> Yesterday, the web was buzzing with commentary about Google CEO Eric Schmidt's dangerous, dismissive response to concerns about search engine users' privacy. When asked during an interview for CNBC's recent "Inside the Mind of Google" special about whether users should be sharing information with Google as if it were a "trusted friend," Schmidt responded, "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
> "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
To what degree does Apple's privacy stance come from selling hardware versus Tim Cook, as a gay man born in Mobile, Alabama in 1960 [1], instinctively understanding why people need privacy?
There were opportunities for Apple to pivot away from privacy. (They no longer just sell hardware. In the quarter ending December 30th, 2017, Apple earned 18% of their net sales from services [2].) But privacy remains a value they choose to ensure they remain incentivized to protect. That isn't the case at Facebook.
When people buy a heart shaped container on amazon, browse cat pictures on tumblr, and watch a certain anime on crunchyroll, they probably don't mind. What is a problem is when people take all these disparate actions, aggregate them, and then create a "profile" for each person's personality is where they start to worry.
It's the same as how people go outside, go to restaurants, stores, gyms in the public and don't hide their faces because there's no shame in what they're doing. If, however, you as an individual follow them throughout their day, jotting notes on what they're doing, when they're doing it, and with who, you're considered a creep even though you've observed things in the open.
I like the comparison with a cop. The second you notice a police car behind you, your driving changes.
Now imagine a police officer with you at all times, peeking behind your shoulder at any screen you use, writing down everything you type, recording every conversation, financial transaction, web search; charting every location you go to on a map.
Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun (whose former campus is today Facebook HQ), 1999
> The chief executive officer of Sun Microsystems said Monday that consumer privacy issues are a "red herring." "You have zero privacy anyway," Scott McNealy told a group of reporters and analysts Monday night at an event to launch his company's new Jini technology. "Get over it."
Since when? Google has always been about "trust us with your data - all of it". Thing is they haven't had any major leaks or exfiltration publicized so for the "trust" part it's arguable that's still intact.
They haven't had any major privacy scandals yet ... just wait until we do, and it starts coming into public consciousness just how much they know about us.
To be fair he's not prohibiting you from building your own walls around your house. We're talking about FB. The problem there is, I'd imagine his account is specialized in a way that he has access to all the knobs so he can turn it all the way to zero. In that way he suffers the same problem as all people in power -- they don't see the problems faced by the plebs they talk down to.
> Zuckerberg reportedly took action after he learned that a developer wanted to purchase one of his neighbor's homes and use the fact that Zuckerberg lived close by as a marketing tactic. He started purchasing the homes last December. Zuckerberg will lease the four homes he just bought back to its current residents.
I honestly believe I would do the same. That developer sounds like a jerk.
Edit: Assuming I had the millions to do it, that is.
Sure, but I think the point is that it is hypocritical to declare that privacy is over -- for other people, like your users -- and guard your own privacy jealously.
Yes indeed. So many influential people use their influence to sow the seeds of the future they want in the public's mind. They do this by prophecising the future, and their followers do their best to make the prophecy a reality (often subconsciously).
Google is no better. Eric Schmidt, while was Google's CEO suggested that young people should change their name upon reaching adulthood (as opposed to something like a "right to be forgotten" that EU citizens enjoy today):
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/7951269/Young-...
>Facebook's Zuckerberg Says the Age of Privacy Is Over
Awesome. So he's going to give everyone his e-mail login and password, right? Because nobody gets privacy anymore and he's going to lead by example, for sure.
Oh, wait. He means the age of privacy is over, except for hypocrites and rich people who can afford to pay for it.
That's an extremely uncharitable reading of this article - he says nothing that suggests he wants everyone to publicly post their email logins and passwords.
This kind of hyperbole is not conducive to productive conversation about Facebook or privacy in general.
Zuckerberg changed his mind on this in an interview in 2014:
"I don't know if the balance has swung too far, but I definitely think we're at the point where we don't need to keep on only doing real identity things," he says. "If you're always under the pressure of real identity, I think that is somewhat of a burden."
He still wants all public-facing identities tied to a real identity he can track and analyze. That encourages even greater abandon of one's privacy, as you worry less about tying your real name to still-monetizable private thoughts.
Could this be used against Facebook in court eventually? Like showing this as evidence that Facebook has been maliciously trying to abuse its users' privacy?
Zuckerberg said that because that would have benefited Facebook if it became true. It's like IBM now saying "forget Intel and transistors, quantum computers are the future!" (because we happen to make them and be ahead of everyone else in this).
There are things about Facebook's privacy policies and respect for its users that are perpetually in the news that it seems like they could easily nip in the bud to garner some goodwill.
Their dark patterns around deleting your account is one example. Why not just allow people to quickly and easily delete their accounts? Not "deactivate" while they send you photos of your friends, telling you how much they'll miss you. Not soft delete. Hard delete. Commit to allowing users to just leave if they aren't finding value in the platform.
Why do they resist dealing with that kind of low hanging fruit? Do they view offering easy opt-out functionality to present a major risk to the business?
As a company why would you prioritize your developer's time on that? At best it sits low on the backlog. Your performance reviews aren't based on how much you make it easy for people to leave. The only way that stakeholders can drive behavior is if they actually had any power, but Facebook users don't sit on the board.
> As a company why would you prioritize your developer's time on that?
Because as a leader within the org you're watching the company's reputation and share value erode, and having them spend some time on those items would gesture to the community and world that you take the public's concerns seriously.
I'm sure they are already prioritizing developer time on many different privacy fronts, including auditing old apps to see what data they siphoned off. (As was implied by Zuckerberg's interview on CNN)
Not to beat a dead horse too much but ultimately I would believe that he was swayed by the amount of money the company could make by sharing it. A sad thing to see happening to all too many aspects of life!
How might we go about deweaponizing information? Does it require anarchical self governance and radical transparency or is there another way?
I propose one key: teaching the world to be emotionally responsible at an individual level. Nonviolent communication provides a clear structure and set of principles to practice to this end.
How is information anything but the most powerful weapon.
Consider the quote "All warfare is deception".
In other terms, all warfare is about information asymmetry.
To get around this, you'd need the opposing side of the deal to share much more.
The end result is a world with a lot more openness. This only works if we turn of the outrage and shame, but that seems like it can't work with human nature.
Really, we either accept that facebook and similar have this advantage, or we do something to keep our information from them.
The other alternative is to run a misinformation campaign against them. Something tor-like but with likes. That'd break the core monetization concept of these kinds of sites though.
Nonviolent communication is all about hacking shame, anger, blame, judgment, criticism, etc. out of our language and minds. It sounds like teaching this to people may be a longer, yet more sustainable path.
In the end, people are going to judge, if only to see who is most suitable to some task or best given something.
Politics is also an invariant, people are going to lobby to get things themselves, given scarcity, this is at the expense of others.
These things combine to mean that it will always be problematic for everyone to be completely open. The only way to make this a non-issue is to have all judgements made be completely accurate, but that seems like it takes way too much information.
I think we have to deprogram scarcity mindsets, too. Establishing an upper bound of minimally necessary judgment based on what is sustainable and meets the needs of all involved over an agreed upon time might be useful, too. NVC is founded on assumptions of abundance of resources for life. I'm not sure what research there is on the validity of the claim, but I have found adopting the belief biases my mind toward seeing ways to accomplish my goals with available resources or uncommon ways to get my hands on what I need.
This reminds me of this article about using landfills for raw materials.
Promote transparency and openness everywhere as much as possible. This is what I like about facebook mission, to make the world more open.
I personally hate to have to hide stuff. Its not without cost and inconvenient.
One way or another, bad or good, right or wrong, he's probably right. Even if you decide to go "off the grid", you'll probably never find work in a society that considers lack of social media footprint evidence that you're "hiding" something.
It has been known forever that Zuckerberg advocates for radical unprivacy, i.e. technological breakdown of the barriers guarding human internals. Sort of alluded to in dramatized fashion in the movie and given a psychological background, but that aside, it is public knowledge.
Remember when influential people and institutions encouraged (or outright required) the use of a platform made by the man who said the age of privacy is over?
Does anyone get the feeling that Facebook friendlies are monitoring posts like this one and steering the conversation?
Yes, other CEOs may have made similar statements, but they didn't volunteerily give millions of customers data to unscrupulous partners because that's clearly wrong to do. It's the statement with the action that's enlightening, not just the statement.
The lack of any sense of right and wrong within FB's leadership is astounding.
"Facebook Inc. faces a massive uphill task to win back the general public's trust, results from two separate opinion polls, reported on by Reuters, have shown.
According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll published on Sunday, just 41 percent of Americans now trust Facebook to obey laws that protect their personal information. In contrast, of the 2,237 respondents to the poll, which ran from Wednesday through Friday, 66 percent, 62 percent and 60 percent, respectively, believe that Amazon.com Inc., Alphabet Inc's Google and Microsoft Corp. will do a better job of respecting their privacy.
A separate survey released the same day by Germany's largest-selling Sunday paper, Bild am Sonntag, delivered a much more damaging assessment, revealing that 60 percent of Germans believe that Facebook and other social networks have a negative impact on democracy."
Not to sound condescending but as a German I can tell you that american social networks never enjoyed much trust by us anyways regarding handling of our data.
Part of that resentment might be caused by anti-american-bias, anti-capitalist-bias, German romanticism and many more but most importantly remembrance of the GDR's Stasi.
Those 60% you mention sound absolutely reasonable even without the cambridge analytica scandal. I know several people who never registered with facebook or whatsapp and are reluctant to do be pushed into it even by close friends and family.
How many people in Germany use American-made software and services? How many use Windows, macOS or Android? Amazon? Netflix? Uber? Snapchat? Instagram?
I see many Europeans talking about "anti-americanism" yet a lot of them consume their products and culture en masse.
Using it yes, but often without letting the product get away without some snark. But, as my sentence structure tried to clarify: anti-capitalism and -americanism might play a role here and there but only a minor one.
With respect to the Amazon link you provided, did you watch the video?
Amazon explicitly states that the ads provided are targeted based upon user action. So if you go to Amazon searching for music, they may show an ad on the side of the page that provides a discount offer for a specific band or artist.
As far as I know, Amazon doesn't sell user data to anyone, even for advertising.
Just because they don't sell access to the information doesn't mean they're not being evil. That company is likely the worst in terms of user tracking out of all the companies mentioned in these comments.
After all, this is a company that tracks not only what books you read, but how far you've read it, how much time you spent reading every page and how many times you went back to previous pages.
This is also the company who has microphones placed in people's houses, happily installed by the users themselves.
Given the fact that so many people people trust them with so many things, and their desire to be a provider of every single service, they certainly are a much bigger privacy invader than even Google or Facebook.
They're rapidly heading down the path, at the very least.
Microsoft has been giving away their operating system for free in exchange for mining your personal data. Everyone who uses Windows 10 can expect to have everything on screen scraped, all their keystrokes logged, and all their files transferred to Microsoft for analysis.
What do you suppose their reason is for taking all this data?
> They're rapidly heading down the path, at the very least.
Who is? Amazon? Not likely. Though I haven't worked there for several years now, I would be flabbergasted to discover that Bezos would approve an initiative that involved selling user data to advertisers.
I can't speak to Microsoft. I am not a user of Microsoft's products, nor any of its subsidiaries' products, and they are not mining any data from me.
Not a fan of any of the two companies but I believe you're being unfair.
At least Microsoft[0] does not sell your personal information or build it's business around renting access to your personal information. There is a big difference between sharing data with advertisers and sharing data with company-controlled subsidiaries and vendors.
Amazon is a little more permissive [1] but again, it does not sell your data.
Both of them ask for your consent before sharing the data. So for example, if your friend/contact shares his data, the third party does not see your data (as opposed to what Facebook did).
Posts such as yours reek of whataboutism (same as the Obama campaign narrative) and do more harm than good. The two companies have not built their business around personal data. The personal data in this case is a side-effect of selling an actual product/service which brings in the cash.
At least Microsoft[0] does not sell your personal information or build it's business around renting access to your personal information. There is a big difference between sharing data with advertisers and sharing data with company-controlled subsidiaries and vendors.
"We tell you about things we think you’ll like. For example, we may send you email to remind you about items left in your online shopping cart. We also display advertising in some services, and we’d prefer to show you ads you find interesting."
Maybe I'm crazy, but I figure that Google has way more personal and in-depth information on me. Maybe I like a few political posts and share some recipes on Facebook. But people search their deepest, darkest questions on Google while logged in to their Google account. Every email I have sent and received is on Google. Google tracks my location 24 hours a day. Google stores my work documents. Google knows every video I've watched on YouTube. Google has every photo that my phone takes.
>Among the announcements was the launch of a new effort to share user data with publishers and introduce more machine learning into Google’s publisher products.
It specifically says "aggregated and anonymized" data, not personal data. Even then, I imagine with the Facebook backlash, this will be heavily scrutinized.
Did FB really give out personal data? In any case, do we even have an understanding of what is meant by anonymized data (when applied to specific datasets) anyway? I sometimes wonder if any of these firms could call it anonymized by changing the name on the profile to somebody's initials.
Yep, they really gave out the data. One example is "instant personalization" where Facebook partners would get full copies of Facebook user data including images, likes, friends, etc.
It was turned on by default without user notification.
I have considered moving to another email provider, but the fact is that maybe half of my emails will be sent to Google addresses. So they will still get my information. I have an Outlook account at work and the search is crap in comparison to Googles - which is another reason tying me to Google for the time being.
Check out Fastmail. A year ago I switched from Gmail, and slowly people started using my new email (I had gmail forward all other mail to the new mailbox). Now I hardly get any through Gmail.
The search is pretty good and the UI is nice. Maybe you'll prefer Gmail, but it's worth a try at least.
As much as someone can ditch Gmail for a POP3 account at some other email provider, someone can just as easily not use Facebook and communicate with people through email, SMS, iMessage, etc.
I do have to store my email and work documents on Google as it's the platform my employer uses.
> And if you don't trust Google, then Bing and DuckDuckGo are a click away
I really really really really want to like DuckDuckGo, but it simply doesn't work compared with Big G.
I switched my default search engine to DDG once again last week, and after a frustrating week of rarely finding what i want, had to switch back go Google.
Last night was the final straw. I was trying to find out the delivery area for a particular newspaper. All DDG gave me was irrelevant ads, links to the newspaper's home page, outdated links to newspaper pages that are 404 now, and links to Wikipedia and other articles about the city.
Same search query on Google gave me as the first result a link to a page at the newspaper where I could put in a ZIP code to see if delivery was available.
I'll try DDG again in six months to see if its improved, as I have three or four times now. Fingers crossed.
I agree, it would almost be nice if you could allow Duck Duck Go to track some of your searches. Google knows I am after the web framework when I type Django. Duck Duck Go doesn't.
> I'll try DDG again in six months to see if its improved, as I have three or four times now. Fingers crossed.
I've been doing this for years as well, and I'm much too lazy to do the !g trick. If you rely on google search daily to help get complex tasks done, DDG just doesn't cut it as far as I'm concerned.
For searches for the latest movie trailer or whatever? Sure it works great, but for me simple queries like this make up a tiny percentage of what I use Google Search for. It's easy to take for-granted now that we are so used to it how incredibly good Google's search results are.
I'd love to move to DDG, I really would, everything else about them appeals greatly to me, but every time I read an article by someone saying the made the jump I can't help but wonder what they actually use it for that makes it work for them.
> And if you don't trust Google, then Bing and DuckDuckGo are a click away.
Quick reminder that if you're using Chrome, Bing and DuckDuckGo do not protect your search history. If you're using Chrome and have web history turned on (you probably do), Google parses your browser history to get your search queries from sites like Amazon, Bing, and DuckDuckGo.
It's not as simple as just choosing to move to a different product. Google makes every effort to cross-contaminate their products with each other, precisely so they don't lose any of that information. It's very difficult to give up just part of Google's ecosystem.
Google is way worse, you have other options in social media and many, many people are moving to other platforms.
Google on the other hand is everywhere, both on your side and on the servers you visit. They probably track less proportionally, but you give them far more data than facebook, no doubt.
Yes but now Facebook and similar social sites are a digital slot machine so users are addicted. They probably don't care about their image as much as when they were growing.
Sadly, I think the only way to replace a digital drug is going to be with a less evil digital drug. It's quite hard to break those habits.
It's all well and good that people now realize the privacy issues with social media, but the question is do we do something about it or do we just get used to it? Social media is here to stay, people are hooked.
> Yesterday, the web was buzzing with commentary about Google CEO Eric Schmidt's dangerous, dismissive response to concerns about search engine users' privacy. When asked during an interview for CNBC's recent "Inside the Mind of Google" special about whether users should be sharing information with Google as if it were a "trusted friend," Schmidt responded, "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/google-ceo-eric-schmid...