Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by CGamesPlay 2096 days ago
Is this the same scandal from before: where the app had the camera on because when you swipe to record a story they wanted it to be instantly available? Did it just take a while to reach lawsuit status or is this about some new thing?
2 comments
ignoramous 2096 days ago
> Is this the same scandal from before:

Scandal(s):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23950892

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21513471

Though, my favourite (unrelated to the camera "bug" here) is the one Will Strafach uncovered: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1090394419902197761.html

link
Zenbit_UX 2096 days ago
One of us would have had to write this code, a PM would have had to authorize and break it down, a UX designer might have had to design its internal dashboard for "how to perv on users most efficiently" including flows and user stories, and then that code would have had to be pushed to the Instagram git repo which surely has some ~hundred devs on it that saw it go in, or may notice it at some time in the future.

Now I know it takes a healthy dose of cognitive dissonance to work for facebook in this day and age but the main reason this doesn't seem likely to me is that that's way too many people involved in something beyond shady (even for Facebook) for this to not get out. There's even a [formula](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...) to calculate how likely it is for a conspiracy to remain a secret depending on the number of people involved.

link
lalos 2096 days ago
Multiple (horrible) events through history can provide the insight that as long as you partition each task enough, people will happily work and contribute to a horrible end goal and later claim they were only following orders and had no idea of the side effects of their individual actions.
link
jclardy 2096 days ago
You have a very optimistic outlook on corporate culture. Do you code review every piece of code that goes into a corporate project? I work at a relatively small company with three apps and 5 iOS devs, and I look at maybe 20% of things committed. If every dev looked at every line of code every other dev produced, 100 devs would get nothing done, ever.

The reality is this was probably a marketing initiative - "Can we tell what users are most interested in on the screen" and the answer is yes - on-device eye tracking is very simple to achieve using Apple's vision framework.

link