Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/12/19/facebook-let-netflix-and-spoti.html
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I thought all Mark wanted was to be my friend?
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The good news is that they didn’t turn in any criminals, and if they saw any insider information, they didn’t run right to their stockbroker. Honest.
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That was Tom. Mark just wants to use you,
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And, let’s not forget, Netflix and Spotify read private messages of Facebook users. Amazon took that list of friends’ names and contact information. Yahoo read steams of friends’ posts as recently as this summer.
These companies didn’t have guns to their heads to be complicit, it is possible to say “no, that’s unethical.” I can’t delete my facebook account again, but now I have to go consider whether I want to keep doing business with Netflix.
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#DeleteFacebook
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Yet I keep hearing people saying “I don’t care”.
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Wouldn’t it be great if his private emails were released?
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I saw it coming last week and finished unloading my remaining FB stock. Can’t say it was insider information though, just a well founded belief that the shit show was going to keep going on and on and on and on and…
Yeah, it’s vexing. Deleting facebook is kind of a no-brainer, since it makes your life objectively better with no downside, but it’s trickier with Netflix or even Amazon because there are actual benefits to their services. And if I don’t do anything to make those companies feel like it costs them somehow, then they’ll keep doing this stuff whenever it seems like there’s a few pennies to be made. So that’s hypocritical of me.
OTOH it does feel like I could spend my life quixotically boycotting stuff and never making a difference, because those companies have only ever cared about users who are willing to be treated as an inert commodity. If they wanted to court people who demand to be treated as people, they wouldn’t have founded tech startups in the first place.
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Ugh. And still, Netflix recommendations manage to suck 99%.
But I think I remember that one isolated time where I was like, how could they possibly they know? … that I would like six Barbara Streisand biopics.
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My favourite ever was when it said, “Because you watch Arrested Development, you might like:” and then what followed was the most bizarre assortment of random things. A history documentary, a sitcom, a romcom movie, a made-for-TV action movie about a firefighter forced to fight in a post-apocalyptic arena.
Basically when they made Arrested Development season 4 nearly everyone who had Netflix watched it, so the fact that you watched it provided essentially no information and the algorithm just lost its mind.
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It’s even worse here in Germany, where the catalog is substantially smaller, so you can sometimes feel the algorithm panic, throw up its arms and say, ah, f* it, I’m gonna recommend Transphormants 2. Oh and throw in Arrested Dev, too, won’t hurt anybody.
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Facebook revealed to be doing something evil, it must be a day ending with a y.
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I’d like to thank the moderators here for letting me read all messages that get deleted.
It’s been well worth the $24.99 a month.
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FTFY. Not that I’m completely immune from this kind of behaviour. I’m not on Facebook, but I do use my Gmail account (not my primary e-mail, and not the one I do searches with) as a login on a couple of third-party sites because the integration is convenient. I’m sure they’re poking around despite my countermeasures.
But as nosy as Google is, Facebook takes things to another level and constantly lies about doing so. Being on Facebook is bad enough in terms of selling out one’s privacy to Zuckerberg, but using “Login with Facebook” on other sites* (which I assume is the conduit through which the information was shared) is deliberately identifying oneself as a sucker.
[* Including this one. While I understand why BoingBoing has to have a presence on Facebook and Twitter, and while I trust it not to abuse my data, the BBS having Login with Facebook|Twitter|Google|Yahoo as options sends the wrong message. Perhaps they can’t be turned off in Discourse, but if they can they shouldn’t be offered]
And yet people still use “Login with Facebook”, which I assume is the conduit through which the information was shared.
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