in tech circles. Everyone will forget about this in two weeks.
I don’t agree. It’s personal anecdote, but at every group event I attended over the holidays a non-tech person talked about how they were deleting Facebook from their phones or closing their account entirely. And a more recent survey had 7.5% of Facebook users claiming to have deleted their accounts in respond to the Cambridge Analytica stories. We’ll see what’s in Facebook’s 2018 Q1 10-K at the end of April, but all the signs I’ve seen point to a significant hit and no signs towards grown in user count or engagement.
How did they choose their sample and how was the survey conducted? A red flag that immediately comes to my mind is that these 7.5% of people claimed to have deleted (not deactivated) their account. Either:
I’m inclined to go with 1 because nowhere in the article is there a statistic of people deactivating their account. They only mention deletion and updating privacy settings. Seems kind of weird to me. If I’m correct in this assessment, then this undermines the integrity of the survey. If they can’t get that right, then they probably didn’t pick a good sample to begin with.
It was through a Facebook quiz. :)
Hmmm… I agree that Facebook’s self-serving differentiation between “deactivate” and “delete” is problematic in actually determining people’s responses. But challenging the integrity of the survey seems a step too far.
Shit, Mark himself in the quoted article says they haven’t seen a meaningful number of deletions, which he doesn’t quantify or compare with deactivations. He’s taking advantage of the same fuzziness that they created.
You’re probably right. Many people don’t realize that deactivate isn’t delete. But, presuming the survey-folks are doing their jobs, having that many people INTEND to delete their account is a meaningful measure of sentiment. Maybe not earth-shattering (it’s not 50%), but given how entrenched Facebook is right now, it rings as important to me.
I’m sorry, but I’ve been on the Internet way too long to just take what I read at face value. Based on my experience, people/publications (especially relatively unknown ones, like the one that was linked) blow things way out of proportion to get clicks/views. There is no indication as to how the survey was conducted, so I’m going to assume the worst, because that’s usually what it is.
Hey, I used to be a social studies teacher. I’m all about skepticism in sources.
I’m not sure I see reason to put zero stock in their ability to call 1000 people, but hey, fair enough.Edit: Hah, then I duckduckgo-ed Toluna, the company who did the survey (according to the article). Evidently it’s paid online survey-taking. That doesn’t necessarily mean they fudged anything, but I’m sure that’s not representative of the population as a whole. Touché.
What would you suspect that percent of deleters (or maybe including “intend to delete but got unintentionally stuck at ‘disable’”) is then? I’m one of five I know, and the only one in the tech industry.