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Top Facebook Executive Defended Data Collection In 2016 Memo, Warned That Facebook Could Get People Killed (buzzfeed.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from BuzzFeed: On June 18, 2016, one of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's most trusted lieutenants circulated an extraordinary memo weighing the costs of the company's relentless quest for growth. "We connect people. Period. That's why all the work we do in growth is justified. All the questionable contact importing practices. All the subtle language that helps people stay searchable by friends. All of the work we do to bring more communication in. The work we will likely have to do in China some day. All of it," VP Andrew "Boz" Bosworth wrote. "So we connect more people," he wrote in another section of the memo. "That can be bad if they make it negative. Maybe it costs someone a life by exposing someone to bullies. Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools." The explosive internal memo is titled "The Ugly," and has not been previously circulated outside the Silicon Valley social media giant.
The Bosworth memo reveals the extent to which Facebook's leadership understood the physical and social risks the platform's products carried -- even as the company downplayed those risks in public. It suggests that senior executives had deep qualms about conduct that they are now seeking to defend. And as the company reels amid a scandal over improper outside data collection on its users, the memo shows that one senior executive -- one of Zuckerberg's longest-serving deputies -- prioritized all-encompassing growth over all else, a view that has led to questionable data collection and manipulative treatment of its users. The full memo is embedded in BuzzFeed's report. In response to the story, Zuckerberg wrote in a statement: "Boz is a talented leader who says many provocative things. This was one that most people at Facebook including myself disagreed with strongly. We've never believed the ends justify the means. We recognize that connecting people isn't enough by itself. We also need to work to bring people closer together. We changed our whole mission and company focus to reflect this last year."
The Bosworth memo reveals the extent to which Facebook's leadership understood the physical and social risks the platform's products carried -- even as the company downplayed those risks in public. It suggests that senior executives had deep qualms about conduct that they are now seeking to defend. And as the company reels amid a scandal over improper outside data collection on its users, the memo shows that one senior executive -- one of Zuckerberg's longest-serving deputies -- prioritized all-encompassing growth over all else, a view that has led to questionable data collection and manipulative treatment of its users. The full memo is embedded in BuzzFeed's report. In response to the story, Zuckerberg wrote in a statement: "Boz is a talented leader who says many provocative things. This was one that most people at Facebook including myself disagreed with strongly. We've never believed the ends justify the means. We recognize that connecting people isn't enough by itself. We also need to work to bring people closer together. We changed our whole mission and company focus to reflect this last year."
Delete your accounts now! To hell with the Zuck!
I could give my life story on there and they still wouldn't know dick about me.
Projecting the image that you know everything about everyone may spook the product, but it's great marketing.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
https://mobile.twitter.com/boz...
I'm not sure I believe anything any of them say but it certain does provide a different view of it than the article portrays.
BACKPEDALING !!!!!!
Anyone who trusts the pieces of shit who own and run Facebook, is someone so stupid they should be prevented from breeding.
We all know the score now.
Smart people won't use Facebook any more ( if they ever did ) and stupid people WILL continue to use Facebook.
And the show goes on.
No more comments needed.
The lot of them, they are despicable.They are the most insular and straight up arrogant people currently in business, and the same applies to the majority of big tech companies. Stopping their 'influence' is as simple as not using their site or tools, the douches. This all should have been front and center ten years ago, long before even 2016. Better late than never.
http://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg-ims-wont-help-facebooks-privacy-problems-2010-5
Da Blog
And they said they needed my phone number to verify who I was. I said, no you don't, and canceled out if it. It's funny all the people who use their Facebook or Google accounts to log in to sites. Thus is just giving these cum bags even more information on you. I don't use Chrome, I don't use Gmail, I don't use Twitter and I don't use the same my real email account for YouTube. I keep my cookies cleared out on my browser, I don't use Google for searches unless I absolutely have to and I never use my real name for anything. Still Google somehow knows to send me ads of things I have looked at on other computers. I recently started using Brave browser (which is really crappy) and it seems to be blocking Google for the most part.
The point of Facebook *is* to "connect people". So is Twitter, so is the global telephone network and the Internet itself.You can't sue a telephone company for facilitating campaign calls that were headed by foreign operatives, can you? What about facilitating voice calls that coordinated an assassination? Facebook essentially is the same thing - a medium. It's hard for me to say it but I agree with Facebook. The fault lies in said operatives (and the users' gullibility, unfortunately) IMHO. Don't kill the messenger.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
It's not an inherently bad sentiment. In fact, a few years ago everyone here were cheering Lavabit for practically the same message.
That said, context is everything. Since Facebook doesn't seem to care for their users beyond sticking them in a virtual approval bubble and selling their ad impressions, it's hard not to see this memo as anything but arrogant corporate greed regardless of the writer's intentions.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
It's no secret that Facebook's various offenses and Zuckerberg's pretty damning responses to the blowback are troubling the Facebook eloi. One can only imagine how difficult it must be to concentrate on automating the liberal safe space they all dream of while navigating this ongoing shitstorm. They thought they were working on behalf of the most virtuous of all the virtue mongers in the Valley, but it turns out they're actually employed by a bunch of piratic shitheels.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
We recognize that connecting people isn't enough by itself. We also need to work to bring people closer together. We changed our whole mission and company focus to reflect this last year.
I've observed that social media in general has turned out to be better at dividing, isolating and siloing people than it is at unifying. I think social media is more about people talking than about listening. More about expressing one's one opinion than being enlightened by the opinions of others. More about people trying to distribute their ideas and beliefs and fears like tiny seeds on the winds of the internet. But those seeds fall on sterile, desiccated ground.
I don't think this is how social media wanted to be, just how it, or it's user base has evolved. Of course I reserve the right to be wrong. My Daytimer quote for the day is from Dean Rusk:
One of the best ways to persuade others is with your ears -- by listening to them
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
It seems to miss that latter letter.
I'm the last person to want to defend Facebook - I don't even have FB account because I disagree with how invasive their data mining is. But if you're going to criticize FB for the negative things that come about from the increased connectivity their site enables, you also have to give them credit for the positive things that come about from the same connectivity. Getting in touch with long-lost friends, getting out news of major life events without having to resort to the telephone grapevine, easier dissemination of information about good/fun places to visit and better ways to do things based on the feedback of others you know. If you evaluate it that way, billions of people have voted by using FB that, based on a cursory evaluation of the benefits versus drawbacks (i.e. possibly unaware of the privacy implications), FB is for them on average a positive influence on their lives.
Criticizing FB solely on the basis of the bad things their social network can bring about is like criticizing vaccines solely on the basis of the few cases where they wind up killing people who are inoculated. You can't do that - you have to add up both the good and the bad. The most you can do with just the bad is criticize them for not taking enough steps to try to mitigate how their service can be used to promulgate the bad.
I'm guessing that, when the under-the-bus shoving begins, this guy will the the first to get shoved.
There are no stupid questions, just stupid people.
I fully believe that he wanted to spur discussion. If you write a memo knowing that it goes against the grain of your audience, and you don't want a discussion, then what on earth do you want? But his comment, like Zuck's repsonse, is rather duplicitous (sleazily weaselly). Of course he wanted a discussion, but that's not all; he wanted change to follow, or at least warn people about how their policy might backfire. I don't believe for one second that this memo was just a discussion piece that did not accurately describe the company policy.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Regardless of his intent, he was an idiot to put it in writing. You never write anything, or say anything on an electronic device, that you might have trouble explaining to a jury.
If he wanted to discuss these issues, it should have been a privileged conversation with an attorney in the room.
FB needs to hire some adult supervision.
Hope not, moving targets are harder to hit.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
And you can rsquo;te me on that!
Yes, any technology can be used for good and bad. What can be used to find a self-help group of people suffering from the same rare disease you have can be used for fringe loonies looking for equally deranged individuals. But that is NOT the problem with Facebook.
Don't try to deflect the discussion now onto whether FB's effect on people is good or bad, hoping that someone will come and defend Facebook akin to "Facebook doesn't kill people, the Terrorists using it do, it's just like guns, ya see?". That isn't the problem with Facebook. The problem with Facebook is not how its users (ab)use it.
The problem is how its owners abuse its users.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
That is why I often mail things like "As discussed earlier, we agreed to do ... If I misunderstood this, please let me know." This covers my ass and gives the other person a moment to opt out. It also removes future discussions where he and I had interpreted information differently.
Once i did not interpreted the "Yeah sure" as sarcastic.Saved BOTH our asses.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Delete facebook. You have been warned from within their ranks.
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
Apparently Zuckerberg didn't disagree with "All the questionable contact importing practices. All the subtle language that helps people stay searchable by friends." because he kept those in place.
If the ends didn't justify the means, Zuckerberg still justified them, just with different rhetoric. The end result is still the same, just given a different name.
Twinstiq, game news
You never write anything, or say anything on an electronic device, that you might have trouble explaining to a jury.
That coming from ShanghaiBill...aside, what a sad and lonely life to fear constant persecution which will likely never come.
... it turns out that businesses are only concerned about making money! They are only constrained by those laws, morals, or ethics that have a negative impact on profits! Shocking!
The logic of this ia that If we connect people they will interact; If they interact it can be good or bad; examples of good branch are they fall in love and feed the poor- examples of bad branch are they kill each other. Who is responsible?
The logic applies to Slashdot, Facebook, the NYT, every radio playlist... and you and I in our daily activities. I'm glad Facebook is at least thinking about it
So the tension is between those who believe the connecting agency is responsible and those who believe the individuals being connected are responsible. Most of us believe both
Quite appropriate on Good Friday, don't you think?
To all of you who thought Big Brother would come from "The Government": Surprise!
Here is where our free society dies...not with the bought-off corporate shills we elect, but far more directly. Even our damaged and fallible version of representative democracy is being rendered irrelevant by corporate executives who simply arrogate to themselves decisions about the kind of society we will have, and the acceptable costs of creating it.
This is what happens when a social or technological innovation allows some organization to gather and use power in a way that outstrips the ability of our democratic processes even to properly evaluate it, much less control it. So some unaccountable, unreachable corporate douchebag decides how many deaths will be an acceptable cost for implementing his personal vision of America. And what are the consequences for this kind of arrogant corporate over-reach? We just put an angry-face emoticon at the bottom of a 100-word comment, and fool ourselves into believing that's the extent of a citizen's duty in a democratic society.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
https://mobile.twitter.com/boz...
I'm not sure I believe anything any of them say but it certain does provide a different view of it than the article portrays.
I don't understand what the fuss is about except that its trendy to dump on Facebook for any and every conceivable or even illogical reason. All cyber technology comes with and implicit and inherent danger that it will be either used nefariously or misused to harm. It was and remains perfectly legitimate subject matter. Kurzweil in his discussion of the Singularity has made similar points in his books and you don't have to believe in the Singularity to understand the technological inertia he cites.
Most recently, AI folks discuss the same subject matter; https://www.edge.org/conversat...
> The major scandal that broke is that Facebook (willingly)
> supported a rightwing data mining company, and yet all the
> conservative snowflakes can whine about is how oppressed they are.
Carol Davidsen, Obama's digital campaign manager for 2012, about this at a TED TALK in 2015. The interesting part begins at 19 minutes into the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
In her own words...
===
> but we were actually able to ingest the entire social network, social network
> of the US that's on Facebook, which is most people. Where this gets
> complicated is... that freaked Facebook out... right? So they cut off the
> feature. Well the Republicans never built an app to do that. So the data is
> out there. You can't take it back... right? The Democrats have this
> information, so when they look at a voter file ansd someone comes to them,
> they can immediately be like "Oh, here are all the other people they know. And
> here are people they can help us persuade, because they're really good friends
> with this person".
> The Republicans do not have that information and will not get that
> information... right? I'm a democrat, so maybe I could argue that's a great
> thing. But really, it's not, in the overall process...right? Like that wasn't
> thought all the way through and now there's a disadvantage of information that
> to me seems unfair. But I'm not Facebook, so this is the reality.
===
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user