[HN Gopher] We Built a Facebook Inspector
___________________________________________________________________
We Built a Facebook Inspector
Author : atg_abhishek
Score : 262 points
Date : 2021-01-06 03:53 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (themarkup.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (themarkup.org)
| gotem wrote:
| We get mad at FB for spying and then we spy on FB? Fighting fire
| with fire?
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| A company is not a person.
| h0l0cube wrote:
| Opting to relinquish one's data to a principled, accountable,
| and transparent organization driven by clear objectives and
| beholden to a strict privacy policy, is very different to what
| one does when they sign up to Facebook.
| peteretep wrote:
| Truly baffled to how you think there's an equivalence here
| pjc50 wrote:
| "sousveillance": the watching of the powerful by the less
| powerful.
| luplex wrote:
| Note that facebook has all this data freely available. They
| probably run very similar analyses. But they don't act on them,
| or publish their results. Lack of access to this data is a big
| problem for social media researchers that needs to be solved.
| Etheryte wrote:
| While I see where you're coming from, I don't really see how
| this could be addressed without very fat NDAs and a serious
| risk of leaking personal data. For comparison, you wouldn't
| expect say Apple to give researches access to their proprietary
| intellectual property. I very much agree with you that it could
| be very beneficial, I struggle to construct an argument for why
| Facebook should do this.
| londons_explore wrote:
| People working at facebook would _love_ to publish this data,
| and let other researchers take a look...
|
| But the simple fact is that any high profile analysis of this
| data will simply further fuel debate about facebook overreach
| and harm facebook's business.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > People working at facebook would love to publish this data,
| and let other researchers take a look...
|
| Why would they love to do so considering this will end up
| being detrimental to Facebook's profitability and thus their
| compensation and/or promotion opportunities?
| d0100 wrote:
| Because they would love to do it, __if __it didn 't affect
| their careers detrimentally.
|
| Any study on Facebook data would generate several papers in
| good publications, great for the more scholarly inclined
| working at Facebook
| tt433 wrote:
| Arguably hiding this data until public rage inevitably boils
| over is worse for Facebook long term
| Hnsukka wrote:
| Facebook this and Facebook that... It is the best
| KaiserPro wrote:
| This is a good project, especially as the subjects are paid.
|
| I'm interested to see what the outcome would be. I'm not sure
| that advertising is the worst part of FB, I strongly suspect its
| other users.
|
| I am very interested in the "recommended" findings. I think that
| for all but a few, they reflect their own world view. However
| that's a hunch
| throwawaysea wrote:
| Slightly off-topic, but if you're looking to clear your Facebook
| history, there's an extension for that:
| https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/social-book-post-m...
| typeiierror wrote:
| The sample selection / non-response bias highlighted in this
| write-up is a _Big Idea_ problem I've been thinking about
| recently: Limitations...*Trust in surveys and
| political leanings:* About 95 percent of people contacted
| for the panel chose not to participate because of lack of trust
| in having a third-party application installed on their computer
| or other concerns for privacy.
|
| Think about that - a reputable, privacy-first organization asked
| people to opt-in to fully consented, voluntary, compensated
| research and _~95% declined_! I can 't even imagine what hidden
| skews are present in the 5% that agreed. This issue is systemic
| in consumer research and impacts both public (e.g. election
| polling, U.S. census) and private (pharmaceutical trials,
| media/advertising research, voluntary AI/ML training daat)
| polling.
|
| Governments and businesses make biased, potentially
| discriminatory decisions if a non-random segment of the
| population chooses to never be counted. The ad industry attempts
| to circumvent this through non-voluntary passive tracking, which
| trades off non-response bias with bulldozing user privacy. The
| headwinds are only growing too, as consumer awareness of privacy
| lapses and the politicization of polling continues to reduce who
| participates in opt-in research.
|
| Finding a solution to this that doesn't resort to privacy-eroding
| tactics is a moonshot level problem in terms of the size-of-the-
| prize if solved.
| OneGuy123 wrote:
| > a reputable, privacy-first organization...
|
| Are you a shill for them? "Reputable" as mainstream media?
| "Reputable" as in the fake news is reputable?
|
| Whenever someone claims "I am reputable" you should run away as
| fast as you can.
|
| This "I am reputable" is purely subjective based on your own
| biases and incentives.
|
| No one can be reputable in the news space and people must
| understand this as soon as possible: everyone lies, even
| natural science which is supposed to be the gold standard gets
| so many studies wrong.
|
| The only way news organizations stay alive is either by: a)
| clickbait articles which eventualy devolves into lying or
| exaggeration at best. b) News orgs that are financed by private
| people/corporations who have their own agendas.
|
| There is no such thing as a "reputable" news source.
|
| Perhaps one in ten thousand jounralist is still legit, so that
| he is an actual investigative journalists. But 99.999 of
| "journalists" are actually just script readers and clickbait
| writers.
|
| Do you not see where "I am reputable" leads to? Soon the "I am
| reputable" organization will get political power and then they
| will make laws based around "my reputable reporting" and this
| will lead to censortship.
|
| "I am reputable" always leads to censorship down the line since
| it implies that "my opponent is not reputable and is lying and
| MUST BE SHUT DOWN IN THE NAME OF DEMOCRACY".
| pjc50 wrote:
| Per my answer above: the situation where nobody can be
| trusted is horribly unstable, because evidence-based or
| impartial policymaking or even justice becomes impossible.
| This tends to result in replacing trust relationships with
| force relationships, and the society devolves into warlordism
| or dictatorship in order to restore order and control. You
| can't expect people to trust an election where all candidates
| are disreputable, so they vote in a dictator.
|
| This is why the unreliability of news organizations is such a
| serious problem.
| skinnymuch wrote:
| Look at your response. Why would OP be a shill when you've
| responded this way? It's not hard to see people will have
| strong opinions on things even if they believe their opinion
| isn't wild, like yourself.
| pjc50 wrote:
| The key thing here is trust. Trust is a resource like a
| rainforest: you can exploit it sustainably, or you can get a
| far greater profit by destroying it. Trusting people are a
| resource that can be exploited for fraud, which the internet is
| _great_ at producing. It 's not really surprising that random
| organizations find low trust.
|
| It is however very unfortunate, as historically being a "high
| trust society" has been a great advantage of the west. And it's
| going to take a lot of repairing.
| nxpnsv wrote:
| Meanwhile fb has all of this info from the 100%...
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Is it a problem that should be solved? Shouldn't people have
| the right to live in peace and not be forced to participate in
| some survey?
|
| I also don't really see the problem with 95% of people
| declining; they made the smart choice. If I was a regular
| Facebook user I would also decline because the account would
| contain tons of very sensitive data such as DMs and running an
| untrusted, unknown application on my main computer is also a
| major dealbreaker.
| typeiierror wrote:
| Try applying the problem to other issues to see the impact:
|
| * An advertiser wants to place ads on sites / tv networks
| that have an audience that is more likely to buy their
| product upon seeing their ads. If they don't want to violate
| privacy, they run a survey. What if the response rate among a
| historical disenfranchised group (e.g. African Americans) is
| terrible? The modern "data driven" marketer would see little
| reason to advertise on Black media properties. This isn't a
| fictious example - it's a current problem in the media
| planning / agency industry.
|
| * A local government has to decide between investing in more
| ESL resources in public education vs. other competing budget
| needs. They look at census / community survey data (which
| some Hispanic and immigrant populations are fearful of
| responding to d/t politicization) and decide to prioritize
| other asks due to undercounted demand. The data could also be
| skewed in other ways that warp their decision, like
| allocating budget to school zones that only represent
| specific immigrant communities that haven't historically been
| disenfranchised.
|
| The big picture issue here is governments/businesses making
| decisions with bias information leading to incorrect
| conclusions, and the only know recourse currently is to scrap
| privacy.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Look at it from the point of view of regular folks:
|
| * An advertiser - a malicious being intent on tricking me
| out of my money - wants to make a survey to determine how
| to make it easier to trick people into parting with their
| money. Why would I help someone make my life, and life of
| other people like me, worse?
|
| The answer to that is to beat advertising down until it
| isn't so blatantly customer-hostile. Then people may be
| more willing to help.
|
| * I'm in a politically precarious situation and the
| government is asking questions - ostensibly for purposes
| that could benefit me, but if my honest answers were seen
| by a different government agency, it would cause me a world
| of hurt. I hide away. Or lie.
|
| The answer to that is ideally to fix the politically
| precarious situation of a subset of your population - but
| at the very least, to foster the trust in information
| separation between government agencies, so that I can e.g.
| afford to be honest with the census bureau without worrying
| about the IRS or the police. That level of trust is not the
| default.
| indymike wrote:
| You've really summed up the state of the world right now:
| we're in a crisis of trust. We don't trust each other, we
| don't trust institutions and the result is anxiety, fear
| and anger.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| I broadly agree, but I would frame it a bit differently:
| we have a severe lack of trustworthiness in our modern
| world; or, at least, the trustworthy voices are lost in
| the noise.
|
| This is a big big part of why I primarily use FOSS as
| much as possible. Generally speaking, FOSS developers and
| distributors seem to act with the user's interests in
| mind more often than proprietary software vendors.
| (Certainly the distributions do, probably out of
| necessity - there's no shortage of competitive distro
| options, so a distro being shady is practically a death
| sentence. Individual developers still deserve more
| scrutiny.)
|
| The advertisers certainly do not have my best interests
| in mind.
| danShumway wrote:
| Agreed. The issue isn't that people don't blindly trust
| advertisers and VC-backed companies enough. The issue is
| that those entities are not trustworthy.
|
| People who are choosing not to share data with those
| companies in their current form are making a smart
| choice.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| I think you may be underestimating the problem with your
| framing. The real trouble is outside of software.
|
| If you think about it, how come otherwise reasonable
| people become anti-vaxxers, or flat-earthers, or
| believers of any kind of (perhaps less obvious) nonsense?
| The arguments I've seen tend to boil down to lack of
| trust. They don't trust healthcare institutions ("it's
| all bought out by big pharma!"), scientists ("all bought
| out by big $something!"), government agencies ("they're
| incompetent"/"literally nazis"), etc.
|
| To some degree, these institutions all violated our trust
| in one way or another, and media (both mainstream and
| social) is doing stellar job at amplifying the damage. To
| me, the problem with the people mistrusting institutions
| to the extreme isn't the facts - they often have good, if
| cherry-picked ones. It's the relative weight given to
| those facts (like, just because there was a screwup with
| the swine flu vaccine doesn't mean flu vaccines in
| general are evil dangerous pharma moneymakers). Fixing
| that requires teaching people some rational thinking, and
| I'm not sure how to do that; it's much more difficult
| than just throwing citations at them.
| danShumway wrote:
| This is an idea that Cory Doctorow has also promoted at
| various points: that the increase in conspiracy theories
| are due to the increase in conspiracies, and people just
| don't know how to tell real conspiracies from fake one.
|
| I agree that his/your position is worth considering, and
| I don't think it's that far off of the mark, but I also
| think it's kind of oversimplifying a tiny bit.
|
| I think some people honestly get swept up in conspiracy
| theories out of pure mistake, but I've also seen people
| get pulled into conspiracy theories not out of some kind
| of rational mistake, but because those theories validate
| something that they want to be true, or because they
| offer a community that isn't otherwise available, or just
| because it feels good to think that every problem in the
| world is some specific person's fault. Jumping from
| general distrust of the world to full-on conspiracy is...
| well, it's a jump, not a simple step. I don't think
| everyone in QAnon is there just because they're not
| rational enough, I think there are multiple issues at
| play.
|
| I suspect there is no single unified cause for conspiracy
| theories that we can point to, even though I do agree
| with people like Doctorow that actual rampant corruption
| in our institutions both isn't helping with the problem
| and is understated as a potential contributing factor.
| indymike wrote:
| This line of thinking confirms my biases.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Fair enough. I think that the community aspect is a
| competing theory here - or even a complementary one. I've
| personally (face-to-face) dealt with conspiracy believers
| that tend to be isolated in their beliefs, but I totally
| buy that for many, it's the shared belief that matters,
| almost regardless of what the belief is even about. This
| also has support of some sociological research I remember
| reading.
|
| About the Doctorow's idea, I don't know. Do we have
| increased amount of conspiracies? Or perhaps just a
| perception of it? Or maybe we're constantly exposed to
| micro-conspiracies - namely all the businesses, big and
| small, scheming how to one up each other and screw up
| their customers - that make people prone to see
| conspiracies everywhere?
| danShumway wrote:
| > and the only known recourse currently is to scrap
| privacy.
|
| I agree that low response rates are a problem, but people
| should still have the choice whether or not to give this
| information. To me, when I see that voluntary participation
| in these studies is so low, that's not a problem with
| privacy, that's a problem with the institutions doing the
| collection.
|
| A good example of that is political surveys, which are
| really hard because people don't answer their phones. But
| why don't people answer their phones? Because they're
| swamped with scams, political ads, and other spam. Half of
| the time that someone says they're conducting a political
| survey on a phone call, what they're really doing is
| campaigning for a candidate.
|
| The problem isn't that people are allowed to decline phone
| calls, the problem is that most of the phone calls people
| get are unwanted crap -- so it really doesn't make sense
| for them to answer the phone, they're making the correct
| choice by letting unrecognized numbers go to voicemail.
|
| As a further analogy, if 50% of mail in the US postal
| service was infested with live spiders, you might see
| delivery rates for paper bills and official notices
| plummet. That would be a problem. But the solution wouldn't
| be to force people to open their mail anyway, it would be
| to stop putting spiders in people's Amazon boxes. And as it
| is with spiders, so too it is with advertisers.
|
| You want to improve voluntary participation rates? Focus on
| removing bad actors and making people feel safe about their
| data. Governments, telemarketers, political groups,
| advertisers, and just companies in general all have serious
| issues with self-policing how they use and collect data.
| That's not anyone else's fault or problem to solve.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Just do what Nielson does: Pay people for their data.
|
| I don't think it's that difficult; if pay-for-survey skews
| results toward overvaluing the opinions of the poor
| and/desperate-for-money, well, then it would be the first time
| in history.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| An organization people had never heard of asked them to install
| a browser plugin, and they declined like they should.
|
| Even if it's an organization you recognize, verifying it's not
| someone using their name for some sort of scam isn't always
| straightforward.
| danShumway wrote:
| Right. An alternate take on this passage is, "95% of contacts
| exercised basic security measures rather than blindly install
| unvetted code on their machine."
|
| It doesn't take that much of a shift in perspective to turn
| this into a very optimistic statistic indicating that normal
| users aren't always quite as security-unconscious as we
| normally think -- that for whatever reason (security, apathy,
| paranoia, whatever) sometimes they do actually make the right
| choices when interacting with sensitive information like
| their browsing habits.
|
| You could not pay me to install an unvetted Electron
| application where I can't even see the source code, that is
| designed to MITM my browsing activity. Even if I trust the
| author's intention, who wrote the app? Who tested it? How do
| I know that the automatic redactors are going to actually
| work? It's not like it's hard to have security leaks in
| Electron.
| kleiba wrote:
| But that's exactly the point of the OP: 95% "declined like
| they should" -- but what does that say about the 5% that
| didn't? What general conclusions can you draw from data
| elicited through people that are clearly unlike the
| mainstream?
| AlexandrB wrote:
| In my opinion, this is a symptom of weak/ineffective regulation
| in the personal information space. The consequences for data
| breaches to the guilty parties have been minimal at best.
| Meanwhile responsibility for fraud has been pushed onto
| individuals via concepts like "identity theft". Even if the
| company in question was indeed reputable and well-known, most
| people don't have the technical expertise to evaluate any
| claims about security or privacy. Who would take that risk
| knowing that at the end of the day most of the consequences
| will fall on them personally?
| wbobeirne wrote:
| The national averages for race they posted add up to 116.33%. I
| wonder where they messed it up?
|
| Edit: They also only have 77.77% for national average age, though
| that might be explained by those under 18.
| jeffchien wrote:
| The problem might be "Hispanic or Latino" row, which is 16.4%.
| On (US or state) government forms that's usually a different
| question from race. See the second image here:
| https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/06/18/census-cons...
| apizzimenti wrote:
| Yep, this is exactly it. "Hispanic or Latino" is a question
| of ethnicity according to the Census Bureau:
|
| > "People may choose to report more than one race to indicate
| their racial mixture, such as "American Indian" and "White."
| People who identify their origin as Hispanic, Latino, or
| Spanish may be of any race."
|
| Basically it boils down to "Hispanic" or "Latino" being
| designations for country of origin, where Hispanic refers to
| anyone from a Spanish-speaking country, and Latino refers to
| anyone from Mexico or a Central- or South-American country.
| They're often used interchangeably in the US, though.
| pessimizer wrote:
| It's an endless rationalization to avoid talking about people
| who are of American (New World) descent as such. The thing
| most of the people targeted by the most aggressive anti-
| immigration rhetoric in the US share is that they are of
| American descent, and that's not a thing that you say.
| unityByFreedom wrote:
| Wow. Is that from the current admin? We are one human race.
| The origin of the word racism is from people who think there
| is more than one race which is scientifically incorrect.
|
| The question about this should only ask about ethnicity.
|
| Kindly explain your downvotes.
| detaro wrote:
| the link is from 2015.
| unityByFreedom wrote:
| In that link they don't use the word race. The above
| commenter wrote,
|
| > On (US or state) government forms that's [Hispanic or
| Latino] usually a different question from race.
|
| I've never seen this (before this census).
| roywiggins wrote:
| Did you fill out the census? See question 8. Lots and
| lots of US government forms that collect demographic data
| have a separate question asking if you're
| Latino/Hispanic.
|
| https://www2.census.gov/programs-
| surveys/decennial/2020/tech...
| unityByFreedom wrote:
| The census you link is from the current admin and I was
| shocked to see it written that way. I don't think it's
| right or normal at all and I don't agree that this was
| standard practice prior to this admin.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > I don't think it's right or normal at all and I don't
| agree that this was standard practice prior to this
| admin.
|
| It's normal (the basic structure has been used since
| 1980), though there was a proposal which didn't end up
| being used to consolidate the race and Hispanic origin
| questions for 2020.
| unityByFreedom wrote:
| Wikipedia writes,
|
| > The 2010 US Census included changes designed to more
| clearly distinguish Hispanic ethnicity as not being a
| race. That included adding the sentence: "For this
| census, Hispanic origins are not races."
|
| Government forms should simply ask about ethnicity, not
| race, and certainly shouldn't be asking _both_. I don 't
| see why anyone who isn't racist would object to that. You
| can definitively call someone racist for listing
| ethnicities as different races.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in
| _the_Un...
| detaro wrote:
| > _In that link they don 't use the word race._
|
| The link specifically describes a (potential) move away
| from using the word, showing examples where they did and
| describing some of the history of when it was used. The
| comment you replied to even told you which specific image
| in the article to look at for an example...
| unityByFreedom wrote:
| Above poster suggested it's normal in US forms to
| separate a question about race and Hispanic ethnicity.
| I'm saying that isn't normal. The way the census broke
| this out appears to be subtly advancing the idea that
| there is more than one human race.
| theresistor wrote:
| In my experience it's very normal. Every employment
| application I've ever completed, spanning a couple of
| decades, has had two optional questions that were phrased
| in exactly this way.
| resynth1943 wrote:
| "there is more than one race which is scientifically
| incorrect."
|
| ...not quite. There's definitely more than one race ;)
| unityByFreedom wrote:
| You misquote. I said _people who think there is more than
| one race_ is the origin of the word racism. There is one
| human race and many ethnicities.
| rendall wrote:
| > _Wow. Is that from the current admin?... Kindly explain
| your downvotes._
|
| I did not downvote, but,
|
| 1) no, these racial and ethnic classifications have been
| used for decades
|
| 2) Trump is not relevant to Facebook Inspector
|
| 3) The philosophy of race and etymology of racism are at
| best a distraction from the topic at hand, and likely
| flamebait
| kelchqvjpnfasjl wrote:
| I don't have to worry about sickle cell disease.
| tjpnz wrote:
| Is this the same study involving the open source browser plugin
| that Facebook were up in arms about?
| djmips wrote:
| No, but it is mentioned in the article.
| ccorda wrote:
| An example of what they used the data for is this investigation
| into feed changes in Georgia ahead of the runoff:
| https://themarkup.org/citizen-browser/2021/01/05/in-georgia-...
|
| Raw data available here: https://github.com/the-markup/citizen-
| browser-georgia
| toper-centage wrote:
| Those ad spending values are mind blowing... No wonder Facebook
| doesn't want to change anything.
| pjc50 wrote:
| "Facebook made money from showing users ads containing
| misinformation."
| netsharc wrote:
| It seems media companies have a different interest in
| political races: if they call it a tight race, the candidates
| will pay them to run ads. And indirectly, if they report that
| it's tight, people will keep tuning in, and they can sell
| these eyeballs for a better price to their advertisers.
|
| For example the 2008 Dem primaries with Obama vs Hillary.
| Obama was sure to win it months before the Dem conference,
| but I can recall CNN still calling it a race...
| rchaud wrote:
| > if they call it a tight race, the candidates will pay
| them to run ads.
|
| All the spending happens well before news channels start
| reporting ballot counts. Multi-million dollar political
| campaigns do not rely on the news media to tell them how
| they should spend their ad budget over a months-long
| election cycle.
|
| By the time news orgs start reporting actual ballot counts,
| it's too late to spend any more money. A good chunk of
| votes have already been cast via mail. Poll stations have
| either closed or are at best a few hours away from closing.
| netsharc wrote:
| What, and the news doesn't report poll numbers of "likely
| voters" before the election? Who'd be frontrunner, who's
| surging, etc, etc?
| koreanguy wrote:
| in no time, they themarkup.org will sell the scraped data , just
| another data mining nobody who try to make money out of users.
| makach wrote:
| How did you find my pin-code? (9003)?!
| ballenf wrote:
| Presumably meant for another front page story:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25656827 (Simulating
| Terminator PIN code hacking scene)
| dddddaviddddd wrote:
| Have they published any results of their study yet?
| [deleted]
| jacinabox wrote:
| This is the facebook inspector, please disclose your nudes....
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(page generated 2021-01-06 23:03 UTC)