[HN Gopher] My interview with Steven Levy re. leaking of my Face...
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My interview with Steven Levy re. leaking of my Facebook Goodbye
post
Author : amadeuspagel
Score : 215 points
Date : 2021-10-26 11:41 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (alecmuffett.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (alecmuffett.com)
| dleslie wrote:
| I take issue with the final off-hand comment he made about Tik
| Tok[0] on one of the linked twitter threads:
|
| > Also: the tiktok algorithm has decided that I am a "foodie";
| it's pretty much correct about that. Why should I suffer a more
| mediocre & less valuable experience? Because "democracy is at
| stake" because of bunch of people never learnt how to identify
| conspiracy theories at school?
|
| Well, it's not so great. The ability to discover preferences and
| adapt content could also be used by a malicious actor to discover
| targets; ie, for a totalitarian regime to discover dissenters.
| Such a regime needn't have an agreement with the social network,
| either; they need only use the tools made available to users and
| advertisers upon that network to harvest information about
| dissenters. It's as simple as creating a honey pot. Moreover, if
| an agreement exists with the social network, then the curation
| itself can omit undesirable content in the general case, and keep
| it available in the explicit case; not censoring it, per se, but
| ensuring that it does not receive an equitable platform.
|
| That's what many are clamoring for, isn't it? A way to
| selectively weed out voices and people that are undesirable.
|
| I feel like the problem is two fold:
|
| 1. That there's this assumption that somehow the tools used to
| harm some won't be used to harm others.
|
| 2. That the feed is necessarily worth saving.
|
| (2) is most interesting to consider, I think. Perhaps it's not.
| Perhaps algorithmic social media feeds aren't worth saving.
|
| 0: https://twitter.com/AlecMuffett/status/1451997185478963211
| OldHand2018 wrote:
| > I do not believe that there are other solutions which would
| scale. If you can see a viable liberal means to keep people safe
| other than "the status quo, only moreso" then do please let me
| know.
|
| Hello Alec, if you are reading this.
|
| This is what it looks like when you choose profit over safety.
| Facebook chose to enter a market with a business model that
| depended on "doing things at scale" but it, in fact, could not do
| safety at scale. You and Facebook knew that you could not do
| safety at scale. The business model is flawed. Facebook should
| not be in that market. But profit dictates that Facebook stay.
| splatzone wrote:
| I wonder what the mood is like at Facebook at the moment. It must
| be pretty demoralising to see revelations about your company's
| behaviour in the press, especially if you believe in the mission.
| Yet I wonder if there's a different narrative that employees
| internally are believing in.
|
| I've been freelance my entire life and never worked for a large
| corp, so I don't know what it's like. But I'd be fascinated to be
| a fly on the wall in Facebook's offices this month
| [deleted]
| oconnor663 wrote:
| Speaking from personal experience as a former FB employee (but
| 8 years ago at this point): It was pretty easy to put all the
| bad press out of mind, because so much of it was obviously
| mistaken and uninformed. Media coverage of Facebook is
| overwhelmingly written by people who don't know how websites or
| tech companies work, and who don't know how to evaluate or even
| acknowledge the tradeoffs involved in the subjects they write
| about.
|
| To be fair, this is how media coverage of most things works.
| High quality criticism is rare, and you have to seek it out.
| Thoughtful people do seek it out. But as a matter of personal
| experience, the fact that most criticism is low quality makes
| it easy to ignore without losing any sleep.
|
| On the other hand, maybe the press is much more negative now,
| and the situation is different? Could be. I've been out for too
| long to know.
| adventured wrote:
| > Facebook whistleblower warns 'dangerous' encryption will aid
| espionage by hostile nations
|
| So another reason the politicians in DC are so abnormally happy
| about Haugen. She's providing a security/safety theater argument
| against encryption, one that is so convoluted it's bound to
| confuse the general public in a _we have to deny your rights to
| protect your rights_ sort of way.
| [deleted]
| bogwog wrote:
| She seems more like a lobbyist than a whistleblower.
| cudgy wrote:
| Perhaps she works for the CIA?
| wakiza33 wrote:
| It's all little too perfect isn't it. I think the CIA
| connection scenario is certainly worth keeping in back of
| mind.
| bogwog wrote:
| This kind of paranoia is how you get another
| insurrection.
|
| If you're finding it difficult to ignore thoughts like
| that, maybe it's a sign that you need to take a break
| from social media.
| cudgy wrote:
| Keeping a thought in the back of one's mind is not
| paranoia.
| detcader wrote:
| A deranged conspiracy theory, just like all the wackos
| that believed the NSA was spying on everyone or that
| COVID leaked from a medical lab
| Tainnor wrote:
| The author is presenting a false dilemma viz. their three
| reported options (1. IP level restrictions, 2. Citizenship based
| restrictions, 3. Union of legal systems):
|
| - We can't just ignore the fact that the internet is a global
| technology but jurisdictions are regionally restricted. This is a
| tension, of course, but to just throw up the hands in the air and
| conclude that, therefore, the internet should be a wholly
| unregulated space is not an option and not a single nation will
| allow that eventually.
|
| - It is not necessary that the whole of the internet abide by one
| of these mechanisms, different things can be regulated in
| different ways, and "mixtures" of the systems are conceivable.
|
| - The fact that proposed regulations have edge cases is not
| something that makes regulation impossible. That seems to be a
| very engineer-like mindset, but in truth, the law is quite good
| when it comes to integrating competing interests and principles
| or do decide that at some point, something is "good enough".
| Otherwise no laws would ever be written.
|
| - IP based restrictions do not become ineffective automatically
| because VPNs exist. This is proven by the fact that geoblocking
| works reasonably well on streaming services etc. VPNs are often
| blocked and, even when not, many people are not technically
| competent enough to set one up. Of course, it depends on what we
| want to use IP based restrictions for. If we're targeting
| criminals (or dissidents), that's probably not a viable solution,
| but if it's about blocking certain content to certain users then
| it should work reasonably well. NB: I'm not arguing in favour of
| geoblocking, it's a stupid thing that should disappear, but the
| point is solely that it works reasonably well for lots of users.
|
| - Finding some sort of common ground between different
| jurisdictions is something that is necessary in many areas of
| life which is why trade agreements etc. exist. If the EU pushing
| GDPR means that Facebook et al. need to adopt better practices
| wrt. privacy across the globe (because it's too difficult to
| determine whether a user is EU-based or not), then I guess that's
| gonna be the price they have to pay to operate in the EU. If the
| price for operating in China is, nobody is able to talk
| critically about China anymore, then the response should be "well
| I guess we won't be operating in China, then" (or, failing that,
| this should become something that would make western users
| abandon the network, or even better, something that other
| countries would take issue with, forcing the service to actually
| have to take a stand on this).
| CarelessExpert wrote:
| Man, there is a profound lack of self-awareness when you cite
| 1984 in an article defending Facebook, when Facebook is complicit
| in the creation of modern surveillance capitalism and the slow
| but inexorable shift to the digital panopticon...
| [deleted]
| pfraze wrote:
| Just saying, at this stage, if I were Facebook and I wanted to
| take the pressure off, I'd be putting out little stories that
| make the story about the whistleblower instead of about Facebook.
| I'd also focus on stories that will make us disagree with her
| over various particulars rather than with Facebook.
|
| Facebook has a pretty simple problem: they pissed off too many
| people, either by taking too much of the winnings for themselves
| or by inserting themselves into divisive governing tasks or just
| by ruining what earlier users liked about the product. Lately I
| even think the anger towards them is because they represent the
| Internet, and the whole Internet seems to suck lately.
|
| So does Facebook deserve every bit of this bad press? Maybe not.
| Maybe it's not all fair. But it's all coming from somewhere-
| they've just made too many people mad. I don't think you can
| insert yourself this directly into monopolizing control of
| information and the enormous winnings of the Internet without
| this happening.
| wakiza33 wrote:
| That's a fair perspective. The part of it though that is
| nefarious is that the main segment they have angered is the
| media. Simply put, the advertising dollars that used to go to
| newspapers now go to Facebook and Google (because you can reach
| the same audience far more efficiently).
|
| Unfortunately, it's pretty clear the media 'has it out for'
| facebook, ultimately, for monetary reasons. Particularly the
| big institutions believe that if Facebook were out that a lot
| of those dollars would flow back.
|
| It's the heart of all of the facebook attacks.
| pfraze wrote:
| I think that's true to an extent; angering all of the media
| at once is sure to have some bad consequences. But I think
| the other grievances I mentioned are fairly specific and not
| just engineered via repeated bad press.
|
| Again, the core of their problem is that they inserted
| themselves into the middle layer of everything. In doing so,
| they adopted all the negatives along with the positives. It
| seems like an untenable position in the long run; you just
| can't monopolize computing like this.
| wnissen wrote:
| Given that the newspapers watched Facebook first co-opt their
| content, and then their revenue, and continually jerked them
| around with misleading or even fraudulent metrics ("pivot to
| video!"), I think they have been remarkably restrained. And
| that's leaving aside the damage of email, community forums,
| and democracy that don't directly affect the media.
| jollybean wrote:
| Facebook pissed off people by having power.
|
| The power to control the narrative (or take it away from others
| by virtue of giving yahoos in their basement, or regular
| people, a huge voice) is the real power, and the elite are
| really scared of that.
|
| I don't mean that to sound globalist/conspiracist, but it's
| effectively what's going on here.
|
| Mostly from the centre to far left (FYI not being political
| here, this has nothing to do with traditional politics, it's
| just that FB is currently damaging one side more than the
| other), most believe that FB and it's ilk are the reason 10%
| believe in QAnon and 35% believe the election was stolen and
| vaccine hesitancy is at 30%.
|
| Personally, I think they are largely right on that, and on some
| reasonable level, there should be actually a concern that
| idiots in their basement making things up have more influence
| than researchers.
|
| We don't think about the 'rest of the world' so much, but FB is
| a major conduit for information in a lot of very problematic
| and violent places. To be fair, probably they're a healthy
| outlet as well. But you can see how there, too, leaders are
| wary of 'Facebook'.
|
| Note the Machiavellian manner in which it is framed i.e. this
| is a 'Facebook' problem, when in reality, it's not Zuck out
| there making the rules so much as it's people on FB having a
| voice.
|
| More cynically, the powers that be are very concerned about
| fairly unmitigated Free Speech.
|
| Just check out these headlines - just from the Atlantic in the
| last few days.
|
| "The Largest Autocracy on Earth'
|
| "What happened when Facebook became Boomerbook"
|
| "Facebook is a Doomsday Machine"
|
| From Vox: "Mark Zuckerberg runs a nation-state, and he's the
| king"
|
| From NYT: "It's Time to Break Up Facebook"
|
| UPenn: "Who Can Stop Facebook? Limiting the Power of Social
| Media"
|
| They are all wetting their underpants over this.
|
| The need for a 'good discussion' about this aside - Francis was
| a Political Agent, from day 1.
|
| This was not a Whistleblower who happened upon some ugly
| information - this was a planned, organized political hit job.
| Again for better or worse, I'm not judging that part of the
| motivation, just that this 'Whistleblower' status is as fake as
| any of the fake news on Facebook.
|
| The information leaked really isn't justified in the normal
| sense. Unless there is some legally material wrongdoing here, I
| can't imagine how someone gets away with leaking millions of
| emails from their employer 'cause they don't like them'.
| Probably 50% of people take umbrage with their employers.
|
| This was well planned from the data collection, to the legal
| team, to the PR team, to the coordination with the press and
| the coordination with the political bodies.
|
| You don't get to testify in Congress one day after you '60
| Minutes' interview breaks the story. Congress doesn't work that
| fast. This was coordinated by the involved parties.
|
| Her 60 Minutes interview was basically pitch perfect - she was
| like the 'absolutely perfect witness on the stand' with her
| tone and disposition just right, and her words chosen very
| carefully. Those were very well scripted and rehearsed
| responses. She wouldn't need to see the questions, she knows
| effectively what they were going to be in general, it was a
| platform to say what she's been wanting to say (and rehearsing)
| since before she worked at Facebook.
|
| It's a small world at the top - there are only so many big news
| agencies so many Senators, there's only one 60 minutes etc..
|
| The press needs the right fuel to drive a narrative, Frances
| gave them several months worth of headlines, and enough
| momentum to allow direct political engagement.
|
| I actually do believe that we need some kind of regulator
| impetus, though I don't know what that would be exactly, and
| I'm not sure what kind of constitutional basis legislators are
| going to be able to use, there's not much precedent for this.
|
| Moreover, it's a bit hypocritical to be talking about breaking
| up FB when there are likely more traditional issues of monopoly
| at Google and Amazon.
|
| I believe there are a few sane paths to choose, I don't have
| much faith we'll chose one of them. My bet is they introduce
| some kind of legislation that doesn't have much teeth and FB
| ends up mostly being what it was before, while it's main
| product FB.com slowly dies as their business bets on Insta, FB
| Messenger, What's app and people switch to other things.
| aeturnum wrote:
| > _Facebook pissed off people by having power._
|
| > _most believe that FB and it 's ilk are the reason 10%
| believe[...]_
|
| > _Personally, I think they are largely right on that_
|
| Do you think Facebook has the power or is it being used as a
| conduit for others? Either way, is that about Facebook
| specifically or the kind of company that Facebook is?
|
| There is plenty of confused thinking about Facebook (and
| other social media). Some think they are controlling people.
| Some think they are unable to moderate their own service and
| have fallen prey to scammers and disinformation pushers
| (conspiracies, nation state election meddling).
|
| > _This was not a Whistleblower who happened upon some ugly
| information - this was a planned, organized political hit
| job._
|
| It seems to me like a whistleblower can practice what she is
| going to say. The Wall Street Journal originally reported on
| her documents about a month before her 60 minutes interview.
| The process of writing that first story likely took months,
| giving her plenty of time to make connections and practice. I
| would bet that people at the WSJ have the numbers of
| congresspeople.
|
| I don't agree with Haugen's perspective but it seems silly to
| try to argue she's not someone who exposed internal documents
| suggesting wrongdoing - i.e. a whistleblower. What is the
| point of fighting over the category?
|
| > _Moreover, it 's a bit hypocritical to be talking about
| breaking up FB when there are likely more traditional issues
| of monopoly at Google and Amazon._
|
| What point are you trying to make here? It seems like you
| agree all three of these companies could use regulatory
| intervention so why would it be bad to do one before the
| other? And why would it be hypocritical to regulate Facebook
| for a new kind of harm because other companies are
| simultaneously doing a new kind of harm?
| jollybean wrote:
| 1) I don't know the answer to how much or how little FB
| censors, that's such a complicated thing and I'm not sure
| if anyone has a good sense of where FB is materially doing.
| Of course it's an impossible problem anyhow.
|
| Either way - I believe voices on FB do have a lot of power.
|
| I felt this viscerally when visiting with an older family
| member who listens to insane people on FB all day, who
| happen to be anti-vaxxers. This person is 'at risk' and has
| been strongly influenced by the nauseating, constant
| misinformation about vaccines and other things.
|
| 2) The argument over the term 'whistleblower' - and the
| material legality of the allegations matters a lot.
|
| What Enron did was wrong, that's not an opinion.
|
| The Facebook leaks don't point at legal wrongdoing, or
| rather, it would be an editorialisation to indicate that
| they are even doing anything wrong, legal or otherwise.
|
| There's a world of difference between someone 'disagreeing'
| with Facebook vs. indicating that FB has done something
| very illegal, which I believe the term 'whistleblower'
| implies i.e. they're 'blowing the whistle' on some
| malfeasance.
|
| When someone is a 'whistleblower' they are subject to all
| kinds of protections not afforded to someone merely
| 'disagreeing' with their company.
|
| Ironically, what she did was probably very illegal.
|
| And yes, she does have the right to be 'prepared' but it
| rather seems to me to be disingenuous as people are not
| going to be aware of the planned mechanations of the
| organized plot, and I think that matters as well.
| aeturnum wrote:
| > _This person is 'at risk' and has been strongly
| influenced by the nauseating, constant misinformation
| about vaccines and other things._
|
| I agree that Facebook is a conduit for gross views, but
| it seems important to decide who should be sanctioned and
| how much. Is it the fault of the person saying the lie or
| the fault of the network that distributes it?
|
| > _the material legality of the allegations matters a
| lot._
|
| I'm not aware of any claim that this set of docs shows
| legal wrongdoing, so that feels pretty well settled.
|
| I also think there is plenty of whistle blowing that
| doesn't demonstrate direct illegal activity. The obvious
| example is Snowden who, of course, reported on programs
| that were all understood to be legal. Other examples I
| think of that I would call whistleblowers: Manning,
| whoever leaked the Exxon global warning docs, ditto for
| Big Tobacco[1], the pentagon papers, etc. There are
| endless examples of leaking docs demonstrating immoral
| activity that's not illegal (which often prompts
| changes).
|
| > _When someone is a 'whistleblower' they are subject to
| all kinds of protections not afforded to someone merely
| 'disagreeing' with their company._
|
| She probably doesn't qualify for whistleblower
| protections under the law (edit: also, as I have seen
| calls for a defense fund, I don't think she is claiming
| she does), but as I said neither would many of the people
| who leaked documents in the cases above. I think it would
| be fair to call all of them whistleblowers.
|
| > _it rather seems to me to be disingenuous as people are
| not going to be aware of the planned mechanations of the
| organized plot_
|
| I do not understand this view. It is not disingenuous to
| think about an argument before making it. The Facebook
| critics have been quite public about their critiques.
| What is the "plot" here?
|
| [1] These docs may have proved they lied to congress? Not
| sure.
| pfraze wrote:
| I was a bit overwhelmed by your Wall of Text (tm) at first,
| but I decided to check your comment history and figured, yeah
| okay let me dig in, and I think you made some interesting
| points. Here are my thoughts...
|
| > Note the Machiavellian manner in which it is framed i.e.
| this is a 'Facebook' problem, when in reality, it's not Zuck
| out there making the rules so much as it's people on FB
| having a voice.
|
| I agree that Facebook has become somewhat of a proxy topic
| for the Internet. It's also probably accurate that some
| people in power are concerned about an open press -- not FB's
| power specifically -- and are using the FB situation to
| attack the core ideas of the Internet. Somewhere deep inside
| of this situation however is a much more complex conversation
| about how the Internet _should_ work, because if Facebook is
| really the best model for information flow online then we
| really do have a problem. As you say, there should be
| actually a concern that idiots in their basement making
| things up have more influence than researchers.
|
| This is where I get a little uncomfortable with the framing
| that this situation is only "Facebook versus Traditional
| Media & the Powerful," because it deframes the conversation
| that Facebook is a monopoly over the commons which shouldn't
| exist. Facebook is a very opinionated system, from its focus
| on connecting everybody as maximally as possible to its
| algorithm design to its UI design to its privacy invasions. I
| hope - perhaps naively - that general dissatisfaction with
| them can lead to new openings in the market as people look
| for alternatives, and that it happens before any kind of
| regulatory intervention starts.
|
| > Francis was a Political Agent, from day 1.
|
| Anybody who understands media knows that Francis' leaks were
| heavily coordinated, for all the reasons you say. That
| required backing of some kind; more than she probably could
| provide herself (though she did apparently have some crypto
| money?).
|
| I don't know what else to do with that information, and I
| don't really want to get distracted with that part of the
| debate. The things we talk about end up becoming the thing
| that matters. This is why I also started my original post
| with the point about Facebook probably dropping these
| stories. This gets us into the media war that's being waged
| between both sides rather than the relevant issues: is FB
| good for the world as it is right now, and if not then what
| would make it better?
|
| > Moreover, it's a bit hypocritical to be talking about
| breaking up FB when there are likely more traditional issues
| of monopoly at Google and Amazon.
|
| Those conversations are happening too. FB is just the one
| getting dogged the hardest right now, and (as I said)
| probably because they're the least popular of those
| companies.
| jollybean wrote:
| Those are good points, however, I think that putting it in
| the context of 'values of the internet' is a bit too
| academic.
|
| I don't think this is rhetorical or intellectual issue.
|
| Some groups are losing power and they are scrambling,
| that's most of the story.
|
| FB doesn't really have a monopoly, I think Zuck just made
| it easy for people to have their own 'pages' on the net,
| and the resulting unmitigated chaos is the result of it,
| and the elites don't like that.
|
| I failed to mention as well - the government I believe is
| using this to push for more regulation and control. For
| better or for worse.
|
| I don't see this as a hugely principled fight. I mean - in
| _some_ forums it 's framed that way, but not in the
| corridors of power.
|
| If it were, I think the discussions would be more nuanced.
| For all of the yelling and hype, what I do _not_ see are
| attempts to take an objective assessment of the situation,
| while offering a bunch of solutions with apparent tradeoffs
| etc..
|
| This is a very tricky issue.
| pfraze wrote:
| It is a tricky issue, and you might be right. It's also
| very hard to parse when a conversation goes this
| mainstream what the true essence of it is. I mean,
| basically all topics lose nuance when they go this
| mainstream.
|
| I think we (mostly) agree on the grievances I listed? But
| I think your point is that the fight has - at least -
| evolved into a power battle that's beyond what I'm
| talking about, and I can't disagree with that.
| [deleted]
| numair wrote:
| There's no honor among thieves. What this guy, and the
| whistleblower, and Mark Zuckerberg, and Roger McNamee, and
| everyone else are doing is simple -- they're all turning on each
| other. Don't try to figure out who is "right" or "wrong" or
| whatever, or if it's the government going after them, blah blah
| blah. It's just a bunch of dirty people pointing fingers at
| others, trying to wash their karma.
|
| Somewhere in the vaults of the FBI are recordings of my final
| conversations with Sean Parker. One of the things I keep
| repeating to that unrepentant sexual predator is, "in the end,
| all of you will turn on each other." And that's exactly what is
| slowly happening, and will continue happening. Especially as all
| of these formerly-young millennials turn into old people who will
| be desperate to sell their kids and grandkids on a "I was one of
| the good guys" narrative.
|
| Like rats on a sinking ship, I tell ya. And don't @ me with a
| reference to the stock price -- the _labor_ market determines the
| future of the giants in our field, because they're _labor_
| constrained, not _capital_ constrained. If Facebook can't hire
| the best talent to build the best apps for iOS 22 or whatever,
| all of the money in the world won't make them relevant again.
| [deleted]
| jmeister wrote:
| Hot air from /u/numair
| detcader wrote:
| I don't really care how "dirty" all of the people are, I'm
| going to listen to what experienced people of all opinions and
| motivations have to say about the issues and each other, and
| make up my own mind. Dismissing the underlying censorship
| issues ignores the consequences for billions; what happens at
| Facebook sets the standards for the rest of the internet and
| beyond.
| numair wrote:
| > what happens at Facebook sets the standards for the rest of
| the internet and beyond.
|
| That used to be the case. But at this point, you're really
| just watching the ghosts of the past emerge in the present.
| Facebook doesn't own the future. It's impossible to own the
| future if you can't hire the talent needed to maintain the
| ownership.
|
| There was a time that Facebook's employees were so dedicated
| and talented that one guy went off into isolation and single-
| handedly wrote the first version of Facebook for iPhone. I
| doubt the 2021 equivalent of that guy could _ever_ be
| convinced to join FB. (A+ to whoever correctly guesses who
| I'm talking about.)
| will4274 wrote:
| > unrepentant sexual predator
|
| What is this? I don't have any context.
| jjulius wrote:
| The user you're responding to reported Parker to the FBI
| alleging he witnessed him rape a 16 year-old. He's also got
| some prior history involving FB and how they treated an app
| he developed years back. Here are a few links related to this
| that I discovered by Googling "numair sean parker" just now.
|
| His Twitter feed also alludes to many other people being
| involved with underage boys.
|
| https://mobile.twitter.com/numair/status/1408055869481254912.
| ..
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26725402
|
| https://numair.medium.com/15-years-is-enough-time-silicon-
| va...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2134289
|
| -----
|
| Edit: It's worth pointing out that this post of his from 2006
| aged like milk, given his current views of Parker and (as
| I've read in other threads lately) Zuckerberg/FB.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20070107220225/http://www.numair.
| ..
| tablespoon wrote:
| > The world is a far less bad place than people credit. The
| impact of speech is still not the same as that of sticks and
| stones, and guns, knives, or fists must still be wielded by
| people, not Youtube videos. Generations have been wrongly certain
| that children needed legislation to keep them safe from the evils
| of crystal-set radios, comic books, video nasties, satanism,
| "dungeons & dragons", and Kate Moss' "heroin chic" -- let alone
| Instagram.
|
| This guy underestimates the power of speech, and seems to get
| there by cherry-picking his examples. I'm generally supportive of
| privacy and opposed to censorship, but there are some pretty
| serious and legitimate problems that exist nowadays that
| challenge that view (some are new, some are amplified versions of
| perennial problems). Hand wavy dismissals of those problems don't
| make a compelling argument.
|
| Personally, my sense is the democratization of industrial-scale
| broadcasting technology might have made some bad tradeoffs,
| compared to the previous system where that technology was
| controlled by well-educated elites subject to social regulation
| by peers. That previous system certainly had its flaws, but it
| did slow many things down and tended to be more restrained (on
| average), and that was probably better.
|
| So you might be able to avoid the need for censorship by making
| wide-scale broadcasting technology as hard as it used to be (or
| at least harder than it is now).
| burnished wrote:
| Yeah. Invoking sticks and stones and the satanic panic but
| seemingly not addressing genocide enabled by the platform
| seems.. bad.
| tqi wrote:
| The nuanced tone / takeaway from the actual interview transcript
| feel very different from the final article:
| https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-papers-badge-posts-form...
|
| Reading both, and seeing how disengaged the interviewer actually
| was with the interviewee, it really feels like Levy came into the
| interaction with a pre-constructed narrative in mind.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| As cited in this article, Frances Haugen is arguing _against_
| allowing Facebook to use end-to-end encryption because she
| suggests Facebook should have _more_ surveillance of private
| communications:
| https://twitter.com/AlecMuffett/status/1452309133928054799?s...
|
| A lot of people jumped to the defense of the Facebook leaker
| because the media so successfully framed it as a "whistleblower"
| situation, but that's not really what's happening here. She's
| very much an activist, and some of her suggestions really do not
| align with what the tech community wants at all.
|
| Any time someone goes in front of the government and insists on
| less encryption and more government control of tech companies, we
| should be worried and proceed with extreme caution. No matter how
| much you dislike Facebook, this situation is no exception.
| berkes wrote:
| "what the tech community wants" is pluriform and broad.
|
| However, what we clearly see here, is how one company can
| almost dictate "what all of us get". If Facebook decides to
| have e2e, that is what we have. If it decides to have "less
| encryption" that is what we get.
|
| The real issue is not what governments, tech communities or
| whistleblowers want. The real issue is that it matters very
| little, because in the end we get "what facebook wants"
| regardless. And that, according to those leaks, is entirely
| driven by profit.
| wavefunction wrote:
| > her suggestions really do not align with what the tech
| community wants at all.
|
| Speak for yourself. Facebook has become a threat to my
| country's democracy and stability and has enabled all sorts of
| horrific violence. If Facebook could be trusted to do the right
| thing I would feel differently but they've shown time and again
| they don't have the capacity or will to do so. "Move fast and
| break things" apparently applies to everything Facebook touches
| and so they should be regulated and controlled like a toddler.
| masswerk wrote:
| I think, two entirely different topics became mixed up here:
| the privacy of point to point messages and the impact of
| algorithmic enhancement of public messages. To my best
| abilities, I fail to see a connection. (That is, you may
| suggest that the latter may lead to an increase of
| "problematic" calls to action in private messages, but, then,
| you've already messed up in the first place, by enhancing the
| impact of public messages.)
| dmix wrote:
| > against allowing Facebook to use end-to-end encryption
|
| Apparently three of her lawyers are connected to the US intel
| agencies. This is entirely US-gov friendly whistleblowing and
| they know which horses to back.
| newaccount2021 wrote:
| Haugen is Tipper Gore for the web era...the "enlightened
| intellectual" who will save us from ourselves
|
| Frances Haugen is really just bothered by the fact that some
| stubborn betas refuse to conform to her worldview...but like
| Tipper Gore, she'll have to settle for the equivalent of a
| Parental Advisory warning
| lmc wrote:
| He's quoting a Telegraph article which misrepresented Haugen's
| view. She's for end-to-end encryption but concerned Facebook's
| implementation of it will be closed-source and not open to
| scrutiny. It's about 2h15 into yesterday's UK Online Safety
| Bill Committee testimony:
|
| https://www.parliamentlive.tv/Event/Index/cddf75b6-4279-43db...
| swalsh wrote:
| Web 3.0 offers the best solution to this. Web 2.0 companies,
| and the people that control them are just going to continue
| reaching for more control of the data we create, and give them
| for free. It's a problem that a small group of elite engineers
| have so much power.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| One can believe that the whistleblower is correct in their
| identification of the problem _and_ believe that the
| whistleblower is wrong about the best solution. This is not an
| inconsistent position.
| madrox wrote:
| I haven't been able to find a clip of it, but Biden recently
| brought up that democracies are having a hard time keeping up
| socially with the pace of innovation, and that autocracies are
| reacting quicker. He wasn't advocating for autocracy; merely
| pointing out that democracy is struggling on this point. I've
| been thinking about this a lot whenever government oversight is
| brought up.
|
| I'm not convinced the war against misinformation is any more
| winnable than the war on drugs in a free, self-determining
| society. The best we can hope for is to curb the worst
| consequences by slowing virality.
| rst wrote:
| That's not the position that Haugen took testifying before
| Parliament in the UK -- where she expressed strong support for
| e2e encryption. She said her views had been misreported earlier
| -- that she'd questioned whether Facebook could be trusted to
| implement e2e properly, and that the reporters had garbled it.
|
| See, e.g.,
| https://twitter.com/sleepdefic1t/status/1452724217393434636
| gadders wrote:
| One other interesting thing to note is that the whole Facebook
| whisteblower campaign is being funded by Pierre Omidyar
| https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/20/22737042/facebook-whistl...
| Closi wrote:
| I also don't see anything too 'whistle-blower' worthy in the
| goodbye post.
|
| It just seems to be a vague message that although social media
| sometimes have a positive impact, it also sometimes has a
| negative impact, and that Facebook has employed strategies to
| help it grow. Hardly shocking findings!
| capableweb wrote:
| > some of her suggestions really do not align with what the
| tech community wants at all
|
| I agree in general with your comment, but what I don't like is
| anyone (Haugen, you or anyone else) speaking for "the tech
| community". We all have different opinions, and you can't
| generalize with that.
|
| For example, plenty of people I know including myself would be
| strongly against less encryption, but strongly for more
| government control of tech companies (not via less encryption
| but via other means).
|
| It's really hard to generalize, and in this case we gain
| nothing by generalizing so let's do it less, not more.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > For example, plenty of people I know including myself would
| be strongly against less encryption, but strongly for more
| government control of tech companies (not via less encryption
| but via other means).
|
| But that's not what Haughen is lobbying for. She's explicitly
| saying that end-to-end encryption is bad because it doesn't
| allow Facebook to monitor private communications enough.
|
| I'd be surprised if you could find more than a tiny minority
| in the tech communicate who agree with this.
| capableweb wrote:
| I understand that, that's why I expressed that I don't like
| them expressing it as something the "tech community"
| wants...
| CarelessExpert wrote:
| > As cited in this article, Frances Haugen is arguing against
| allowing Facebook to use end-to-end encryption because she
| suggests Facebook should have more surveillance of private
| communications:
| https://twitter.com/AlecMuffett/status/1452309133928054799?s...
|
| That's because encryption is _incredibly problematic_. And I
| say that as a huge fan of digital privacy and an avid user of
| Signal.
|
| I'm not so blind as to think that perfect encryption is an
| unalloyed good, and in that screenshot (which, I'll point out,
| excludes any broader context for her remarks) Haugen touches on
| just one of many very legitimate problems with the technology.
|
| Now, in the end, I think (though I'm not certain) I believe the
| upsides outweigh the downsides. But don't pretend as though she
| doesn't raise a valid concern, even if you don't agree with her
| conclusion.
|
| > A lot of people jumped to the defense of the Facebook leaker
| because the media so successfully framed it as a
| "whistleblower" situation, but that's not really what's
| happening here. She's very much an activist
|
| _All whistleblowers are activists_.
|
| Do you really think Snowden didn't have an agenda? Of course he
| did! His act was specifically and explicitly political.
|
| Hell, Wikileaks has proven itself to be nakedly political.
|
| The only reason I'm betting you don't see it that way is you
| happen to agree with their politics.
|
| > some of her suggestions really do not align with what the
| tech community wants at all.
|
| Don't deign to speak for me. There is no unified "tech
| community" on this topic, even if your echo chamber leads to to
| believe otherwise.
| arthur_sav wrote:
| There's no rational discussion around these e-mob hate trains.
| It boils down to "You're either with us or against us".
|
| I guess we're focusing on hating facebook this year.
| macshaggy wrote:
| Based on what. The twitter link is just a picture but there is
| zero source attribution. He uses his own twitter status for his
| article. So, he's the source of his own article. At this point
| the entire blog post, twitter post, and the credibility of the
| author I find lacking.
|
| I'm not defending anything that Frances Haugen did do, or say,
| but I find it disturbing that anyone can take the author
| seriously if he can't find support for his argument that
| doesn't come from himself than he has no argument and linking
| to other "sources" means nothing he writes is verifiable beyond
| the actual documents he does link to.
| nojito wrote:
| This is a very common deflection tactic by corporations.
|
| Try and discredit the leaker over the information that was
| leaked.
|
| We saw it with Wikileaks and now we will see as more and more
| tech employees start sharing what goes on behind the curtains.
| vintermann wrote:
| The leak is more important than the leaker. That I support
| and value the Snowden leaks doesn't mean I always have to
| agree with Snowden (I think he's terrible on macroeconomics
| and crypto, for instance).
|
| No whistleblower has ever received such a red carpet as
| Frances Haugen. In itself, it's good that she's aggressively
| defended by the political establishment rather than facing
| reprisals and jail. But it should make you question what's
| going on here, quite apart from the contents of the leak
| itself.
|
| One of the things Haugen proposes, repealing section 230
| protection, is even supported by Facebook itself and strongly
| opposed by antimonopolists (who argue that it will be far
| easier to comply for Facebook than any would be competitor).
| jmull wrote:
| There isn't any reason someone can't be both a whistleblower
| and an activist.
|
| > and some of her suggestions really do not align with what the
| tech community wants at all
|
| For what it's worth, she says her views on E2E encryption have
| been misrepresented.
|
| Also, where is this single "tech community" with cohesive views
| on all this? I've never seen it. I'm pretty skeptical of anyone
| claiming to speak for the tech community.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > For what it's worth, she says her views on E2E encryption
| have been misrepresented.
|
| My link above has direct quotes from Haughen regarding E2E
| encryption.
|
| I don't understand why people are so eager to project
| something different on to what she's directly saying.
| jmull wrote:
| I'll just note, I'm not projecting anything.
|
| Do you really think those tweeted screen shots sum it all
| up accurately, though? Considering that she says her views
| are being mispreresented, couldn't those two quotes be
| cherry-picked? You know the reputation of the Telegraph,
| right?
|
| A guy tweeted that someone said (unattributed, but I assume
| the Telegraph) that she said.... It's just not solid. If
| you're going to accept that uncritically, I think you're
| essentially believing what you want to believe.
| md2020 wrote:
| As much as some on HN like to criticize Moxie/Signal for their
| decisions (Intel SGX debacle), seeing these kinds of sentiments
| get cheered on in the media makes me really glad they exist.
| Same for the Tor Project, Matrix.org Foundation, EFF, etc.
| Can't be easy being in their positions ever, but especially
| right now.
| abrahamepton wrote:
| I don't understand why it matters what Haugen believes -
| whether in "no encryption" or space fairies or whatever -
| instead of what she proved, which is the profoundly amoral and
| dishonest nature of the company.
| vintermann wrote:
| It matters because she's using the one to promote the other.
|
| We should be able to say that the leaks themselves are good,
| but also that they are making a transparent political play
| for control over Facebook (more than reining in their
| amorality and dishonesty).
|
| Whistleblowers do not usually have the support of a top tier
| lobbying firm (Bryson Gillette) paid for by a rival tech
| billionaire (Pierre Omidyar). I say take the leaks, but say
| no thanks to the "advice" it comes with.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| She isn't just a neutral presenter of data, she is a
| spokesperson and advocate. She is positioning herself to be a
| decision maker, or help decision makers.
| dls2016 wrote:
| Isn't a whistleblower by definition not neutral? I'm not
| even sure what a neutral whistleblower would look like.
|
| Should her motivations be questioned? Absolutely! But if
| you don't like her stance, just say so instead labelling
| her an "activist" or "advocate" like there's something
| inherently bad about those things.
| bostonsre wrote:
| > her suggestions really do not align with what the tech
| community wants at all.
|
| I feel like we as a tech community should take a step back and
| consider whether or not we should not be the only ones that
| decide what should or should not be done. It is a massive
| country with many opposing viewpoints.
|
| We have massive conflicts of interest and some tech companies
| have shown over and over that greed trumps morals in many
| cases. We are humans and we are not a group of enlightened
| arbiters that know what is best for the world.
|
| We have done a shit job so far of managing ourselves. Sure in
| lots of cases we have made the world a better place but I think
| we need to be honest with ourselves and acknowledge that greed
| has crept in and supplanted that "making the world a better
| place" mission.
| sanedigital wrote:
| In my opinion, domain experts have a moral obligation to
| speak up regarding policy that involves their area of
| expertise.
|
| On the topic of encryption, we're the only community with an
| understanding of what "breaking encryption" means. There are
| no skeleton keys, only vulnerabilities. We have a moral and
| ethical duty to fight _for_ encryption, privacy, and
| security, not against it.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| > There are no skeleton keys, only vulnerabilities.
|
| This is something really unique to digital technologies. In
| meat-space, everything has a vulnerability: force. With
| sufficient reason and circumstance, whether or not you give
| up your keys, the government is still able to claim
| dominion over anything you're trying to hide. All they have
| to do is break a few walls.
|
| Digital technologies don't have this problem (feature if
| you're the government). If you have your key stored in your
| memory, and there is no back door in the software, no
| matter what court orders anyone has, if you don't tell them
| the key then the information is lost to them forever.
|
| This kind of breaks some fundamental assumptions layed into
| law prior to tech. When you use encryption, tech really
| becomes an extension of your mind, and your 5th amendment
| rights effectively shut the government out of them
| completely. While I like this idea, it definitely poses
| problems for enforcement of basically every digital and
| financial law on the books, which can pose problems for all
| of us.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| The use of force generally leaves evidence of its use,
| however. If the government cuts the door off your safe,
| and doesn't have a warrant to conduct that search, then
| the facts will speak for themselves when you avail
| yourself of your rights - e.g. to have evidence from an
| unlawful search suppressed in court and the subsequent
| civil rights lawsuit.
|
| This is where the analogy breaks down - introducing
| backdoors and passkeys into digital security doesn't
| create the same trail in the physical world.
|
| The better analogy would be - imagine that the government
| insisted that all locks be approved by the government, on
| the understanding that those locks would have master keys
| that the government owned. They would be able to come to
| a bank during the night, unlock the front door, the
| vault, and your safe deposit box; or come into your home
| when you were at work, unlock your filing cabinet and
| look at your records.
|
| You would have to trust that government employees who had
| access to the master keys would only use them for
| legitimate purposes, and when authorized to do so. You
| would have to trust that the government could secure
| those keys at all times so they never fell into the wrong
| hands, and that no unauthorized duplicates would be made.
|
| You would have to do all those things bearing in mind
| that the government regularly loses such master keys, has
| employees that exceed their authority, misuse government
| resources, demonstrate poor custody practices, and so on.
|
| It doesn't seem like a good bet to me.
|
| EDIT: oh yes, and I forgot to mention there's a whole
| bunch of other bad actors out there who know how to buy a
| government-approved lock, take it apart, and are highly
| motivated to make their own master keys.
| bostonsre wrote:
| Yes, I agree that we should absolutely provide advice on
| our area of expertise for topics in our domain but I don't
| think we should be the ones that make the decision. The
| other side of the debate aren't idiots, they have some
| valid view points, else this encryption debate would have
| been settled long ago.
|
| Encryption was not the only point brought up by the OP,
| they were also against government regulation. My main point
| is that we are tech workers that have conflicts of interest
| and that we should look hard at our viewpoints and ask
| ourselves if they are better for us or better for everyone.
| We are humans and like other industries, greed has crept in
| and we don't always make great decisions when left on our
| own.
| LastMuel wrote:
| > We are humans and like other industries, greed has
| crept in and we don't always make great decisions when
| left on our own.
|
| I feel strange having to point out that Governments are
| made up of people too. If it's not people that are making
| the good decisions, whom do we turn to?
| bostonsre wrote:
| Yes, democracy is the worst form of governance except for
| all of the other ones. I trust more in our government
| than I do in zuckerberg. Letting him continue the path
| that he and only he decides does not seem like a good
| idea.
| LastMuel wrote:
| I find it odd that you exalt democracy and the idea of
| limiting individual freedom in the same paragraph.
| Zuckerberg isn't a government unto himself and answers to
| shareholders and board members; one of which served as
| Chief of staff for the National Economic Council in the
| Obama administration. You seem to think that our
| government and large corporations are separate and
| isolated organizations, but the people that work within
| them often slip between the two. Taking Zuckerberg out of
| the equation will certainly not change the game.
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| So then what is your solution to this?
| adolph wrote:
| > I don't think we should be the ones that make the
| decision
|
| Is Admiral Poindexter a preferable decision-maker?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_Information_Awareness
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| I have yet to see a compelling argument for enshrining
| security vulnerabilities in law outside of the usual sob
| stories that like to get echoed in Congressional
| testimony.
| Kalium wrote:
| Would you care to share what you think the valid view
| points against encryption are?
|
| For my own part, I find it helpful to remember that
| questions over encryption have been ongoing for several
| decades. Historically, the arguments boiled down to
| shouting about CSAM, terrorism, drugs, etc. Mostly it
| tended to be really be about law enforcement agencies
| wanting to have the unfettered powers of surveillance.
|
| What's perhaps most interesting to me is that the
| prevalence of encryption seems to have done very little
| to stop the FBI from catching people. I know this next
| point will be contentious, but perhaps there's room to
| question why these people who are indeed not idiots are
| so against encryption for you and me.
|
| So yes, you're absolutely right. Let's look hard at our
| viewpoints and biases and expertise and paychecks and ask
| ourselves - why does the FBI want us to not have
| encryption? Why do we want it? Who has the valid view
| points here?
| stanleydrew wrote:
| I don't think it's that complicated or nefarious. Law
| enforcement are humans just like us, mostly trying to do
| their jobs with as little effort as possible. Encrypted
| communication makes their jobs harder in some cases, so
| they don't like it.
|
| > What's perhaps most interesting to me is that the
| prevalence of encryption seems to have done very little
| to stop the FBI from catching people.
|
| I don't think we can know this. Or maybe you have some
| data? But more importantly there's a big gap between
| "catching" someone and "convicting" someone. Having the
| content of specific communications can make a big
| difference in actually proving guilt.
| Kalium wrote:
| > I don't think it's that complicated or nefarious. Law
| enforcement are humans just like us, mostly trying to do
| their jobs with as little effort as possible. Encrypted
| communication makes their jobs harder in some cases, so
| they don't like it.
|
| I completely agree. My point was not that their motives
| are inherently evil per se, just that they're as self-
| centered as anyone and carefully gazing deep into our
| navels does not imbue their perspectives with extra
| validity or compelling strength.
|
| > I don't think we can know this.
|
| We do know that the FBI routinely arrests and prosecutes
| people, even ones that use encryption. There's no end of
| public sources showing it occurring again and again. The
| fate of Dread Pirate Roberts is a good example.
|
| > Or maybe you have some data?
|
| What data would you like? The FBI has statistics
| available going back to the 1930s:
| https://www.fbi.gov/services/cjis/ucr
|
| > Having the content of specific communications can make
| a big difference in actually proving guilt.
|
| You're absolutely right, it definitely can be! Which is
| why the FBI has learned how to both build cases without
| such things. They've also learned how to gain access to
| encrypted communications. Between the two, some might
| opine that it's enough to raise questions about if they
| really need to prevent you and I from having access to
| cryptography or not. They're clearly experts at law
| enforcement and perhaps have no need to confiscate the
| tools of mathematics from technologists.
|
| Which brings me back to the point. Let's look hard at our
| viewpoints and biases and expertise and paychecks and ask
| ourselves - why does the FBI want us to not have
| encryption? Why do we want it? Who has the valid view
| points here? What have we gained from this navel-gazing?
| bostonsre wrote:
| We live in a world made of spectrums where we must
| balance opposing desires. We cannot have prosperity
| without security (in the law enforcement sense) and we
| cannot have freedom with absolute security but we make
| compromises to try to find a balance between those
| opposing forces. It is an incredibly hard problem to
| solve but I don't really know where that perfect balance
| is and I'm not sure anyone knows.
|
| I don't want to live in a police state and I'm not sure
| of anyone else that does. I also don't want to live in
| complete anarchy or even a libertarian state because I
| think there are bad people out there that would take
| advantage of that and potentially hurt other people.
|
| It always seems to be hand waved away on this forum, but
| perfect computer security could indeed help criminals out
| there. I don't know the numbers around how many more but
| I really believe that no one knows.
|
| I make no assertion that one side is right and the other
| is wrong, just that it is a hard problem and that I don't
| know the answer.
|
| Where and how do we find the balance? I know the law
| enforcement community pushes against computer security to
| attain better security (in the law enforcement sense) and
| I know that tech people generally push for computer
| security that limits law enforcement abilities. I don't
| think we can let one side of the argument completely win,
| but how do we find that balance?
| Kalium wrote:
| You seem like an intelligent, thoughtful, and educated
| individual. Perhaps you might find it interesting to read
| up on the history of attempts to pursue the precise
| balance you suggest is desirable:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip
|
| If you seek numbers, the FBI invites you to inspect their
| data: https://www.fbi.gov/services/cjis/ucr
|
| As you correctly and wisely say, the world is full of
| hard problems with many strong, clear, compelling, and
| valid viewpoints to balance. It may just be possibly
| worth considering that this might not be one such
| scenario where balance is possible, let alone achievable.
| Do you think there might be cases, in the fullness of the
| human experience, where one set of extremists on an issue
| are right, their opposite numbers are wrong, and any
| balance between them also wrong? What if what seems to be
| a balance is based on a false premise?
|
| Perhaps we should stop, take a step back, and examine our
| biases?
| bostonsre wrote:
| Yes, I absolutely think that finding that balance is
| usually a case of finding the unhappy minimum and not
| about finding a spot where everyone is happy.
|
| > Do you think there might be cases, in the fullness of
| the human experience, where one set of extremists on an
| issue are right, their opposite numbers are wrong, and
| any balance between them also wrong?
|
| Yes, I think there probably are cases where something
| like this happens but I would assume those cases would be
| a little less debatable. But yes, what you say makes a
| lot of sense and is probably a large part of the reason
| the current political climate is so tribal.
|
| > Perhaps we should stop, take a step back, and examine
| our biases?
|
| If you are talking about the current case though, what is
| the false premise or what are the biases?
|
| There are indeed monsters out there that hurt women and
| children and use technology to accomplish those crimes.
| They are not made up bogey men. They flock to technology
| that provides them cover and punishments for crimes deter
| criminals from attempting those crimes. If criminals did
| not have to fear punishments, more crimes would happen. I
| certainly would speed more if I didn't have to worry
| about speeding tickets.
| Kalium wrote:
| > Yes, I absolutely think that finding that balance is
| usually a case of finding the unhappy minimum and not
| about finding a spot where everyone is happy.
|
| I'm glad we agree!
|
| Here's where the hot take comes in: we're there now.
| Encryption is something we have access to. Law
| enforcement manages to work around it on a regular basis
| and has now for several decades.
|
| > Yes, I think there probably are cases where something
| like this happens but I would assume those cases would be
| a little less debatable.
|
| One would certainly hope so, but it's perhaps possible
| that this might not always be true. There are often
| people ready and willing to debate what should be
| undebateable. It shocks the conscience.
|
| > If you are talking about the current case though, what
| is the false premise or what are the biases?
|
| Some people have come to this conversation with the false
| premise that taking away encryption will substantially
| help law enforcement, improving safety and security for
| our vulnerable friends, neighbors, and community members.
| Their pain, suffering, and exploitation is _very real_ ,
| yet that perhaps does not always make functional what is
| done in the name of keeping them safe.
|
| Some have come to this debate with the bias of assuming
| there is a useful policy medium to be found. Perhaps
| there is not, as we might be dealing with technical
| matters that are all-or-nothing in unavoidable ways.
|
| Some may find these to be perhaps worthy of careful
| examination, as such things can perhaps lead to
| dangerously misguided policy - such as the Clipper chip
| or mass surveillance.
|
| Thank you for being thoughtful and centering kindness,
| mercy, and compassion.
| jimbokun wrote:
| > My main point is that we are tech workers that have
| conflicts of interest and that we should look hard at our
| viewpoints and ask ourselves if they are better for us or
| better for everyone.
|
| That is a trait lacking in almost everyone these days,
| not just tech workers.
| secondcoming wrote:
| To play Devil's Advocate and use your own point against
| you;
|
| Some software engineers might be experts in the domain of
| encryption, but there are other professions who are experts
| in the domain of National Security.
| golemotron wrote:
| Tech people have tech knowledge, but they are not policy
| experts. Our job is to give the people creating policy
| information on our area of expertise, not theirs. If you
| don't agree, look at that comments on this post. They are
| shallow and tech centric, not considering all of the
| various impacts of a comprehensive policy.
| peterwei87 wrote:
| It's not obvious that Ms. Haugen provides any additional
| expertise in policy matters. What are her achievements in
| the policy space that merit deference to expertise?
| ineedasername wrote:
| Her expertise and motives are separate from the public
| utility of what she revealed. I'm not going to denounce
| her for leaking this material: I can separate the utility
| of having this material in the public record from her
| reasons for putting it there.
|
| As for her expertise, she worked in FB's civic integrity
| unit as a product manager. I may disagree with her, but
| she does have a reasonable basis to claim better
| knowledge on the topic than the average person.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > We have massive conflicts of interest and some tech
| companies have shown over and over that greed trumps morals
| in many cases.
|
| How is using end-to-end encryption of private communications
| a case of greed trumping morals? If anything, encrypting
| private messages and preventing others from reading them - be
| it Facebook or the various world governments - seems like the
| obvious moral move.
|
| I think a lot of people, tech or otherwise, are projecting
| their own ideals on to this Facebook leaker without looking
| closely at the details of what she's been lobbying for. Most
| people seem to want _less_ surveillance and interference with
| private communications by Facebook but she's arguing for
| much, much more.
|
| But that's the problem: The issue has now been so dramatized
| in the media that the average viewer doesn't really know
| what's being proposed, they just see "Facebook bad,
| whistleblower good" and assume it's what they want.
|
| It's up to people who know the subject matter, including the
| tech community who understand things like end-to-end
| encryption and government regulation thereof, to speak up.
| [deleted]
| jimbokun wrote:
| And you think partisan politicians and activists will make
| unbiased decisions with no negative unintended consequences?
|
| Encryption is not a pro-tech position. It is a pro-privacy
| position and you don't need to be a tech expert to see the
| value in that.
| boringg wrote:
| I think one of the big sticking points of the problem is the
| challenge of power represents innately. It is very difficult
| to have an exceptional steward of power over long time
| periods. The government has done a poor job, individuals have
| done a poor job, crowdsourcing responsibility has done a poor
| job, corporations have done a poor job.
|
| I am not trying to throw my hands up in defeat but pointing
| to an intransigent problem that is not easily fixable however
| simple every side of the argument tries to frame it and why
| they should be the arbiters of power/control. I understand
| the reluctance of any individual or company to hand over a
| large portion of control to a government or other community
| that doesn't have a track record - it is a fraught situation.
| bostonsre wrote:
| Yes, democratic governments have many drawbacks around
| regulation but aren't they the least bad choice we have in
| a situation like facebook?
|
| There is no governance beyond zuckerberg currently and he
| has proven that he is aligned with zuckerberg and not
| society. Continuing with the status quo and doing nothing
| does not seem like a good idea to me.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| I mean, he's been pretty open about his goals and moral
| code for a while now. The entire company was built on the
| assumption that being connected to as many people as
| possible is net good.
|
| You can probably argue that he's wrong on this, but it's
| hard to say that he just cares about himself.
| bostonsre wrote:
| I doubt it, but I guess its possible that is his only
| true north. If it is, he is going about it in a
| Machiavellian or Caesar like manner where he does not
| care about the impact he has while attaining those goals.
| But I also think it's possible that his actions are those
| of someone who is power hungry and does not care about
| what happens in his wake.
| adventured wrote:
| There is an excellent, obvious solution. And it's the one
| Facebook refuses to consider because it's a large negative
| economically.
|
| Give users a lot more control. Over their feeds. Over what
| they receive or not. How they receive it.
|
| Alternatively, abolish the feeds entirely. Make people seek
| out updates by other users manually. It's time consuming,
| it drastically slows down the reaction-agitation cycle.
| People then focus on consuming only what's most important
| to them to a far greater degree, as their time is limited.
| Facebook moved away from that early approach by intention
| to spur time-on-platform, consumption, engagement.
|
| In the offline space you have a small number of actual
| friends, a small number of people you can actually keep up
| with, because of time constraints. That's a good thing, not
| a bad thing. It keeps people focused on what's most
| important to them. Facebook seeks to generate the opposite
| outcome, they want max engagement and consumption, so now
| you've got two thousand fake friends, and two hundred more
| relevant people within those two thousand fake friends that
| you receive updates from on a daily or weekly basis. That's
| insane. There's no other good way to put, it's insanity.
| It's bullshit. It's fake, it's inhuman. That mass
| consumption of content, that the feed/wall was built to
| accomplish, how much of it matters to the end user? I think
| the answer is very little. Put it back into the user's
| hands to seek out profile page updates, to seek out updates
| by their friends - they'll do it if it really matters to
| them, and they'll massively neglect the users that don't
| matter to them. This is also where Facebook's finances
| implode; most FB employees are self-interested in that
| outcome not happening.
|
| The central issue is: the core mission of Facebook (today)
| is a fraud. Everyone should not be connected. Everyone does
| not want to be connected to everyone else. It is not a
| great ideal to pursue connect-everyone, it's fundamentally
| anti-human. It will not make the world a better place. That
| ideology needs to be challenged, and it rests at the center
| of Facebook.
|
| Facebook has built itself to agitate for attention. They
| designed the feed/wall to prompt artificially high levels
| of engagement. Give that control back to the user in
| spades. People will adjust their systems, they do know
| what's best for them when it comes to this matter (and a
| lot more so than a politician thousands of miles away that
| has never met this person, or Facebook corporate).
|
| Society sculpting by some ruling authority, some group that
| happens to be dominant at a given time, is a truly horrific
| approach. It will accelerate the splintering into tribes,
| and accelerate oppression by the government.
| quotemstr wrote:
| > I feel like we as a tech community should take a step back
| and consider whether or not we should not be the only ones
| that decide what should or should not be done
|
| When it comes to encryption, tech activists say tech should
| take a back seat to policy-makers and let them decide on the
| rules. When it comes to internet censorship, tech activists
| says "but my private companies!" and argues that techies
| decide on the limits of acceptable discourse for the whole
| world.
|
| What do these stances have in common? That activists are
| arguing that tech should do what power wants.
|
| There are no principles at work here. There's only a "who,
| whom" power dynamic. Activists will say whatever is effective
| in the moment for achieving their immediate aims, and right
| now, that's being good little sycophants for people with
| broad, unclear, and definitely undemocratic influence over
| public affairs.
| malwrar wrote:
| Some part of me feels like this would be like letting the
| country decide on vaccines.
|
| I don't think people have any idea what end-to-end encryption
| means, they just hear maybe the occasional slogan ("it keeps
| your messages private", "it lets terrorists hide from cops")
| and assume there's some valid choice between totally cripple
| online security and totally cripple people stalking your
| communications. I don't even think people understand the
| implications of what communications means. Why else are we
| still talking about this issue in abstract terms when the
| harms are precisely enumerable and the supposed benefits can
| be completely debunked as fantasy?
|
| All this stuff is so depressing. Free speech online is no
| longer in vogue, the ACLU, EFF, and other usual heroes of
| these sorts of battles feel asleep at the wheel. It's sad to
| think I might see the death of something so beautiful.
| himinlomax wrote:
| > I feel like we as a tech community should take a step back
| and consider whether or not we should not be the only ones
| that decide what should or should not be done.
|
| As an engineer, I'm in a better position to understand what
| the f is going on regarding encryption and, say, nuclear
| power than most people.
|
| No amount of wishful thinking will change that.
|
| > It is a massive country with many opposing viewpoints.
|
| World. Not country.
| bostonsre wrote:
| > As an engineer, I'm in a better position to understand
| what the f is going on regarding encryption and, say,
| nuclear power than most people.
|
| Yes, you are an engineer and understand the implementation
| details and potential side effects, but what about the
| opposing viewpoints like those from law enforcement? Are
| you an expert in law enforcement? Your viewpoints should
| trump theirs why exactly? You really don't think that it's
| possible that you can't see the forest for the trees?
|
| Do nuclear scientists define nuclear energy policies or do
| they provide advice to those that define them?
|
| > World. Not country.
|
| I don't think we have a world government that will make
| regulations in regards to facebook.
| himinlomax wrote:
| > but what about the opposing viewpoints like those from
| law enforcement?
|
| You're right, I may be ignorant of the issues that
| support the need for weakening encryption, but the fact
| is that I can evaluate the other side of the equation.
| And if the side pushing against encryption is making
| terrible arguments, I can see how terrible they
| objectively are.
|
| > Do nuclear scientists define nuclear energy policies or
| do they provide advice to those that define them?
|
| Similar thing: the arguments against nuclear power are
| idiotic and typically plain wrong and based on irrational
| appeals to fear.
|
| Just like the previous issue, if a decision has to be
| made, it has to balance the pros and cons. Even if I can
| only properly evaluate only one side of the equation and
| find it lacking, I can certainly have serious doubts as
| to the legitimacy of the choice presented. And that's one
| side more than most people can grasp.
| nradov wrote:
| I have seen plenty of comments by engineers here containing
| wildly incorrect statements about nuclear power. In general
| engineers seem to overestimate their own competence in
| areas outside their immediate professional experience.
| dkarl wrote:
| > We have done a shit job so far of managing ourselves. Sure
| in lots of cases we have made the world a better place but I
| think we need to be honest with ourselves and acknowledge
| that greed has crept in and supplanted that "making the world
| a better place" mission.
|
| I think "we" have been largely absent from the conversation
| as heard by the rest of society. You can't say "trust the
| software engineers" like you can say "trust the doctors," not
| because we don't have ethics or expertise, but because what
| most people think of as the voices of our profession are the
| PR mouthpieces for companies like Facebook and Google.
|
| Speaking person to person and in online forums such as this,
| you'll find most engineers concerned about privacy and the
| societal and emotional harm of social media, and reflexively
| distrustful of corporations that speak about issues they have
| a financial stake in. But that's not what non-engineers
| _think_ we think. The assumption seems to be, well, you 're a
| techie, so of course you uncritically embrace all that stuff.
| People who know me better and know I don't think that way
| seem to regard me as less of a techie for that reason, which
| goes to show how little they are aware of sentiment in our
| profession. I think that's what we need to fix.
|
| A profession like medicine suffers a little bit from the same
| bias, where people tend to assume that doctors are personally
| pro-surgery, pro-drugs, etc., but doctors have a professional
| structure that creates recognized authorities, which means
| journalists have somebody to talk to when they want to get
| the overall take of "doctors" on an issue where their
| expertise applies. When writing about a public health issue,
| journalists have no problem getting an independent
| perspective from doctors with credibility, relevant
| expertise, and no direct financial stake in the issue.
|
| Software is in a position analogous to if the only doctors
| visible in the media were PR flacks for hospitals and
| pharmaceutical companies.
|
| A big cultural difference between medicine and software is
| that doctors are traditionally trained to bear the mantle of
| authority. They are trained that commanding the trust and
| respect of patients is vital to providing care to them, and
| that it is a skill separate from and equally necessary to the
| technical skills that make a doctor worthy of that respect.
| Tech people are socialized to beware of the dangers of
| authority and distrust those who seek it. I may be speaking
| as an old-timer here, but when I was young, I learned to
| lionize the scientists and engineers who rejected the
| accoutrements of authority, who wore cheap and frumpy
| clothes, who let their hair go crazy, who reveled in stories
| of their own stupid mistakes, who actively punctured the
| mystique of authority so that they would only have as much
| respect as their knowledge and achievements alone would earn
| them.
|
| In other words, medicine comes from an old tradition, which
| long accepted that wielding authority and being worthy of it
| were separate skills. Keeping the two connected was a moral
| responsibility that fell on individual doctors and on the
| profession as a whole. The tradition of software is much
| younger and was much more deeply marked by the
| counterculture, which took an opposite approach to the
| problem of authority, declaring that we could and should
| unlearn our reflexive deference to the superficial aspect of
| authority and replace it with a critical, informed
| consumption of the expertise of other members of society. To
| the counterculture mindset, it was unacceptable that society
| should be at the mercy of the closed ranks of a profession
| privileged by its exclusive knowledge.
|
| I think that the counterculture perspective was an important
| corrective, but it is incomplete, because the problem of
| authority hasn't gone away. Even if we despise authority, we
| still depend on it, so the question is: how should we as a
| profession create and elevate professional authority? How do
| we make it possible for a journalist to easily get a read on
| what software engineers think as professionals, distinct from
| the official line of large corporate employers of software
| engineers?
|
| Maybe software needs a replacement for the old professional
| societies, except with an emphasis on policy and public
| education, instead of expensive journals and social events
| designed to help you find your way into the old boys' club. I
| have no idea what such a group would look like, though.
| watwut wrote:
| Whistleblower and activist are not mutually exclusive. Most are
| both, like Snowden was both. Reality Winner too. And whether I
| agree with someone views is really not relevant toward whether
| they are whistleblower.
| dls2016 wrote:
| I'd go one step further and say a whistleblower is by
| definition an activist. The entire point of leaking is to
| instigate change.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| HN is a bit schizophrenic on this topic. On one hand, it seems
| everybody wants more freedom and less surveillance, but they
| give FB a hard time for not monitoring content better.
| Hopefully these aren't the same people expressing these
| contradictory points of view.
|
| I'd be curious to know what both side think the ideal social
| network should look like.
| alecmuffett wrote:
| Author of original blogpost here; I am seeing a lot of
| discussion here about "what constitutes a public group?" and
| so I wrote this to help with the discussion.
| https://alecmuffett.com/article/15095
| kop316 wrote:
| I would argue "HN" is not schizophrenic, "HN" is a bunch of
| users who have different passions and will comment/vote on
| different things.
| colordrops wrote:
| We should coin this the "hive mind fallacy". Though there
| probably already exists a name for this.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| "Everybody" is an increasingly large group of non-
| technologists with a social and political agenda. It used to
| be in tech circles most people believe the line should be
| drawn at illegal content, trolling and obscenities. We don't
| want more freedom, we want to protect the freedoms that we
| are entitled to. And no one should need to defend such an
| obvious position against those who want to turn the web into
| a glorified television.
| dd36 wrote:
| A solution is requiring social media companies to verify the
| identity of users. They don't have to require other users
| know the identity but the company has to. This protects
| against sock puppet armies and makes bans easier to enforce.
| PascLeRasc wrote:
| Please keep in mind that some of us just want bad things to
| happen to Facebook and don't have a pro or anti-surveillance
| agenda behind that.
| newaccount2021 wrote:
| HN/Twitter/Reddit is for free speech when it conforms to the
| prevailing zeitgeist and against it otherwise, it isn't that
| hard to figure out
| tboyd47 wrote:
| I don't think either side has a solution. But, that doesn't
| mean they can't detect an obvious subterfuge from outside the
| community.
| munificent wrote:
| _> I 'd be curious to know what both side think the ideal
| social network should look like. _
|
| I don't care what they look like as long as there's hundreds
| of them all on relatively equal footing.
|
| I firmly believe that most of the major problems facing
| society today are not caused by any features of particular
| companies, but by the consolidation of power in a very small
| number of them.
| danjac wrote:
| Maybe the ideal social network is no one big "social
| network", i.e. get rid of your Facebooks and Twitters and go
| back to small, decentralized, localized forums and interest
| groups running on independent, secure, open-source platforms
| that are easy for laypeople to set up, maintain and moderate.
| swalsh wrote:
| I think you need both. Small decentralized topic specific
| forums are important. But, without a larger community
| people tend to not realize the outside world may not share
| the same opinions. That leads to this tribalist attitude of
| hatred of "others".
| Tainnor wrote:
| I'm skeptical that seeing opposite viewpoints expressed
| by random people on the internet leads to shared
| understanding or less hatred.
|
| If anything, research seems to indicate that tolerance to
| opposing viewpoints and revising of stereotypes comes
| from extended personal contact and having a shared sense
| of purpose, and that's difficult to achieve on the
| internet.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > On one hand, it seems everybody wants more freedom and less
| surveillance, but they give FB a hard time for not monitoring
| content better.
|
| That seems perfectly consistent. FB is _already_ going all-in
| on surveillance and ignoring any notion of freedom; if they
| must destroy privacy, the least we can ask is that they
| actually do something useful with it.
| foobarbecue wrote:
| You are conflating schizophrenia with multiple personality
| disorder. This is a common, but harmful, mistake.
| gnabgib wrote:
| Perhaps you could provide some insight into why? I don't
| see how multiple personality disorder is a very useful
| characterization when you're describing a community made up
| of multiple personalities.
| swalsh wrote:
| HN is not a single person, it's a community with a variety of
| members with a variety of opinions. The fact that communities
| tend to form consensus of opinions, especially such as
| subreddits, is kind of a major issue.
| junon wrote:
| > I'd be curious to know what both side think the ideal
| social network should look like.
|
| I'd rather they didn't exist, honestly.
| ghaff wrote:
| How do you define social networks? Should email mailing
| lists not exist either because those are absolutely social
| networks in a way as were BBS systems?
| Tainnor wrote:
| Not OP, but IMHO, the danger comes from the algorithms
| which lead to "engaging" content being pushed
| aggressively to everyone. "Engaging" can mean cat videos
| or "incredible looking food", but it means divisive,
| partisan, insincere and outright dangerous more often
| than not.
|
| Inasmuch as a "social network" is just people signing up
| to talk about certain topics and that's it, I don't have
| a problem with it. Internet forums of the 2000s weren't a
| problem necessarily. And while HN does have some
| "virality" mechanisms built in due to upvoting and while
| it is sometimes a "problem" on very divisive topics, it's
| not nearly on the scale of Facebook, Twitter and Co.
|
| So if it were up to me, Twitter, Facebook, Tiktok etc.
| should either disappear or they should at least have to
| revise their algorithms and open them up to public
| scrutiny. Or, you know, if they went back to their
| original purpose of just being about connecting with
| friends and family. But I guess you can't make money out
| of that.
| ghaff wrote:
| I take your point. But I would need more convincing that
| just getting rid of algorithms/recommendations/etc. would
| suddenly make all the problems go away.
| junon wrote:
| Another part of the problem is size. Older communities
| were miniscule compared to the billions of users each
| platform has now.
| Tainnor wrote:
| All? No. Conspiracy theories and disinformation existed
| before the internet, too.
|
| But we can at least try to get rid of the things that
| make the problem worse.
|
| Moreover, minimising hyper-addictive patterns on such
| platforms would have a host of other benefits too.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| While I agree that it's a sticky problem, I think we can
| find a middle ground between "email mailing list" and
| "site dedicated to maximizing engagement by both
| encouraging the spread of rage baiting misinformation and
| deliberately maximizing the number of people who see it".
| junon wrote:
| Yep, this is my point summed up pretty well. SMS can be
| seen as a "social network" if you really squint your eyes
| - clearly I'm not talking about BBS/forum software/etc.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > HN is a bit schizophrenic on this topic.
|
| What if there was a way to send private message, in a
| decentralized manner, and where it's not even possible to
| tell if the recipient has actually read the message or not?
|
| There are blockchains using ZK-proofs allowing to do that
| today. Not only it's decentralized so "fuck corporation
| surveillance/profiling" but it's also highly unlikely uncle
| sam and its offsprings can break the elliptic curves and ZK-
| cryptograhy in use by these blockchains, so "fuck state
| surveillance" too.
|
| But then it's using the word "blockchain", so HN is pretty
| much against it.
|
| And instead HN as a whole shall root for "secure" messengers
| that are leaking metadata like there's no tomorrow while
| explaining that they're the best thing since sliced bread
| "because they're easy to use".
|
| Go figure.
| 8eye wrote:
| the future will not be censorship but categories, so people
| will not get banned, they will get labeled and you will
| filter tags out, those tags will be connected to a person, if
| you don't like a tag you will see less of that persons
| content. this will be useful in keeping the peace. it'll mess
| up dialogue but most people have a hard to with empathy these
| days. so maybe certain sections will have open discussions
| for people who are okay with seeing content from other tags,
| and are okay with engaging with that content. right now
| dating apps will forever ban your account if you engage a
| certain way with the opposite sex, so in many cases a match
| will get banned because the person they matched with did not
| like their content. but that does not mean someone else won't
| like their content. so the people who have the most in common
| including their communication styles should be allowed to
| still engage with each other without getting banned by
| someone else's arbitrary rules that are subjective depending
| on a persons upbringing.
| gadders wrote:
| I think what they want is more freedom for their own
| opinions, and more surveillance on people they disagree with.
| Quessked73 wrote:
| In the case of FB, I actually believe having Instagram and
| Facebook not e2e could be even work, if people are educated
| and made aware about it, while Whatsapp remains e2e.
|
| Instagram and FB are mostly "public" facing so they offer a
| big surface for malicious activities. (Scammers,
| Groomers/People seeking CSAM which are always used as a
| reason for more surveillance/ Trolls etc.)
|
| Whatsapp is more private and requires knowing one's phone
| number which ideally should be harder to get ahold of.
|
| Messaging on Instagram/FB could be compared to whispering in
| a crowded place, private...but not fully private.
|
| In an ideal world this would not be necessary, but there will
| always be a fight between surveillance and freedom. And
| perhaps giving up freedoms in some parts could allow us
| regain more freedom in others, as long as people are aware
| about it, which might be the biggest hurdle to tackle.
| secondaryacct wrote:
| Maybe decentralized completely: do not talk to my kids about
| your BS paranoid and my kids should just see whatever kids
| want to see.
|
| We dont exactly need a centralized humongous social website.
| Im on both sides honestly: I want facebook to subside in
| profit of isolated more freedom-centric micro network where
| we can say what we want but wont impact massively crowd
| thinking ?
|
| Like that if monitoring must happen it happens in isolation,
| and if freedom must exist it s not on the same place as the
| other fucktards?
| thereddaikon wrote:
| HN isn't one person with a single set of ideals and opinions.
| Its a website, with many people who's worldview ranges quite
| drastically. Tech, like anything else in the world, is going
| to have a cross section of humanity in it. You have
| libertarians, anarcho-capitalists, traditional GOP and Dems,
| European Socialists and full on communists here. You can't
| expect such a diverse group to have a homogenous view.
| boringg wrote:
| Exactly - every community has a diverse set of opinions
| (whether its discernible to the average person or not is a
| different question) and rarely do you find a homogenous
| group of individuals without a very strictly enforced
| control mechanism which suppress differences from being
| seen then creating a homogenous community.
| helen___keller wrote:
| Like any social network, HN falls into polarized, sometimes
| unproductive, discussion with certain topics. For HN, that's
| frequently discussion of big tech and their antics and
| discussion of censorship/moderation/surveillance.
|
| Links about the intersection of these topics, such as
| apple/CSAM or facebook/moderation, are most likely to have
| comments that devolve into polemic without much productive
| discussion taking place.
| [deleted]
| josephg wrote:
| > Hopefully these aren't the same people expressing these
| contradictory points of view. I'd be curious to know what
| both side think the ideal social network should look like.
|
| I see social networks (and in many ways the internet as a
| whole) like a new country we've founded. It's a bit different
| from countries made out of atoms. For a start, everyone there
| is a dual citizen with somewhere in meatspace. And instead of
| community centres we build websites. But it's a _place_.
|
| How are those spaces governed? Is it a democracy? No. Each
| social network is its own mostly benevolent corporate
| dictatorship. If you don't like the rules, your only option
| is banishment.
|
| Healthy communities (in healthy society) need rules to keep
| bad actors in check. And freedom to explore and be ourselves.
| Healthy communities in real life use participatory processes
| to figure out what those rules should be. You need people to
| feel like they have a voice. It'll never be perfect. And
| different rules will make sense for different groups.
|
| Facebook's problem is they're trying to be the government,
| the judiciary and police for billions of people from every
| country on the planet. There is no single set of rules and
| policies which will work everywhere. And even if there was,
| how do you police billions of people? AIs make mistakes.
|
| I don't know how, but I think FB needs to eat humble pie and
| find ways for communities to decide on (and enforce) their
| own social norms somehow. It'd be messy and disjointed, but
| so are people. Reddit and discord do this - although they're
| obviously very different products.
|
| Tyrannies don't have a strong history of making choices which
| primarily benefit their citizens. So far, facebook's track
| record hasn't been much better. To improve, they need to
| acknowledge the position they're in, learn from history and
| give some power back to the people who populate their site.
| lowkey_ wrote:
| > On one hand, it seems everybody wants more freedom and less
| surveillance, but they give FB a hard time for not monitoring
| content better.
|
| I don't think these are conflicting views: (1) Less
| monitoring on private messages (2) More monitoring on public
| posts
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _Less monitoring on private messages_
|
| As pointed out on The Last Week Tonight show, private
| messaging apps are a cess pool of misinformation [0]
| especially in the developing world.
|
| But: Facebook can and does monitor private messages
| whenever any user flags / reports them [1]. The problem is,
| how effective is the mechanism given not many know it is
| even there. Of course, e2ee mustn't be compromised but it
| should also not be used as an excuse to let misinformation
| run amock. May be homomorphic encryption gets us there, may
| be UI changes do. I hope Facebook does act swiftly and
| decisively whatever the case, since e2ee (backdoored or not
| [2][3]) seems like the scape goat here.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/l5jtFqWq5iU
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25211185
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13389935
|
| [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25685446
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > 1) Less monitoring on private messages
|
| The Facebook leaker is explicitly arguing _against_ this
| though. She cites Facebook's push for end-to-end encryption
| of private messages as a problem.
| ekianjo wrote:
| It's almost as if the leaker was planted by a government.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Facebook leaker is explicitly arguing against this
| though. She cites Facebook's push for end-to-end
| encryption of private messages as a problem._
|
| One doesn't have to agree 100% with an ally.
| mwigdahl wrote:
| Nor does one have to disagree 100% with an enemy.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| Nor do you have to support an ally you agree with a
| majority of the time if they get some big things wrong.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| If someone is going to Congress and lobbying against end-
| to-end encryption of private communications, how are they
| an ally?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _If someone is going to Congress and lobbying against
| end-to-end encryption of private communications, how are
| they an ally?_
|
| Because they're also lobbying for other things you care
| about. And those things are more likely to be passed into
| law than the E2E encryption pieces.
|
| Taking a puritanical view on an issue is a high-risk
| high-reward gambit. Nine out of ten times, it ejects you
| from the room. One out of ten times, you will organize
| sufficiently to make it a wedge issue ( _e.g._ the NRA on
| guns, NIMBYs, _et cetera_ ).
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| There's a gambler's fallacy at work here, though. Our
| Fourth Amendment right to encrypted private
| communications is so important that if we lose it (or
| give it up), any future wins in areas like corporate
| transparency, monopoly regulation, and net neutrality
| won't ultimately matter. We won't have the freedom needed
| to benefit from them.
|
| To the extent Haugen disagrees, she's not on "our side."
| adventured wrote:
| > One doesn't have to agree 100% with an ally.
|
| Depending on how terrible the bad ideas are that they're
| pushing, they may not be an ally at all in fact. A multi-
| purpose trojan horse may be more accurate.
|
| In this case, promoting the abolition of end to end
| encryption is quite heinous. She's providing the
| authoritarians a potent argument that isn't yet well
| established in the public mind (we have to be able to see
| all of your data so we can keep you safe from the Chinese
| trying to see all of your data).
| lowkey_ wrote:
| I'm merely clarifying HN's common opinion.
|
| As for the whistleblower, I'm very skeptical of her -- to
| be a tech PM against encryption, and somehow linking e2e
| encryption to making the platform less safe, is dubious
| at best. Removing misinformation and calls to violence on
| the Facebook platform doesn't need to include monitoring
| private messages.
|
| The idea that she's been a PM at large tech companies for
| 15 years and doesn't understand that Facebook monitoring
| messages will mean China can monitor those messages is
| almost too suspicious to believe.
| kolmogorov wrote:
| How do these two align? Why would FB sending messages
| that are sent encrypted (not e2e) and stored on US
| servers allow China to read messages? If you allege
| hacking then why wouldn't they be able to hack the
| devices?
|
| Re misinformation: why would misinformation not simply
| happen in e2e group chats like it is already happening in
| e.g. Brazil or India? What's the difference between
| posting to a group of friends on Facebook vs sharing a
| group message to those friends?
|
| I do think messages should be encrypted but the trade off
| isn't as straightforward as you make it sound.
| dboreham wrote:
| > Why would FB sending messages that are sent encrypted
| (not e2e) and stored on US servers allow China to read
| messages?
|
| Not parent, but I think the idea is that if BigCo does
| business in CountryA , then CountryA's government
| invariably forces BigCo to spy on their users who are
| residents.
|
| Obviously compromising the user's device is a workaround
| open to governments but hard to achieve in bulk.
| piggybox wrote:
| The idea is once a company has some power over its users,
| that power will be used by some government somewhere as
| well. The latest example:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/17/world/europe/russia-
| naval...
| tboyd47 wrote:
| This is probably what would have naturally happened if the
| CDA were never passed. Instead, we've turned internet
| companies into geese that lay golden eggs for the
| government.
| hammock wrote:
| If someone has their Twitter set on private (only followers
| can see content), but they accept most/all follow requests,
| would you consider their content in category 1 (private) or
| category 2 (public)?
| adventured wrote:
| The obvious solution to #2 is encrypted private social
| networks that aggressively lock out the monitors. To
| continue the monitoring it'll require abolishing
| encryption, that's where the views in question (more
| freedom + less surveillence and more content monitoring)
| inevitably are going to end up conflicting and must always
| end up conflicting.
| hannasanarion wrote:
| How do you ban monitoring of _public posts_?
| adventured wrote:
| > How do you ban monitoring of public posts?
|
| I'm not suggesting you should or can in any practical way
| (how heavily - or not at all - that public posts should
| be monitored by the government is a different debate from
| what I was saying).
|
| I'm saying that the parent comment claiming the views are
| not necessarily conflicting, is incorrect.
|
| This must always conflict in the end:
|
| > I don't think these are conflicting views: (1) Less
| monitoring on private messages (2) More monitoring on
| public posts
|
| More aggressive public monitoring (along with the follow-
| on laws to regulate & punish a lot more things said in
| public) will inevitably result in a drive toward more
| encrypted private social networks that can't be easily
| monitored. Those private social networks will rely
| heavily on encryption. The aggressive public monitors
| will have to abolish encryption to then regain the high
| degree of mass content monitoring they used to have. Call
| it networks going underground, or dark; the authorities
| will come up with a negative naming scheme for it as they
| seek to castigate the shift.
|
| You can bet on the rise of mass popular encrypted private
| social networks (likely built around
| subjects/topics/ideology/x thing in common; more like
| groups or subreddits than mass social media today, in
| other words). It's coming this decade. And the response
| from the government toward that is quite predictable.
| They'll use it as another argument against encryption.
| tytso wrote:
| If there is a drive towards more end to end private
| messaging, I'm OK with that. But I wouldn't call that
| "social networks"; in my mind there is a huge difference
| between an encrypted end-to-end message between two
| users, an encrypted message which is sent out to a large
| group of users, and a public post.
|
| You can make an end-to-end message between two users
| perfectly secure, to the limits of engineering and the
| security hygine of the two users. No problem there. If
| you have an encrypted message sent out to a group of
| users, as the group of users gets larger and larger, it's
| more likely that one of those users might be an informant
| to law enforcement, or will be sloppy with their message
| hygine, so that after they get arrested invading the
| capitol on January 6th (for example), law enforcement
| gets access to all of their information on their phone
| with the pin code 1234. Still no problem as far as I'm
| concerned. Criminals tend to be stupid, and that's good
| from a societal point of view.
|
| Public posts are a different story altogether, because
| social networks have an economic incentive to promote
| "engagement". And if that engagement happens to emphasize
| messages that incite hate, or anger, or causes people to
| think that vaccines contain 5G modems, or whatever, hey,
| that's just good for shareholders, and in the captalist
| system, shareholder value (especially VC value, for
| startups) is the highest good, right? Well, I have some
| real concerns about about that. I think that corporations
| which are prioritizing engagement uber ales, even if that
| causes social harm, should be potentially regulated.
|
| And that's why it is quite possible for someone (like me)
| to believe that end to end encryption should be allowed,
| and promoted, even if it gives the FBI hives --- and at
| the same time, argue that public posts should be highly
| monitored from the perpsective of trying to get insight
| to whether the amplification alogirhtms might be doing
| something unhealthy for our society's information
| ecosystem.
| csmoak wrote:
| How do you look at spamming private messages to many
| recipients, resulting in a similar effect to posting
| publicly?
|
| I know of bullying on FB where the harasser sends the same
| message to dozens of friends of the harassed. FB makes this
| easy to do since a list of someone's contacts are often
| easy to find online and there is no recourse to find or
| report these messages (as with a public post).
|
| To me this presents a particularly tricky double-edged
| sword. E2E encryption is good in many cases, but tied to an
| easy way to send many messages and easily-accessible lists
| of people to target a message to, can result in a similar
| but more hidden version of public posts.
|
| My guess is that this is being used today to disseminate
| similar content that is being restricted on public posts.
|
| As far as I can tell, restrictions to limit the number and
| speed of private messages have not been effective against
| this kind of approach, and new accounts can always be
| created. In some cases, these messages go to a different
| "inbox" for non-contacts, but not always, and this just
| delays the receipt of the message since, again, they cannot
| be found or reported.
|
| I don't know a good solution to this problem, but it's not
| one I've seen talked about.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| There is no solution. Either you give people e2e and let
| them choose to do horrible things with the privilege or
| not.
|
| Maybe a middle ground is that every e2e message is hashed
| and sent once, and if duplicate hashes are detected at
| scale (of the hashed message) you slow the propagation to
| 1 user per day.
| fragmede wrote:
| The limits aren't always visible. In particular, its a
| good idea if new accounts get heavily limited in
| invisible ways, and it's a moderate challenge to create
| mass amounts of them that don't start off shadow-banned.
| Quessked73 wrote:
| Perhaps our expactation of privacy should depend on what
| platform we use, no e2e on public platforms (i.e.
| Facebook) but e2e on other platforms where an
| username/id/phonenumber is required, that can not be
| found easily.
|
| I think the main problem is users mainly using only one
| platform for their communication instead of choosing it
| on a case by case basis.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| How about (3) Less consolidation of power
|
| Personally as someone who doesn't use FB and never will, I
| couldn't care less if Facebook wants to track and monitor
| every one of their users, monetize their every movement,
| and ban any message they want. In a free market you'd have
| thousands of social networks to provide competition with
| all sorts of different policies and ToS. The real issue is
| that one company is in a skewed position of power due to a
| broken marketplace. Fix that problem and all the other
| problems are irrelevant.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| > _In a free market you 'd have thousands of social
| networks to provide competition with all sorts of
| different policies and ToS._
|
| You know, I _want_ to believe that, but I don 't think
| it's true.
|
| Because of the "network effect", the value of belonging
| to a social network is mostly dependent on how many
| people are on it. This dynamic very strongly favors a few
| big social networks.
| Shish2k wrote:
| How would thousands of competing networks deal with a
| government-enforced "no E2EE; wiretapping API required"
| law?
| cabalamat wrote:
| Badly, and that's the point.
|
| I'd like social media to be run by everyone having a
| social media server linked to their home network (imagine
| something like a Raspberry Pi), with it being totally
| decentralised and every user controlling their own
| server.
|
| Then if the government wants to shut it down, they have
| to raid everyone's home.
| herval wrote:
| Or, you know, just work with the ISPs to make it illegal,
| like with BitTorrent.
|
| Also, what you want already exists - you're free to go
| use Mastodon and run your own node. You can't possibly
| think that's a reasonable product your grandparents would
| be able to use.
| cabalamat wrote:
| > Or, you know, just work with the ISPs to make it
| illegal, like with BitTorrent.
|
| BitTorrent certainly isn't illegal in the UK; it might be
| in other jurisdictions.
|
| > you're free to go use Mastodon and run your own node
|
| Would it work behind a NAT'ed router on a dynamic IP? I
| suspect it might not.
|
| > You can't possibly think that's a reasonable product
| your grandparents would be able to use.
|
| What I envisage is an SD card containing the OS + apps,
| you put it in the Pi, plug it into your router by
| ethernet, configure it via its web app, and you're ready
| to go. I think it ought to be possible to make it easy
| enough for the average person to install (certainly
| anyone who could install a router + internet would be
| able to).
| beaner wrote:
| > The real issue is that one company is in a skewed
| position of power due to a broken marketplace
|
| Nobody seems able to identify what the unfair advantage
| is.
|
| The truth is that this is the nature of social networks:
| the successful ones tend towards Monopoly. Why? Because
| more people attract more people. Access begets access.
| The value of a network grows with the square of its size
| [0], and higher-value networks attract more users.
|
| You can't break up a social network without starting to
| make rules about who can associate with who, which is a
| fundamentally anti-free position.
|
| The problem is not Facebook. In its absence another would
| take its place. The "problem" is human nature, and that
| we were not designed cognitively for the types of
| networks that technology now enables for us.
|
| We should focus on education, friendship, and real-world
| experiences. Legal fights against social networks in
| general or Facebook in specific are futile.
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law
| yawnr wrote:
| My question is what constitutes a public post? I feel like
| that definition is evolving. Is a WhatsApp group with 1k
| members spreading disinformation still a private message?
| tacitusarc wrote:
| Yes.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| How about a WhatsApp group with 20 family members?
| 6510 wrote:
| Depends on the type of invitation.
| sangnoir wrote:
| The invitation type can change at any time.
| gnramires wrote:
| It really does not seem like a terrible idea to set off
| an arbitrary point at say 50 or 100 messages. Not
| everyone is going to be happy, sure, but it's clear.
|
| More important I think is the kind of "control" that's
| exerted: it of course should be around developing
| factually accurate sources and promoting those instead
| (maybe a warning "This post contains keywords detected
| anonymously that suggest misinformation. Here is an
| alternative position"
|
| The fundamental problem is that we are building our
| entire lives around a few systems that are completely
| opaque. Facebook, Google, and many other algorithms are
| still closed source, and to their own detriment they
| cannot reveal details of their inner workings. That's why
| we need a way to move to a radically open society that
| still allows for innovation and advanced technology.
| ryandrake wrote:
| The distinction between "public" and "private" is gray
| and messy when it comes to corporate social media
| platforms. Is anything really private? How do you send a
| message to someone in Messenger? You're not sending the
| HTTP request to person X. You're _sending it to Facebook_
| with metadata that says "please make this visible to
| person X and consider it private". Then Facebook keeps
| the message and decides whether or not to publish it
| onward to person X, and whether or not to display it to
| anyone else (internally, externally, in logs, etc.). It's
| not like a package that gets sent over to person X's
| house. It stays on Facebook's property at all times.
|
| When you post something to "your" feed, you're _sending
| it to Facebook_ with metadata that says "please post
| this on my wall" or whatever.
|
| To strain an analog analogy, this is not like the
| telephone or even the post office, where you hand them
| something or send out voice packets and they just look at
| the recipient and forward it on to the actual person.
| Everything you send is sent _to Facebook_ and kept _at
| Facebook_.
|
| Replace "Facebook" above with any social media platform
| or cloud service. They're fundamentally the same. I don't
| consider iCloud photos private. You're sending your
| content _to Apple_ , not putting it in some safe that you
| alone control.
| 6510 wrote:
| > Then Facebook keeps the message and decides whether or
| not to publish it onward to person X
|
| An interesting weird angle: If X deletes their whatsApp
| account messages fail silently. FB stores the message
| under the false pretense that they are able to forward it
| to X. I think imessage does the same?
| boringg wrote:
| Yes, that is definitely a public post.
| [deleted]
| nradov wrote:
| There are plenty of private email lists with 1000+
| members. Should email providers be censoring
| misinformation in those messages?
| samhw wrote:
| And what about 100? 25? 10?
| dilippkumar wrote:
| > Is a WhatsApp group with 1k members spreading
| disinformation still a private message?
|
| Yes it is.
|
| A "public post" is when the message was directed towards
| anyone who cares to listen.
|
| A "private post" is when the message was directed to a
| specific group of recipients. The length of the list of
| recipients doesn't grant a non-recipient access rights to
| the message.
|
| This is easy stuff.
| tqi wrote:
| Furthermore, aligning on a definition is only half the
| battle. If you create some arbitrary line (100+ =
| public), forums will break up in into many groups of 99.
| Or it will switch to viral messages that are forwarded in
| 1:1 threads. There is a the fundamental asymmetry between
| bad actors (who are highly sophisticated) and regular
| users (who are generally unsophisticated) that makes it
| really hard to roll out tools / rules that have both high
| precision and high recall.
| tinco wrote:
| As far as I know, legally speaking it would be a private
| message if the members were all members of a legal entity
| like a business. I.e. subject of this HN article is a
| private message to the Facebook organisation which
| clearly has over 1000 members.
|
| I also think legally, but this may vary from jurisdiction
| to jurisdiction, a message to one thousand people that
| you do not know personally and you are not in an
| organisation with, or that organisation has an open
| access policy (even if there's an entrance fee) would be
| a public message.
|
| Of course, IANAL and just learned this from reading the
| news.
|
| More interestingly however, is what Facebook or other
| media _should_ consider public. In my opinion a WhatsApp
| group with 1k members should _not_ be considered public,
| even if there 's absolutely no bar to entry. Private
| companies should have no business policing private
| communities. If they've got concerns they should invite
| law enforcement to decide if there's any laws that are
| being broken.
|
| The moment when communication becomes public is when the
| communication goes outside the boundaries of the group.
| If my antivax aunt posts an edutainment video about how
| vaccinations cause autism and it is clear that it is
| misinformation, and that edutainment video is not just in
| her group of weirdo's, but actually shared on her public
| timeline, in my opinion Facebook should definitely come
| down with the ban hammer. There should be a little
| "report" flag that I'll use to snitch on my aunt. Even if
| it's on her "friends & family" timeline I wouldn't
| consider it private for the purpose of culling
| misinformation. She should specifically select a group of
| people who have self-selected to be in that group for it
| to be considered a private message.
|
| Also, if a private group on a platform like
| Facebook/Whatsapp has members that are underage, and not
| all members are in a complete graph of direct
| friends/family, Facebook should require that group to
| have active moderation that conforms to some sort of
| platform wide code of conduct.
| quotemstr wrote:
| > I don't think these are conflicting views: (1) Less
| monitoring on private messages (2) More monitoring on
| public posts
|
| The same people argue that FB needs to censor more public
| content and wringing their hands in public over just how
| _awful_ it is that in places like India, WhatsApp message
| forwards can spread memes that respectable people like
| western journalists and tech activists don 't like.
|
| It's a "who, whom" thing. There's no principled stance
| differentiating private from public with respect to control
| and censorship. It's become respectable in western
| political discourse to demand totalitarian control over the
| spread of ideas. Today's activists will do or say whatever
| it takes in the moment to bring the boots closer to human
| faces forever. Anyone who values human dignity needs to
| oppose this movement.
| jollybean wrote:
| While I agree the elites are upset about losing power,
| there absolutely are issues of principle here.
|
| There is such a thing as legitimate authority.
|
| For example - there are people who do actual science, and
| other people who actually can read scientific papers and
| make assessments, there are people who have legitimate
| basic understanding of science, relationships with
| scientists, and consistently communicate reasonable
| information about that, as it relates to our world.
|
| And there are people who make stuff up.
|
| And very influential actors who will use a system without
| information integrity to their advantage.
|
| These people wield enormous power and fundamentally shape
| outcomes for everyone.
|
| Both the Truth, and the Public Good matter. While the
| later is more ambiguous, it's also material.
|
| The question the becomes - how do we allow yahoos in
| their basements to say anything they want publicly (i.e.
| aliens invented COVID, the vaccine will kill you), how do
| we allow legitimate detractors to question classical
| authority (i.e. ivermectin might work), how do we try to
| unbias information when it's politically contentious
| (i.e. mask policies), how do we allow politicians to
| speak their minds, but to not destroy their communities
| with irrational or completely irresponsible information
| (i.e. 'the vaccine isn't safe, you don't need masks, just
| eat healthy )'.
|
| I'm afraid we don't have the answers, but maybe some
| degree of 'proportional oversight' on the most public
| bits of information might be reasonable i.e. statements
| about the vaccine, when they reach a certain threshold of
| popularity, must have references to actual studies, or
| something along those lines.
| quotemstr wrote:
| > The question the becomes - how do we allow yahoos in
| their basements to say anything they want publicly (i.e.
| aliens invented COVID, the vaccine will kill you), how do
| we allow legitimate detractors to question classical
| authority (i.e. ivermectin might work), how do we try to
| unbias information when it's politically contentious
| (i.e. mask policies), how do we allow politicians to
| speak their minds, but to not destroy their communities
| with irrational or completely irresponsible information
| (i.e. 'the vaccine isn't safe, you don't need masks, just
| eat healthy )'.
|
| How do "we" this? How do "we" that? Who determines what
| constitutes the group of "we"? Power to censor
| _inevitably_ , _invariably_ , and _irreversibly_ gets
| used to simple deceive and propagandize people in favor
| of what the censor wants. Safety is no excuse either ---
| every tyranny begins with the excuse that unusual powers
| are necessitated by some emergency.
|
| There is no such thing as "irresponsible information". I
| reject the entire concept. There are only competing truth
| claims, and some nebulous "we" made up of journalists and
| tech activists has no more legitimate basis for policing
| speech than anyone else. There is no "legitimate
| authority" over people's minds.
|
| You're right here that there is an issue of principle
| underlying the double standard: the principle is that
| some people think that they ought to control what other
| people thing, ostensibly for their own good. I wish they
| would at least be open about this principle.
| jollybean wrote:
| 'We' work together as a community and groups of
| communities.
|
| Traditionally through Classical Liberal institutions like
| 'Executive, Legislative, and Judiciary' with elected
| representatives for oversight, but more realistically
| also through the '4th Branch of Government' i.e. the
| Central Bank, the security apparatus (Military, FBI, NSA,
| CIA), a Free Media with integrity (believe it or not,
| they don't just publish whatever, there are norms and
| standards), the '5th Estate' i.e. people with voices
| outside the norm, the Academic community, Industry, NGOs,
| Faith Groups, Cultural Institutions. Other nations and
| international bodies.
|
| You're confusing a bit the legitimate motivation for
| regulation, with the means by which bad actors take power
| (i.e. we can't use security as a measure because then
| Stalin will come along).
|
| 'Security' is 100% a material issue, it's not even an
| argument - there are bad actors trying to do bad things
| all day long from petty violence to terrorism to invasion
| etc..
|
| What that means is we have to take special care in those
| scenarios, usually by means of oversight and
| proportionality.
|
| For example, the police can't just go into your home,
| they need a warrant, signed by a judge etc.. The laws the
| security apparatus use have oversight by elected
| officials.
|
| There are no rules for this FB issue, it's the Wild West,
| and because it touches on issues of censorship, security,
| politics and now Public Health ... it's a tough one.
| ineedasername wrote:
| Frances Haugen's own motives are not the defining factor
| regarding the public utility of leaking this material.
|
| Her motives are her own, and once her information is out in the
| open it isn't up to her to decide what we all do about it. I'm
| not about to dismiss what was revealed just because I disagree
| with some of her opinions about that material.
| nanis wrote:
| > Frances Haugen's own motives
|
| Motives aside, whether she is acting as a mole for
| intelligence agencies to gather support for enabling more
| 'round the clock surveillance of wrong-think under the guise
| of "blowing the whistle" is a defining factor.
| ineedasername wrote:
| If you have evidence of her working as a secret
| intelligence agency undercover operative, then I'll be
| incorporate that into views on this issue.
|
| However, I think I'd still be glad that the information she
| leaked is now public, just like I'd be glad if a plot by
| intelligence agencies to systematically censor social media
| was made public, just like I've been glad when prior abuses
| by the government have been made public. Get it all out in
| the open.
| adolph wrote:
| > motives are not the defining factor regarding the public
| utility of leaking this material
|
| An evaluation of likely motives is incorporated into the
| evaluation of the evidence. There are a lot of things that
| can't be known: How much is true? How much made up? How much
| is true but not representative of the totality?
| ineedasername wrote:
| _The impact of speech is still not the same as that of sticks and
| stones, and guns, knives, or fists must still be wielded by
| people, not Youtube videos._
|
| That somewhat sidesteps the fact that it's speech that can get
| people riled up enough to invite violence. Acknowledging this
| fact is not advocacy for censorship. It's recognizing that there
| are plenty of things short of "yelling 'fire' in a crowded
| theatre" that can be the cause of quite a bit of harm, and we
| should try to avoid and discourage that.
|
| _How_ we go about that task is another matter. I don 't like or
| want censorship, and similar to Muffet I don't see a whole lot of
| options on the table. But we certainly can't blind ourselves on
| the issue by not acknowledging that plenty of awful things are
| enabled & possible because of speech.
|
| Otherwise his sentiment amounts to "guns don't kill people,
| people kill people". Which is trivially true while ignoring the
| significant role that _both_ have in an act of violence. Not much
| different than saying "guns don't kill people, bullets kill
| people." It's all a single system and there are multiple
| essential components.
| gverrilla wrote:
| "make the world more open and connected" only means "scale fast
| and get as much products as you can to later sell to
| advertisers".
|
| being connected or open won't end slavery, homelessness, crime or
| ignorance.
| loeg wrote:
| > being connected or open won't end slavery, homelessness,
| crime or ignorance.
|
| Is any other corporation (Visa, Saudi Aramco, Apple, ...)
| expected to solve slavery, homelessness, crime, and ignorance?
| This is an absurd criticism.
| 54b4b54 wrote:
| "feel weird, in a "Frances Haugen may have messed-up my legacy"
| kind of way."
|
| Should have blown the whistle then. All engineers in tech have a
| certain level of ethical responsibility they have completely
| failed to maintain. An internal good bye letter you hope never
| gets leaked because it might ruin your chances with other
| companies later in life sounds like quite the opposite of that
| ethical responsibility.
|
| Fuck your career, be a better human. Every FB employee knows what
| they are signing up for.
| [deleted]
| ootsootsoots wrote:
| Frankly at this point every technologist should be held
| accountable. The entire online business community is built
| around privacy invasion.
|
| Fuck YOUR career 54b4b54; we engineers have enough power to
| stop this by not opening our laptops tomorrow.
|
| It's easier to sit online and deflect, project, and carry on
| like a coward.
| pbalau wrote:
| This [0] is related to the topic at hand.
|
| 0. https://twitter.com/AlecMuffett/status/1452725377332297734
| alex_young wrote:
| There's a genuine moral dilemma here isn't there?
|
| Imagine for a moment that we are debating what a company should
| do with a chalkboard in a public square. People keep writing
| things on it organizing racially motivated killings, etc. The
| company has implemented a technology which allows people to write
| things on it without anyone being able to see who posted what or
| when.
|
| If the company does nothing it will surely lead to the government
| rightly removing access to the board, but perhaps some similar
| thing would go on in people's own private spaces anyway.
|
| Seems like a lose lose problem to try to solve.
| tayistay wrote:
| Bad analogy. Facebook has an algorithm which promotes posts
| that drive engagement, which is often extremist stuff. Just
| regulating that (as Haugen suggests) would improve things.
| alex_young wrote:
| Context is the discussion about e2e encryption. Sorry if that
| wasn't clear.
| muglug wrote:
| > I built a great team, built the product, and unlike the current
| crop of whistleblowers I submitted my resignation and fostered
| strong relationships with my soon-to-be-ex-colleagues, because
| there is a lot more impact to be had through constructive
| engagement than in rage-quitting.
|
| This has a bit of a holier-than-thou approach. He was in a
| radically-different position than some of the whistleblowers --
| he was an engineer working on features that would clearly appeal
| to FB's user base.
|
| A lot of the people saddled with the hard work of civic integrity
| & election integrity are well-paid but severely under-resourced
| by the company. Facebook only cares enough to put out PR fires,
| and not prevent real-life ones resulting from its work.
| jahnu wrote:
| Agreed!
|
| And this:
|
| > journalists are nothing but exploitative
|
| Talk about sweeping generalisations!
| Ozzie_osman wrote:
| > I don't think Facebook is "good" or "evil" -- I think it's a
| corporation.
|
| Sure. You could say this about any company or any country. Or
| even a person. We're all just a collection of thoughts and
| actions.
| fareesh wrote:
| On the popularity of Haugen: I find it amusing how your
| government treats a whistleblower who is promoting government
| control over social media, vs the way your government treats a
| whistleblower who leaks evidence of government spying and abuse.
|
| The fact that Edward Snowden and Julian Assange are treated the
| way they are (and the earlier treatment of Manning) gives the US
| government zero credibility on press freedom, social media
| legislation or anything remotely related to privacy.
|
| EDIT: Furthermore according to the FBI it's ok for Hillary
| Clinton to keep government communication explicitly marked
| classified in her basement server because no harm is intended,
| whereas others have been prosecuted in the absence of intended
| harm.
|
| The optics are absolutely terrible on these issues. If I can
| speak for some of the folks in the rest of the world, we're
| laughing and shaking our heads.
| helen___keller wrote:
| > Furthermore according to the FBI it's ok for Hillary Clinton
| to keep government communication explicitly marked classified
| in her basement server because no harm is intended, whereas
| others have been prosecuted in the absence of intended harm
|
| What exactly does this have to do with the topic? Your first
| paragraphs are talking about treatment of whistleblowers and
| Hillary Clinton is (obviously) not a whistleblower.
|
| Adding in a Clinton dig just adds political derailment to the
| topic for no particular reason.
| fareesh wrote:
| Do you realize that I am advocating for Assange, who exposed
| the Bush administration. Why is it only a political dig if
| it's aimed at Clinton?
| helen___keller wrote:
| Yes, your post is otherwise advocating for whistleblowers,
| which is on topic and makes sense to discuss.
|
| Clinton's email server is not a whistleblower. Clinton is
| not a whistleblower. The FBI is not a whistleblower. Your
| sentence "according to the FBI it's ok for Hillary Clinton
| to keep government communication explicitly marked
| classified in her basement server because no harm is
| intended" does not relate to whistleblowers in any way.
| What is does do is signal a political flag to other
| individuals. This sort of political signalling does not
| contribute to the conversation about whistleblowers and
| ultimately is not productive.
| fareesh wrote:
| Yes and I also clarified that this is about optics.
| Anyway, since you are challenging the reference - I shall
| explain it. It is a bit complex and hinges on a few
| pieces of information and reasoning:
|
| 1) The whistleblowers I am advocating in favor of -
| Assange, Manning and Snowden, are being prosecuted
| because the US government is ensuring that there is
| justice served to those who would dare to expose their
| secrets to the public. The secrets have already been
| leaked. The genie cannot be put back into the bottle, so
| as such the persecution of these individuals is punitive,
| and to serve as a warning to others who would dare to do
| something like this in the future.
|
| 2) Hillary Clinton mishandled classified information. The
| FBI said that she did not do this intentionally (I am
| inclined to agree with the FBI here btw). HOWEVER, there
| is magically no interest in setting an example here, or
| being punitive, or serving any kind of warning to others
| who would dare to make a mistake like this. Director
| James Comey said that any reasonable person in her
| position would have known that this was wrong.
|
| The US government wants to make an example out of Assange
| and Snowden when they leak classified information, but
| not of Hillary Clinton because she didn't intend to do
| any harm. As such, Assange (who is not even a US citizen)
| and Snowden leaked this information in the interest of
| the public exposing the apparent misdeeds of the US
| government. From an optics point of view, the moral of
| the story appears to be that if you are Hillary Clinton's
| housekeeper, you get to print out classified material for
| her convenience, but if you are a concerned citizen, you
| don't get to learn about the fact that your government
| collects your internet correspondence en-masse.
|
| 3) I quote from:
|
| https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/11136
|
| in which Neera Tanden writes to John Podesta:
|
| > I know this email thing isn't on the level. I'm fully
| aware of that. But her inability to just do a national
| interview and communicate genuine feelings of remorse and
| regret is now, I fear, becoming a character problem (more
| so than honesty).
|
| And also:
|
| https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/43150
|
| In which Assistant Attorney General Peter J. Kadzik tips
| off Hillary Clinton's campaign manager about what the
| Department of Justice will be doing in the next couple of
| days, so that the campaign can get their communication
| ready in advance.
|
| We see here that there is widespread agreement, even
| amongst allies, that some wrongdoing has been done, and
| we see the government's machinery springing into action
| to help this person out.
|
| ---
|
| Perhaps you are a wealthy or fortunate person who sees
| things from a different perspective, but I am an ordinary
| person living in a third world country where government
| corruption regardless of party is the norm. I see a
| powerful person getting off easy and getting help from
| people inside t he government to clear their name. I also
| see good people who risked their lives and their families
| being persecuted by the most powerful government in the
| world, and all they did was help ordinary people like me
| understand what our governments are doing to us. Mr.
| Snowden has to live in Russia and may never get to go
| home again. Mr. Assange has lived in captivity for years.
| Mr. Clinton can give a speech in a single day and make
| $200,000 while his wife is in government. Maybe for you
| this is not shady at all, but for ordinary people like
| me, this is just emblematic of corruption and a broken
| system where government protects its own. The optics are
| terrible.
| pionar wrote:
| You're honestly comparing apples and oranges here. One
| side (whistleblowers) is a case where someone actively
| published and drew attention to classified material.
|
| The other one is someone who was careless with classified
| material due to laziness and either A) not caring about
| the ramifications of that or B) not knowing.
|
| I'm not defending Clinton, she's icky for many other
| reasons (not the least of which is her insincerity and
| power fixation), but your comparison is a non-sequitur.
| burnished wrote:
| Because some nut, clutching their gun, waking up from a
| nightmare screaming "Hilary!" is a meme at this point.
| Bringing it up out of nowhere seems to mark tribal
| membership more than anything else. If it was just the
| first thing that came to mind then you should probably know
| (so I will tell you) that 'the emails' have become
| something of a loaded topic, what with getting mostly used
| as a rallying cry these days.
| paisawalla wrote:
| He's anticipating the objection re Snowden. You have to be
| angry about the fact that the information he released makes
| the govt look bad, and not just the fact of improper process,
| a la Clinton. Therefore, the treatment of whistleblowers
| really does depend on who's hand they're strengthening -- the
| govt or someone else's -- and not a generalized respect for
| the truth.
| helen___keller wrote:
| > Therefore, the treatment of whistleblowers really does
| depend on who's hand they're strengthening -- the govt or
| someone else's -- and not a generalized respect for the
| truth
|
| This is a very easy argument to make without resorting to
| political derailment, especially since it's basically a
| founding principle of our country (separation of powers,
| because we can't trust governing entities to police
| themselves, therefore competing and opposed government
| entities must effectively 'police' each other).
| paisawalla wrote:
| Sure, but
|
| 1. a lot of people also find that entire situation to be
| such incredible bullshit
|
| 2. the counterargument discredits itself when it employs
| the mental gymnastics needed to explain that
| inconsistency
| helen___keller wrote:
| > 1. a lot of people also find that entire situation to
| be such incredible bullshit
|
| OK? The fact that government doesn't police itself sucks,
| yes. The fact that I don't have a Lamborghini also sucks.
| I don't see what throwing in a Hillary Clinton dig is
| going to do to solve this situation or offer any kind of
| insight to other readers and commenters besides making
| people feel angry about politics.
|
| > 2. the counterargument discredits itself when it
| employs the mental gymnastics needed to explain that
| inconsistency
|
| I don't even know what you're referring to right now or
| how it relates to the topic.
| paisawalla wrote:
| You honestly sound like you're going out of your way to
| be upset about this.
| boringg wrote:
| Exactly. OP clearly has an agenda (though all over the map in
| their comments). Clinton has no relation to this whatsoever.
| Maybe too much consuming of right wing media.
| fareesh wrote:
| Just so I understand your claim:
|
| My agenda is that I am advocating for the rights of Julian
| Assange - who exposed various embarassing government
| secrets for the Bush administration...
|
| .. and simultaneously my agenda is also that I am
| advocating against Hillary Clinton, the political opponent
| of George W Bush?
|
| Our local Indian news channel NDTV (which leans left)
| released a story in 2016 about Hillary Clinton asking her
| housekeeper Marina Santos to print out classified
| information. The US Government has no problem with this. I
| don't think that the housekeeper having access to
| classified information is in the public's best interests. I
| do think that the releases made by Assange and Snowden are
| in the public interest. But the US government has a problem
| with this.
|
| This is the double standard that I am highlighting - the US
| government (regardless of who is running it) is
| demonstrably and fairly consistently at odds with what is
| in the best interests of the public when it comes to
| privacy, social media, etc. etc.
| pionar wrote:
| You're leaving out that even though she asked her
| housekeeper to print out classified information (so you
| say, I'm not familiar with the story, but I'll take your
| word on it for this), she wasn't actively trying to
| undermine US security. She's just careless and ignorant
| of the ramifications of her actions.
|
| I'm not defending Clinton or Assange. I think they should
| both be facing some sort of punishment for their actions.
| Neither is a saint.
|
| Assange has a martyr complex that he's milking for
| support. Clinton is a megalomaniac that will say anything
| to get into power.
|
| Neither are good people.
| tayistay wrote:
| How smug. Do you actually think that your government, whatever
| that is, would just welcome someone who rightly divulged
| government secrets?
| [deleted]
| AlexB138 wrote:
| > I find it amusing how your government treats a whistleblower
| who is promoting government control over social media, vs the
| way your government treats a whistleblower who leaks evidence
| of government spying and abuse.
|
| That is because e.g. Snowden is actually a whistleblower,
| warning the people against the powers that be, and Haugen is an
| activist pushing for an agenda which aligns with what the
| powers that be want, making her a useful political pawn.
| fareesh wrote:
| Yes pretty much this. It's transparent and laughable.
| rhcom2 wrote:
| Snowden is an activist pushing for an agenda too. Sure, one
| we agree with and seems ethical but it's still an agenda.
| Side note, when did "activist" become a dirty word?
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| When their political opinions are opposite to mine
| aero-glide2 wrote:
| I cannot trust the media anymore, they are crazy and they are
| making me go crazy.
| JulianMorrison wrote:
| Haugen is making a point which is distinct from "government
| control over social media".
|
| Her point is that FB is knowingly algorithmically delivering
| content that makes them a profit by creating "engagement",
| through amplifying whatever riles people up, which is known to
| include hate, violence, and untrue conspiracies. It it not a
| neutral public message board.
| marcinzm wrote:
| >The optics are absolutely terrible on these issues. If I can
| speak for some of the folks in the rest of the world, we're
| laughing and shaking our heads.
|
| I can't think of a large government that doesn't protect its
| interests and those of the elite above others. In my experience
| people tend to have a blind spot for how their own government
| functions versus other governments.
| paisawalla wrote:
| This makes sense if your analysis is of bureaucrats and the
| administrative state. But it doesn't explain why individual,
| elected representatives wouldn't be unable to express a
| respect for the release of true-yet-damning information.
| marcinzm wrote:
| Why do you assume the politicians or their parties didn't
| already know most of what is going even if unofficially?
| Politicians are around for a while usually and political
| parties stick around even longer. They also often want to
| ensure they get a nice cushy post-retirement gig somewhere.
| Damning yourself is generally not a good move.
| Joool wrote:
| > On the popularity of Haugen: I find it amusing how your
| government treats a whistleblower who is promoting government
| control over social media, vs the way your government treats a
| whistleblower who leaks evidence of government spying and
| abuse.
|
| Well one of them leaked documents of said government, the other
| company secrets.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| On one hand are whistleblowers to the American public against
| the U.S. government. On the other hand, a whistleblower to the
| American public _and_ U.S. government. Not sure why one would
| expect them to be received similarly.
| fareesh wrote:
| Would the judiciary (branch of government) consider Haugen to
| be in violation of any NDAs that she had with Facebook?
| s17n wrote:
| In general, leaking a company's secrets is going to be a
| civil matter, and to the extent that it's a criminal case a
| prosecutor would be very unlikely to press charges if the
| company isn't asking them to. On the other hand leaking
| classified government secrets is always a criminal matter
| and charges are almost always going to be pressed.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| For better or worse, there are different prescribed legal
| procedures with their own protections for whistleblowing that
| involves classified information. You're supposed to leak that
| to Congressional oversight committees with security clearances,
| not the press. There is an obvious weakness here if you don't
| trust Congress itself, but that is still the law.
|
| As for Clinton, the issue there as I understand it isn't so
| much "intended harm." There are simply different consequences
| for intentional versus unintentional data spills.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| " AM: I believe that the pushback we are seeing from Governments
| against Facebook for pursuing this goal, is substantial and aimed
| squarely at making an example of FB to discourage further
| adoption of end-to-end encryption."
|
| Who to trust...
| tayistay wrote:
| > I built a great team, built the product, and unlike the current
| crop of whistleblowers I submitted my resignation and fostered
| strong relationships with my soon-to-be-ex-colleagues, because
| there is a lot more impact to be had through constructive
| engagement than in rage-quitting.
|
| Nonsense, and smug. Nobody would have heard of this guy were it
| not for "the current crop of whistleblowers." And we've all seen
| that Facebook isn't going to fix itself.
| loeg wrote:
| > Nobody would have heard of this guy were it not for "the
| current crop of whistleblowers."
|
| You might not have heard of him, and that's fine, but Alec
| Muffet has had a Wikipedia article dating back to 2013. He's
| been a public figure since long before this crop of
| "whistleblowers."
| Gunax wrote:
| > 1. regional censorship will be applied at a network level --
| e.g. upon "Indian IP Addresses" or "Indian Phone Numbers" --
| which is not a good solution because the Internet does not
| respect national boundaries, nor does it work that way: e.g. VPNs
| exist and are already used to bypass these approaches. 2.
| regional censorship will be applied at a human level -- e.g. upon
| "Indian Users" -- which is not a good solution because it assumes
| that (a) online anonymity should and can be effectively stopped,
| (b) national identity is straightforwardly applicable to humans
| (how about "dual nationals?") and (c) platforms must know the
| nationality of their users merely to function, e.g. to send cat
| pictures. 3. global censorship will be applied blindly as the
| union of regional censorships -- so people in the USA will not be
| able to critically discuss Indian politics, and absolutely nobody
| would be able to discuss China. This would be highly illiberal
| and destructive of public discourse.
|
| It's going to be neither of these, but close to #3. Users will be
| able to discuss anything (withing their nationality's rules) but
| they would be not visible to user outside their own--or atleast
| not available to the citizens/users of the place is question.
|
| The seeds have all ready been planted with this Russian
| propaganda/disinformation/whatever campaign (not trying to argue
| about the veracity of it, but it's interesting that the public
| apparently cares more about _who_ said it than _what_ was
| actually said).
|
| Even in the USA, supposed home of the free, we are seeing that
| free speech doesn't seem to apply if you are not a citizen. Can't
| have weak American minds exposed to wrongthink from abroad.
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