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Top Communications Union Joins Group Pushing for Facebook's Breakup (bloomberg.com)
The top U.S. communications union is joining a coalition calling for the Federal Trade Commission to break up Facebook, as the social media company faces growing government scrutiny and public pressure. From a report: "We should all be deeply concerned by Facebook's power over our lives and democracy," said Brian Thorn, a researcher for the 700,000-member Communications Workers of America, the newest member of the Freedom From Facebook coalition. For the FTC not to end Facebook's monopoly and impose stronger rules on privacy "would be unfair to the American people, our privacy, and our democracy," Thorn said in an email.
Facebook disclosed July 2 that it's cooperating with probes by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Bureau of Investigation on how political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica obtained personal information from as many as 87 million of the siteâ(TM)s users without their consent. The FTC, the Department of Justice and some state regulators were already probing the matter, which prompted Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg to testify before Congress in April. Facebook also faces calls for regulation from many lawmakers and the public over the privacy issue, Russian efforts to manipulate the 2016 presidential election and the spread of false information on the platform.
Facebook disclosed July 2 that it's cooperating with probes by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Bureau of Investigation on how political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica obtained personal information from as many as 87 million of the siteâ(TM)s users without their consent. The FTC, the Department of Justice and some state regulators were already probing the matter, which prompted Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg to testify before Congress in April. Facebook also faces calls for regulation from many lawmakers and the public over the privacy issue, Russian efforts to manipulate the 2016 presidential election and the spread of false information on the platform.
If you don't like it, you can always go to MySpace or GeoCities.
Check your premises.
You can walk away from Facebook at any time. Just turn off the computer, stand up, and walk away.
What are you supposed to break up and how will it help anything? Instagram and FB as two entities will probably just be even more effective at invading privacy. Working for a company that was a former Bell company... it really doesn't matter. We have a big huge weird metal desk in our courtyard that's AT&T's and a number of executives were from oldschool AT&T. Breaking a company up really just ends up making the executives more money and makes it harder to account for shenanigans.
Into two social networks. One for the cool people and one for the dorks.
Have gnu, will travel.
I'm having a hard time understanding how Facebook is a monopoly. Sure, Facebook has a lot of features that other services have, and it's difficult to bring users into competing services, but I fail to see how that constitutes a monopoly. Facebook isn't the only game in town, they're just the "best" one. That's like saying the NFL has a monopoly on American style football; there's the Canadian League, Arena Football League, UFL, and so on - it's just that the NFL is the only one that doesn't suck. Why not break up their monopoly? But that begs the question about how would they "break up their monopoly?" Shut down the service? Not allow advertisers? I'm having a hard time understanding how that would even be legal.
The biggest area of concern that would need to be broken up is the Facebook social network, and I fail to see any meaningful way of breaking that part up. Sure, you could make Facebook spin off some of its other brands, but Facebook itself would still likely be intact and a problem.
However, I'm not sure that Facebook even is such a great problem. Stupid people who believe everything they read on the internet are a much bigger problem. Facebook just provides a platform for sharing such junk, and I'd say any platform that allows stupid people will suffer from similar problems. Speaking of which, I just got a Facebook notification from a stupid friend that cars will explode if the fuel tanks are filled completely in the summer heat. I need smarter friends.
Facebook, sure, OK. But so typical of humanity. We will charge at the red cape, and think we have achieved something. The real threat to us is companies like this which no one ever heard about and thus will never get called to testify to Congress.
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Facebook is useful and popular precisely because everyone in the world with any interest in social media is on it (well, except for places that restrict free access to the Internet, like China). You can't "break it up" into 20 different social-media sites, because then it won't be useful any more.
Sure, you could force them to spin off Instagram or whatever as a separate corporate entity, but as brucekeller observes-- what difference would that make? You'd still be left with a core platform that has billions of users. That makes the core platform bigger than any news outlet in the history of the world, and means that it will always have enormous power to influence political opinion.
With that said: I'd love to migrate from Facebook to a different social media site, one which still retains the basic functionality of Facebook. I'd be OK with doing this even knowing that most of my friends would *not* be on the new site, at least initially. But I tried looking for Facebook alternatives a few months ago, and the results were... not encouraging. Maybe someone here can post a suggestion.
Instead of focusing on a single company, why not target the crux of the problem instead ?
Get some serious privacy laws enacted so that NO company is allowed to obtain or collect private information from individuals without their express knowledge and consent. ( No, burying it on page 212 of a EULA doesn't qualify, nor does tying the right to spy on us for a discounted price for a service ) Obtaining it without consent is basically theft and should be treated as such.
Companies get a fucking slap on the wrist for surreptitiously obtaining data on us and / or losing it in a breach. Why is it I can get hit with a $150K fine for downloading a music track ( per infringement ) but companies stealing OUR personal data is perfectly legal ? Imagine if companies had to pay a $150K fine for every customers data they obtained without consent. ( Or on a per customer / account basis during a data breach ) That would be one impressive fine if you have several million customers data in your possession. . .
Additionally, some harsh laws ( at least on par with HIPAA laws ) need to be enacted to protect said information and force companies to take this matter seriously.
The only way you fix this is if you hurt them financially.
Breaking up and regulating Facebook would be a good start. But they're only in this mess because they're incompetent. The corporations that hold the most personal and intrusive data on us are the telcos. They also know exactly who we are, i.e. no anonymous or fake accounts when they have our home address and bank information. I wonder who they sell that data to? How could we find out?
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
Two more shall take its place!
Hail Zuckra!
That would work if I had an account. Now, what would be your suggestion for people who don't have a FB account but appear in pictures of someone? What would you suggest as a sensible way to avoid their omnipresent tracking cookies? What would you suggest as a suitable way to react to more and more companies not having an own web presence and instead relying on FB not only for their presence but also for contact, which is by now even to the point of them doing their hiring through FB?
I am absolutely certain that you have a good suggestion how to avoid FB in those cases, right?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Now, what would be your suggestion for people who don't have a FB account but appear in pictures of someone?
What would you suggest for anytime someone posts a picture containing you in any online way? Someone has a picture of something that includes you on their blog. What legal recourse do you want? You can't sue the blog operator, they didn't post it. Sue your friend? Put them in jail?
Jail is too good for them. I suggest execution at dawn, along with gouging out the eyes of anybody who tried to steal my soul by looking at this infernal picture.
drives them out of hosting user-generated content entirely due to the risk of damages from prosecution for hosting libel, hate speech, or facilitating sex trafficking and child pornography.
- Um, "hosting libel?" Really? While I have no doubt libel exists on FB do we hold AT&T accountable for libel communicated over their phone system? Or GM accountable for libel said in their vehicles? None starter...
- Hate speech? You have to be joking. No I suspect you are not. Why don't you just spit the truth out and say you prefer censorship. Forget the 1A because obviously free speech is hate speech.
- Sex trafficking? Huh? I hardly think the best apple pie recipe ever created qualifies as sex trafficing.
- Child pornograhpy? Honestly why am I even wasting electrons on this?
Look, I don't particularly care for Facebook but you're whack-a-doodle....
Caution: Contents under pressure
Burn the whole thing to the ground. Go 'connect' with people the old fashioned way: in person.
I made one just to watch my kids in events that are live streamed on Facebook.
Have to say it seems pretty useless otherwise. It's illogical in design, shit you dismiss keeps coming back, they keep suggesting "friends" for my fucking fake person.
It's actually a bit creepy.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Maybe you should have considered the ramifications of smearing yourself in chocolate and prancing around in a speedo at your 12 year old daughter's birthday pool party.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Break up a company that provides a free service? How does that work? More like the feds aren't getting their cut and business could get "difficult" in the future.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
OK, in my ideal consumer-first world, we'd both:
1) Break up monopolies or any company large enough to get more than a third of a market
2) Outlaw unions that could disrupt public transportation/services (like this AT&T union), artificially drive prices (or the price of government services) up, influence elections, or drive companies out of the city/state/country
As a side benefit, this might also have the effect of removing a lot of money from politics (e.g., https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/list.php?cycle=2016)
"What would you suggest for anytime someone posts a picture containing you in any online way?"
Scale always matters.
Don't pretend facebook or google are the same thing as being in the background on some rando's self hosted blog.
If some random picture from 3 years ago has me in the background of some Japanese tourists blog on xyz.com; and another random photo containing me from a month ago is on some Brazilian journalists news feed hosted by uvw.com... that's not even slightly a problem
But when a multiple billion people are all taking photos and putting them on the same host, and that host is combing them for meta data to track all the people in all the photos... then suddenly we have a bona fide surveillance network. And its not even limited to the photos that were published... simply uploading them to decide which to publish.
The operator of that network should be subject to a LOT more scrutiny than some rando with a blog.
Scale always matters.
With Google, nobody knows you're a dog. What is "scale" when your picture shows up in a google or bing search?
Don't pretend facebook or google are the same thing as being in the background on some rando's self hosted blog.
So now we're limiting the issue to being "in the background"?
The operator of that network should be subject to a LOT more scrutiny than some rando with a blog.
I asked the question of how you deal with someone who has posted a picture that includes you to their blog. That wasn't "some rando", that could be one of your friends. And there was nothing about "in the background", it was "a picture that included you." And your friend is very likely to have included your name to identify his friends in that picture.
People post some amazing pictures to their blogs, thinking that the only people who will see them is their friends. You should check out the search engines sometime. If you have no answer, say that. Don't change the problem to fit your solution, deal with the problem as it exists.
Consumers are benefited by centralization of a sort. In order to have that without having a monopoly, standards must be forced. What good would phone system competition have been without a telephony standard?
We should create a distributed data standard for social networking and force all providers to start using it, open up their data to all other providers, and not be able to mandate any client. Build privacy control into the standard and force compliance. Users should be able to say that the providers have no right to do anything other than store the data and allow normal clients access to it in the way the standard describes.
The free market will then work in the way that it should and take care of the monopoly aspects.
Is Facebook getting targetted because they don't pay off politicians? I would support breaking up Facebook, but there are a hell of a lot more important companies that need to be broken up. Comcast, anyone?
What I do in my home is my business. If you take picture of me in my home, be prepared that me and my lawyer will come not only to, but for your home.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Heh. There's no way an FTC with a chair nominated by a Republican president would think about splitting up Facebook (or most any corporation, for that matter).
It could be beneficial if some of Facebook's vertical integration could be split apart (e.g. messenger, Instagram), which might provide room for competing services to fill those tasks. But there's just zero chance the current FTC will be interested in bothering.
wants them broken up is because they want to unionize them.
Google (right now, presumably) does not run facial recognition software on the images and correlate the results. Facebook, however, probably has a windowless building somewhere with NSA computers tying it all together.
I don't get the concern over this. What are you a member of some primitive tribe that thinks your soul will be stolen if your image is take and then posted somewhere online? It's a photograph. If you appear in the background of a photograph I take it's not like it matters or anyone cares. People spend too much time worrying about this shit. Just go live your life and quit worrying about who posted a picture you happen to appear in on facebook and what nefarious bullshit some imaginary supervillain is planning to use it for.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
... Let's break up all of the media conglomerates. Times corporation? Your times has come! AT&T? Let's try A, and T, and T. Comcast? I'm out of jokes, but you're on the list, along with Time Warner, Sinclair, I Heart Media, and so on and so forth.
The true sign of a first class mind: he judges ideas by who has them, rather than by their own merit.
Google (right now, presumably) does not run facial recognition software on the images and correlate the results.
"Omnichad and I chillin' at the local jazz fest. What a great day of music..." No Google face recognition software necessary. While you may not know if Google is doing it, you also don't know if Bing is doing it, and since it is a valuable function to do, they probably are. (If it weren't something valuable, Facebook wouldn't do it, either.)
People want laws about Facebook and what happens if you don't have a Facebook account and someone puts a picture of you up. I think the term is "bill of attainder" when you write a law that is specific to Facebook, and the US Constitution prohibits those. So, if you have a law that covers Facebook in this context it is going to cover your friends who post your picture on their blog, too. That's why I am asking: to what extent do you want to legally punish your friends for their actions just because you want to slap Facebook down?
"So now we're limiting the issue to being "in the background"?"
No. That was just an example.
"I asked the question of how you deal with someone who has posted a picture that includes you to their blog."
One picture by one person on one host really doesn't bother me.And if it did, I'd ask them to take it down. What is the 'problem' that needs solving? Why is it a problem?
"And your friend is very likely to have included your name to identify his friends in that picture."
No, *my* friends aren't fuckwits. But as this isn't just about me: yes, a lot of people are tagged in friends images. I'm happy to concede that it happens all the time.
So what should people do when it happens if its not wanted? I assume they would tell their friend to take it down. But a couple random pictures of me online in the background (or even the foreground!!) even if my name is mentioned in the adjacent text -- that simply isn't a dystopian nightmare.
Its not a problem that needs a lot of attention.
"If you have no answer, say that"
Its not that I have no answer, its that my answer is that no societal level response is needed. Deal with it personally, or civilly if you find it egregious enough.
But its only at scale where you have organizations correlating and tagging that metadata at scale that it rises to the level of being a problem that society and government should be involved directly to curtail it; because at scale it IS a dystopian nightmare.
One picture by one person on one host really doesn't bother me.
That's nice. Are we talking about you specifically, or the general issue of pictures of people being posted on the web when they don't have any control over it? I really don't care what you personally think about one image. The question is, what should the LAW think about such things. I've already explained this.
Its not that I have no answer, its that my answer is that no societal level response is needed. Deal with it personally, or civilly if you find it egregious enough.
Ok. No laws necessary. I don't know how you deal with Facebook "personally", and trying to sue them for a civil claim will be a nightmare, but "no societal level response is needed." Others disagree.
But its only at scale where you have organizations correlating and tagging that metadata at scale that it rises to the level of being a problem that society and government should be involved directly to curtail it;
Wait. So you DO think there should be some laws. And now we're back at the question I asked, for which you had a different answer. You think laws controlling Facebook are necessary; you don't understand that you can't write laws for Facebook alone.