> Meta agreed in August to pay up to $18 billion to settle the multistate lawsuit surrounding child safety issues. Buried in the 130-page settlement was an agreement to release Meta from future liability related to the Cambridge Analytica privacy breach, making New Mexico the only state to pursue a case. Florida was the only other state that did not sign the settlement, saying it was not tough enough on Meta.
This is an inconvenient reminder for people who want more "regulation" and who believe states with high levels of paper regulation like California really care about protecting consumers.
Years down the line, you'll find that a bunch of the people who worked on these cases have cush jobs working on the other side.
The multi-state settlement was a huge loss for Meta.
You are focusing on the money, which is not the important part. The important part is that the settlement just settled that one lawsuit. There are many thousands of individual lawsuits over many of the same issues, mostly by local governments (school districts).
Almost all the work the nearly 50 states in the multi-state lawsuit put in to prepare their case, such as depositions, getting expert reports, their successful legal arguments, the testimony from the trial, etc can be used by the plaintiffs in all those other suits.
This basically gives all those plaintiffs a fully loaded giant legal cannon that was custom built using the vast resources of the Attorney General's offices of almost 50 states specifically as an anti-Meta weapon.
I think the Cambridge Analytica scandal was a big deal, and even used it to reinforce and reprioritize some privacy-focused initiatives at a past job. But I heard some credible voices on social media say that the actual impact was negligible. Anyone know what they mean? Maybe that has some bearing here?
> who believe states with high levels of paper regulation
I _do_ want real regulations with teeth against shitty companies like Meta. Just because California has done a performative take doesn't make expecting more controls on these scumbags a wrong thing to expect. Bad execution doesn't make the idea wrong, your scare-quotes be damned.
I wish HN was more of a reliable aggregator and not just people protecting their industry at all cost
You can reliably tell what the most upvoted comments will be
Does that mean we should always hate on big tech? No. If a platform is getting unfairly targeted, that's nice to know. But you come here to get the general sense of the landscape and the first comment is always slanted in favor of big corporate
Nobody's asking for more bureaucracy, they're asking for these companies to be held properly accountable, which will involve bureaucracy.
Nobody's asking for computers that use a lot of electricity, they're asking for powerful computers, which will use a lot of electricity. You can't just turn up with a space heater and pretend it's the same thing because it also uses a lot of electricity.
This is the Ayn Rand trick; let's make government not work == government can never work well == let's cut all customer protections and end up with unfit for consumption beef and glass in your food == somehow it's still not the fault of the free market since after enough people get sick I guess they'll leave one star reviews on Google from their hospital beds == companies will self regulate to produce healthier food?
Bloat is real. One can simplify an organization while making it more effective. California broadly seems to be in the overcomplicated/ineffective quadrant.
Bloat is real. The point is if there's a regulation that should stop glass contamination in food and it doesn't then the answer isn't 'too much red tape, see?'.
It's that there's clearly been industry capture and the regulations no longer work. It doesn't mean the regulations themselves are automatically the problem.
It also doesn't mean every regulation is good or should exist, but that's not an argument I see anyone actually making. Only some people like to pretend like someone is making that argument, because the actual argument is harder to argue against.
Compared to what? Your string of comments are banal generalities that may or may not apply to this particular situation. Where else in this world at this time, is this particular governmental failing handled materially better?
Singapore? China? Russia? Switzerland? England?
I have sometimes learned interesting things from you (as a commenter) but there is nothing to learn here. It appears to be only diversion and distraction.
Perhaps. But you’d be more persuasive if you proposed ways to achieve the same or more effective controls over corporate abuses, just more efficiently. Instead you come across as a baby/bathwater proponent.
Nobody wants more “regulation” in the abstract, any more than they want more “water” in the abstract (to drink? When drowning? In a drought? In a flood?).
Positioning yourself as zealously in favor of or opposed to abstract concepts like regulation is silly.
> This is an inconvenient reminder for people who want more "regulation"
Some people say they want more “food,” but did you know that consuming calories can lead to obesity?! The existence of fat people is an inconvenient reminder for people who claim to be “malnourished” or “wasting away.”
This is such a stupid libertarian take with a dash of neo-liberalism. The fact these ideologies got so much foothold is the only reason they perpetuate. There's enough shared delusion to intrude on reality. Good regulation takes into account the context of what it is regulating. If it was written pragmatically with penalities in proportion greater than the harm it causes you'd have far fewer companies doing fuck shit.
The penalty should never be less than the profit or approximate value of power gained from the violation. There should be full transparency around the chain of events that constituted the violation and how the resolution was arrived at. No special privileges for mega-corporations. The harm needs to be clearly identified and there should be a process to re-evaluate outcomes that could be reasonably argued are unfair to the victims only.
...what's inconvenient about it? The less "regulation" in dem scary quotes there is, the easier it is for companies to shirk them (and cheaper, too). The only actual argument there can be is that that $18 bn fine will have to ultimately come out of the pockets of the Meta's customers, and perhaps that'll force Meta to adopt even uglier business practices (defying the whole point of regulating it).
> Years down the line, you'll find that a bunch of the people who worked on these cases have cush jobs working on the other side.
Man, I love people on Internet making predictions that will be impossible to disprove for decades, and by that point nobody would care anyhow.
Putting aside the fact that a huge amount of regulation is designed by the most powerful companies to promote and defend their interests, the issue is that regulation, when not enforced, provides a way for corporations to inflict massive harm on individuals and discharge it for pennies on the dollar.
$18 billion was a paltry sum and represents about a month's worth of Meta's revenue. Let that sink in: a month's worth of revenue to discharge liabilities associated with years of massive harm to young people that some legal experts concluded could have reasonably resulted in damages in the high hundreds of billions of dollars, and possibly exceeding $1 trillion.
And as part of the settlement, Meta didn't even have to acknowledge any wrongdoing.
> Man, I love people on Internet making predictions that will be impossible to disprove for decades, and by that point nobody would care anyhow.
You're acting as if there's no precedent for what I stated when the evidence is overwhelming.
A handful of examples for you:
1. Eric Holder, former federal prosecutor, U.S. Attorney for D.C. and Deputy AG. He was a partner at Covington & Burling, where he represented Chiquita Brands in the case over its payments to a Colombian paramilitary group and also represented Uber and Airbnb.
2. Lanny Breuer, head of the DOJ's Criminal Division from 2009 to 2013. He didn't prosecute senior bank executives after the financial crisis and then went on to do white collar defense work as vice chair at Covington & Burling.
3. James Comey, U.S. Attorney for SDNY and Deputy AG. He became general counsel for Lockheed Martin and then Bridgewater Associates before he became FBI Director.
4. Mary Jo White, U.S. Attorney for SDNY. She defended financial institutions at Debevoise & Plimpton afterwards, then chaired the SEC between 2013 and 2017, and then went back to Debevoise.
5. Louis Freeh, federal prosecutor for SDNY, federal judge and FBI Director from 1993 to 2001. He went on to become general counsel credit card company MBNA and later represented Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who was alleged to have received over £1 billion in bribes from BAE Systems for arms deals. In his defense, Freeh argued that the money was actually going into official Saudi government accounts so they weren't bribes. BAE later pleaded guilty to US charges related to false statements and export violations.
If you read my comment carefully, I didn't argue for less regulation. I did suggest that more regulation wasn't the solution.
The quantity isn't the problem here; it's the quality. When the system has been completely corrupted, regulation stops doing what laypeople expect it to do.
Virtually none of the regulation people genuinely concerned about consumers, children, etc. would reasonably ask for will ever be enacted and enforced the way they'd want in today's broken system. The law isn't working for the masses; it's working for the asses.
Respectfully, I also initially thought you were advocating for less regulation.
Further, to me regulation (rules) is legislation, rules, and procedures. Your criticism of this settlement, of a court doing the regulating, shows I need to recalibrate.
TBH, a bit of a face palm for me; eg Roberts Court regularly legislates from the bench.
BREAKING NEWS: Attorneys that successfully reached the top of their fields, and have government experience, are in demand by people and corporations that have legal interactions with governments.
BREAKING NEWS: it's widely-discussed that the revolving door creates potential conflicts of interest and helps facilitate regulatory capture, which is why many observers argue that it has a corrupting influence and is a corrosive threat to democratic society.
And then people wonder why a whole swath of society is for tearing down public institutions, buys into conspiracy theories and is willing to elect the most unqualified people.
There are indeed some revolving door issues, but there is also a lot of people going between government and industry that is perfectly legitimate and expected.
First, unless we are going to limit ourselves to hiring government lawyers for regulatory agencies fresh out of law school where else are we going to get lawyers with significant experience in the field that agency regulates?
Second, especially for political appointees, these government jobs are usually temporary. Where do you expect an experienced say antitrust lawyer working for the government to go when that gig ends?
It really isn't unusual for lawyers to work both plaintiff and defense in the same field. Major law firms often take cases from both plaintiffs and defendants in whatever fields their specialize in.
It might be possible to build a system where there is no switching, but it would have to be quite different. We'd need some way for you to go into government early in your career with assurances that you can stay there for the rest of your career. I can't see a reasonable way to do that.
> We'd need some way for you to go into government early in your career with assurances that you can stay there for the rest of your career.
Prior to the current administration at least, staying in government work for an entire career was more than possible and let's be clear: tons of people do stay in these jobs. Not every government lawyer, SEC employee, etc. goes over to the "dark side".
The problem is not that there is no ability to stay in public service; it's that the financial rewards of going to the other side can be massive and for the most ambitious and money and power-driven, this is a problem because the system isn't nearly as resistant to corruption as Americans would like to believe.
People with intelligence, skill and drive can use public service as a path to lucrative opportunities working for companies and organizations that are diametrically opposed to the public interest.
> Major law firms often take cases from both plaintiffs and defendants in whatever fields their specialize in.
This actually isn't really true in the way you're suggesting. For example, you won't find firms that handle consumer class action defense filing class action lawsuits on behalf of consumers, you won't find firms that sue employers over wage and hour violations also representing employers, etc.
That's why firms in these markets are known as "plaintiff-side" or "defense-side" firms.
> Years down the line, you'll find that a bunch of the people who worked on these cases have cush jobs
Aren't they supposed to be replaced by AI by then?
There won't even be human bodyguards; just Zuck, Musk, Bezos and Rasputin in their Thunderdomes sheltered by swarms of T-800s going StarCraft 3 on our ass
But judge! We can't be a monopoly ["Quickly... delete all instances of 'Instagram can hurt us' emails..."]. Email exists. Mouths exist, people can communicate without using Facebook...
And by the clever move of pitching itself as ride sharing between casual users, don't forget. If they were offering "call a taxi" from the start, the outcome may have been very different. People still say "call an Uber" and not "call a taxi with Uber".
Airbnb did the same thing: Lie that their business was merely about providing a few bucks to people with a spare sofa in their house, rather than what it really was: Enabling setting up illegal hotel businesses.
Probably to similar purposes as the 2024 opioid settlement: housing assistance, schools, subsidized child care. Legislators will probably try to align it with goals that seem like they would counter the stuff Meta's doing. Smaller communities will probably fail to allocate it promptly.
I am sure instead of more bombs, missiles and other military stuff, they will invest it into the public good, education for citizens, and infrastructure. No one will line their pockets. Not in the US. No, no, they will use that money to make things better. for all the people abused by tech giants. I am so sure of it.
So far all these fines have been "ugh that's one day of net profits only",
be it at Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook - you name it. Are there kickbacks
involved to keep the fines at a minimum?
Yeah, fully agree. Fines for companies bigger than a certain threshold should be percentages of their global annual income and potentially include jail time for the decision makers that enabled them.
As long as these are the incentives companies/execs will continue to do this shit
This is much more important than the fines. But really it should be widened to include not only those who made the decision but also those who implemented it (software developers, designers, project managers) and those who benefited from it (executive officers, shareholders).
Anyone involved with the company who knew what was going on and did nothing to hinder it is culpable to some degree.
With the rank and file I am not 100% sure. I mean, they get paid a fraction of execs and potentially don't have the whole picture.
Additionally, it is really hard to draw a line. For instance, I can develop some logic that could take a screenshot of your phone. It is perfectly fine for debug builds or with explicit user consent while using an app to provide some additional context on some issue. The same logic used to spy on users is not.
I "enable" them, but I won't consider myself responsible or even remotely involved.
I mean, with few exceptions, most people know what they are ultimately working on. I've never encountered someone in an actual company who could truly say "I just convert protobufs at one layer to JSON at another layer, and have no idea what this code is being applied to..."
The key to this story is in the word "liable." That's lawyer-speak for a civil, not criminal, legal judgment. The loser must pay money, no one goes to jail, and Meta has so much money that the judgment means nothing.
Meta already pays billions to gain access to people's personal data. This is just another business expense, a line item on a balance sheet.
When faced with an adverse ruling, an individual raises his hands, is handcuffed and led away. A corporation raises its prices.
Standard PSA: Cambridge Analytica electing Trump is not a true story. Cambridge Analytica absolutely broke Facebook's terms of service with its personality quiz scheme but it did not affect the 2016 election.
I'm an advertiser who has managed hundreds of millions of dollars for small startups and big corporations, brands, as well as a few small political campaigns.
Even at the time of the Trump election, the kind of ad targeting that Cambridge Analytica says they were offering through the personality quizzes was absolute garbage. There is a reason why the official response from Boz doesn't even mention the personality quiz stuff, because it was essentially irrelevant to the Trump campaign's performance on paid advertising on Meta. And I would go further to say that, except for his success in fundraising, all of his Meta advertising probably didn't move that many votes.
Cambridge Analytica, the organization, of course, loves to claim that they're the dark evil viziers behind the Trump campaign and they've advertised themselves as such to dictators all over the world. But that's just like Edward Bernays writing "Propaganda" back in the day, it is a way to sell their services. Trump digital director Brad Parscale said the campaign did not even use Cambridge Analytica’s controversial psychographic targeting.
Not to mention, the only reason that Cambridge Analytica had that open graph information available is because communities like Hacker News begged again and again for Facebook to open the graph and not have a walled web. After that they cut off that graph access.
Quizzes had like an 85% engagement rate on Facebook, they were legendarily effective paid eyeballs content. Adtech firm System1 aka OpenMail even merged with an adtech firm that owned a quiz content company, it made like $1m/2wks at small scale. I don't really know what Cambridge Analytica concretely did (to this day I have not seen a single screenshot of any of their creatives or a single concrete report of theirs) but I do know quizzes were really effective. For whatever purposes.
Yes they had a high engagement rate (due to how the platforms were structured at the time and how hyper-shareable it was) and you could make some money serving ads on quizzes because they had a high engagement rate. They were absolutely terrible as an ad targeting methodology.
I don't know how you would be able to tell, you've never won an election, how would you know what is important for being elected? It's not something a chatbot knows about either.
If you go find the original ones it’s all about defending Facebook. Basically you can’t give our data to a competitor or build one. There’s a reason they had to quickly release a new ToS and its cause CA didn’t break it.
My understanding of the story [1] is the CA claimed it was collecting data for psychology research, then turned around and used the data for political consulting.
> Cambridge Analytica then arranged an informed consent process for research in which several hundred thousand Facebook users would agree to complete a survey for payment that was only for academic use.
I mean the data was collected in 2013 and then used in 2016 for political consulting. I have to imagine the guy actually did try doing psychology research and then realized it was a dead end (or that the psychology pointed out you could predict voters).
> the only reason that Cambridge Analytica had that open graph information available is because communities like Hacker News begged again and again for Facebook to open the graph and not have a walled web.
This isn’t true. All the early Facebook access revolved around engagement and anything even remotely related to data portability was verboten.
Anything remotely related to data portability was verboten?
Here is Facebook's own CTO in 2010 on HN itself saying “First, we genuinely support data portability: we want users to be able to use their data in other applications without restriction.”
> Anything remotely related to data portability was verboten?
Yes. Please read the entire sentence before replying:
> All the early Facebook access revolved around engagement and anything even remotely related to data portability was verboten.
2010 is years after the Facebook platform was launched.
Regardless, as people in that thread pointed out at the time, what he is referring to is not data portability. If you were building on the Facebook platform at the time, you would know that apps had pretty much free reign to soak up the personal info but the main thing people cared about in terms of data portability was the ability to use the social graph outside of Facebook. Facebook hated the idea because it would allow competitors to bootstrap their own social graph without having to find and re-add all their friends, so it was the one thing that everybody knew could get you booted off the platform.
*Guy that knows more than everybody else voice* Uhm actually it was called The Facebook at the time so this discussion by people that are embarrassingly ignorant of the nomenclature is very laughable to me, a expert
Facebook and Google were one of the first major online services offering an "takeout" feature in service of data portability. FB had multiple rss feeds. It's graph API was around quite early due to demand.
My understanding of the internet is Google is extremely flawed but fair and they didn't try to hold you hostage
Facebook is not fair and they actively do (ever try deleting an account? surprise! it's back a few months later. look at how many users we have, as measure of our success)
> Facebook and Google were one of the first major online services offering an "takeout" feature in service of data portability. FB had multiple rss feeds. It's graph API was around quite early due to demand.
There was a period of time years before the Graph API launched that was all over the place. Facebook couldn't decide how they wanted their platform to work, so they cycled through a bunch of ideas like APIs, FBML, etc. before “Operation Developer Love” and the Graph API happened. Until that point, you could access a load of personal info, but the data portability everybody cared about – the social graph – was off the table because competitors could use it to bootstrap their own social graph without users having to find and re-add all their friends again. You tried to mirror that, you risked losing your account.
You're right that the tools were hype, and that they didn't work. So why, despite knowing that Cambridge Analytica tools were useless, did Trumo keep paying it?
Well, Robert and Rebekah Mercer were primary backers of the Trump campaign, and they also owned a major stake in Cambridge Analytica. Giving something like $49 million dollars to Trump and Co.
There were actual crimes but it was essentially the Russian government hacking email campaigns related to Hillary Clinton and drip-feeding them to the press. On the ad side there's none that I'm aware of.
From the article: "Jurors also found Facebook misled the public about investigations into data brokers following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, finding the company liable for over 2 million violations."
A jury just found that there were more than 43 million crimes (total) committed on the ad side. I think you're saying that the illegal data collection wasn't related to the advertising end, but it was. That's why they did it. Whether it was actually useful or not is irrelevant.
More importantly to me, the billionaires using it to launder their bribes to the US president probably won't ever be convicted, but that does not mean they aren't just low class crooks who can afford good lawyers.
> Cambridge Analytica, the organization, of course, loves to claim that they're the dark evil viziers behind the Trump campaign and they've advertised themselves as such to dictators all over the world.
That’s just a link to full Wikipedia page for the company. I must admit that I would be personally interested in seeing a vaguely scientific analysis of the effect they had. For all the talk on the subject I have yet to see any real analysis backed by data on the subject.
Well please share. CA sold a service to anyone who would pay. The world of advertising is full of expensive solutions that don’t really do anything. In many ways politics is harder than selling an actual product since everyone already knows their options and the choice costs them nothing. For all the hype I have yet to see anyone contest the null hypothesis that it was yet another waste of marketing spend.
I think the point is that jury members have to be objective at all times. So you would do him a favour by being not objective, since the ruling may be overturned and dismissed. So, stay objective.
Then again the whole court system is so skewed in favour of who has more money.
The data wasn't "scraped." Here's the part you left out describing what really happened:
> Aleksandr Kogan, a data scientist at the University of Cambridge, was hired by Cambridge Analytica, an offshoot of SCL Group, to develop an app called "This Is Your Digital Life" (sometimes stylized as "thisisyourdigitallife").[15][16] Cambridge Analytica then arranged an informed consent process for research in which several hundred thousand Facebook users would agree to complete a survey for payment that was only for academic use.[15][17] However, Facebook allowed this app not only to collect personal information from survey respondents but also from respondents' Facebook friends.[15] In this way, Cambridge Analytica acquired data from millions of Facebook users.[15]
> (public profile), [private] page likes, [possibly private] birthday and [possibly private] current city
?
(I've put in my best understanding of the other elements. AIUI, you can make the latter two public, but if I recall the scandal, that wasn't what occurred.)
> "Let this be a warning to every technology company doing business in our state," Torrez said Friday. "If you lie to New Mexicans about how you use their data, we will find out, and we will hold you accountable."
This is a great way to get companies to simply stop operating in your state, but keep operating everywhere else.
> Meta agreed in August to pay up to $18 billion to settle the multistate lawsuit surrounding child safety issues. Buried in the 130-page settlement was an agreement to release Meta from future liability related to the Cambridge Analytica privacy breach, making New Mexico the only state to pursue a case. Florida was the only other state that did not sign the settlement, saying it was not tough enough on Meta.
This is an inconvenient reminder for people who want more "regulation" and who believe states with high levels of paper regulation like California really care about protecting consumers.
Years down the line, you'll find that a bunch of the people who worked on these cases have cush jobs working on the other side.
The multi-state settlement was a huge loss for Meta.
You are focusing on the money, which is not the important part. The important part is that the settlement just settled that one lawsuit. There are many thousands of individual lawsuits over many of the same issues, mostly by local governments (school districts).
Almost all the work the nearly 50 states in the multi-state lawsuit put in to prepare their case, such as depositions, getting expert reports, their successful legal arguments, the testimony from the trial, etc can be used by the plaintiffs in all those other suits.
This basically gives all those plaintiffs a fully loaded giant legal cannon that was custom built using the vast resources of the Attorney General's offices of almost 50 states specifically as an anti-Meta weapon.
Why do you have to get our hopes up? (:->
Stop framing bad regulation as a case against good regulation.
Yes and: Regulation is just a scary word for rules.
I think the Cambridge Analytica scandal was a big deal, and even used it to reinforce and reprioritize some privacy-focused initiatives at a past job. But I heard some credible voices on social media say that the actual impact was negligible. Anyone know what they mean? Maybe that has some bearing here?
How is this:
> people who want more "regulation"
Same as this:
> who believe states with high levels of paper regulation
I _do_ want real regulations with teeth against shitty companies like Meta. Just because California has done a performative take doesn't make expecting more controls on these scumbags a wrong thing to expect. Bad execution doesn't make the idea wrong, your scare-quotes be damned.
I wish HN was more of a reliable aggregator and not just people protecting their industry at all cost
You can reliably tell what the most upvoted comments will be
Does that mean we should always hate on big tech? No. If a platform is getting unfairly targeted, that's nice to know. But you come here to get the general sense of the landscape and the first comment is always slanted in favor of big corporate
> Bad execution doesn't make the idea wrong
It does raise the question of the value of California’s bureaucratic burden.
Nobody's asking for more bureaucracy, they're asking for these companies to be held properly accountable, which will involve bureaucracy.
Nobody's asking for computers that use a lot of electricity, they're asking for powerful computers, which will use a lot of electricity. You can't just turn up with a space heater and pretend it's the same thing because it also uses a lot of electricity.
Bureaucrats are absolutely asking for more bureaucratic systems. The incentive is clear
I don't think I've ever seen that. Lobbyists and legislators, absolutely.
But my experience is that admins mostly want the rules to be clear and simple.
Is the incentive genuine? Is it load-bearing?
> Nobody's asking for more bureaucracy
Very few are also asking for less bureaucracy, which in this case could potentially increase state capacity to pursue civic goals.
Indeed, nobody here is asking for less bureaucracy in regard to this situation because it wouldn't solve anything.
What is the actual problem being solved though?
That Facebook sells a lot of data
what's all the cut the red tape talk from _insert lots of groups/demographics here_ then?
This is the Ayn Rand trick; let's make government not work == government can never work well == let's cut all customer protections and end up with unfit for consumption beef and glass in your food == somehow it's still not the fault of the free market since after enough people get sick I guess they'll leave one star reviews on Google from their hospital beds == companies will self regulate to produce healthier food?
Bloat is real. One can simplify an organization while making it more effective. California broadly seems to be in the overcomplicated/ineffective quadrant.
Bloat is real. The point is if there's a regulation that should stop glass contamination in food and it doesn't then the answer isn't 'too much red tape, see?'.
It's that there's clearly been industry capture and the regulations no longer work. It doesn't mean the regulations themselves are automatically the problem.
It also doesn't mean every regulation is good or should exist, but that's not an argument I see anyone actually making. Only some people like to pretend like someone is making that argument, because the actual argument is harder to argue against.
"... seems to be ..."
Compared to what? Your string of comments are banal generalities that may or may not apply to this particular situation. Where else in this world at this time, is this particular governmental failing handled materially better?
Singapore? China? Russia? Switzerland? England?
I have sometimes learned interesting things from you (as a commenter) but there is nothing to learn here. It appears to be only diversion and distraction.
Perhaps. But you’d be more persuasive if you proposed ways to achieve the same or more effective controls over corporate abuses, just more efficiently. Instead you come across as a baby/bathwater proponent.
let's make capitalism == everything is for sale == let's buy government == let's make government work for the buyer == government works well ==...
Net neutrality is also a form of regulation. Are you against it?
Nobody wants more “regulation” in the abstract, any more than they want more “water” in the abstract (to drink? When drowning? In a drought? In a flood?).
Positioning yourself as zealously in favor of or opposed to abstract concepts like regulation is silly.
[dead]
> This is an inconvenient reminder for people who want more "regulation"
Some people say they want more “food,” but did you know that consuming calories can lead to obesity?! The existence of fat people is an inconvenient reminder for people who claim to be “malnourished” or “wasting away.”
This is such a stupid libertarian take with a dash of neo-liberalism. The fact these ideologies got so much foothold is the only reason they perpetuate. There's enough shared delusion to intrude on reality. Good regulation takes into account the context of what it is regulating. If it was written pragmatically with penalities in proportion greater than the harm it causes you'd have far fewer companies doing fuck shit.
The penalty should never be less than the profit or approximate value of power gained from the violation. There should be full transparency around the chain of events that constituted the violation and how the resolution was arrived at. No special privileges for mega-corporations. The harm needs to be clearly identified and there should be a process to re-evaluate outcomes that could be reasonably argued are unfair to the victims only.
...what's inconvenient about it? The less "regulation" in dem scary quotes there is, the easier it is for companies to shirk them (and cheaper, too). The only actual argument there can be is that that $18 bn fine will have to ultimately come out of the pockets of the Meta's customers, and perhaps that'll force Meta to adopt even uglier business practices (defying the whole point of regulating it).
> Years down the line, you'll find that a bunch of the people who worked on these cases have cush jobs working on the other side.
Man, I love people on Internet making predictions that will be impossible to disprove for decades, and by that point nobody would care anyhow.
> ...what's inconvenient about it?
Putting aside the fact that a huge amount of regulation is designed by the most powerful companies to promote and defend their interests, the issue is that regulation, when not enforced, provides a way for corporations to inflict massive harm on individuals and discharge it for pennies on the dollar.
$18 billion was a paltry sum and represents about a month's worth of Meta's revenue. Let that sink in: a month's worth of revenue to discharge liabilities associated with years of massive harm to young people that some legal experts concluded could have reasonably resulted in damages in the high hundreds of billions of dollars, and possibly exceeding $1 trillion.
And as part of the settlement, Meta didn't even have to acknowledge any wrongdoing.
> Man, I love people on Internet making predictions that will be impossible to disprove for decades, and by that point nobody would care anyhow.
You're acting as if there's no precedent for what I stated when the evidence is overwhelming.
A handful of examples for you:
1. Eric Holder, former federal prosecutor, U.S. Attorney for D.C. and Deputy AG. He was a partner at Covington & Burling, where he represented Chiquita Brands in the case over its payments to a Colombian paramilitary group and also represented Uber and Airbnb.
2. Lanny Breuer, head of the DOJ's Criminal Division from 2009 to 2013. He didn't prosecute senior bank executives after the financial crisis and then went on to do white collar defense work as vice chair at Covington & Burling.
3. James Comey, U.S. Attorney for SDNY and Deputy AG. He became general counsel for Lockheed Martin and then Bridgewater Associates before he became FBI Director.
4. Mary Jo White, U.S. Attorney for SDNY. She defended financial institutions at Debevoise & Plimpton afterwards, then chaired the SEC between 2013 and 2017, and then went back to Debevoise.
5. Louis Freeh, federal prosecutor for SDNY, federal judge and FBI Director from 1993 to 2001. He went on to become general counsel credit card company MBNA and later represented Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who was alleged to have received over £1 billion in bribes from BAE Systems for arms deals. In his defense, Freeh argued that the money was actually going into official Saudi government accounts so they weren't bribes. BAE later pleaded guilty to US charges related to false statements and export violations.
Revolving doors in the US have gold handles.
> And as part of the settlement, Meta didn't even have to acknowledge any wrongdoing.
So there are assholes who give up your birth right for a plate of lentils, and that makes you conclude there should be less regulation?
> Revolving doors in the US have gold handles.
That just requires some extra rules. No, I'm not being sarcastic.
If you read my comment carefully, I didn't argue for less regulation. I did suggest that more regulation wasn't the solution.
The quantity isn't the problem here; it's the quality. When the system has been completely corrupted, regulation stops doing what laypeople expect it to do.
Virtually none of the regulation people genuinely concerned about consumers, children, etc. would reasonably ask for will ever be enacted and enforced the way they'd want in today's broken system. The law isn't working for the masses; it's working for the asses.
Respectfully, I also initially thought you were advocating for less regulation.
Further, to me regulation (rules) is legislation, rules, and procedures. Your criticism of this settlement, of a court doing the regulating, shows I need to recalibrate.
TBH, a bit of a face palm for me; eg Roberts Court regularly legislates from the bench.
Now that's one heck of a mixed metaphor. Kudos.
BREAKING NEWS: Attorneys that successfully reached the top of their fields, and have government experience, are in demand by people and corporations that have legal interactions with governments.
Who woulda thunk it?
BREAKING NEWS: it's widely-discussed that the revolving door creates potential conflicts of interest and helps facilitate regulatory capture, which is why many observers argue that it has a corrupting influence and is a corrosive threat to democratic society.
And then people wonder why a whole swath of society is for tearing down public institutions, buys into conspiracy theories and is willing to elect the most unqualified people.
There are indeed some revolving door issues, but there is also a lot of people going between government and industry that is perfectly legitimate and expected.
First, unless we are going to limit ourselves to hiring government lawyers for regulatory agencies fresh out of law school where else are we going to get lawyers with significant experience in the field that agency regulates?
Second, especially for political appointees, these government jobs are usually temporary. Where do you expect an experienced say antitrust lawyer working for the government to go when that gig ends?
It really isn't unusual for lawyers to work both plaintiff and defense in the same field. Major law firms often take cases from both plaintiffs and defendants in whatever fields their specialize in.
It might be possible to build a system where there is no switching, but it would have to be quite different. We'd need some way for you to go into government early in your career with assurances that you can stay there for the rest of your career. I can't see a reasonable way to do that.
> We'd need some way for you to go into government early in your career with assurances that you can stay there for the rest of your career.
Prior to the current administration at least, staying in government work for an entire career was more than possible and let's be clear: tons of people do stay in these jobs. Not every government lawyer, SEC employee, etc. goes over to the "dark side".
The problem is not that there is no ability to stay in public service; it's that the financial rewards of going to the other side can be massive and for the most ambitious and money and power-driven, this is a problem because the system isn't nearly as resistant to corruption as Americans would like to believe.
People with intelligence, skill and drive can use public service as a path to lucrative opportunities working for companies and organizations that are diametrically opposed to the public interest.
> Major law firms often take cases from both plaintiffs and defendants in whatever fields their specialize in.
This actually isn't really true in the way you're suggesting. For example, you won't find firms that handle consumer class action defense filing class action lawsuits on behalf of consumers, you won't find firms that sue employers over wage and hour violations also representing employers, etc.
That's why firms in these markets are known as "plaintiff-side" or "defense-side" firms.
Maybe dont have them written by companies then.
It's not that simple, it's very difficult to prevent that from happening.
> Years down the line, you'll find that a bunch of the people who worked on these cases have cush jobs
Aren't they supposed to be replaced by AI by then?
There won't even be human bodyguards; just Zuck, Musk, Bezos and Rasputin in their Thunderdomes sheltered by swarms of T-800s going StarCraft 3 on our ass
I say let them. They're not keeping us away from them - they're keeping themselves away from us, as it should be.
This was 10 years ago. Pretty crazy that this is finally seeing the justice system.
Reminds me of that FOIA request a guy filed when he had his kid and did not receive reply/confirmation until his kid was in college...
Prolong is a legal tactic
But judge! We can't be a monopoly ["Quickly... delete all instances of 'Instagram can hurt us' emails..."]. Email exists. Mouths exist, people can communicate without using Facebook...
(Yeah, 'Book. We know email exists. You apparently don't. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433)
Move fast and break t̶h̶i̶n̶g̶s̶ the law. Because the law moves very slowly.
I genuinely thought that was the baseline assumption in that statement.
Uber only exists because it ignored taxi regulations long enough to be too big to kill, right?
And by the clever move of pitching itself as ride sharing between casual users, don't forget. If they were offering "call a taxi" from the start, the outcome may have been very different. People still say "call an Uber" and not "call a taxi with Uber".
Airbnb did the same thing: Lie that their business was merely about providing a few bucks to people with a spare sofa in their house, rather than what it really was: Enabling setting up illegal hotel businesses.
Didn't Spotify also start by streaming a whole bunch of pirated music?
We'll probably see similar decisions on misbehavings of major LLM companies ~2036, when it won't matter anymore.
10-years old ago thing? Yeah, so fast. And what exactly will the settlement money go to?
Probably to similar purposes as the 2024 opioid settlement: housing assistance, schools, subsidized child care. Legislators will probably try to align it with goals that seem like they would counter the stuff Meta's doing. Smaller communities will probably fail to allocate it promptly.
I am sure instead of more bombs, missiles and other military stuff, they will invest it into the public good, education for citizens, and infrastructure. No one will line their pockets. Not in the US. No, no, they will use that money to make things better. for all the people abused by tech giants. I am so sure of it.
Is the USA even still producing bombs and missiles? Last I heard it's completely ineffective due to all the corruption (same as Russia's problem).
How about real fines?
So far all these fines have been "ugh that's one day of net profits only", be it at Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook - you name it. Are there kickbacks involved to keep the fines at a minimum?
Yeah, fully agree. Fines for companies bigger than a certain threshold should be percentages of their global annual income and potentially include jail time for the decision makers that enabled them.
As long as these are the incentives companies/execs will continue to do this shit
> include jail time for the decision makers
This is much more important than the fines. But really it should be widened to include not only those who made the decision but also those who implemented it (software developers, designers, project managers) and those who benefited from it (executive officers, shareholders).
Anyone involved with the company who knew what was going on and did nothing to hinder it is culpable to some degree.
With the rank and file I am not 100% sure. I mean, they get paid a fraction of execs and potentially don't have the whole picture.
Additionally, it is really hard to draw a line. For instance, I can develop some logic that could take a screenshot of your phone. It is perfectly fine for debug builds or with explicit user consent while using an app to provide some additional context on some issue. The same logic used to spy on users is not.
I "enable" them, but I won't consider myself responsible or even remotely involved.
You'd have to individually prove that each person charged knew what was going on, and that could be difficult. And rightfully so.
I mean, with few exceptions, most people know what they are ultimately working on. I've never encountered someone in an actual company who could truly say "I just convert protobufs at one layer to JSON at another layer, and have no idea what this code is being applied to..."
The key to this story is in the word "liable." That's lawyer-speak for a civil, not criminal, legal judgment. The loser must pay money, no one goes to jail, and Meta has so much money that the judgment means nothing.
Meta already pays billions to gain access to people's personal data. This is just another business expense, a line item on a balance sheet.
When faced with an adverse ruling, an individual raises his hands, is handcuffed and led away. A corporation raises its prices.
Standard PSA: Cambridge Analytica electing Trump is not a true story. Cambridge Analytica absolutely broke Facebook's terms of service with its personality quiz scheme but it did not affect the 2016 election.
I'm an advertiser who has managed hundreds of millions of dollars for small startups and big corporations, brands, as well as a few small political campaigns.
Even at the time of the Trump election, the kind of ad targeting that Cambridge Analytica says they were offering through the personality quizzes was absolute garbage. There is a reason why the official response from Boz doesn't even mention the personality quiz stuff, because it was essentially irrelevant to the Trump campaign's performance on paid advertising on Meta. And I would go further to say that, except for his success in fundraising, all of his Meta advertising probably didn't move that many votes.
Cambridge Analytica, the organization, of course, loves to claim that they're the dark evil viziers behind the Trump campaign and they've advertised themselves as such to dictators all over the world. But that's just like Edward Bernays writing "Propaganda" back in the day, it is a way to sell their services. Trump digital director Brad Parscale said the campaign did not even use Cambridge Analytica’s controversial psychographic targeting.
Not to mention, the only reason that Cambridge Analytica had that open graph information available is because communities like Hacker News begged again and again for Facebook to open the graph and not have a walled web. After that they cut off that graph access.
Quizzes had like an 85% engagement rate on Facebook, they were legendarily effective paid eyeballs content. Adtech firm System1 aka OpenMail even merged with an adtech firm that owned a quiz content company, it made like $1m/2wks at small scale. I don't really know what Cambridge Analytica concretely did (to this day I have not seen a single screenshot of any of their creatives or a single concrete report of theirs) but I do know quizzes were really effective. For whatever purposes.
Yes they had a high engagement rate (due to how the platforms were structured at the time and how hyper-shareable it was) and you could make some money serving ads on quizzes because they had a high engagement rate. They were absolutely terrible as an ad targeting methodology.
Have you seen one of their quizzes?
I don't know if they were making an ad targeting solution. An ad targeting and voter targeting solution are different things.
All I am saying is I'd reserve your professional judgement until you've actually seen what they were doing.
Yes I have seen their quizzes and examples of how they work and and how it's supposed to feed into ad targeting in theory
Can you share a link to one?
I don't know how you would be able to tell, you've never won an election, how would you know what is important for being elected? It's not something a chatbot knows about either.
Cambridge Analytica didn’t break the TOS.
If you go find the original ones it’s all about defending Facebook. Basically you can’t give our data to a competitor or build one. There’s a reason they had to quickly release a new ToS and its cause CA didn’t break it.
My understanding of the story [1] is the CA claimed it was collecting data for psychology research, then turned around and used the data for political consulting.
> Cambridge Analytica then arranged an informed consent process for research in which several hundred thousand Facebook users would agree to complete a survey for payment that was only for academic use.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...
I mean the data was collected in 2013 and then used in 2016 for political consulting. I have to imagine the guy actually did try doing psychology research and then realized it was a dead end (or that the psychology pointed out you could predict voters).
> the only reason that Cambridge Analytica had that open graph information available is because communities like Hacker News begged again and again for Facebook to open the graph and not have a walled web.
This isn’t true. All the early Facebook access revolved around engagement and anything even remotely related to data portability was verboten.
Anything remotely related to data portability was verboten?
Here is Facebook's own CTO in 2010 on HN itself saying “First, we genuinely support data portability: we want users to be able to use their data in other applications without restriction.”
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1440154
> Anything remotely related to data portability was verboten?
Yes. Please read the entire sentence before replying:
> All the early Facebook access revolved around engagement and anything even remotely related to data portability was verboten.
2010 is years after the Facebook platform was launched.
Regardless, as people in that thread pointed out at the time, what he is referring to is not data portability. If you were building on the Facebook platform at the time, you would know that apps had pretty much free reign to soak up the personal info but the main thing people cared about in terms of data portability was the ability to use the social graph outside of Facebook. Facebook hated the idea because it would allow competitors to bootstrap their own social graph without having to find and re-add all their friends, so it was the one thing that everybody knew could get you booted off the platform.
*Guy that knows more than everybody else voice* Uhm actually it was called The Facebook at the time so this discussion by people that are embarrassingly ignorant of the nomenclature is very laughable to me, a expert
Are you ok?
Facebook and Google were one of the first major online services offering an "takeout" feature in service of data portability. FB had multiple rss feeds. It's graph API was around quite early due to demand.
My understanding of the internet is Google is extremely flawed but fair and they didn't try to hold you hostage
Facebook is not fair and they actively do (ever try deleting an account? surprise! it's back a few months later. look at how many users we have, as measure of our success)
There's this for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1890164
> Are you ok?
What do you mean?
> Facebook and Google were one of the first major online services offering an "takeout" feature in service of data portability. FB had multiple rss feeds. It's graph API was around quite early due to demand.
There was a period of time years before the Graph API launched that was all over the place. Facebook couldn't decide how they wanted their platform to work, so they cycled through a bunch of ideas like APIs, FBML, etc. before “Operation Developer Love” and the Graph API happened. Until that point, you could access a load of personal info, but the data portability everybody cared about – the social graph – was off the table because competitors could use it to bootstrap their own social graph without users having to find and re-add all their friends again. You tried to mirror that, you risked losing your account.
You may be missing the actual crimes.
You're right that the tools were hype, and that they didn't work. So why, despite knowing that Cambridge Analytica tools were useless, did Trumo keep paying it?
Well, Robert and Rebekah Mercer were primary backers of the Trump campaign, and they also owned a major stake in Cambridge Analytica. Giving something like $49 million dollars to Trump and Co.
What are the odds they made a profit on the deal?
There were actual crimes but it was essentially the Russian government hacking email campaigns related to Hillary Clinton and drip-feeding them to the press. On the ad side there's none that I'm aware of.
From the article: "Jurors also found Facebook misled the public about investigations into data brokers following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, finding the company liable for over 2 million violations."
A jury just found that there were more than 43 million crimes (total) committed on the ad side. I think you're saying that the illegal data collection wasn't related to the advertising end, but it was. That's why they did it. Whether it was actually useful or not is irrelevant.
More importantly to me, the billionaires using it to launder their bribes to the US president probably won't ever be convicted, but that does not mean they aren't just low class crooks who can afford good lawyers.
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> Cambridge Analytica, the organization, of course, loves to claim that they're the dark evil viziers behind the Trump campaign and they've advertised themselves as such to dictators all over the world.
Aren't they defunct [1]?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica#:~:text=De...
Yes but the founders and related people are still very happy not to disabuse the notion of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
> it did not affect the 2016 election.
This is false.
> all of his Meta advertising
You don't appear to have any understanding of how Cambridge Analytica affected the election.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica
That’s just a link to full Wikipedia page for the company. I must admit that I would be personally interested in seeing a vaguely scientific analysis of the effect they had. For all the talk on the subject I have yet to see any real analysis backed by data on the subject.
I know what it is. One can read it and see that CA's effect wasn't just "all of [Trump's] Meta advertising".
Well please share. CA sold a service to anyone who would pay. The world of advertising is full of expensive solutions that don’t really do anything. In many ways politics is harder than selling an actual product since everyone already knows their options and the choice costs them nothing. For all the hype I have yet to see anyone contest the null hypothesis that it was yet another waste of marketing spend.
Nothing in that Wikipedia link disagrees with me at all.
This guy made the exact same comment 12 days ago ... that one was flagged and is dead.
Yes and I thought it was very unfair that I was flagged for taking a lot of time and effort to make an accurate comment.
I for one thank you for your insider view. It makes HN comments worth reading.
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If I was on any jury ever I would vote Zuckberger guilty of everything. He is a creature of nepotism, a monster of a broken system.
I think the point is that jury members have to be objective at all times. So you would do him a favour by being not objective, since the ruling may be overturned and dismissed. So, stay objective.
Then again the whole court system is so skewed in favour of who has more money.
Do they? What happens if you do the opposite of jury nullification and find someone guilty who's innocent?
Not defending Mr. Mark but what’s the nepotism angle to his story?
Since these articles tend to actually bury the data that was scraped:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...This information was limited to what was publicly accessible on the site rather than some private data as many outlets tend to claim.
The data wasn't "scraped." Here's the part you left out describing what really happened:
> Aleksandr Kogan, a data scientist at the University of Cambridge, was hired by Cambridge Analytica, an offshoot of SCL Group, to develop an app called "This Is Your Digital Life" (sometimes stylized as "thisisyourdigitallife").[15][16] Cambridge Analytica then arranged an informed consent process for research in which several hundred thousand Facebook users would agree to complete a survey for payment that was only for academic use.[15][17] However, Facebook allowed this app not only to collect personal information from survey respondents but also from respondents' Facebook friends.[15] In this way, Cambridge Analytica acquired data from millions of Facebook users.[15]
Is that not parsed as,
> (public profile), [private] page likes, [possibly private] birthday and [possibly private] current city
?
(I've put in my best understanding of the other elements. AIUI, you can make the latter two public, but if I recall the scandal, that wasn't what occurred.)
I am not sure that this is the case.
The app had access to data about the friends of its participants.
AFAIR that included attributes that were set “friends-only”.
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> "Let this be a warning to every technology company doing business in our state," Torrez said Friday. "If you lie to New Mexicans about how you use their data, we will find out, and we will hold you accountable."
This is a great way to get companies to simply stop operating in your state, but keep operating everywhere else.
Great, we don’t want companies that break the law here in NM
"If you stop me from smoking up fentanyl in front of your store, im only going to smoke up fentanyl outside other stores and not yours!"
Thatd be nice yeah
Promise?
Sounds like it's working exactly as intended.
Is that a problem?
Cyberpunk 2077 in all states except New Mexico.