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We Can't Trust Facebook To Regulate Itself, Says Former Operations Manager (nytimes.com)
schwit1 shares an op-ed on the New York Times by Sandy Parakilas, a former operations manager on the platform team at Facebook: Sandy Parakilas led Facebook's efforts to fix privacy problems on its developer platform in advance of its 2012 initial public offering. What I saw from the inside was a company that prioritized data collection from its users over protecting them from abuse. As the world contemplates what to do about Facebook in the wake of its role in Russia's election meddling, it must consider this history. Lawmakers shouldn't allow Facebook to regulate itself. Because it won't (Editor's note: the link could be paywalled; alternative source). Facebook knows what you look like, your location, who your friends are, your interests, if you're in a relationship or not, and what other pages you look at on the web. This data allows advertisers to target the more than one billion Facebook visitors a day. It's no wonder the company has ballooned in size to a $500 billion behemoth in the five years since its I.P.O. The more data it has on offer, the more value it creates for advertisers. That means it has no incentive to police the collection or use of that data -- except when negative press or regulators are involved. Facebook is free to do almost whatever it wants with your personal information, and has no reason to put safeguards in place. The company just wanted negative stories to stop. It didn't really care how the data was used. Facebook took the same approach to this investigation as the one I observed during my tenure: react only when the press or regulators make something an issue, and avoid any changes that would hurt the business of collecting and selling data. This makes for a dangerous mix: a company that reaches most of the country every day and has the most detailed set of personal data ever assembled, but has no incentive to prevent abuse. Facebook needs to be regulated more tightly, or broken up so that no single entity controls all of its data. The company won't protect us by itself, and nothing less than our democracy is at stake.
Water is wet!
The number of Russian shitposters on this and other tech sites aren't going down either. How about Slashdot starts looking into these VPNed users from Macedonia and Russia who can't stop spamming RT/Sputnik talking points?
Maybe one will show up in this very thread to incoherently ramble about the DNC in poorly translated English?
At the very least....there should be regulation against companies like Facebook acquiring information on people that ARE NOT registered members of their site/product.
If you haven't signed up, then they should not collect information about you.
I've read about the "shadow" accounts FB tries to put together on folks that are not on FB...that should be banned and that information immediately and permanently purged from their systems.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
That's how you know your marketing team is doing things right, when you can suck the life out of people and they don't even notice or gave up caring. Facefarm is kinda like cigarettes, but for the Internet.