Most notable pieces I took from the article: 1) Facebook does not see third parties (such as BlackBerry) as “third parties.” 2) Facebook told Congress that it disabled third party access to user data, but in actuality did not.
My own strong interjection: Facebook’s competitive advantage is its disregard for ethics. Somehow, Zuckerberg has been able to convince a lot of smart people to do unethical things and build unethical technology, while the competitors have a harder time doing the same. This disregard for ethics has allowed Facebook to “grow at all costs.” Meanwhile, the more conscientious programmers and entrepreneurs (or at least those held more accountable) are busy wrangling with the real challenges and intricacies of civilization. (I personally prefer it that way - I like my work being tied to the well-being of society.)
Talking about ethics, this is going to sound below the belt. If Facebook were to enter into a contract with the defense department like Google did (and terminated a renewal just a few days ago), I doubt if any Facebook employees would even think of creating a petition to management or of quitting their jobs over that. Somehow I feel the people that Facebook attracts as employees may be the ones who don't care much for others overall. That or they're so dedicated to work that they're completely oblivious about all the news in the last several years.
To give benefit-of-the-doubt, I think they believe their own propaganda. Facebook folks actually believed that (e.g. among many) pushing people to reveal all aspects of their life equally to everyone was in society's best interest.
And I once met a Facebook employee who actually was a staunch EFF supporter…
It takes a certain degree of naivety to believe that. It also lacks a certain degree of critical thinking to not ask the question "but what if some people choose not to share?" or the even easier question "can any of this be abused?"
Could have been just the best possible shot to avoid a neo-totalitarian society, and the current abuse could be actually a minor consequence (and completely manageable for nation states > take a look at EU GDPR).
That moral opinions equals the one of Peter Thiel about the good in mass surveillance: based on his opinion that after 9/11, powerful western entities were on the side of really harsh intrusive countermeasures (and the restriction of current liberties quite probably), that could probably, fundamentally change the western societies as they existed at that moment.
The alternative to that way of doing things was to allow the existence of public and private entities like Facebook and their subrepticious intrusiveness, allowing mass surveillance, but also allowing to avoid other gruesome measures.
And that could explain why nobody can pull-out a facebook takedown.
I hope it's clear in my comment that I'm neither apologizing for Facebook nor sympathizing with Thiel and his crap etc. I think assuming-good-faith and looking for charitable explanations is a good practice, even if I actually don't believe people actually deserve the charity.
> Having known so many people involved with Facebook for so long, I have come up with a phrase to describe the cultural phenomenon I’ve witnessed among them – ladder kicking. Basically, people who get a leg up from others, and then do everything in their power to ensure nobody else manages to get there. No, it’s not “human nature” or “how it works.” Silicon Valley and the tech industry at large weren’t built by these sorts of people, and we need to be more active in preventing this mind-virus from spreading.
> Facebook’s competitive advantage is its disregard for ethics.
This appears to be a quality that occurs in some business owners.
I know more than a single entrepreneur with similar disregard for things like data retention and PII. Their reluctance to address these issues when advised, I assume, would persist until they get burned.
Taking a step back, at the root it appears simply that some people are better at focusing than others. These entrepreneurs would work on improving metrics they see relevant and their effort will be more efficient thanks to zoning everything else out.
Seeing evil intent here would be counterproductive, similar to reprimanding someone on the spectrum for not saying hello: it might just not occur to a person. The key difference here is that these decisions negatively impact countless third parties, and those third parties lack the expertise to recognize the issue.
While there’s a lot that can be said against FDA[1], there seems to be a parallel here. I want to reserve my judgement about regulation in this area, but it seems like there’s a case for it, similar to how we’d like to keep food manufacturers in check.
[1] A movie called Dallas Buyers Club comes to mind.
similar to reprimanding someone on the spectrum for not saying hello
Why hold anyone in the upper class accountable for their actions when we can just claim they all suffer from mental disorders and make excuses for them?
I might’ve been unclear, I do think we could push for more enforced accountability in these cases.
The parallel between narrow focus and mental disorder was meant to illustrate how attributing these outcomes to malice (which I sometimes see) is ineffective. If those actors play by the rules and are immune to ethics-based arguments, then maybe the rules are due to be updated.
The comparison relies on an assumption that these corporate bad actors unwittingly "don't see the harm" that arises as a side effect of their laser focus on (non-maliciously) optimizing something else-- similar to how someone with a different behavioral orientation might unwittingly not register the effect of ignoring a common social convention.
I'd say this claim needs a lot of supporting evidence before we should take it seriously. At the moment it's just a rhetorical device, and would almost certainly be used to mitigate blame aimed at corporate bad actors. So I'd say without some type of serious evidence of this unwitting laser focus, evidence of people genuinely "not seeing the harm" despite huge op-eds in major newspapers, outrage from tech communities, harrowing stories of data privacy issues, etc. etc., we really should not put any weight on this "non-malicious focus" interpretation.
In other words, these are smart people. They knew full well what they were doing. Lobbying, PR, and attempting regulatory capture after the fact to launder their reputation and absolve blame are absolutely baked in as part of the strategy, until conclusively proven otherwise.
You're describing a huge lack of regard for the victims in this situation, and an exceptional amount of forgiveness for the assailants. Unfortunately, this is the attitude that lets ethical gray-lines exist, and the attitude that should be beaten if you want to avoid stricter regulations.
They're not third parties because these API's are protected by user login credentials as near as I can tell. That means you provide your login information, and your device can access your Facebook data, as you expect a client of Facebook to be able to do.
That means all the privacy protections from the "website" are there, you're just not looking at it through a browser, it's an interface provided by the device manufacturer.
> This disregard for ethics has allowed Facebook to “grow at all costs."
There's a great phrase for this: "move fast and break things". When you believe it is ok to break small rules and norms, it becomes easier to break larger norms and ethics and rules. This philosophy took SV by storm, but at its core it's always been about disregarding things like laws and ethics, and now we are seeing the world that created.
I wish I could agree with you're more nuanced viewpoint, but seeing a whole industry making insane amounts of money based on abusive and deceptive business models suggests that there truely is a broader issue. Whether the underlying attitude is best describe by "move fast, break things" is debatable but we can't easily dismiss the idea.
I think the point is that that quip usually refers to technical breakage, i.e. "it's better to ship more often and potentially break something that you then fix equally quickly, than spending thrice as much time analysing the problem to ensure there's no breakage in the first place". In other words, an entirely different meaning that what the grandparent meant when they said it was a great phrase for it.
The point that the poster was making was that while the phrase normally refers to its technical development philosophy, it seems that it also seems to reflect Facebook's attitude to other issues, such as regulation and privacy.
I thought it was insightful. Fundamentally, “move fast and break things” means you’re not going to be afraid to do something just because you haven’t thought through all the repercussions yet. Personally I find it easy to see how to, as an engineer...ignore hunches that there might be a security hole or a privacy hole in the interest of pushing things forward. “Move fast and break things” implies that you’ll get something working out the door and you’ll come back and fix it later. When you always move to the next thing, you never really come back and fix all the things you broke.
> Move fast and break things. Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough.
In the technical space, things may be legacy code or APIs. In the business space, things may be ethics and laws, and this incidentally is exactly the model we see in companies like Facebook and Uber and AirBnB.
The phase fundamentally captures an essense of what Umberto Eco and Rober Paxton observed of early 20th century political movements emerging in Italy and Germany.
Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action’s sake. Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes.... No syncretistic faith can withstand analytical criticism. The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge. ...disagreement is treason.
If you notice people working - say, construction - in a particular way, and they're trading safety for speed, and if you weren't concerned with worker-safety, you might consider that tradeoff their business. If you also found that it led them to build buildings that overlapped other people's properties, you might note that the tradeoffs they choose might also lead to that problem.
Especially if you notice that other construction firms are making the same sorts of tradeoffs and also having the same problems.
I'm not saying that firms who "move fast and break things" are inevitably also unethical, shitty companies. Everyone sacrifices QA depth for release at some point. But there's nothing wrong with pointing out many high-profile companies who trumpet their pride of it are, in fact, unethical, shitty companies.
The wrong thing about combining not-very-related things is that you're wasting your ire and offending ethical people at the same time. Great for starting an argument, not so great for convincing people.
BTW, your construction example is terrible. Unsafe construction worksites are illegal, and continuous integration and deployment of software is not.
But they do appear to be related. You see the same things in the same companies, and the commonalities are consistent with treating consequences of the quest for growth at all costs as acceptable. When you have people racing a (real or perceived) time window, they don't stop pushing when humans are involved rather than software.
> your construction example is terrible
Takes all kinds. Including people who intentionally read things obtusely.
Huh. I always interpreted "move fast and break things"
to be referring to the speed of development cycle, as in, SV startups prefer to we deploy new code without really testing everything as thoroughly as an enterprise company might, because time to market is most important and people are forgiving if we break their experience for a short time. I don't think anyone would really fault anyone for that interpretation.
However, if that becomes "do whatever we want to anyone without regards for laws or ethics or customs including directly lying to regulators" as it appears Facebook did then I agree it becomes a problem.
The break-things part is related to the startup meme of disruption too. And as some critic I read once said, many startups disrupt business status quo in the same way that I disrupt the idea of pet-ownership if I steal your dog.
Move fast and break things means don't be afraid to try things that might fail, but it doesn't mean ethics don't matter. There has long been a concern about what facebook does with people's privacy, now there's no doubt they went way too far.
> Move fast and break things means don't be afraid to try things that might fail, but it doesn't mean ethics don't matter.
Sure it does. Move fast and break things means don't be afraid to try new things, but the line isn't "ethical concerns" but rather "legality". There's a whole gray area between what is ethically acceptable and what is legally acceptable, and FB profits in that gray area that other companies are afraid to try because of their corporate values or personal misgivings.
I think Uber's strategy was to go illegal in a big way, presenting a city with a fait accompli of a large number of unlicensed Uber cabs on the street. And then Uber would resist any regulatory efforts through lobbying and in court.
Net neutrality isn't FTC's domain. FTC is the Federal TRADE Commission, which handles stuff like mergers of giant companies, the Do Not Call registry, and identity theft; the FCC, the Federal COMMUNICATIONS Commission, handles things like net neutrality, amateur radio licensing, and selling bands of spectrum.
I think everyone here knows the definition of communications. The parent poster is referring to the position of the current FCC chairman, who is pushing responsibility over to the FTC. It is clear to me, the the parent poster is skeptical of this.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced an agreement on Monday to coordinate their efforts to police the internet once the latter agency has repealed its net neutrality rules.
> Facebook’s competitive advantage is its disregard for ethics. Somehow, Zuckerberg has been able to convince a lot of smart people to do unethical things and build unethical technology, while the competitors have a harder time doing the same.
While I absolutely agree that it's a serious problem, Facebook does not stand out in the business world in this regard. Many in the business world celebrate, rationalize, and embrace this point of view: Making money is all that matters. On HN, until recently I often read the argument that businesses' only responsibility is to make as much money as possible for shareholders and that they have no responsibilities to employees or community. The current U.S. administration openly embraces this view as policy; Rex Tillerson (former oil company CEO) openly stated that US policy was that human rights took a back seat to making money.
For generations, corporations have made money on the labor and the suffering of others, to the point of undermining governments and supporting oppression and murder. Off the top of my head: There was the East India Company in the 19th century, the banana companies in the early 20th century, the businesses that helped the Nazis, the ones who helped and cashed in on right-wing dictators throughout the Cold War, the financial companies who committed massive fraud causing a global recession in 2008, and all the IT companies helping oppressive states like China with their surveillance technology and means of oppression, not to mention Hollywood and other businesses who censor criticism of China.
The question is, why do we normalize and accept this behavior? What is wrong with the morality of business leaders?
(And to be clear, I'm not demonizing all business. Business provides the resources that make advanced nations prosperous, safe, healthy, and connected.)
While I agree I know a few ex Facebook employees and they all, genuinely, believe thst FB cares about user privacy.
I suspect they've convinced good people to go bad with some strange coolade and all those free lunches.
My own strong interjection: Facebook’s competitive advantage is its disregard for ethics. Somehow, Zuckerberg has been able to convince a lot of smart people to do unethical things and build unethical technology, while the competitors have a harder time doing the same. This disregard for ethics has allowed Facebook to “grow at all costs.” Meanwhile, the more conscientious programmers and entrepreneurs (or at least those held more accountable) are busy wrangling with the real challenges and intricacies of civilization. (I personally prefer it that way - I like my work being tied to the well-being of society.)