Submitted via IRC for Bytram
Facebook reportedly thinks there's no 'expectation of privacy' on social media
Facebook on Wednesday reportedly argued that it didn't violate users' privacy rights because there's no expectation of privacy when using social media.
"There is no invasion of privacy at all, because there is no privacy," Facebook counsel Orin Snyder said during a pretrial hearing to dismiss a lawsuit stemming from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, according to Law 360.
The company reportedly didn't deny that third parties accessed users' data, but it instead told US District Judge Vince Chhabria that there's no "reasonable expectation of privacy" on Facebook or any other social media site.
Facebook declined to comment.
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
Facebook Reportedly Thinks There's No 'Expectation of Privacy' on Social Media
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 38 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
(1)
(1)
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 02 2019, @09:30AM (21 children)
If that is indeed Facebooks position (and it's the most honest (and true!) statement I ever heard coming out of their mouth) then can we, somehow, sue them for intentional, large-scale deception with the intent of tricking us out of our data?
Exhibits:
- *Privacy* Statement
- Setting data to *not visible*
- etc., etc., I'm not an actual user so can't tell you about the rest ...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 02 2019, @10:02AM
Don't forgot "private messages". It was even in the name!
(admittedly this was years and years ago, before I deleted my fb account, so perhaps since then they renamed it to "happy fun time sharing messages" or something)
(Score: 5, Interesting) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday June 02 2019, @10:32AM (18 children)
Not likely. Anyone who didn't know from the start that FB was mining and selling their data is beyond "moron in a hurry" levels of stupid. They're absolutely correct in that there is no realistic expectation of privacy, they just should have said "on Facebook" instead of "on social media", because there are a few rare social media platforms that do not mine and sell your data.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Sunday June 02 2019, @12:24PM (17 children)
>beyond "moron in a hurry" levels of stupid
Unfortunately, I think this level equates to ~105 IQ, in other words >50% of the population, and (fortunately?) sometimes the judiciary does actually try to consider the average, or even below average, person when interpreting matters of consumer protection.
As far as "contracts" go, Facebook made multiple prima facie claims of data protection, such as setting levels of data sharing, "private" pictures, etc. all of which amounted to: "whoops, sorry, not really."
If the law implemented "fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice shame on me" then practically every fraud and scam in practice could used that principle to lay responsibility on the victims.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday June 02 2019, @01:58PM (8 children)
Data sharing ain't the same thing. All the privacy controls are you not sharing it with other people in the network and external search engines, they have nothing at all to do with what FB itself can see or do with your information and never have, so that's not much of a legal argument. I'm not remotely fond of the way they do business but how they do business hasn't really ever been much of a secret.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 02 2019, @02:12PM (1 child)
That's a moronic statement, there is no "you" in the picture when your friends log on to Facebook. It's always FB sharing your details, whether it is with other FB users (or "dumb fucks", as the CEO calls them) or with FB's other users (or "partners", as the CEO calls them).
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday June 02 2019, @07:35PM
"You not sharing" means you doing the choosing via settings. Context, yo. Learn it, live it, love it.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday June 02 2019, @10:13PM (5 children)
And, even they did not amount to much more than: Hey, the account holder has marked this private, so pretty please don't look at it, m'kay? Time and time again, those "privacy settings" were trivially bypassed.
And this, I believe, is what started being disclosed in those impenetrable data privacy and sharing disclosures which Facebook inadvertently accelerated into being with their absolutely flagrant repeated abuses. Arguably, those disclosures are read by less than 5% of the population, and understood by less than half of those who do read them. In terms of "consumer protection" I'd put them up in the same scam category as abusive credit cards before the days of interest rate caps.
As long as large corporations continue to prey on the masses, extracting far more value than they provide, they deserve to continue to have regulations tightened around their business models until they stop.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday June 03 2019, @11:31AM (4 children)
Oh I didn't say it was a good business model. I just said they weren't likely to lose a lawsuit for lying to users.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday June 03 2019, @11:46AM (3 children)
Premise: multi-billion dollar corporation
is a given. At a minimum, they can afford to argue and continue a case until all plaintiffs are dead.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday June 03 2019, @01:00PM (2 children)
Nah, class-action lawsuits are a thing that big corps lose or settle pretty regularly.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday June 03 2019, @01:19PM (1 child)
>class-action lawsuits are a thing that big corps lose or settle pretty regularly
That's just the legal Ouroboros feeding itself, of the few class-action lawsuits that actually do pay something to "the damaged" the settlement paid to the aggrieved parties usually amounts to something much less than 10% of the actual damages. Most of those cases still drag on for years before reaching settlement, and I think the trigger that causes them to reach settlement is when they are in danger of not recovering the plaintiff's full legal fees.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday June 03 2019, @01:26PM
Didn't say I was a fan of them but neither are large corporations.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Bot on Sunday June 02 2019, @02:33PM (7 children)
Last time i checked, among the posting prefs in FB there is an "only me" with a lock. If FB can get away with this, a cryptocoin scam-exchange can claim they weren't really selling you the stuff, a news site can claim they weren't really telling you true stories and the web should be only good for posting cat pics.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday June 02 2019, @07:37PM (5 children)
It already is only good for posting cat pics. Well, and porn. And arguing about shit when nobody important cares about your opinion in the least.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday June 02 2019, @10:18PM (4 children)
Hey, read below, I'm agreeing with you.
While it's tempting to believe this, just like one vote in a national election is meaningless, it's infinitely more heard / cared about / meaningful than the slob who just suffers in silence and never expresses a worthless opinion one way or the other.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2, Funny) by slob who just suffers in silence on Monday June 03 2019, @01:32AM
Hey, watch it.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday June 03 2019, @11:37AM (2 children)
Well, my vote at least absolutely will be meaningless in 2020 unless it helps a third party break out above five percent and get taken somewhat seriously. TN is a deeply red state. So much so that my nearly half black town went ~75% for Trump. Otherwise my vote would do nothing but add to the total popular vote for the nation. Which is meaningless.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday June 03 2019, @11:49AM (1 child)
and, I'm sure that most of those blacks are now benefiting from Trump's tax law changes, right?
We offer free education, it's a shame that the educated masses keep screwing themselves at the ballot box.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday June 03 2019, @01:05PM
A pretty good chunk of em, yep. If you don't get how lower tax rates and larger dependent credits might be something poor folks would enjoy having, you really don't understand poor folks.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday June 02 2019, @10:15PM
And porn. Just like VHS tape, drugs, and rock and roll - technology explodes when it provides massive dopamine pushes to users for a very low price.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 02 2019, @05:48PM
This is the same as "free" product in supermarkets, when if you want to get it "free" you have to buy half of their stock, but that's in their terms, several dozens of pages long. The problem is that if something is profitable, will be done, doesn't matter is it "ethical", "unethical" or "forbidden" - it's not forbidden if it's for profit, that's how the modern surveillance capitalism works. If someone thinks that "social media" and "internet communities" (which were indeed working for some time) have something in common, it's too late.
Some things I think may be useful as hints:
- Making the "Internet access" two side. Let's call it a normal way: You don't have connection from the world? It's an access to specific Internet services, not the Internet. Internet is two-side. Purchasing Internet connection without external access is the same as TV. Period.
- Always have control over your platform. Use servers, even with open source technologies. It is possible to put a small website using Raspberry Pi. Sometimes things need to be learned, that's a process purged by polit-correctness as reserved for "higher caste", but yes, an ordinary "worker" still can learn new things. By learning how to publish in the Internet, not how to beg the publisher, you get rid of the external control and censorship.
- Abandoning artificial scarcity. Without services made artificially scarce, you won't be able to play one-armed bandit in high quality and view ads in HD, but for exchanging of knowledge these are not useful at all.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 02 2019, @09:38AM (3 children)
It's fairly obvious that there is an expectation of privacy. Why else was there such a scandal when the Cambridge Analytica event happened? When was the last time you hear something like, "it just rained, and now the ground is all wet, what a scandal!"
People expected that their data would be held private. Ergo, there is a "reasonable expectation of privacy." Note, that this is an expectation, which may not match the EULA or any other legally-enforceable thing.
Now whether the numerous highly-paid lawyers can convince the legal-professional judge that the law runs counter to societal expectations remains to be seen.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 02 2019, @12:35PM (2 children)
It is a scandal because after the 2016 election, the MSM determined that FB might have had a part in Her loss. Since then, FB has been on their target lists. Before that, any deal like the one with Cambridge Analytica would not have been hyped up. It may even have been encouraged if the MSM stood to gain information on its audience. For all I know, there may have been tons of agreements FB made before this one.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by stretch611 on Monday June 03 2019, @12:04AM (1 child)
I hate facebook... I hate Trump... But the biggest reason why Clinton lost in 2016 is Clinton.
She can and will blame facebook, Comey, and Russia. But the fact is that someone as damaged as Donald Trump was/is coming even close to Hillary in the election is that she has just as much negative baggage as he does.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 03 2019, @02:40AM
Your hatreds don't matter to me in the least, but you're correct. Clinton lost due to her own failings.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by zocalo on Sunday June 02 2019, @09:39AM (1 child)
Maybe they could just go with Scott McNealy's "You have no privacy. Get over it." and leave it at that. At the very least it would be the first truly honest EULA ever.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 5, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Sunday June 02 2019, @09:18PM
Did you really need an "increasing body of evidence" to see this? It's been well-known to anyone who has been paying attention for over a decade.
I've been a member of Facebook since near the very beginning, when it was only open to people with email addresses from a few elite colleges. And over the years, Facebook changed the privacy settings many times. Probably a half-dozen times over its first decade, when Facebook did this, it would deliberately override the clear intent of previous privacy settings and set the new defaults to make them as expansive (and non-private) as possible. And there would be threads over Facebook about this, and I'd have to go and tell Facebook yet again never to share my data.
Perhaps you were not on Facebook when these things happened, though I believe even a few years ago there was an incident like this again.
I don't remember the details of what the exact settings were. But they went something like this -- there was a time when Facebook was only open to those with a .edu email address. Then they opened it to anyone. Prior to that, they probably had a privacy setting like, "Don't allow my information to be shared beyond those at my home institution, except for friends at other institutions." I obviously had that box checked. And then they'd change the privacy settings so you'd no longer have that exact setting, but now the new privacy settings would take into account ALL people even without .edu addresses. So maybe the new setting would read, "Share my information with anyone with a .edu address." And under the new settings, that would automatically be set by default to share as widely as possible, even if you previously had a setting that conflicted with that idea.
I know this wasn't an exact setting, but something like this would happen every year or two. Or maybe originally they only had a general setting for your entire profile, but then they introduced individual privacy settings for your personal info on your profile vs. your posts on your wall vs. your list of friends, etc. And when they'd introduce those new settings, maybe only "your profile" would still be set to share with no one, but your posts would default be set to share with anyone on the web, as would your list of friends.
Again, I don't know what the exact settings were like, but Facebook clearly had a reputation of doing this multiple times. It NEVER respected your privacy. It ALWAYS assumed whenever it introduced new settings or features that you'd AUTOMATICALLY default to the most sharing possible, under the most generous reading of your previous privacy settings, even if your clear intent was to keep everything relatively private.
All of this is the reason I stopped using Facebook over a decade ago. My profile still exists to allow friends who don't know my current email address to have a way to message me if they really want to get in touch. But I almost never post anything, because I know Facebook is evil, Facebook will gather data from any device or browser you use (so I've never downloaded the app, nor will I ever open Facebook in a browser except in an isolated browser on an isolated user account in a private window).
Anyone who ever thought Facebook respected privacy was either not paying attention to clear evidence or delusional.
Now, whether Facebook assumed any LEGAL responsibility for presenting privacy settings to users that it then didn't adhere to or secure enough? That's a different question. But anyone who thinks Facebook is changing its stance by stating outright that it doesn't believe social media users have an expectation of privacy -- well, this has been Facebook's clear stance for over a decade. Zuck maybe never said it this bluntly, but he's basically made statements several times over the years that indicate he thinks attempts at protecting online privacy are "dishonest" or "lying" or something (because you should be open and honest and share your info with everyone), so yeah, he's also made it clear he doesn't think there should be privacy either.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by SemperOSS on Sunday June 02 2019, @09:40AM
I guess that is why they don't have any privacy settings in Facebook ... Oh, they have!
--
Hm, maybe I should add a sarcasm warning to my signature?
Open Source Solutions and Digital Sovereignty is the new black
(Score: 4, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Sunday June 02 2019, @09:55AM
Zuck. He has zero expectations of respecting any person's privacy. Because they are "dumb fucks". What can we expect of a company that he has founded?
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 02 2019, @10:44AM
So again, we have "Silicon Valley" actively subverting existing moral code, then defending themselves by claiming the moral code never existed in the first place. It would be nice if someone there grew a spine and actually admitted what they stood for, instead of this two-faced weaseling.
This idiocy has been spouted before [businessinsider.com]. A premise [networkworld.com] that has [lifehacker.com] been [stanford.edu] debunked [stanford.edu] before [teaz.me].
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Sunday June 02 2019, @11:45AM (4 children)
Facebook is far, far worse than the loss of individual privacy. It's the loss of collective privacy. Our information as individuals doesn't count for much. Our place as nodes in a network is much more interesting, because an entity sitting above that network and watching how information propagates across it could control that network.
As a sociologist by training, it would be invaluable to study it to learn how fads propagate or political memes arise. Being able to figure out who the interchanges are and why would give me a huge amount of information about how human society works. It's a vast body of real-time data nobody's ever had before. But they (and presumably the government) have that body of data to themselves, and we don't. It makes them the biggest mega ultra stalkers of all time.
That information asymmetry is what we should erase if we want to take down Facebook. Their social graph should be made available to all.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 02 2019, @04:33PM
Which explains, quite nicely, why they're getting so increasingly insistent on FB profiles being attributable to actual human beings...not cats, dogs, gerbils or totally made up pseudo-Greeks...and purging their database of all the 'fakes'.
I'm assuming whatever models of human interactions they're playing with started throwing up weird results for these profiles, especially when they started cross-referencing their data sets against data sets like phone books, electoral rolls, credit agencies etc. (so, RIP my fake Greek chappie profile...my only FB profile, it only took them about 8 years to twig he was a wrong 'un....I'll have to ask the sister if the cat's profile is still active.).
I used to think the best way to deal with FB et al. was to encourage people to poison their data sets, so encouraged people to create profiles for pets etc back in the days when you didn't require to supply them with a phone number etc, problem with that data is that now they've enough valid data from all the muppets who have given them everything to make a good stab at flagging any dubious stuff already in, and then ignoring it, then deleting the account, or flagging it for 'special attention', whatever takes their fancy that day...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Sunday June 02 2019, @07:41PM
Exactly. That is why social media are banning conservatives and right wingers. They don't want to just study how human society works - they want to ultimately control it. Those members of social media who are NOT conformists, can be pressured into becoming conformists, if they just discover how it can be done. However good or bad their understanding is, they don't want to compete with any other agenda. It's important that outside voices be censored as early, and as completely as possible.
Places like gab.ai will remain out in the cold, with no access to the larger population of conformity.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 03 2019, @03:08PM (1 child)
Like Zuck's hoodie says, one of their 3 main focuses at the C-level was 'graphing'. (do a search for Zuckerberg's hoodie and don't stop until you find it, they are trying to scrub it hard...)
You may wonder why you hardly ever see any graphs on peoples' profiles despite this being such a huge focus of people with a hundred billion dollars in play-money.
They are graphing 'influencers' and then either shutting them down if they are unwanted(like me) or they are amplifying them if they are simply apolitical high-born half-wit kardashian wannabees.
A guy who sits next to me who was actually trained to work in security keeps saying to me 'I don't care if they watch me, follow me around all you want, so what?' and I am surprised I have to tell him that this is not how it works.
When you are listening to your dictator ordering you on a suicide mission and you momentarily wonder where the voices of reason are who might stand up with a different plan(read carefully sailors on usa ships in the strait of hormuz....), it might have been nice to know when it would have mattered, that the dictator was sabotaging the careers of all capable intellectual civilian leaders when they were 19 years old and making contrary officers into chair sitting pogues.
Consensus cracking. They are building a system of gleichshaltung on a massive scale and they know exactly who is capable of threatening it with dissonance or worse, actual civilian political movements resistant to infiltration, threatening all of their war game scenarios and actuarial charts with dreaded unpredictability. (also known as "Life" and "Liberty" and "Happiness")
And they are trying to ruin those people's lives so they never attain any status as a public figure, and they are doing this to people at a young age using all their integrated internet learning software.
It's animal farm. Are you one of the baby doberman's that can be trained or are you a voice that will forever be inconvenient? Are you a highly intelligent sociopath who will design nanobot brainbots for the right price? Or are you a potential nanobot scientist who could foil their plot of world domination on a lunch break?
Or are you a charismatic speaker and natural leader with a beautiful girlfriend who believes John Lennon over Doctor Strangelove?
They are going to see it in the graphs and come for you. There is a pyramid, you were not born at the top so you need to stay at the bottom and if according to their graphs they determine you are a breakout risk, expect the worst. Every craigslist roommate will be cops, every tinder date will be cops, your car and apartment will be tampered with, etc etc. Worse if you dare question mention the part Israel is playing in all of this.
I will say it again, Zuckerberg has betrayed the United States and deserves prison, at least, for several life times. And that is only because I don't believe in the death penalty as a general principle.
People like Zuck should be studied and mocked and made an example of lest we get an entire generation like him, who believes the purpose of the internet is to enforce unjustifiable power and condone atrocity.
But as things go, I expect that is what they will do to me. Not because they are that smart, they are the ones who need graphs because they are too rich to feel like they have to learn to program like some prole, but because there is a blob of people in the middle of the bell curve who will give all of their rights away if they can just get their next household listening device in the mail on time and feel important while they talk on the phone in restaurants.
This is a clown world, the people who aren't clowns are likely to be the first to disappear because the clowns don't like being reminded of that fact.
btw where is Arjen Camphuis anyway? Why was his wikipedia erased?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 03 2019, @05:19PM
Please take your meds now. Thanks from all of us who find Facebook is wrong and don't want to be seen as wearing tinfoil hats.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 02 2019, @01:11PM (1 child)
Left your curtains open? No privacy. You left your curtains open.
WRONG.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 02 2019, @04:14PM
Even worse, if you leave your Windows® open.
Oh wait... Windows® is open by default and can't be secured.