Out of context: Reply #151
- Started
- Last post
- 419 Responses
- mg331
Dick Durbin's portion really bothered me.
He basically tried to equate Zuckerberg’s reluctance to say what hotel he stayed at, and who he sent messages to this week, with information Facebook has available to them based on what users do. These are not comparable. A human being choosing not to divulge certain info to other human beings to protect their privacy isn’t the same as a website tracking or not tracking user actions.
Durbin should have asked if Zuckerberg would be mad that the hotel he stayed at either a) published that Zuckerberg stayed there that night, or b) was hacked because of poor network security and a list of guests, including Zuckerberg was made public.
That would have gotten to the notion of presumably private information being misused.
Durbin was trying to say “okay so you don’t want to give away that info [to us, to people watching,]... can you understand why people are mad about how their info was used on FB?”
It’s so astronomically incomparable because:
A) people agree to terms and conditions to use the site regardless of whether or not they read them).
B ) there’s an expectation that your data is used, but kept private within that network or system, and kept secure there.
C) Any games, apps, candy crushes, quizzes, etc. come with confirmations of what data they will access within your account. You must agree to proceed. These apps also have their own terms and conditions (that nobody reads, but agrees to anyways.)The news that FB looks at your private message isn’t a surprise at all. That’s no different than any email provider scanning your messages to gather data and use it to shape the ads you’re served. Nobody has freaked out about that fact in years. It’s so no different than a website being able to track your activity elsewhere on the web (FB does this) because ad networks are built around tracking your behavior on any site they’re connected to. There’s hundreds of millions of dollars if not billions at play in that alone.
None of this really bothers me at all to be completely honest. I just want to know if my data was used by Cambridge Analytica, how quickly did they decide I wasn’t worthy of targeted Trump campaign propaganda simply because my account is full of decidedly and excessive anti-Trump posts. I just want to know how quickly I was deemed to be a lost cause!
- yupmonospaced
- you could see zucks delight as he realised it was a really crap analogy that was going nowhere.kingsteven