Is Facebook Evil?

[nelsonic]

• http://gizmodo.com/why-facebook-is-evil-according-to-mindblowing-new-seri-1709083311
• https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/sep/29/how-evil-is-facebook
• https://veekaybee.github.io/facebook-is-collecting-this/

[des-des]

yes

[joseluisq]

😈 👍

[garmjs]

@des-des 😂

[nelsonic]

https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-doesnt-tell-users-everything-it-really-knows-about-them
Is this helping Facebook to ...

"give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected. People use Facebook to stay connected with friends and family, to discover what’s going on in the world, and to share and express what matters to them."

See: their "mission": https://investor.fb.com/resources/default.aspx

Also:
http://qz.com/874394/we-already-have-a-muslim-registry-its-called-facebook/
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/12/facebook-should-delete-the-muslim-registry-it-already-has/

And lest we forget:

• https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/29/facebook-users-emotions-news-feeds
• https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2014/07/01/9-answers-about-facebooks-creepy-emotional-manipulation-experiment
• https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/17/facebook-ethics-but-is-it-ethical

Does it frustrate anyone else to see their friends/family pouring their time into Facebook knowing that Facebook's actual "mission" is to:

"amass everyone's personal data & sell it to the highest bidder"

[sirmews]

As a developer, I say Yes.

As a marketer that uses Facebook data for targeting, Yes.

As an evil scientist that loves playing with data gathered by Facebook Pixel, Ummm No.

[jedwards1211]

As a full-time React developer who loves using it, I felt really conflicted when Facebook recruiters contacted me 😄 I basically just told them I would love to work on open-source tools like React etc. but would not be willing to work on Facebook's core product.

[des-des]

Also we should all delete whatsapp and use signal / something like riot. (asap)

@eliasCodes ?

[eliasmalik]

@des-des probs. I believe Signal is currently recommended by most security peeps. Telegram, not so much. Haven't heard of riot.

[Adamantish]

My biggest fear is less whether facebook is evil right now but the unmonitored manipulative power they are amassing for whoever happens to own them in future. If we have watchdogs to watch newspapers why is the far more powerful newsfeed algorithm under less official scrutiny? Do they manipulate elections? Deliberately, accidentally as a side effect? If they don't now, how would we know on the day that they decide to?

This chrome extension is worked on by volunteers here in Berlin to try and fill that gap. The idea is that upstanding citizens allow the extension to let a node app scrape their newsfeed so we can reverse engineer with an open, anonymised dataset and spot when facebook make big, manipulative changes.

If anyone has good design and copywriting skills I bet they'd welcome help making their promotional pages more attractive at the least. They're open to contributors.

[nelsonic]

@coudrew sounds like Fb have a pretty tight grip on your community of friends... 😞

[gregtandiono]

I really like the use of github issues as a discussion thread. Best part about it is that it weeds out the trolls, since we're all engineers (but then again I've had my fair share of entertaining dev trolls from time-to-time)

:)