How to Manage Employees When They Make Mistakes - <AUTHOR> http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/09/30/how-to-manage-employees-when-they-make-mistakes/

<comment><USER2> One of the things that was drilled into me in the cadets was that you can delegate responsibility for a task, but not accountability. Ultimately, when things go wrong it's your fault not theirs. Perhaps they didn't have the skills, resources or experience required. Perhaps something unexpected came up. Ultimately, their failure is your failure as a manager and that's what you need to remember. Rarely was a bit of shouting required and when it was it was more about motivation than discipline.

"Praise people publicly, but discipline people privately" This goes doubly if you need to criticise someone who has to manage others

<comment><USER3> _One of the things that was drilled into me in the cadets was that you can delegate responsibility for a task, but not accountability._

Me too, but unfortunately it doesn't work like that in most organizations. Your boss's full time job, as he sees it, is to take credit for your successes and give you the blame for his failures. That's _why_ he chose to become a manager rather than staying hands-on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Pretty good list of management wisdom. I would have to disagree about one point though:

 _6\. Praise people publicly, but discipline people privately_

I used to completely agree with this earlier, but somebody(can't recall who) pointed a problem with this principle, a while ago.

Most things in the work place even if 'done' by one person has contributions from many to enable that person complete that assignment/task/project. Praising that one person in front of others can make the other feel shorted.

I would prefer to do this: "Discipline people privately and praise people privately, unless it is the whole team that is being praised"

Of course, there are always special occasions, when one has to boost up the standing of an employee in front of others, in preparation for bigger roles.

my 2c

</comment><comment><USER5> A pretty good list of rules to go by.

Also I think it's important to have a look at the system which enabled the person to make the mistake.

One story a former colleague told me about a former workplace. The company would issue commission checks every month to their sales people. For some reason, they were using a spreadsheet to calculate the totals. A new hire in charge of the spreadsheet to issue checks did a sort on the names but didn't include the other columns to be sorted together. As a result, some people who just started working there got issued checks for thousands of dollars and some of them took off with the money. It resulted in months of headaches as the company attempted to sort everything out.

The person who accidentally sorted the spreadsheet got fired. However, no one else got disciplined. IMO, the people who allowed this system to be setup and used are the people who should have been responsible.

<comment><USER4> I would agree, that the people who set up the system should have atleast reviewed the work of the newbie, if they don't have a proper process documentation for managing it. (I often found, that excel based worksheets, though used extensively and sometimes for some really big stuff, are not accompanied by decent documentation)

I like to think, that when an employee doesn't perform well, there are three major sources of factors contributing towards that bad performance: 1) the employee 2) the management immediately above him/her 3) The top management which consiously or otherwise sets up the prevalent culture, which often can be an enabler or a disabler of performances.

In reality though, it could be a mix of factors from any one or more sources, in varying proportion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I can't think of a situation where punishing someone for a mistake as though they were a misbehaving child is a remotely good idea.

If it's an honest mistake — that is, the employee honestly tried to make something work but it just wasn't happening — the employee requires help in achieving his goals, not abuse.

If the mistake shows gross incompetence or negligence, the employee should be fired.

Keeping someone around but killing their morale is a poor choice in both scenarios (unless we're making the assumption that you are only capable of hiring morons).

</comment><comment><USER7> In the economic analysis of law there is a standard argument that goes like this:

If you punish a crime more severely, people will do less of it. But you have to be careful. If you punish both murder and shoplifting by death, a shoplifter who is being pursued by a cop might as well shoot the cop—he has nothing to lose.

<comment><USER8> It is my understanding that severity of punishment is not strongly correlated with reduced incidence of the behavior being punished. _Consistency_ of punishment is strongly correlated. That is, a minor punishment consistently applied is far more effective at controlling behavior than a severe punishment inconsistently applied.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The problem with advice like this is that, as a result of following it, you become a phony. The "don't go back to being buddy buddy" stuff is just odd. It's manipulative at worst and unnatural and uncomfortable at best.

My philosophy is this: If you're half competent at choosing your team and someone you lead isn't performing, it's probably your fault. So before you decide that "your employees have made a mistake," you should probably be clear on whether not _you made a mistake_ first.

Are the expectations clear? I bet you they're not. Leading people means exhaustive communication, especially about details and success conditions. If you're not sharing this stuff, you're not providing useful leadership.

Have you communicated the stakes? If something is important, don't assume that everyone else knows that. What makes it important? Why should anyone else case?

Are you available to help? If you're not making time to check in and support as unexpected complexities of the task crop up, you're in for some nice surprises at the end.

When people fail to meet the needs and expectations of the task, are you direct about it or do you pretend everything is cool? Do you look for opportunities to teach about the failing, explain what was disappointing? Most importantly, do you point out how to do better next time?

When people do outstandingly well, do you recognize that?

The tl;dr of this: getting what you want from people is a combination of being proactive and communicating. Not micromanaging, not being a babysitter, not being a bully, not being a softie.

Be direct, don't expect anyone to read your mind, understand you're part of the process as a leader.

(All this collected from being led by extraordinary leaders, lazy ones, and outright terrible ones.)

<comment><USER4> _.... exhaustive communication, especially about details ....._ and _....communicating. Not micromanaging, not ..._

I agree with some of your points, but aren't the 'details" and 'not micromanaging' statments conflicting in what you say?

<comment><USER9> You could definitely take it too far and enter that territory, yes.

I'm saying the difference between "Build me a house by next week" and "Build me a house large enough for four people with a garage and laundry facilities. If we're missing those things, we won't be competitive."

Especially outside of technical realms, it's nauseatingly common for requests to go under-specified, leading to a bunch of wasted work once everyone circles back and realizes "Oh, forgot to tell you about..."

<comment><USER4> That is true, quite often time and work gets wasted because the right specs are not decided or not communicated or the right questions not asked up front .

As a supplier of data analysis and reports to cost cutting/six sigma projects, I have seen it too many times where some project leaders don't go by the 'data first' principle. They pre-decide the direction of the project with no or minimal data and then go about collecting selective data supporting their direction.

<comment><USER10> >>They pre-decide the direction of the project with no or minimal data and then go about collecting selective data supporting their direction.

I associate this behavior with (impulse) buying. Some like to think they are buyers who base their decisions on rationale rather than feelings, when in reality they buy based on emotion only to rationalize it later.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> People, especially in management, _really_ need to read and understand Kohlberg's theory of moral development [1] before comparing adult incentivized behavior with the behavior of children.

[1]: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kohlberg%27s_stages_of_moral_de...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kohlberg%27s_stages_of_moral_development)

</comment><comment><USER12> So if his rules are "point out what went wrong, describe what he wanted, work with the employee to alter things so it wont happen again", where does "punishment" and "distance" come into it at all? Why is it good that for several days his employee feels unable to talk to him about anything? Who does that benefit?

So his expected and desired situation outcome was different from the actual outcome and he's disappointed, or angry, or whatever. Why does that give him the right to 'punish' someone else? His inaccurate mental model (based on a poor understanding of his employee) -> his problem.

What if his 'punishment' doesn't work because the employee _isn't_ "crushed", what if the employee is indifferent to being shouted at or distanced?

The only thing which matters is how to alter things so it's better next time That's it. That might mean process changes, or not giving that responsibility to that employee, or replacing that employee. Anything else is railing against the unchangable past.

(Also, how to deal with children is not a good framework for how to deal with adults).

<comment><USER13> _Why is it good that for several days his employee feels unable to talk to him about anything? Who does that benefit?_

Agreed, I am completely uncomfortable with that. Once you indicate to someone that you do not trust them, why should they trust you?

The sad thing is that he is actually sounding reasonable to himself (and to others I am sure), because he is advocating against an even worse behaviour (like yelling at people).

 _Also, how to deal with children is not a good framework for how to deal with adults_

Agreed, but it's not like his childrearing advice is that great either. Yeah, you can threaten to take the lego away from two fighting children, but it's better to teach them the skills to negotiate possession.

<comment><USER14> I understand why you would be uncomfortable about it. But I firmly believe that giving an employee time to reflect on what went wrong & why is important. And they need distance to achieve this. If you're immediately chummy with them after a failure then this time of reflection is less likely. I know it doesn't sit well with everybody so I'm not asking you to adopt my style. But it is not manipulative and actually is quite effective.

<comment><AUTHOR> _> But I firmly believe that giving an employee time to reflect on what went wrong & why is important. And they need distance to achieve this._

I agree with you on this but I see a distinction between being 'cold and distant' vs 'not chummy'. The latter seems appropriate but the former seems counter productive (at least it would be with me).

My impression is that you mean the latter but I can see how the original post might be read as meaning the former.

<comment><USER14> Perhaps my language didn't properly reflect my thoughts. I did mean the latter. thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> _But when they're being naughty an "I'll buy you ice cream if you're good" approach doesn't work and isn't warranted. I much simpler, "if I have to come over there and separate you two, you're going to lose your lego set for a week" yields better results. Not with a yell. Certainly never with violence. But with heat._

I didn't parent that way at all. I see no reason why my parenting style wouldn't work equally well as a management style. My sons are 20 and 23 and are fanatically loyal to me, even when I am sick and under stress and wigging out on them like some kind of lunatic. I don't punish. Discipline and punishment are not the same thing and the fact that the word "discipline" has come to be a euphemism for punishment is just commentary on how rampantly common it is to punish kids rather then teach them how and why to do things. Did I take things away from them sometimes? Yes. But only to remove the problem, not as a form of punishment. And I did not threaten. Threats are a weak stance and they breed disrespect and fear, neither of which is anything I want from anyone generally, let alone my kids.</comment>


Those opposing ACTA are missing something fundamental… - <AUTHOR> http://postdesk.com/blog/acta-sopa-pipa-support-defence

<comment><USER2> The line in support of ACTA and SOPA has always been this: the Internet has a piracy problem. We're just trying to fix it. If you don't like our method, why don't you suggest an alternative?

I have a huge problem with that. Copyright infringement is already illegal. We already have the DMCA to enforce it. If ACTA and something like SOPA pass and piracy continues, then what? The problem hasn't gone anywhere, and the same people will be back with an even harsher "solution" and the same old argument. This argument, extrapolated, is a never-ending death spiral into Internet totalitarianism.

</comment><comment><USER3> The author makes a big rhetorical/logical fallacy: (s)he describes the "problem" that the internet has without ever explaining what exactly the problem is (its existence is just implied).

The issue is exactly the oposite. There is no problem with the internet, but the industries, that see internet as a potential new source of (parasitic) revenue, are __creating __a problem so that the politicians ca __solve __it.

> but then how do we make money without intellectual property rights

I really don't know. But maybe you should ask Paulo Coelho, the developers behind The Indie Bundle, or Monty Python ([http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/kit-eaton/technomix/monty- py...](http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/kit-eaton/technomix/monty-python- youtube-move-boosts-dvd-sales-23000)).

> We talk of freedom, artistic expression, and creativity, but at the end of > the day, someone has to get paid.

Well, who said that art must be paid for, and that it must be paid for by the customer? In my opinion, art made for profit is not art, true art comes from within, and is expression of the soul, which would need to be expressed even if there was no money coming from creating art. Even so, the politicians and lobbyists emphasise the "successful" artists, those earning big bucks, but really there are many artists that are only losing/spending money doing their art, but still do it. After all, we're all artists.

Furthermore, that artists have to "make a living" is a relatively new idea. In the past, artists had donnors, rich people who financed them so that they could create in peace, without worries.

<comment><USER4> In reality, the people making the most money off artists (that's musical performers mainly) today are the recording companies. It used to be that you needed to sign with a record label to market your music, sell your music, and book live concerts. The internet has put that power into the artists' hands. Artists can "make a living" without "making it big" with the internet. The record labels are running an antiquated business which is no longer needed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The author conflates value with money all through this article - saying that if something doesn't make money it is worthless. This is simply ridiculous.

examples:

> How does the internet create and sustain value?

> ...at the end of the day, someone has to get paid

> Without the structure, the economic exchange will not get beyond the barter > level.

> The industry has to begin to demonstrate what legislation it wants

</comment><comment><USER6> The author takes the idea of "intellectual property" for granted. What about the problem of independent invention? The telegraph, telephone and lots of other major inventions had multiple pretenders to the throne of "inventor". I think that this fact make "IP" into something less than property.

The problems with this article extend further into its underpinnings than merely assuming a problem without explaining what the problem is.

</comment><comment><USER7> What I dislike about the article (apart from the sensationalism he admits to in the first paragraph) is how he is is trying to equate current state with "Wild West" and heavy regulation and censorship with "civilized modern age".

But that's not how it works, at least according to most people who know something about the Internet. ACTA is not "inevitable civilizing of uncivilized land", turning Wild West to Modern Age, it is something turning Modern Age to Orwellian dystopia.

That's why arguments like "if you don't want ACTA, you have to propose something yourself" won't work on people who don't buy the "OMG IT'S SO SAVAGE, IT NEED CENSORSHIP" meme.

</comment><comment><USER8> The only 'problem' ACTA, SOPA and PIPA actually solve is that outdated business models are increasingly unprofitable.

Any of the other problems around the IP regime - for example, the extremely destructive effects of software patent abuse, or the unchecked power of large organizations to issue fraudulent copyright takedowns - are not remotely addressed by any of these bills or by past bills.

Engaging with these people isn't helpful because they're in complete denial about reality. It may be true that the vast majority of political forces and financial forces are aligned in favor of stuff like ACTA and SOPA, but that's not because the bills solve a real problem; it's because those bills make rich people richer, so naturally they're going to spend money to pass them.

</comment><comment><USER9> Why did people not say this about VCRs— oh wait…

</comment><comment><USER10> Cheesy opinion piece by a dude who doesn't seem to have even read the legislation. Plus, why is it written in the 3rd person?

</comment><comment><USER11> I don't understand this "the internet needs to be tamed" perspective that people approaching from this angle always come from. How does this make any sense at all? Is there something actually, demonstrably wrong with the current anarchic structure of internet governance?

Or is the answer to that simply "We don't have powers we would like to have to better our own position" from entrenched real world political blocs?

<comment><USER12> "We see stuff that we don't like. Some of it is stuff that you wouldn't like. Some of it is stuff that paid lobbyists are telling us not to like. We don't understand the Internet, nor international law, and we want to do something about this stuff that we don't like. Some of that stuff is actually serious and causing harm to real people. Some of it is stuff that paid lobbyists claim is causing indirect harm (unemployment) to real people."

I'd like to see better, stronger, cleverer measures taken against images of child abuse; against the people who abuse children for those images; the people who make those images, or who share those images, or who distribute those images, and probably against people who possess[1] those images.

I'd like to think there's effective ways for international law enforcement to track people trading things like plutonium or other specialist radiological materials.

Many people would happily give up some freedoms to give law enforcement powers needed for those things.

So it's baffling to me that regulators point to movie piracy or mp3s or fake handbags. Most people don't care about fake rolex watches; they certainly don't want to allow weird privacy violating laws to be passed just to crack down on sellers of fake rolexes.

[1] I accept that more research is needed. If someone can show me excellent quality research that possession of images of child abuse reduces a person's risk of abusing a child in the real world then I guess possession becomes less problematic.

<comment><USER11> [http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2011/06/30/child- por...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2011/06/30/child-pornography- reduces-child-abuse/) There does seem to be some evidence to indicate that this is actually the case. However I don't think it should even be granted that just because a a digital item has the potential to be abhorrent to human sensibilities, this is adequate justification for the policing of all digital content. Even assuming child pornography is not, there could be other digital items within this category (images of snuff, detailed plans for wardrobe lab production of biohazardous / infectious diseases, whatever) that certainly are.

My objection isn't that there is zero potential for some degree of damage from those things, but that actually policing them is one hundred percent utterly impossible. All allowing legal enforcement agencies to try does is give them wide ranging fishing powers and the curtailment of civil liberties in the general populace. So not only do any attempts to actually accomplish anything in this area fail on principle, they simply give people in power a skeleton key for the abuse thereof by justification of whatever digital closet horror you can be manipulated by.

The mathematics of the situation is this; Digital content can be stored and transmitted completely privately and there can be no method by which this can ever be exposed. The consequences of this fact are limited to the transfer of knowledge only, from which nobody can directly be harmed.

Although I am an anarcho-capitalist so I even carry this theory over into the real world, at least in the real world the objection that real people can be directly physically hurt or killed by the absence of strong centralised authority to keep various boogeymen at bay has some basis in reality if you accept that is the best way to prevent those negative externalities.

Online, the worst that can happen is that you are mentally exposed to some deeply unpleasant things. And typically this is only in the case that you have searched for them extensively, so it appears to be the definition of a limited harm victimless crime.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The problem is that it's not the people asking for this. That's why people are protesting SOPA/PIPA/ACTA. That's why people in several European countries took to the streets protesting their government's involvement in ACTA. Even worse, ACTA was drafted in secret, away from the people the agreement is going to affect. When the special interests in RIAA and MPAA and the like have the power to bring governments together to draft a treaty in secret, you can't be surprised when the people take to the streets, and I'm of the opinion that you can't morally defend ACTA unless you had a hand in crafting it, or got paid by someone who did.</comment>


Why Privacy Matters - <AUTHOR> https://thistooshallgrow.com/blog/privacy-security-roundup <comment><USER2> I do not understand what this article is trying to communicate. It starts with a rambling anecdote and ends with a list of some unrelated terms barely tangential to privacy.

<comment><USER3> I loved the anecdote on the Jewish census. Because I am always struggling to find examples about why sharing information might not be dangerous now, but it can be later, and you never really now.

I wish the article were about that, about what kind of information we are sharing in the present time, that may come to bite us back.

Here is my spin: Information can be used to your advantage (Relevant ads are good when they work), but it can also be weaponized (Oh, you search a lot for medical conditions?, maybe your insurance provider is interested. Or worse like we saw with Cambridge Analytica, "you seem to be democrat, let me see if I can bias you a little by hitting you where it hurts")

Here is my personal take on the situation from my experience: We are in a data collection period. Google, Facebook, Amazon, even Apple. Apple might be the worst actually. Silently amassing and hoarding data, researching the proper databases that can hold the data. We have seen things coming up in the last years like NoSQL, like Spark, massive analytical tools and real time databases. This is the equivalent of building a weapon.

Then the time of using that weapon comes. How? I wish I knew. I remind myself that we are just one CEO away of things being really bad. We are now under the shadow of people that grew in a different time, with a different set of ethics. Google still has the original founders on the board, Tim Cook is of the Steve Jobs school, Amazon is on its first CEO run. A few decades down the board, a new CEO gets appointed, and new CEO finds that he/she just inherited a massive data repository that can be used whatever he pleased. "Oh, we will never do that"? Sure, wait for the next guy to change their mind very fast, in the name of profits, or protecting a stock going down, or less strict ethics because they didn't live in the time where lack of privacy can kill you personally.

Sometimes I hold from sharing my thoughts, because people might label me as a conspiracy theorist :) But it is indeed on the back on my mind.

<comment><USER4> "I loved the anecdote on the Jewish census. Because I am always struggling to find examples about why sharing information might not be dangerous now, but it can be later, and you never really now."

The best example of this is the handwritten notes of the Tsars Russian imperial intel/police services in the very late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Handwritten records and notes stored in shacks that were retrieved and indexed around (forgive hazy dates) 1905 and used to track down "revolutionaries".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I vastly prefer Bruce Schneier's take (from 2006):

 _The Eternal Value of Privacy_

[https://www.wired.com/2006/05/the-eternal-value-of- privacy/](https://www.wired.com/2006/05/the-eternal-value-of-privacy/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh thanks, I'll give it a read

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> ... published on a site that accesses 7 different top-level domains. And that's even before allowing any javascript to run.

Oh the ironing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, that's something I'd love to do differently. The problem is I don't have the technical skills to build that website myself. As I said in the cookie banner, I disabled all the trackers I could. Unfortunately, Squarespace doesn't let its customers disable _all_ of them, which is extremely annoying.

<comment><USER7> I liked your article, why don't you check out Ghost? I can help you spin up a VPS and a Ghost blog if you like in an hour, pro bono of course.

[https://ghost.org/marketplace/](https://ghost.org/marketplace/)

<comment><USER8> Ghost is pretty neat! It's self-hosted solution though, which means that you have to update your OS and the software (Ghost related or not) on it regularly if you don't want it to be vulnerable which isn't ideal if you're not technical and don't want to deal with this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems like the foreword has little to do with the rest of the article. I was hooked after reading the beginning anecdote, but the transition to a general overview of security concepts felt a bit abrupt. I agree with the general sentiment of the article though. I'm glad that there's been an increasing amount of attention placed on privacy lately.

</comment><comment><USER10> I totally agree with you. Unfortunately as of today, people are not putting enough attention on who they give their sensitive information to. Data breaches are increasing in number, billion of accounts are hacked every day (I just discovered one of my side-accounts got hacked through [https://haveibeenpwned.com/](https://haveibeenpwned.com/)), nevertheless the majority of us is still not protecting its data properly (perhaps the problem relies on ignoring the problem itself?). And the situation is even more dramatic in the B2B market: I work in the cybersecurity industry and every day I see companies being hit by these attacks. That is why, I always advice the people I know to start using privacy-oriented tools that could actually prevent or help preventing something like this to happen. Like using a password manager ([https://1password.com)to](https://1password.com\)to) create strong password and store them, or a secure email system ([https://protonmail.com](https://protonmail.com)), or "simply" by keeping your systems and softwares up-to-date or by backing up your data.

We, at Cubbit, are contributing to the mission of getting back our privacy by building a distributed and encrypted cloud storage service that puts users in control of their data ([https://business.cubbit.io](https://business.cubbit.io)).

<comment><USER11> Even when you do intentionally accept to give your sensitive information to X player, you don't what other players will get their hands on that data, whether through breaches, sale of information, etc.

<comment><USER10> I don't understand your position, can you explain yourself better?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> So privacy matters because the information can be used against you. That is reasonable but hiding information is not the only the way to fix the issue.

Knife can be used to harm people, sure you can fix it by banning/destroying knife but thats not the only way to fix the issue.

I'm more interested to solution where we assume the information will be public and fix the issue that arise due to that.

<comment><USER13> I think your knife analogy is poor. Banning/destroying data is not what privacy is about. Privacy is about ensuring no one has your data who shouldn't. Knife safety also involves ensuring no one has a knife who shouldn't, such as toddlers.

Assuming all information is public and fixing the issues that arise is like giving everyone (even toddlers) a knife and then fixing the issues that arise from that. There is no fixing the issues that arise from a toddler having a knife. The solution is to take the knife away, they should not have a knife. The same solution is there for data, take the data away from the people who shouldn't have it, they should not have it. Or even better, don't get a knife to a toddler/your data to people who shouldn't have it in the first place.

<comment><USER12> >Privacy is about ensuring no one has your data who shouldn't

Yes and that is because that someone can use it to harm you and you'll suffer. Ensuring no one has your data who shouldn't is only one way but not the only way to prevent the suffering.

Let say you know my credit card account number, the reason I don't want other people to know the number is because it can be used to stole my money.

But what if there is way that even though you know my credit card number, you can't stole my money, then having my credit card number public would not be an issue for me.

Analogy is not perfect, but with knife, my point is we let everyone to easily obtain knife even though we know that it can be used to harm people. One way we do this is by having a severe enough punishment as a deterrent for people who use it to harm other. This is what I mean by fixing the issue that arise due to easily accessible knife.

<comment><USER13> I'm fairly certain we will always require privacy. If I have your credit card number and I want to use it to hurt you, I can, unless there's something else I need that I don't have, perhaps a security code. If someone can figure this out without needing privacy that'd be pretty phenomenal, but my little brain can't conceive of such a thing. And until then, we need very strong privacy.

<comment><USER12> The solution for the credit card problem would be hard but there are plenty of situation where the solution is not that inconceivable.

One way that it may work is if there is way you can trace any transaction good enough so that you can't use the credit card number without revealing yourself.

Another example would be if I'm gay. This information can be used to really hurt me in the past but not so much these days. Sure I can hide this information to prevent people to hurt me but I rather to fix the issue of the need of hiding it in the first people.

I would imagine if people can hide being gay perfectly there wouldn't be that much acceptance today.

<comment><USER13> I agree it would be best to address the reasons why people hurt each other with information (such as someone who is gay) but the unfortunate reality is that will never happen, not until 100% of our population is virtuous, and that's impossible. And while it may be less damaging today to be identified as gay than it was 20 years ago, in the United States it is now becoming more damaging to be in the majority than it was 20 years ago. As far as I understand Marxism, it's Marxism: the oppressed will overthrow the oppressor and will become the new oppressors. We're just trading oppressors, and while it may seem justifiable to oppress the old oppressors, it doesn't address the issues that people and not virtuous.

<comment><USER12> > that will never happen

That will never happen if there is no effort to make it happen.

> 100% of our population is virtuous

Yes that is impossible, I never made or require that assumption.

<comment><USER13> I'm concerned you're grossly naïve if you think this can happen. It isn't a matter of effort. Yes it will require all of the population to be virtuous, otherwise a single friend, or even acquaintance can hurt someone because of what they know. How is that not obvious? They can mock someone for their preference of beer, or sexual identity, or height, etc to such an extent that they would commit suicide.

<comment><USER12> Privacy or no privacy, there are always be someone who is trying to hurt someone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I like this article because it reminds us of the relationship between privacy and freedom. Important freedom. Freedoms that go far beyond our computer code. In fact, survival.

<comment><USER15> I love your comment. I got distracted by what others have already mentioned about the title not matching the content and then failed to see the big picture. Very admirable (to me at least).

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> > " _On the other hand, open-source software has a less strict definition, and > a different philosophy. You can also see the source code, amongst other > things._ "

No it doesn't. The Open Source definition is very much equivalent with that of Free Software, while having the virtue of being more clear, and I wish FS advocates would take the time to actually read it before talking nonsense.

The political vs non-political aspects have nothing to do with their definitions, but with the organizations behind them.

Also not sure what this had to do with the subject of the article.

</comment><comment><USER17> _That grandfather and two of his brothers left [...] with no plan [...]. They were helped by strangers and survived. Their mother however, along with two other siblings, had a plan. They had a deal with a smuggler [...] and all 3 of them died in deportation. Lesson: each person who has information on you represents an additional chance for it to be leaked._

This puzzles me... The paragraph clearly states that the grandfather had contacts with strangers (and we can then assume there was some exchange of information of some kind), and the ending was positive, whereas another exchange with a single point of contact had a negative outcome. But goes on to present as a lesson that the chance of a negative outcome increases with the number of contacts.

I see the point the author is trying to make, but I think this part fails to prove it satisfyingly. It either doesn't prove anything, or it's missing key information (shared information with the strangers and the smugglers) to support the point. To me, it proves that luck (and maybe the grand-father's ability to be a good judge of character in picking which strangers to rely on) were more likely deciding factors.

(Or that having no plan helps. But that's for a different perspective.)

</comment><comment><USER18> With the existence of shadow profiles, is ideal privacy even possible unless you live in a remote area with a tech averse population? What about the census? The data you provide to the gov is also very sensitive and has a history of being abused (see the role of the US Census Bureau in Japanese Internment Camps). However if you don't provide it, it affects gov funding for your demographic. What about the computer in your pocket? Most of it isn't open source

<comment><USER19> Satoshi Nakamoto apparently did it.

<comment><USER18> I feel that the public doesn't know that for sure; same with Banksy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Somewhat related: _Privacy is Power_ \- Why and How You Should Take Back Control of Your Data by Carissa Véliz

[https://www.amazon.com/Privacy-Power-Should-Take-Control- ebo...](https://www.amazon.com/Privacy-Power-Should-Take-Control- ebook/dp/B08788L77V/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=veliz&qid=1598969278&sr=8-1)

</comment><comment><USER21> We don't have any privacy, we gave it away in exchange for the promise of safety:

".. the truth is, there is something terribly wrong with this country, isn't there? Cruelty and injustice, intolerance and oppression. And where once you had the freedom to object, think, and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillence coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission. How did this happen? .."

".. I know you were afraid. Who wouldn't be? War, terror, disease. There were a myriad of problems which conspired to corrupt your reason and rob you of your common sense. Fear got the best of you, and in your panic you turned to the now High Chancellor, Adam Sutler. He promised you order, he promised you peace, and all he demanded in return was your silent, obedient consent .."

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKnjxT5HRJQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKnjxT5HRJQ)

</comment><comment><USER22> So, why does it matter? The article talks about random security things, that have nothing to do with the title.

</comment><comment><USER23> I don't think that striking high chords, historical and political, is all that useful when talking to people about these things. They tend not to take it seriously or at best just file it mentally with other bad things in the world that they have little agency about. Of course, you may already get the broad societal ramifications if you're already in the privacy camp, but perhaps it's not a very effective entry point.

(It's another thing if we're talking about politics, not about individual choices. In pure politics big picture arguments, like "what if there'll be a dictatorship", might be more proper).

I would try to frame it, for individual people, as a question of quality and technical savvyness. If a supposedly hi-tech company behaves like a scammy phone marketing operation selling you garbage bundled with hidden subscriptions, we should treat is as such. They _should_ be able to treat you seriously, i.e. give you good quality, reliable products for the money, without scheming behind your back and siphoning all the data they can. Their business model should be sound without this. If they don't, it's just an inferior product and you're being exploited.

A related point is that I don't like products being sold solely on privacy. The tone should be more, we provide you an excellent thing (inside our capital constraints) and of course, it also respects your data.

Currently I see a tendency among people to be more-or-less aware of privacy invasions and their potential, but to think that's ultimately a fact of life and they'd have to be some crazy nerds to do something about it. The thinking should be more that they're using low quality stuff and hurting themselves. (I'm not saying that you should now go and antagonize people in your social bubble, just that it may be a communication strategy if there's an opportunity.)

Besides, trying to defend ourselves from the future state will be probably always perceived as kooky. Better do something about politics directly if you're in a moderately free country. It's more about rogue actors inside the companies and in the broad underworld. There was a time when people installed the damn antivirus.

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm not sure who this article is meant for.

If the idea is to convince non-technical people of the importance of privacy, the article should have just stuck to that. Parts like the free vs. open source discussion seem unnecessary.

</comment><comment><USER25> The title of the article is "The Why and How of Privacy and Security." That should be the title on this HN post as well.

</comment><comment><USER26> These discussions never seem to recognize the role of privacy for empowering oppressors. Shining light into the darkness is the metaphor used by journalists. What if there was no or drastically less darkness?

How would the Uyghur example be different if the Chinese governments discussions, plans, and actions were public knowledge? More implementable, if every citizen concerned that they were at risk ran a self monitoring system that could be purchased or issued by NGOs or reporters which created a public document of their treatment.

What if the German population had been shown the images of torture and abuse so that they could know what the politics were doing? What if married soldier's philandering and rape were shared with their partners?

What if today in the U.S. the smaller scale oppressions of domestic violence were thoroughly documented for courts and automatically detected to provide systemic support? What if "he said, she said" was a problem of the past?

What if every government official's behavior was publicly documented so that any bad actors could be proactively and clearly identified and their good actions could be commended?

What if your argument with your partner(s) or friends were reviewable so that you never had to argue about what you said, you could check it and apologize for what you said (or be apologized to) and get back on track to building understanding instead of entrenching in conflict?

There are obvious challenges that would need to be thought through but it might be worth considering.

</comment><comment><USER27> I learnt "why privacy matters" from this Glenn's TED: [https://www.ted.com/talks/glenn_greenwald_why_privacy_matter...](https://www.ted.com/talks/glenn_greenwald_why_privacy_matters)

</comment><comment><USER28> Related: [https://whyprivacymatters.org](https://whyprivacymatters.org)

</comment><comment><USER29> When I discuss privacy with a friend who doesn't share the same liberalism as me (Chinese, make of that what you will), I often have to point out that it's easy to forget that the spooks will get into bed with political conspiracy - Watergate, COINTELPRO for example. There are very few checks and balances in the US, and arguable none in the UK (You can at least put the US Constitution on your pocket)

"I have nothing to hide" should be considered equal to "I have nothing to say, therefore I have nothing to say"

<comment><USER30> The "I have nothing to hide" trope is _patently_ false. We hide all the time - we hide our private parts under the clothing; in our dwellings, we hide ourselves behind blinds and curtains; we hide most of our thoughts by keeping them to ourselves. 99% of all information is hidden (and should stay that way).

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Privacy tools and OS really matter: privacytoolslist.com</comment>


Zuckerberg Takes Steps to Calm Facebook Employees - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/technology/zuckerberg-facebook-employees.html <comment><USER2> I feel like someone should also give Zuckerberg the memo that it's only a matter of time before an insider also goes rogue and abuses data access (edit: or otherwise; see below). Facebook fundamentally seems to trust itself way too much, and it worries me that it thinks the only threats are external entities... to me, this is another silently ticking time bomb.

EDIT: And don't forget that going rogue is just one scenario. Another is just a bigger attack surface: the more insiders have broad system access, the more credentials there are that can be phished by/leaked to/stolen by outsiders. Really, it would be completely missing the point of security to have arguments about _how exactly_ insiders' credentials might get compromised.

<comment><USER3> You'd think so, but most companies have pretty strict internal controls for this sort of thing. Access is also carefully logged so a leaker is pretty much guaranteed to get caught at which point they'd immediately lose their job and likely face criminal prosecution.

With so much to lose and so little to gain internal leaks of this sort are extremely rare.

<comment><USER4> Who watches the watchers?

#1 - There's always a back door. I did some medical records stuff for a while. I looked myself up, just to confirm for myself how trivial it was to do. Yup, there I was. Which is why I insist that all data at rest is encrypted. (I have yet to win this argument.)

#2 - Our "portal" product had access logs for auditing. Plus permissions, consent trees, delegation. The usual features. Alas. We also had a "break the glass" scenario, ostensibly for emergency care, but was more like the happy path. And to my knowledge, during my 6 years, none of our customers ever audited their own logs.

#3 - My SO at the time worked in a hospital and went to another disconnected hospital for care because she knew her coworkers routinely, illegally looked up patient records, and she didn't want them spying on her.

<comment><USER5> As an ex-employee, I feel _much_ more confident in Facebook's processes than the company you're describing. Facebook would have no problem terminating people who do what you're describing.

<comment><USER6> Imagine you are the Egyptian government. You want to squash a social media fueled rebellion, lead by some anonymous person. How hard is it to get one of your bright and loyal minds hired by Facebook? How much data could such a person exfiltrate before getting fired?

The 'We will log your access and fire you' line of defense prevents nothing from someone who only has a job for the purpose of moving data out.

<comment><USER7> They don't fire you, they arrest you. And then they find out who you work for.

<comment><USER8> Doesn't matter. At the first hint of trouble you escaped back to your country, protected by the government which had sent you there in the first place, and now the rebels have been murdered thanks to the data you got out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Facebook's Board of Directors is a remarkable collection of silent-yet- complicit heavyweights:

-Marc Andreessen;

-Erskine Bowles ("President Emeritus of the University of North Carolina" and "White House Chief of Staff from 1996 to 1998");

-Ken Chenault ("Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of American Express Company");

-Susan Desmond-Hellmann ("Chief Executive Officer of The Gates Foundation" and former "Chancellor at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) from 2009 to 2014");

-Reed Hastings ("Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the board of directors of Netflix");

-Jan Koum ("co-founder and CEO of WhatsApp"); _and_

-Peter Thiel [1].

Might not be a bad idea to pen a letter to their Board [2] with your state attorney general [3] and perhaps a U.S. Senator [4] copied.

[1] [https://investor.fb.com/corporate- governance/default.aspx](https://investor.fb.com/corporate- governance/default.aspx)

[2] [https://investor.fb.com/corporate- governance/?section=contac...](https://investor.fb.com/corporate- governance/?section=contact)

[3] [http://naag.org/naag/attorneys-general/whos-my- ag.php](http://naag.org/naag/attorneys-general/whos-my-ag.php)

[4] [https://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_...](https://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm)

<comment><USER10> probably because speaking out would cause more trouble than its worth. i recall an Uber director decided to open his mouth during the incidents of last year...

<comment><USER11> Or recall the HP leaks.

<comment><USER9> > _the HP leaks_

The HP leak and spying scandal was so convoluted and left so many loose ends that I question its pedagogical utility.

"On September 5, 2006, Newsweek revealed that Hewlett-Packard's general counsel, at the behest of HP chairwoman Patricia Dunn, had contracted a team of independent security experts to investigate board members and several journalists in order to identify the source of an information leak. In turn, those security experts recruited private investigators who used a spying technique known as pretexting. The pretexting involved investigators impersonating HP board members and nine journalists (including reporters for CNET, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal) in order to obtain their phone records. The information leaked related to HP's long-term strategy and was published as part of a CNET article.

Board member George Keyworth was ultimately accused of being the source and on September 12, 2006, he resigned, although he continued to deny making unauthorized disclosures of confidential information to journalists and was thanked by Mark Hurd for his board service. It was also announced at that time that Dunn would continue as chairwoman until January 18, 2007, at which point HP CEO Mark Hurd would succeed her. Then, on September 22, 2006 HP announced that Dunn had resigned as chairwoman because of the "distraction her presence on our board" created. On September 28, 2006, Ann Baskins, HP's general counsel, resigned hours before she was to appear as a witness before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, where she would ultimately invoke the Fifth Amendment to refuse to answer questions."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hewlett- Packard_spying_scandal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hewlett- Packard_spying_scandal)

<comment><USER11> Tom Perkins' memoir recounts this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> tuna-piano Can someone explain to me why the Cambridge Analytica story is making people so much angrier than the later revelation that Facebook was scraping call+text info? That seems to be the larger problem to me.

Somewhere at Facebook there is a team of people who wrote software to scrape, store and analyze the personal call+text data that users didn't explicitly mean to give to Facebook.

The data that Cambridge Analytica attained (from Facebook's API) doesn't seem surprising at all. Isn't the Cambridge Analytics headline really just, "Group doesn't follow website's terms of service from five years ago".

<comment><USER12> > Isn't the Cambridge Analytics headline really just, "Group doesn't follow > website's terms of service from five years ago".

I think the the headline people are seeing is more like "Group doesn't follow website's terms of service from five years ago, and ends up helping Donald Trump win presidency."

A big part of the reason this has become so big a story is political.

<comment><USER13> > I think the the headline people are seeing is more like "Group doesn't > follow website's terms of service from five years ago, and ends up helping > Donald Trump win presidency."

Exactly.

The Obama campaign already acknowledge they did the same thing, but on a bigger scale.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/facebooks- ru...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/facebooks-rules-for- accessing-user-data-lured-more-than-just-cambridge- analytica/2018/03/19/31f6979c-658e-43d6-a71f-afdd8bf1308b_story.html)

"In 2011, Carol Davidsen, director of data integration and media analytics for Obama for America, built a database of every American voter using the same Facebook developer tool used by Cambridge, known as the social graph API. Any time people used Facebook's log-in button to sign on to the campaign's website, the Obama data scientists were able to access their profile as well as their friends' information. That allowed them to chart the closeness of people's relationships and make estimates about which people would be most likely to influence other people in their network to vote.

"We ingested the entire U.S. social graph," Davidsen said in an interview. "We would ask permission to basically scrape your profile, and also scrape your friends, basically anything that was available to scrape. We scraped it all.""

<comment><USER14> > We would ask permission

They asked each user for permission to look at their social graph, in an app designed for this task (Obama election).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I respect Facebook and their engineering chops as much as the next person, they are truly world class programmers, but how the holy hell is everyone daydreaming that they don't work for an advertising company?

You sell and use people's data to get money: this is the business plan. Full stop.

Connecting people can definitely be lucrative and useful in other ways but facebooks particular implementation is impression based not action/outcome based.

<comment><USER16> Because they're paid well. Very well. Everyone I know that works at FB for 2+ years is making 300-500k (including stock) and already owns or is on their way to purchasing a home. That makes it a lot easier to ignore the reality of FB. Meanwhile chumps like me that consider the ethics of their employer will be renting forever. I honestly don't blame them.

<comment><USER15> To be clear, I'm not criticizing or holier than thou —- I'd work there in a heartbeat without complaint and love it.

The part I don't get is that it seems everyone who does work there is in shock and awe that this is going on. SHOCKED!

It's comical to the point of parody.

<comment><USER17> It's a cognitive bias that kicks in when your monthly salary is involved, as succinctly noted in 1935 by Upton Sinclair:

 _" It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"_

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Facebook is an enabler for individuals to successfully undermine our democratic mechanisms. It shouldn't feel nice to work for a company that has to explain itself in front of the government. The employees of Facebook should be aware of what monster they are building.

<comment><USER19> No they're not. They're in denial. I used to work there as an intern, so I get a front row seat to how a lot of employees are reacting. The word I would use is: indignation.

I've seen this us-against-them mentality play out elsewhere in various toxic cult-like organizational cultures. The NSA was a great public example of just how manifestly horrifying things can get with tens to hundreds of decent people willfully participating in corrupt or unethical practices.

The way this all works is terribly fascinating, but the short of it is that you have to become closed off and indoctrinated in order to fit in. Particularly at places like Facebook, Google, and generally anywhere else that provides free on-campus dinners (a good heuristic), employees build their social circles and identities around the company. This, coupled with various other factors, permits an astounding cognitive dissonance amongst a large group of otherwise benign and rational people.

EDIT There's an interesting additional complication I've seen at times: internal spin. The media gets things about companies so wrong so frequently that it's almost too easy to discount the things with an uncomfortable shred of truth as 'fake news'.

<comment><USER20> Agreed. I've never been at FB, but been at a similarly big "darling" software company (don't want to go into specifics for identification reasons) and it largely is about creating an internal "us-vs-them" mentality and a culture that lionizes the good deeds over the bad.

Don't think of the employees as evil, they are probably legitimately not aware of the entirety of what's going on. Like soldiers in a war, they only know how their battles are going, not the war.

<comment><USER21> > evil

Hollywood _et al_ popularize the misconception that evil is fantastic and done with _intent_. Most of the time evil is _banal_ [1]. The larger problems happen when the unremarkable, small deviances from acceptable behavior becomes _normalized_ [2][3].

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem#The_bana...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem#The_banality_of_evil)

[2] [https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Professionalism/Diane_Vaughan_...](https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Professionalism/Diane_Vaughan_and_the_normalization_of_deviance)

[3] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGLYEDpNu60](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGLYEDpNu60)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I hope anyone worth their weight in salt leaves Facebook as an employee and as a user. Employees should already feel shame since the election. They all know what Facebook is built on and what they've done and what they're doing.

<comment><USER23> Which election are you talking about? The 2016 one where everyone cares about Facebook helping elect the US president, or the 2008 and 2012 elections where everyone was ok with Facebook helping elect the US president?

<comment><USER24> I've seen this nonsense spouted a few places now. Personally, I think there is a big difference between the two, one focused primarily on cheerleading to get out the vote, the other using inflammatory fabrications to enrage your base (and get out the vote). I see this as a classic example of when "the ends don't justify the means".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> >> One of [the Facebook employees] said he had avoided a trip home to see his family last weekend because he did not want to answer questions about the company he worked for.

Wow, some people/families are way too media-sensitive. It's just hypocrisy. Facebook is fundamentally the same company as it was last week, last year and 5 years ago. Everyone knew this, especially Facebook employees.

Facebook today is mostly made up of two kinds of employees; money-hungry sociopaths and hypocrites.

<comment><USER26> There's a big difference between a theoretical "Well technically they have all our data and they could share it with anyone and they could use it to target ads quite precisely"

In fact, that statement is true of the government as well. Most people just think it won't really happen, and if it does happen it'll be something fairly trivial like selling me shaving kits because I'm a man, and that my data isn't really all that revealing.

That is vastly different from:

"This specific data you gave facebook went to this specific company, in violation of facebook's own policies.

The breach of ToS wasn't followed up, and we have video of the CEO bragging about fake news, blackmail and honey traps.

This wasn't even a US company influencing the election.

Your data was directly used to campaign for someone you probably deeply oppose.

Not only that, but this specific targeting was probably highly important because we know the result of the election relied upon victories in specific states that are important to the electoral college whilst losing the popular vote.

It also turns out that what had seemed to be deep real organic discussion topics turned out to be targeted propaganda showing a scary ability to control the public discourse

Oh. And this is all carried out by a company whose CEO openly wants to run for political office and could use this to get himself elected next time."

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> What could they possibly do to fix things that wouldn't destroy their business model?

<comment><USER28> Their business model does not rely on third parties accessing private user information.

<comment><USER29> Agreed, it's quite the opposite in fact : their business model relies on jealously guarding private user information to remain the only entity in the world who can sell highly-targeted ads

<comment><USER30> How do you sell highly targeted ads without revealing your data? How did the Obama campaign download the entire U.S. social graph in 2012, and brag about doing so, with Facebook's approval? How did Cambridge Analytica do a comparable thing in 2016?

Facebook doesn't sound that jealous to me.

<comment><USER28> They abstract most of it away. Marketers can set specific targeting criteria and can get a high level estimate of how an ad will perform. Beyond that it's tracking impressions, clicks, split testing, etc.

The app API was different until 2013(?). App developers only needed a single user's permission to access all of that user's friends' information. Both Obama and Cambridge Analytica came out of that period. Now, users can only authorize the release of their own information.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Seriously, I don't have much respect, if any, for those working for Facebook...unless they're working on and can implement drastic changes in how privacy, tracking and profiling are handled for the betterment of humankind. But Facebook being an advertising company that thrives on such details, I doubt if employees would have much say on these aspects or can do anything.

There ought to be a #quitfacebook topic to get many employees to quit. But I don't believe that would get much traction due to the attractiveness of compensation/benefits and probably some challenging work. If someone working at Facebook believes that things will get better, I'd say they're just deluding themselves. It cannot happen with the current management.

P.S.: Since this post is about Facebook, I'm not going to talk about other companies.

</comment><comment><USER32> Sounds like Facebook is having their NSA moment

<comment><USER33> can't wait for the next Snowden

<comment><USER34> I still remember the first Snowden, who revealed to a shocked world that the NSA was involved in signals intelligence. I suspect that the next Snowden will reveal to a shocked world that 3rd party databases have a tendency to leak into other 3rd party databases.

<comment><USER24> What amazed me the most from the first Snowden leak was that the NSA was vastly more effective and competent in their efforts than I had expected.

<comment><USER33> I think that most people think that...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> This one company's unauthorized access to millions of records may just be the tip of the iceberg.

</comment><comment><USER36> >"There was a feeling, said one of the people, that Facebook wanted to take aggressive steps to make sure it could regain user trust. And over all, he said, confidence was up."

I'm curious what might be the source of this regained "confidence."? The idea that this will all just blow ever in a few months?

</comment><comment><USER37> I don't really understand the outrage. Just what do you expect when you share things with hundreds of people (your FB friends) online? For it _not_ to be used? The only reasonable assumption is that anyone and everyone can read whatever you share on FB.

</comment><comment><USER38> Recommended read to add to this[1]. Employee was shocked with the amount of data they have access to without clear business need.

[1] Might be behind paywall: [https://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/mar/17/ex- facebook-e...](https://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/mar/17/ex-facebook- employee-rips-mark-zuckerbergs-secret-/)

</comment><comment><USER39> On the plus side, it's good to know that Facebook has employees who care about being ethical citizens of the Internet ecosystem. Hopefully they can exert pressure on the upper ranks in some way to bring things under control. Facebook has the opportunity to be a force for good, while also accomplishing its business model, but it won't naturally lean in that direction.

</comment><comment><USER40> Someone I know closely worked at Facebook in its heyday, but it has been a while since he left. I asked him around 2014 (he had just left the company) "So what do you think about the way Facebook handles privacy issues?" His response was not defensive at all. Rather, it was a very curious "FB is one of the most open cultures you can ever work in. Any employee can ask any question of anyone at the highest levels and expect to get a honest answer". My thought was "So you didn't have _anything_ to ask questions about?". He was actually a pretty nice fellow, so I stopped asking anything else at that point.

But I remember thinking that it was a very funny, cult-member like response. And you can test this too. Ask your friends who work at FB and I bet you will get some pre-programmed response very similar to that.

<comment><USER29> I worked at Facebook even longer ago than that.

What makes you assume it's got to be a pre-programmed, cult-member like response and cannot believe that this is the actual work culture ?

<comment><USER40> Ok, perhaps you are the best person to ask.

1\. What was Mark Zuckerberg's response when people asked him if Facebook might be overstepping bounds in terms of data collection (shadow profiles)?

2\. What did the company employees think of the backlash over their beacon project?

3\. When Facebook told the EU that they cannot match FB user profiles and WhatsApp user profiles to create a single profile (remembering that they would be fined), what was the general consensus among employees? Did they know that FB had lied? Were they still OK with that? If they were, was there not a single person expressing dissent?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> "KW: Mark, can you give us a sense of the timing and cost for this? Like, the audits that you're talking about. Is there any sense of how quickly you could do it and what kind of cost it would be to the company?

I think it depends on what we find. But we're going to be investigating and reviewing _tens of thousands of apps from before 2014_ , and assuming that there's some suspicious activity we're _probably_ going to be doing a number of formal audits, so I think this is going to be pretty expensive. You know, the conversations we have been having internally on this is, _" Are there enough people who are trained auditors in the world to do the number of audits that we're going to need quickly?"_ But I think this is going to cost many millions of dollars and take a number of months and hopefully not longer than that in order to get this fully complete."

Source: [https://www.recode.net/2018/3/22/17150814/transcript- intervi...](https://www.recode.net/2018/3/22/17150814/transcript-interview- facebook-mark-zuckerberg-cambridge-analytica-controversy)

<comment><USER42> And even if anyone ever considers it " _complete_ ," the reality is, that it's just going to be white wash and bullshit.

Why waste the fucking money. Quit being sentimental. Just trash Facebook and pivot (lol pivot). Be a real motherfucker, and let Facebook burn. Make something cooler than Facebook. Fuck this audit stupidity.

Come on, man.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Honestly, I am not very worried about rouge data analytic companies or Russian trolls on facebook.

I am worried that questionable semi-private German entity can block me (e.g. 30 days ban) on facebook at will. I am an US citizen and don't live in Germany. This is outrageous.

<comment><USER44> Whatabout a semi-private German entity?

<comment><USER43> Take this as a start (I know, Breitbart)

[http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015/09/17/german-govt- hires...](http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015/09/17/german-govt-hires-ex- stasi-agent-patrol-facebook-xenophobic-comments/)

I just read about "FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection Regarding Reported Concerns about Facebook Privacy Practices". Since I am an American citizen and was blocked for 30 days on facebook by this dubious organisation, I may actually drop the FTC an email and ask about their opinion on this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> How fast can I kill all my karma by pointing out that the 3 of the top 4 articles on HN are some realization that Facebook does not give an ef about anybody's privacy?

<comment><USER46> It's been almost a week of this. Actually wondering when we'll get back to interesting tech

<comment><USER47> It is attitudes like this that created the problem in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Let's cut to the chase. Would you work for Facebook in your dream role, at industry leading pay.

The answer, for most of us is an emphatic 'yes'

<comment><USER49> My dreams exclude anything with "Google", "Facebook" and "Uber". And if the role we talk about involves iOS, then Facebook is even less attractive, because imho their app is an example how not to do an iOS application.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> These performances by CEOs before their employees to "calm" them reminds me of Jonestown or some other cult.

Everyone kind of knows the leaders are corrupt liars and false prophets. It's all a scam. But they've invested so much of their lives and identities into the ideology, there's not really any turning back. It's like some "When Prophesy Fails" inflection point for the whole industry.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Prophecy_Fails](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Prophecy_Fails)

<comment><USER51> > These performances by CEOs before their employees to "calm" them reminds me > of Jonestown or some other cult.

To be fair, the sentence that refers to "calming the employees" was from the New York Times and probably supposed to evoke that sort of feeling. The facts presented in the article are simply that Zuck had a meeting with employees to talk about current issues, which is pretty much standard practice for any company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Are we going to talk about the fact that a whole bunch of these employees are former elected officials, or related to one? Which is part of why Zuckerberg isn't actually concerned about the political fallout?

<comment><USER53> Running for president...

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Zuckerberg should resign at this moment. Facebook needs new leadership if it wants to change the way it has been operating.

<comment><USER55> Nah. In a week all of this will be forgotten (do you still remember the helicopter in the river, and the bridge that collapsed?). You and me and a few more people will remember, but we all already know that everything that is posted privately on Facebook will be leaked sooner or later.

I even expect to see a few angry post from people that decided to delete their account now, and when they tried to undelete the account after a few weeks they surprisingly discover that all the old information was missing and Facebook can't recover it because it is deleted.

fake quote > _If they used Windows instead of Linux, they could have send the account to the Recycler Bin, and recover it now._

<comment><USER56> I thought the same a week ago. Nearly bought some FB calls even. But this controversy has surprised me with its staying power.

The real sizzle comes not from the emotional outrage but the calls for government inquiry and potential regulation, which would do structural damage to all of Silicon Valley. This has been a stunningly bipartisan effort, the left supporting it ostensibly because they like regulating big businesses, and the right supporting it because they (perhaps correctly) see Silicon Valley megacorps as adversaries.

<comment><USER57> I did buy some calls. I am sweating currently, bad timing with all the other economic developments.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why I'm joining Cozy Cloud – hint: personal cloud matters - <AUTHOR> http://standblog.org/blog/post/2015/03/11/Why-I-m-joining-Cozy-Cloud-%28hint%3A-personal-cloud-matters%29

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, French Open Source Software community is federating to build a strong alternative to major cloud services. It's getting very interesting.

</comment><comment><USER2> How does "Cozy Cloud" compare with other open source clouds like OwnCloud?

</comment><comment><USER3> Very good news for open-source software

</comment><comment><USER4> Wow, big moves from both sides !</comment>