Bend Over, Facebook is Back

[erimir]

I could figure out that the last word was "epizod", so I didn't need to know the translation of "Star Wars" to guess correctly.

[JoeP]

So ... where in the download dump are call/text records?

[lisarea]

I think it's only applicable if you have the Facebook app on an Android phone, but I don't know where in the records it is.

[JoeP]

I do, and I've even had the Messenger app installed for a time.

Have you got Facebook data? Or are you above such things?

[lisarea]

I am in fact above such things. I have never had a Facebook account, have always known they were creeps, and most importantly, I TOLD EVERYONE SO AND GOT CASSANDRAED EVERY TIME.

But it has been a long term goal of mine to find out exactly what type of information they store in their shadow profiles, for both users and non-users, and I figure since people are paying attention to this right now and downloading their data, I might be able to get some clues from that. Odds are pretty good they just use the name in your contacts, at least in the data they let you see, but they've accidentally slipped up before. (That's how the shadow profiles got confirmed, for one thing.)

[JoeP]

It is your fate to get Cassandraed about everything.

[JoeP]

Meanwhile, I am 90% sure my Facebook dump doesn't have any call or SMS records.

I'm 60% sure this is because I have been cautious with my Fb permissions from the start, and have definitely never allowed Messenger to be my default SMS app.
Conversely I'm 40% suspicious they have the data but aren't letting me know.

[lisarea]

Yeah, I figure they're only going to show people the data on stuff they've given official permissions to.

Not that they don't have it, but as that li'l slipup a few years ago demonstrated, they only show you the stuff you've "willingly" given them. And at the time, they defended their position that people owned the information in their contact lists, just as, if a neighbor gives you a key to their house in case of emergencies, that becomes their key to make copies of and share freely with anyone they choose.

I'm just thinking, they're arrogant as fuck up in there. They're always showing their ass, like remember that time they just casually mentioned to the press that "emotional contagion" experiment they did, like it was no kind of thang at all?

That's why I was thinking there's some slight possibility that they might similarly show their ass in how they attach identities to those call logs. And I wanted to check.

[lisarea]

OH AND ALSO.

So they were going to get "anonymized" private health records (which: there is no such thing as anonymous individual data), deanonymize it, and then, as the reporter suggests, maybe use that to do things like, oh, say, send nurses to the homes of patients they've determined have an insufficient support system because this is totally the type of thing that happens in the American healthcare system which is world renowned for providing concierge care to underprivileged people.

Thing is, if patients wanted this, it would be super-easy for hospitals to ASK THEM FOR THEIR PERSONAL INFORMATION rather than going to all this trouble to anonymize and then deanonymize it. This was explicitly planned as a nonconsensual thing.

[lisarea]

Wait a minute, I just thought of something else also.

Doesn't HIPAA attach to any organization that enters a business arrangement with a HIPAA compliant institution?

Because hypothetically, that would have meant that Facebook, in this scenario, would have, again, hypothetically, had to comply with HIPAA, which would actually be pretty great, because this kills The Facebook.

I know that wouldn't happen, for the same reason that, say, credit reporting agencies haven't been crushed by an avalanche of libel suits, but it is pretty nice to think about.

[JoeP]

Facebook said the project is on hiatus so it can focus on "other important work, including doing a better job of protecting people's data." "we got caught."

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

I AM EATING TOAST, LIKE THE OTHER HUMANS THAT I RESEMBLE pic.twitter.com/k3ek02j7w7

— Internet of Shit (@internetofshit) April 6, 2018

[But]

Originally Posted by lisarea

I'm just thinking, they're arrogant as fuck up in there. They're always showing their ass, like remember that time they just casually mentioned to the press that "emotional contagion" experiment they did, like it was no kind of thang at all?

"Why are you telling us this?"

"Oh, that's part of a different but related experiment."

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

This senate hearing is a perfect beautiful realization of this glorious @TheOnion headline pic.twitter.com/XDPaUzSGlE

— Ryan Cady (@rycady) April 10, 2018

[lisarea]

I watched a bunch of it and it's actually really frustrating. Most of the people questioning him don't seem to understand what they're talking about, and he keeps using this really evasive wording, playing dumb, contradicting things he's said in the past, and almost nobody's calling him on it at all. They keep repeating the same questions other people have asked too.

Then, every now and again, someone will start to ask what sounds like a good question and then just veer into complete nonsense.

Two questions, though:

1. What were the pictures someone talked about that Leahy showed?
2. Where is that letter from the MPAA they entered into record?

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

[mickthinks]

That's actually rather smart of him, I think. Just sayin' ...

[lisarea]

A lot of people have been making fun of Zuckerberg for being short lately. Which: Good job making me defend Mark Zuckerberg, but there's nothing wrong with not being tall, or with wanting some accommodation so you can sit comfortably. That's not what he did wrong.

I just hate seeing the whole thing devolve into "making fun of Zuckerberg for random shit" instead of actually addressing his evasions and the obviously softball questions he's getting from congress, many of whom have gotten some huge donations from Facebook.

Some of the things that should happen that won't include:

1. People need to stop asking him the same questions about "selling" information. He's answered that over and over again, and the answer is no, of course they're not selling information. They consider their dossiers their IP, and they're not just selling their IP to others. That's not how any of this works, and really, people should know this, because we just had that big public discussion of internet privacy, where many of the basic principles were explained. For ad targeting, an online ad company such as Facebook or Google doesn't just hand over identifiable profiles of people. They deliver ads to people based on profiles they have internally. Even in offline ads, you don't just go buy the dossier of an individual person. You buy targeted lists with contact information of people in specific categories. You wouldn't make money just literally selling people's entire profiles.

2. Which brings me to the second one: Stop narrowing the question to advertisers. Advertisers don't get people's personally identifiable information. What about researchers and app developers and others? Ask him who all gets the information. Not who "buys" it, not which "advertisers" "buy" it. Back it up. Ask who has access for any reason, regardless of how Facebook wants to classify how they obtained it. Do they 'trade' it, 'offer' it, 'provide' it? He can comfortably say no to a lot of things that he doesn't classify as 'selling.' What about hashed, or anonymized, data? That counts too.

3. What is "your personal information," and how do they compile it? Facebook is on record saying unequivocally that "your information" includes a lot of stuff that no sane person would consider theirs, including information about others. So if I have your work phone number and other information that you've never made a part of any public profile (which I do), and I let Facebook scrape my contacts, they have said they consider that my information, not yours. Just like how I also have a key to your house, and can agree to let others use that in exchange for some small convenience. (It's not selling, though. It is an 'exchange' and an 'agreement.') So a lot of 'my' information about you ends up attached to your profile as what's called a shadow profile, which they've been caught red handed with. As they have with similar shadow profiles of people without Facebook accounts. And this has happened in countries with privacy laws, so if anything, it's probably worse here, where we don't have privacy laws.

4. What other information do they obtain, and how? Do they acquire (look at me, never saying 'buy' or 'sell') information from data brokers, credit agencies, etc.? Where do they keep that, and what do they do with it?

5. Jesus, will someone please say anything at all about that hospital thing? For fucks' sake, the fact that they've been explicitly working on a project to attach people's medical records to their Facebook profiles is horrifying, especially since it was clearly and obviously designed to be done without the users' knowledge or consent. How did not one person even mention that? (Unless they did at the very beginning before I started listening?)

It seriously almost looks like they got together ahead of time and planned how to phrase questions in such a way that he can answer in a way that makes him look good. It is super weird how these specific, narrowly framed questions came up over and over and over again, giving him tons of little soundbites saying, "No!"

Just generally, they're all coming up with these super-specific scenarios like "do you record audio from the microphone in real time and then immediately serve ads for brand names you've heard in conversations," and stuff like that. Of course they don't.

[ceptimus]

Mark Zuckerberg’s manner has always reminded me of someone, but I could never quite grasp hold of it.

Just now it hit me, watching him testify about data. pic.twitter.com/4Zs2eGlsHD

— Matthew Teague (@MatthewTeague) 10 April 2018

[lisarea]

AND ANOTHER THING that I wanted to actually quote from the transcript so I could show you because it contains some pretty egregious lyin' with almost comical timing. I'm going to annotate this, but this is sequential. I didn't go cherrypick quotes. This actually happened in the order presented here:

BLUMENTHAL: I have a number of other specific requests that you agree to support as part of legislation. I think legislation is necessary. The rules of the road have to be the result of congressional action.

We have — Facebook has participated recently in the fight against scourge — the scourge of sex trafficking. And a bill that we've just passed — it will be signed into law tomorrow — SESTA, the Stop Exploiting Sex Trafficking Act — was the result of our cooperation. I hope that we can cooperate on this kind of measure as well.

ZUCKERBERG: Senator, I look forward to having my team work with you on this.

They are talking about SESTA here, which I have also been talking about recently if you care, which you should. The important thing to point out right here about SESTA is that it is wholly and explicitly designed to punch a hole in CDA 230.

THUNE: Thank you, Senator Blumenthal.

Senator Cruz.

SEN. TED CRUZ (R-TEX): Thank you Mr. Chairman. Mr. Zuckerberg, welcome. Thank you for being here.

Mr. Zuckerberg, does Facebook consider itself a neutral public forum?

ZUCKERBERG: Senator, we consider ourselves to be a platform for all ideas.

CRUZ: Let me ask the question again. Does Facebook consider itself to be a neutral public forum, and representatives of your company are giving conflicting answers on this? Are you a ...

ZUCKERBERG: Well ...

CRUZ: ... First Amendment speaker expressing your views, or are you a neutral public forum allowing everyone to speak?

ZUCKERBERG: Senator, here's how we think about this: I don't believe that — there are certain content that clearly we do not allow, right? Hate speech, terrorist content, nudity, anything that makes people feel unsafe in the community. From that perspective, that's why we generally try to refer to what we do as platform for all ideas ...

CRUZ: Let me try this, because the time is constrained. It's just a simple question. The predicate for Section 230 immunity under the CDA is that you're a neutral public forum. Do you consider yourself a neutral public forum, or are you engaged in political speech, which is your right under the First Amendment.

ZUCKERBERG: Well, senator, our goal is certainly not to engage in political speech. I am not that familiar with the specific legal language of the — the law that you — that you speak to. So I would need to follow up with you on that. I'm just trying to lay out how broadly I think about this.

Couple of things to note here:

1. The body of CDA 230, once you leave out a few paragraphs of the fanfare stuff, where they talk about ideology and legal standing and whatever, is a few hundred words.

Just counted. 388. The actual legal wording of CDA 230 consists of 388 words. It's not some tangled, obfuscatory mess like SESTA is. It's remarkably simple, clearly worded legislation.

2. LOL no, Ted Cruz. That's not what it says. Weird you think so. Of the 388 words in CDA 230, not only does the term "neutral public forum" not appear, but individually, the words neutral, public, or forum don't appear either. For that matter, the words political or speech don't appear in it either, and it's not and never has had anything to do with political speech. Even if you were to try to shoehorn some weird interpretation for political speech, it would do almost exactly the opposite of what's implied. What the hell?

3. Zuckerberg is a lying liar who tells a pretty big whopper when he says, "I am not that familiar with the specific legal language of the — the law that you — that you speak to."

CDA 230, which consists of 388 words that do not include the terms neutral, public, forum, political, or speech, is the law that Facebook has been dependent on since the beginning. Facebook would not exist in any recognizable form without CDA 230, and of the fuck course he is familiar with its specific legal language. It is a foundational building block of the internet as it has evolved, and it is particularly relevant to Facebook. Bullshit he is not familiar with the wording.

It's hard sometimes to tell the difference between incompetence and deception, but really, in this case, it's irrelevant. Both are happening, and what's in various assholes' hearts isn't really important.

BTW, here are the 388 words, in case anyone wants to check my work:

(c) Protection for “Good Samaritan” blocking and screening of offensive material
(1) Treatment of publisher or speaker

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
(2) Civil liabilityNo provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of—
(A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or
(B) any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in paragraph (1).[1]
(d) Obligations of interactive computer service

A provider of interactive computer service shall, at the time of entering an agreement with a customer for the provision of interactive computer service and in a manner deemed appropriate by the provider, notify such customer that parental control protections (such as computer hardware, software, or filtering services) are commercially available that may assist the customer in limiting access to material that is harmful to minors. Such notice shall identify, or provide the customer with access to information identifying, current providers of such protections.
(e) Effect on other laws
(1) No effect on criminal law

Nothing in this section shall be construed to impair the enforcement of section 223 or 231 of this title, chapter 71 (relating to obscenity) or 110 (relating to sexual exploitation of children) of title 18, or any other Federal criminal statute.
(2) No effect on intellectual property law

Nothing in this section shall be construed to limit or expand any law pertaining to intellectual property.
(3) State law

Nothing in this section shall be construed to prevent any State from enforcing any State law that is consistent with this section. No cause of action may be brought and no liability may be imposed under any State or local law that is inconsistent with this section.
(4) No effect on communications privacy law

Nothing in this section shall be construed to limit the application of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 or any of the amendments made by such Act, or any similar State law.

[JoeP]

Originally Posted by ceptimus

Mark Zuckerberg’s manner has always reminded me of someone, but I could never quite grasp hold of it.

Just now it hit me, watching him testify about data. pic.twitter.com/4Zs2eGlsHD

— Matthew Teague (@MatthewTeague) 10 April 2018

Zuckerborg.

[lisarea]

Ha ha, screw you guys if you're bored. You'll probably live.

The House did a WAY better job than the Senate, and several people asked some pretty pointed questions. Rep. Luhan of New Mexico finally brought up the shadow profiles, which is what Zuckerberg AND THE SENATE have been carefully avoiding all this time.

The important thing to keep in mind for this whole thing--and I've probably mentioned it here before--is Facebook's definition of what "your" information consists of. In their definition, as they've explicitly said at least once, "your" information consists entirely of the stuff you yourself have provided. Them saying you can download "your" information just means you can go download the stuff you've consensually uploaded. It does NOT include information other people have uploaded or metadata or anything else they've obtained any way other than by your directly uploading it. Those are the shadow profiles.

And they have a lot lot lot more of the latter, as evidenced by the fact that they've testified that there is so much of the latter that it's too much work to provide it. How much data would you have to have for it to be too much effort and expense to let people download it? (To be fair, I think they're lying. It's that that's "their" precious intellectual property and it'd kill their business if a) anyone else got their hands on it, and b) people realized how extensive and how creepy it is.)

“Facebook is invoking an exception in Irish law in the data protection law — involving, ‘disproportionate effort’. So they’re saying it’s too much of an effort to give me access to this data,” Dehaye told the committee. “I find that quite intriguing because they’re making essentially a technical and a business argument for why I shouldn’t be given access to this data — and in the technical argument they’re in a way shooting themselves in the foot. Because what they’re saying is they’re so big that there’s no way they could provide me with this information. The cost would be too large.”

So that's really important to remember every time he or anyone else is talking about "your" data. They don't consider most of the data about you to be your data. Your data is just the stuff you explicitly provided, and doesn't include any of the stuff they got from others. And he never revealed exactly what all else they have. We do know they have information they got from scraping other people's contacts, we know they have browsing data from their web bugs, and we know they use predictive models to make assumptions and predictions about your behavior. We don't know the extent of that information, we don't know what if anything else they get from other sources such as data brokers, credit reports, etc. We do know they made efforts to get access to actual, legitimate medical records, though. (Data brokers have medical information as well, but they extrapolate it from other information, so it's mostly just assumed.)

Pay super-close attention the things he didn't say, because there's a lot. And look at all the things he pretends he doesn't know. There was a funny little exchange with Diana DeGette yesterday that you can see in yesterday's transcripts, where he pretends not to be familiar with pretty much any of Facebook's high profile legal cases, and she responds with appropriate shock that he's just lying to her face like that.

And remember, he pretended not to be familiar with CDA 230 or with the term 'shadow profiles' either. Of course he is familiar with all of these things, and he had plenty of time to prepare and come up with some convincing reasoning for the things he was being asked about, but instead, he played dumb, and there must be reasons for that. And it's probably not a coincidence that the senate in particular was so careful and so narrow about the wording of their questions. Nobody asked him to even define his terms. Even shitty, incompetent lawmakers must know that's the first thing you have to do.

The whole thing was pretty ridiculous, all told. Most of the people asking him questions either didn't understand what they were talking about or were pretending not to, and the question times were so short nobody had time to follow through or press him on the issues he was so obviously evading. But if you look really closely, and pay attention to the terminology he uses and look at past events, you can fill in a lot of blanks.

I don't know if anything's really going to happen at all. I mean, one potentially good thing is that they're promising some thing where you can view all the ads that are being shown to different audiences, which could be good if they can pull it off and people don't just create whole new accounts for each ad. So rather than having some crazy ad only being shown to receptive audiences so nobody even knows it needs debunked, people could go find them and address them. That's putting a whole lot on random people, though, and what with journalism in the state it is now, it's probably too little too late. I guess it's something, though, sort of.

Ultimately, though, I don't expect people to give a shit. They're too bought in, and not just because they like using Facebook for some reason, but because there's an element of complicity, and people always get defensive about stuff they've been complicit in, even if they didn't realize what they were doing at the time.

I dunno.

So anyway, I guess this concludes my coverage until I think of something else maybe in a few hours or so.

[JoeP]

Originally Posted by lisarea

Ha ha, screw you guys if you're bored.

There will be jokes, yes even jokes that ignore or trivialise the real points, as well as important analysis and "I can't believe they expect to get away with this shit" ranting.

Originally Posted by lisarea

You'll probably live.

We're all going to die.

[JoeP]

Mean whale, the Guardian says

The Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, was given a rougher ride on his second day of congressional testimony on Wednesday

Zuckerberg put on back foot as House grills Facebook CEO over user tracking | Technology | The Guardian

Do you agree? Even if it was still not rough enough.

Also:

I think I’ve finally discovered the secret to eternal youth. It’s not expensive moisturizer or drinking lots of water – it’s being a privileged white man. If you’re a white guy, it seems, you get to stay a child a lot longer than everyone else.

Take Mark Zuckerberg for example. He’s a 33-year-old married father of two, who runs an insanely powerful surveillance network. But, amazingly, he is still a kid.

Zuckerberg's biggest revelation this week? The secret to eternal youth | Arwa Mahdawi | Opinion | The Guardian
which also considers various other white men lacking in responsibility and concludes

What happens with white men, you see, is that they go from being “just a kid” to an “elderly man who didn’t know better” very quickly.

And this:
Zuckerberg certainly convinced me - to log off Facebook for good, that is | Emma Brockes | Opinion | The Guardian:

not only provided a handy and highly personalised visual on which to hang one’s dislike – the bland face, the android expression, the cult-like choice of Facebook-blue tie – but also offered cast-iron proof of the company’s bad faith.

Andrew Bosworth, a vice-president of the company who once taught Zuckerberg at Harvard, jocularly noted that while maybe Facebook “costs a life by exposing someone to bullies” or “maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools”, hey-ho, “anything that allows us to connect more people more often is de facto good”.

[lisarea]

The House did a way, way better job than the Senate, but I think the press is giving the Senate a huge pass putting it off as, "LOL olds don't understand the internet." Obviously, they're in over their head on some stuff, but it's their job to figure it out, and the issues aren't exactly a bunch of opaque technical minutia. Most of it is stuff that people of any age could and should understand, and yet most don't. It's not hard, just uncomfortable. So I'm not totally buying that they were genuinely that confused. I think they were trying to stretch out their two minutes without alienating a campaign contributor and implicating themselves as beneficiaries of the data "breaches" they were questioning him about. They're not quite as dumb as they're pretending to be.

So the House, generally, did better, but anyone who asked a half decent question got cut off for time.

I guess we wait for all those times he said he'd get back to his "team" on questions. Do those answers still count as testimony? Like, how freely can he lie on those, assuming he answers at all?

Man, I wish I knew any law-talking guys.

PS I forgot to mention that I did find that MPAA letter, and it's exactly what one might expect. "But...muh...muh COPYRIGHTS!" They're asking for some shitassed Content ID like system they can use to fuck people over like they do on YouTube. I hate those guys pretty much.