Facebook | Infinite DiariesInfinite Diaries

Facebook Demanding Some New Users’ Email Passwords →

April 3, 2019 · 18:42

Kevin Poulsen:

Just two weeks after admitting it stored hundreds of millions of its users’ own passwords insecurely, Facebook is demanding some users fork over the password for their outside email account as the price of admission to the social network.

Facebook users are being interrupted by an interstitial demanding they provide the password for the email account they gave to Facebook when signing up. “To continue using Facebook, you’ll need to confirm your email,” the message demands. “Since you signed up with [email address], you can do that automatically …”

A form below the message asked for the users’ “email password.”

“That’s beyond sketchy,” security consultant Jake Williams told the Daily Beast. “They should not be taking your password or handling your password in the background. If that’s what’s required to sign up with Facebook, you’re better off not being on Facebook.”

The people running Facebook need to be criminally charged for all the wrong that they’ve done and continue to do.

And please just go and delete your Facebook account.

The Secret Lives of Facebook Moderators in America →

March 1, 2019 · 10:41

Casey Newton, for The Verge:

The panic attacks started after Chloe watched a man die.

She spent the past three and a half weeks in training, trying to harden herself against the daily onslaught of disturbing posts: the hate speech, the violent attacks, the graphic pornography. In a few more days, she will become a full-time Facebook content moderator, or what the company she works for, a professional services vendor named Cognizant, opaquely calls a “process executive.”

For this portion of her education, Chloe will have to moderate a Facebook post in front of her fellow trainees. When it’s her turn, she walks to the front of the room, where a monitor displays a video that has been posted to the world’s largest social network. None of the trainees have seen it before, Chloe included. She presses play.

The video depicts a man being murdered. Someone is stabbing him, dozens of times, while he screams and begs for his life. Chloe’s job is to tell the room whether this post should be removed. She knows that section 13 of the Facebook community standards prohibits videos that depict the murder of one or more people. When Chloe explains this to the class, she hears her voice shaking.

The health consequences resulting from this job must be horrifying, both mental and physical.

Apple Blocks Facebook From Running Its Internal iOS Apps →

January 31, 2019 · 09:39

Tom Warren, for The Verge:

Apple has shut down Facebook’s ability to distribute internal iOS apps, from early releases of the Facebook app to basic tools like a lunch menu. A person familiar with the situation tells The Verge that early versions of Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and other pre-release “dogfood” (beta) apps have stopped working, as have other employee apps, like one for transportation. Facebook is treating this as a critical problem internally, we’re told, as the affected apps simply don’t launch on employees’ phones anymore.

This won’t change how Facebook operates. John Gruber recently called Facebook ‘a criminal enterprise’ and I’m finally willing to agree with him — that company should be treated as such by everyone. Quite frankly, I wouldn’t lose any sleep if they were completely booted from the App Store (including Instagram, WhatsApp, and all their other assets).

Facebook Pays Teens to Install VPN That Spies on Them →

January 30, 2019 · 09:55

Josh Constine, reporting for TechCrunch:

Desperate for data on its competitors, Facebook has been secretly paying people to install a “Facebook Research” VPN that lets the company suck in all of a user’s phone and web activity, similar to Facebook’s Onavo Protect app that Apple banned in June and that was removed in August. Facebook sidesteps the App Store and rewards teenagers and adults to download the Research app and give it root access to network traffic in what may be a violation of Apple policy so the social network can decrypt and analyze their phone activity, a TechCrunch investigation confirms. Facebook admitted to TechCrunch it was running the Research program to gather data on usage habits.

Since 2016, Facebook has been paying users ages 13 to 35 up to $20 per month plus referral fees to sell their privacy by installing the iOS or Android “Facebook Research” app. Facebook even asked users to screenshot their Amazon order history page. The program is administered through beta testing services Applause, BetaBound and uTest to cloak Facebook’s involvement, and is referred to in some documentation as “Project Atlas” — a fitting name for Facebook’s effort to map new trends and rivals around the globe.

[Update 11:20pm PT: Facebook now tells TechCrunch it will shut down the iOS version of its Research app in the wake of our report. The rest of this article has been updated to reflect this development.]

Just delete your account. The stuff they’re doing is completely unacceptable and I’m actually surprised nobody has been jailed yet.

Zuckerberg Plans to Integrate WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger →

January 26, 2019 · 00:29

Mike Isaac, writing for The New York Times:

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, plans to integrate the social network’s messaging services — WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger — asserting his control over the company’s sprawling divisions at a time when its business has been battered by scandal.

The services will continue to operate as stand-alone apps, but their underlying technical infrastructure will be unified, said four people involved in the effort. That will bring together three of the world’s largest messaging networks, which between them have more than 2.6 billion users, allowing people to communicate across the platforms for the first time.

Mark Zuckerberg is the worst thing that could have ever happened to Instagram. I deleted Instagram’s app from my iPhone a few weeks ago because I was not comfortable using any Facebook product anymore. They have shown time and time again that they don’t care about privacy or even have the basic decency to apologize to their users. Time to finally say goodbye.

More Lies from Facebook — Users’ Private Data Disclosed to Other Companies →

December 19, 2018 · 13:23

Gabriel J.X. Dance, Michael LaForgia and Nicholas Confessore, for The New York Times:

For years, Facebook gave some of the world’s largest technology companies more intrusive access to users’ personal data than it has disclosed, effectively exempting those business partners from its usual privacy rules, according to internal records and interviews […]

Facebook allowed Microsoft’s Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users’ friends without consent, the records show, and gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages.

The social network permitted Amazon to obtain users’ names and contact information through their friends, and it let Yahoo view streams of friends’ posts as recently as this summer, despite public statements that it had stopped that type of sharing years earlier.

There’s a lesson to be learned here for other tech companies, which I’m sure they’ll completely ignore. Lying to users and toying with the privacy should not be taken lightly and I keep on wondering when most will realise they don’t need Facebook anymore.

Facebook Filed a Patent to Calculate Your Future Location →

December 12, 2018 · 10:03

Nicole Nguyen, for Buzzfeed:

Facebook has filed several patent applications with the US Patent and Trademark Office for technology that uses your location data to predict where you’re going and when you’re going to be offline.

Have you deleted your Facebook account yet?

In a statement, Facebook spokesperson Anthony Harrison said, “We often seek patents for technology we never implement, and patent applications — such as this one — should not be taken as an indication of future plans.”

Yeah… it really should in Facebook’s case.

Facebook Portal — Who You Call and What Apps You Use Could Determine What Ads You See →

October 17, 2018 · 11:00

Kurt Wagner, reporting for Recode:

Last Monday, we wrote: “No data collected through Portal — even call log data or app usage data, like the fact that you listened to Spotify — will be used to target users with ads on Facebook.”

We wrote that because that’s what we were told by Facebook executives.

But Facebook has since reached out to change its answer: Portal doesn’t have ads, but data about who you call and data about which apps you use on Portal can be used to target you with ads on other Facebook-owned properties.

Of course it can. And over time it’ll probably do other nasty stuff to its users.

Facebook Portal →

October 9, 2018 · 11:18

Portal was created with privacy, safety and security in mind. And it has clear and simple settings, so you always stay in control.

Having all of Facebooks privacy scandals in mind, this product feels like the perfect companion device to their portfolio… if it was released on April Fool’s.

Do not buy this product. You probably shouldn’t be using Google’s Home or Amazon’s Alexa either.

Hackers Stole My Instagram Username and Facebook Doesn’t Care →

August 22, 2018 · 10:16

Maxim Lemeshenko, writing for PetaPixel:

On July 20th, my username got stolen from me on Instagram. Since then, I exchanged a number of emails with Facebook Advertiser Support, talking to a real person, but that has lead nowhere so far.

This is scandalous behaviour on Facebook’s part. Quite frankly, all these companies — Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, etc. — have basically no sensible customer service and while I haven’t had any issues as serious as Maxim’s, getting through to a person who is willing to understand and help is close to miraculous.

There Is No Justification for What Mark Zuckerberg Did to WhatsApp →

June 13, 2018 · 15:01

Felix Salmon, writing for Slate:

Today, it seems inevitable not only that advertising will make it onto WhatsApp, but also that the advertising in question will be targeted—which is to say that when you use the app, Facebook will know exactly who you are, where you live, and what kind of products you might be interested in buying. It’s a complete repudiation of WhatsApp’s founding principles, and makes a mockery of its end-to-end encryption.

I strongly believe that Mark just doesn’t give a fuck and will continue to do whatever he wants, just because he can, until someone stops him. He has no moral backbone and is in it for the money. Facebook in its current form is built to not only make its users addicts, but the whole platform can be likened to cancer, growing on the backbone of the internet.

Tim Cook Says Apple Requested “Zero” Personal Data From Facebook →

June 5, 2018 · 08:58

Laura Sydell, for NPR:

“We’ve never been in the data business,” Apple CEO Tim Cook told NPR on Monday, responding to a report that Facebook struck agreements giving Apple and other device makers access to Facebook users’ personal information […]

“The things mentioned in the Times article about relationship statuses and all these kinds of stuff, this is so foreign to us, and not data that we have ever received at all or requested — zero,” Cook told NPR’s Steve Inskeep and Laura Sydell during the company’s annual conference for developers in San Jose, Calif.

Glad Tim cleared that up.

Facebook Had Data Deal With Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Others →

June 5, 2018 · 08:53

Gabriel Dance, Nicholas Confessore, and Michael Laforgia, for The New York Times:

Facebook has reached data-sharing partnerships with at least 60 device makers — including Apple, Amazon, BlackBerry, Microsoft and Samsung — over the last decade, starting before Facebook apps were widely available on smartphones, company officials said. The deals allowed Facebook to expand its reach and let device makers offer customers popular features of the social network, such as messaging, “like” buttons and address books […]

An Apple spokesman said the company relied on private access to Facebook data for features that enabled users to post photos to the social network without opening the Facebook app, among other things. Apple said its phones no longer had such access to Facebook as of last September.

The article makes it sound as if Apple pulled or had access to private user data from Facebook.

WhatsApp and Facebook — A Massive Culture Clash Over Encryption →

May 1, 2018 · 09:08

Elizabeth Dwoskin, writing for The Washington Post:

The WhatsApp co-founders were also big believers in privacy. They took pains to collect as little data as possible from their users, requiring only phone numbers and putting them at odds with data-hungry Facebook. At the time of the acquisition, Koum and Acton said Facebook had assured them that WhatsApp could remain an independent service and would not share its data with Facebook […]

Another point of disagreement was over WhatsApp’s encryption. In 2016, WhatsApp added end-to-end encryption, a security feature that scrambles people’s messages so that outsiders, including WhatsApp’s owners, can’t read them. Facebook executives wanted to make it easier for businesses to use its tools, and WhatsApp executives believed that doing so would require some weakening of its encryption.

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg don’t know when to stop.

Google Has More of Your Personal Data Than Facebook →

April 23, 2018 · 11:04

Christopher Mims, for The Washington Post:

As justifiable as the focus on Facebook has been, though, it isn’t the full picture. If the concern is that companies might be collecting some personal data without our knowledge or explicit consent, Alphabet’s Google is a far bigger threat by many measures: the volume of information it gathers, the reach of its tracking and the time people spend on its sites and apps […]

It’s likely that Google has shadow profiles on at least as many people as Facebook does, says Chandler Givens, chief executive of TrackOff, which develops software to fight identity theft. Google allows everyone, whether they have a Google account or not, to opt out of its ad targeting. Yet, like Facebook, it continues to gather your data […]

Google also is the biggest enabler of data harvesting, through the world’s two billion active Android mobile devices. Because Google’s Android OS helps companies gather data on us, then Google is also partly to blame when troves of that data are later used improperly, says Woodrow Hartzog, a professor of law and computer science at Northeastern University.

A good example of this is the way Facebook has continuously harvested Android users’ call and text history. Facebook never got this level of access from Apple ’s iPhone, whose operating system is designed to permit less under-the-hood data collection. Android OS often allows apps to request rich data from users without accompanying warnings about how the data might be used.

Meanwhile, we still don’t have the tools or means to protect ourselves from being targeted by Google, Facebook, and others, or to block their tracking practices completely.

Facebook Won’t Disclose What Information It Has Gathered on Non-users →

April 16, 2018 · 12:13

David Ingram, for The Huffington Post:

Zuckerberg said on Wednesday under questioning by U.S. Representative Ben Luján that, for security reasons, Facebook also collects “data of people who have not signed up for Facebook.”

Lawmakers and privacy advocates immediately protested the practice, with many saying Facebook needed to develop a way for non-users to find out what the company knows about them.

“We’ve got to fix that,” Representative Luján, a Democrat, told Zuckerberg, calling for such disclosure, a move that would have unclear effects on the company’s ability to target ads. Zuckerberg did not respond. On Friday Facebook said it had no plans to build such a tool.

While I don’t want Facebook to keep any records about me or my doings online, I do strongly support an open internet, which technically means that I consent to this sort of behaviour. There will always be bad actors in the world and the internet is no different. I can however attempt to block as much of Facebook as possible, by using an appropriate DNS and content blocker or host file.

End-to-End Encryption Does Not Prevent Facebook From Accessing WhatsApp Chats →

April 13, 2018 · 11:49

Gregorio Zanon, posting on Medium:

Facebook could potentially access your WhatApp chats. In fact, it could easily acces your entire chat history and every single attachment. Now, I am not saying it does and have no evidence it did. But after Android users have recently been finding out that their call history and SMS data had been collected by Facebook, I believe it is important to go over the means by which Facebook is already in a position to collect our WhatsApp data, from any iPhone running iOS 8 and above.

In case you did not know about this for some reason…

Aleksandr Kogan Collected Facebook Users’ Direct Messages →

April 13, 2018 · 11:45

Alex Hern and Carole Cadwalladr, writing for The Guardian:

Aleksandr Kogan collected direct messages sent to and from Facebook users who installed his This Is Your Digital Life app, the Guardian can reveal. It follows Facebook’s admission that the company “may” have handed over the direct messages of some users to the Cambridge Analytica contractor without their express permission. The revelation is the most severe breach of privacy yet in the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

This just gets better and better. I wonder what else we don’t know yet.

For the record, I deleted my Facebook account on March 22, a day after my last post on the subject.

Elon Musk Offers to Buy and Then Delete Facebook →

April 1, 2018 · 00:35

James Schlarmann, on Alternative Science:

Cheers erupted in the room. Chants of “Fuck Zuck! Fuck Zuck! Fuck Zuck!” reverberated throughout the building, growing so loud it drowned out the sound of the ocean’s waves at every beach on the planet. Musk stepped away from the podium he was speaking from, raised his arms in the air in triumph, and took in the adulation from everyone in the room.

Elon Musk loves attention, but you can’t deny that he has flair! I’d love to see him do this — read the whole thing, because I don’t want to spoil it for you.

Growth at Any Cost: Top Facebook Executive Defended Data Collection in 2016 Memo and Warned That Facebook Could Get People Killed →

March 30, 2018 · 15:47

Ryan Mac, Charlie Warzel, and Alex Kantrowitz published Andrew Bosworth’s (a Facebook VP) memo from 2016 on Buzzfeed:

Andrew Bosworth
June 18, 2016

The Ugly

We talk about the good and the bad of our work often. I want to talk about the ugly.

We connect people.

That can be good if they make it positive. Maybe someone finds love. Maybe it even saves the life of someone on the brink of suicide.

So we connect more people.

That can be bad if they make it negative. Maybe it costs a life by exposing someone to bullies. Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools.

And still we connect people.

The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is de facto good. It is perhaps the only area where the metrics do tell the true story as far as we are concerned.

That isn’t something we are doing for ourselves. Or for our stock price (ha!). It is literally just what we do. We connect people. Period.

That’s why all the work we do in growth is justified. All the questionable contact importing practices. All the subtle language that helps people stay searchable by friends. All of the work we do to bring more communication in. The work we will likely have to do in China some day. All of it.

The natural state of the world is not connected. It is not unified. It is fragmented by borders, languages, and increasingly by different products. The best products don’t win. The ones everyone use win.

I know a lot of people don’t want to hear this. Most of us have the luxury of working in the warm glow of building products consumers love. But make no mistake, growth tactics are how we got here. If you joined the company because it is doing great work, that’s why we get to do that great work. We do have great products but we still wouldn’t be half our size without pushing the envelope on growth. Nothing makes Facebook as valuable as having your friends on it, and no product decisions have gotten as many friends on as the ones made in growth. Not photo tagging. Not news feed. Not messenger. Nothing.

In almost all of our work, we have to answer hard questions about what we believe. We have to justify the metrics and make sure they aren’t losing out on a bigger picture. But connecting people. That’s our imperative. Because that’s what we do. We connect people.

In the meantime, Mark Zuckerberg responded, and I don’t believe a single word of what he said. This is a conversation he had, when he was 19:

Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuck: Just ask.
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend’s Name]: What? How’d you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don’t know why.
Zuck: They “trust me”
Zuck: Dumb fucks.

There are no words to communicate my disgust with this “company”. Facebook should never have become the monstrosity it now is. We shouldn’t have allowed it.

March 21, 2018 · 12:51

I started deleting all of Facebook content today, using a script. After all my data is erased, which I have no clue how long it will take, I will proceed to delete my account.

Instagram and WhatsApp will be next. Sadly.

#deleteFacebook →

March 20, 2018 · 09:04

John Biggs:

Facebook is using us. It is actively giving away our information. It is creating an echo chamber in the name of connection. It surfaces the divisive and destroys the real reason we began using social media in the first place – human connection.

It is a cancer.

Fuck Facebook →

June 2, 2017 · 11:28

John Gruber:

The Internet Archive is our only good defense against broken links. Blocking them from indexing Facebook content is a huge “fuck you” to anyone who cares about the longevity of the stuff they link to.

Treat Facebook as the private walled garden that it is. If you want something to be publicly accessible, post it to a real blog on any platform that embraces the real web, the open one.

Even though I have a Facebook account¹, I hate what the company is doing and what it stands for. They are however so successful, that many people don’t even realise that they’re “on the internet” when “they’re on Facebook”, as noted by Leo Mirani for QZ:

[…] a closer look at the data […] shows that 11% of Indonesians who said they used Facebook also said they did not use the internet. In Nigeria, 9% of Facebook users said they do not use the internet […]

Considering the substantial percentages—about 10% of Facebook users in our surveys—the data suggest at the very least that a few million of Facebook’s 1.4 billion users suffer from the same misconceptions.

The web would actually be a better place without Facebook, even if it meant Instagram had to die in the process.

Because “I have to.” ↩

Facebook’s New Messenger Bots Are the Slowest Way to Use the Internet →

April 13, 2016 · 11:47

Nick Statt:

Today, Facebook announced a bold new bot initiative that lives inside its Messenger application: artificial intelligence-powered personalities at our beck and call for shopping, checking the weather, getting news updates, and more. There’s just one problem: the bots are slow… painfully slow. In fact, Poncho the “weathercat,” which Facebook messaging chief David Marcus demoed onstage at the company’s F8 developer conference today, comes with a disclaimer that it “typically replies within an hour.” That’s neat, if you’re the kind of person who can spend an hour waiting to know whether it’s going to rain.

Quite frankly, this is about as interesting as 360° video and 3D TVs. A waste of time for everyone involved — developers, users, etc. I rarely have such negative feelings about something, but the fact that this is even news is unbelievable.

Facebook, Google and WhatsApp Plan to Increase Encryption of User Data →

March 14, 2016 · 20:38

Danny Yadron:

Silicon Valley’s leading companies – including Facebook, Google and Snapchat – are working on their own increased privacy technology as Apple fights the US government over encryption, the Guardian has learned.

The projects could antagonize authorities just as much as Apple’s more secure iPhones, which are currently at the center of the San Bernardino shooting investigation. They also indicate the industry may be willing to back up their public support for Apple with concrete action.

Within weeks, Facebook’s messaging service WhatsApp plans to expand its secure messaging service so that voice calls are also encrypted, in addition to its existing privacy features. The service has some one billion monthly users. Facebook is also considering beefing up security of its own Messenger tool.

Snapchat, the popular ephemeral messaging service, is also working on a secure messaging system and Google is exploring extra uses for the technology behind a long-in-the-works encrypted email project.

At this point in time I would like to see more action from the other tech companies — this is obviously a delicate situation, but too much is at stake.

WhatsApp Encryption Targeted by DOJ →

March 13, 2016 · 10:35

Matt Apuzzo:

But in late 2014, the company said that it would begin adding sophisticated encoding, known as end-to-end encryption, to its systems. Only the intended recipients would be able to read the messages.

“WhatsApp cannot provide information we do not have,” the company said this month when Brazilian police arrested a Facebook executive after the company failed to turn over information about a customer who was the subject of a drug trafficking investigation.

The iPhone case, which revolves around whether Apple can be forced to help the F.B.I. unlock a phone used by one of the killers in last year’s San Bernardino, Calif., massacre, has received worldwide attention for the precedent it might set. But to many in law enforcement, disputes like the one with WhatsApp are of far greater concern.

For more than a half-century, the Justice Department has relied on wiretaps as a fundamental crime-fighting tool. To some in law enforcement, if companies like WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram can design unbreakable encryption, then the future of wiretapping is in doubt.

Facebook M — Assisted Intelligence With a Small Dose of Human →

March 4, 2016 · 12:58

Arik Sosman:

Facebook has recently launched a limited beta of its ground-breaking AI called M. M’s capabilities far exceed those of any competing AI. Where some AIs would be hard-pressed to tell you the weather conditions for more than one location (god forbid you go on a trip), M will tell you the weather forecast for every point on your route at the time you’re expected to get there, and also provide you with convenient gas station suggestions, account for traffic in its estimations, and provide you with options for food and entertainment at your destination.

As many people have pointed out, there have been press releases stating that M is human-aided. However, the point of this article is not to figure out whether or not there are humans behind it, but to indisputably prove it.

The call at the end is curious — why the horrendously bad quality? I am not experienced with US telephone services, thus I cannot judge, but I haven’t heard anything as bad in Europe in a long time.

Stolen Kisses — Life After Tweetbot

October 6, 2014 · 17:40

Tweetbot and I have been having an affair since its inception. From iPhone, to iPad and Mac, I simply cannot fathom using another app for my daily Twitter fix. And I’ve tried. A lot of them. Most of them? Probably not, but near everything available for iOS and OS X. And none of them come close.

Continue reading →