[catacombs]

> FB has done a lot of bad things and they deserve the negative press, but it does seem like NYT has some kind of personal agenda against the company and they aren't afraid of exploiting the tech ignorance of their readers to accomplish that goal.

To say The New York Times and the multiple reporters covering the Facebook scandals all have a personal agenda to make Facebook look bad is delusional.

The scandals started with Facebook, and the NYT, as well as other news organizations covering this story, are there to write about it.

Moreover, the Times spoke to nearly 60 current and former employees. You'd think if they had an agenda they wouldn't talk to that many people to corroborate the facts.

If the paper wanted to do a "hit piece," they'd just grab one of their columnists to write it and slap OPINION at the top of the story. A reminder for some people: Opinion is not the same as News. They are different departments that, in most newsrooms, do not dip in each others work.

The Times' investigations team is one of the best in American journalism. I highly doubt the editors would publish a story as a middle finger to Facebook. If you think otherwise, I welcome specific examples of agenda- pushing stories, with exactly the thing they're pushing out that benefits them and not the public.

Again, the scandals started with Facebook, and they're out now for every one to see.

The old saying goes, "Don't do anything that you'd wouldn't want published on the front page of The New York Times."

[stickfigure]

"Facebook gave your personal information to Netflix/Spotify/etc without your consent" is a scandal.

"Facebook gave your personal information to Netflix/Spotify/etc when you installed their app and approved the permission request" is NOT a scandal.

The NYT article makes it sound like the former, not the later. This is either incompetence or malicious intent.

[paganel]

>"Facebook gave your personal information to Netflix/Spotify/etc when you installed their app and approved the permission request" is NOT a scandal.

It is definitely a scandal, 99% of the users generally approving TOSes/permission request screens (including myself) have no idea what it's in there, we generally rely on the goodwill of the companies that wrote out those TOSes/permission request screens.

[catacombs]

Agreed.

This tweet about the issue with TOS sum things up nicely:

"If you were to describe a contract that

- no one has read

- it doesn’t matter if you read because you can’t bargain over the terms

- can be unilaterally changed at any time

- does not explicitly describe the consideration you provide (data!)

You’d fail your 1L contracts class"

[stickfigure]

Nonsense - these are not 10-page EULAs we're talking about. The permission dialogs are clear and explicit about what they will share and who they will share it with. And you always have the option of not installing the app.

[paganel]

Did that message explicitly say "we are going to give access to your private messages to external companies like X, Y, Z" or was it a more convoluted message like "Facebook has direct access to your private messages (of course it has, I'm on FB, ain't I?) and as such it might process your private data with another external entity"?

Either way, many, many of the users would have clicked OK on the confirmation screen even if it had said something like "Facebook is going to sacrifice your first-born child", that's why hiding behind confirmation screens/TOSes when doing nasty stuff like what's described in the article is not enough.

[stickfigure]

When you installed the Spotify app, the message said "This will share your messages with Spotify".

You get similar messages when you install most mobile apps. What exactly are you looking for? If you want to install apps, and the apps are going to do anything useful with data, you need permissions.

nasty stuff like what's described in the article

This thread is about how the article is false and misleading. You can't use the article to justify the article.

[jlarocco]

> ... we generally rely on the goodwill of the companies that wrote out those TOSes/permission request screens.

LOL. The only goodwill they have is towards their bottom line and covering their ass.

[IfOnlyYouKnew]

The NYT directly makes the accusation that private messages were shared without consent:

“This is just giving third parties permission to harvest data without you being informed of it or giving consent to it,” said David Vladeck, who formerly ran the F.T.C.’s consumer protection bureau. “I don’t understand how this unconsented-to data harvesting can at all be justified under the consent decree.”

Facebook, if you carefully parse their statement, does not deny this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18714352

[stvswn]

I'd agree if the facts were that the 3rd parties only had read/write access for messages that were coming from their platform. The NYT article implies that the 3rd parties had read access for all messages, including messages unrelated to the integration. The FB response article doesn't dispute this. If it is truly the case that FB gave the 3rd parties read access to all messages, that wouldn't be what users expected when they gave permission -- and it seems like unnecessary sloppiness and a lack of privacy controls at Facebook.

[jamiequint]

> To say The New York Times and the multiple reporters covering the Facebook scandals all have a personal agenda to make Facebook look bad is delusional.

Maybe they're just technologically illiterate then, because many of the NYT articles conveniently eliminate nearly all of the context or specifics around data use in a way that seems deliberately designed to make Facebook look bad. e.g. the story on partner deals last year conveniently did not mention that it would be impossible for FB to make an app that worked on feature phones without the existence of an API like the one the NYT got so worked up about.

> If the paper wanted to do a "hit piece," they'd just grab one of their columnists to write it and slap OPINION at the top of the story.

That's not how hit pieces work.

> The Times' investigations team is one of the best in American journalism. I highly doubt the editors would publish a story as a middle finger to Facebook. If you think otherwise, I welcome specific examples of agenda- pushing stories, with exactly the thing they're pushing out that benefits them and not the public.

Try reading all of the NYT pieces on FB for the last 12 months (including Cambridge Analytica) then look at the state of the tech world and the size of Facebook during the time they were making those decisions, then look into the technical details behind many of them (actual hacks excluded). The "FB is evil" narrative is not nearly as clear cut as you think.

[Symmetry]

Given how much damage Facebook has done to traditional new reporting it would be unreasonable to expect reporters not to bear Facebook any ill will. They're making, what, half as much as they did in 2010? And that's after the huge drop in revenue that Craigslist caused.

I'm sure the reporters and editors involved are trying their best to be fair. But succeeding in those circumstances is really, really hard.