Zuckerberg set up fraudulent scheme to 'weaponise' data, court case alleges

Zuckerberg set up fraudulent scheme to 'weaponise' data, court case alleges(theguardian.com)

221 points by Malarkey73 7 years ago | 26 comments

makomk 7 years ago |

"Six4Three lodged its original case in 2015 shortly after Facebook removed developers’ access to friends’ data. The company said it had invested $250,000 in developing an app called Pikinis that filtered users’ friends photos to find any of them in swimwear. Its launch was met with controversy."

So basically this company tried to do something creepy and invasive with users' data, were stopped by Facebook, and now they're taking advantage of the fact that the press is pissed off at Facebook and will uncritically regurgitate any negative claim about them in headlines as leverage in their court case against them, likely in the expectation that it'll be cheaper for Facebook to settle than deal with the PR fallout.

forapurpose 7 years ago | |

I don't care about Six4Three or their motives; I care about Facebook and privacy. It might be unfair to Facebook but from the little I know about their business practices, they hardly have clean hands or deserve much sympathy.

> $250,000

That doesn't sound like much for a years-long lawsuit against a major company with deep pockets; unless they are suing for far more, there won't be much, if any, net profit even if they win. I wonder what else is going on here. Was the Pikini app a test of Facebook's privacy policy and/or ML image recognition, to see how they would respond? To make a point? The description of it sounds tailor-made for controversy. Or did activists later pick up on the case and support or fund it?

ihsw2 7 years ago | | |

Honestly it sounds like a developer (or group of developers) through together an app that appeals to creepers and they felt arbitrarily singled out for creating a blatantly creepy app whereas the ones that quietly monetize the same data (via data brokers or something to that effect) get a free pass.

Ordinarily, a developer would bugger off but they (presumably) have alt-right activist leanings and they're trying to make a mountain out of a molehill. Check 4chan on any day and there will be "FB/IG creep" threads where users anonymously upload photos of their female Facebook and Instagram friends in skimpy/swimwear clothing.

tzahola 7 years ago | |

250k?????

I bet their engineer to manager ratio was quite low.

gowld 7 years ago | | |

2 manager and 4 devs for 1 month to make an app.

lallysingh 7 years ago | | |

That's < 1 yrs worth of an SV engineer's rate (after overhead). Roughly half.

aje403 7 years ago | |

Stop, you're making a comment that is not unequivocally anti-Facebook, therefore it is incorrect

dang 7 years ago | | |

We've banned this account for repeatedly posting unsubstantive comments and ignoring our requests to stop.

jasode 7 years ago |

In this particular article, "weaponise" doesn't mean private data as a weapon against the users (like Richard Stallman critiques of Facebook[1]). Instead, the journalists and the lawsuit are talking about desirable user data as a weapon against the API developers.

The article has interwoven 2 themes in a disjointed way and I had to read it several times to separate the components of the dispute.

The 1st theme is that the company Six4Three wrote an app to find photos of friends in bikinis using Facebook's platform API. Facebook later pulled the rug out from under them. In this sense, this is similar to other stories about platforms changing the terms/accessiblity of API usage (e.g. Facebook demoting Zynga games, or Twitter closing off 3rd-party clients, etc). If a platform entices programmers to use an API and then later restricts it (or kicks programmers off it), the claim is being made that it is "fraud". Facebook's counterclaim is that blocking programmers from using its API is exercising its editorial control and therefore "free speech".

The 2nd theme that's mentioned in passing is the Six4Three bikini API dispute as a forensic discovery into how the Cambridge Analytica abuse was deliberately engineered into the platform in 2011 and was approved by Facebook senior management. I think this is the more interesting angle that the Guardian writers should have focused more text on.

[1] https://stallman.org/facebook.html

jakelazaroff 7 years ago |

Only tangentially related, but the second image in the article [1] — the one with all the cameras right in Zuckerberg's face — is crazy. What a strange and surreal experience that must be.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/may/24/mark-zuck...

eridius 7 years ago | |

It's almost like a physical representation of how Facebook tries to capture every nuance of your activity online.

platz 7 years ago |

Statistics: Weaponized pattern recognition.

Gothic High Tech: Consciously weaponized bullshit.

Gollumization: The impoverishment of a system through ephmeralization and weaponized attention.

Bullshit: 1. Data (often a firehose) produced by someone who is indifferent to the truth or falsity of what is being said. 2. Data that appears to contain more information than it actually does. 3. Noise randomly tagged with truth-values to give it apparent legibility. 4. Non-requisite variety.

Legibility: the apparent absence of noise in data.

Data: Any collection of information, bullshit and noise.

Information: Data that has been judged to be true or false through comparison with observed reality at a given point in time.

textmode 7 years ago |

This article is a bit short on details.

Back in December 2016, Six4Three ("643") created a website https://www.facebooksappeconomy.com to raise awareness about Facebook's business practices.

"... Facebook started threatening to shut off friend data to companies in late 2012 unless they made extravagant, unrelated purchases in Facebook's new mobile ads product. Zuckerberg did this in order to keep Facebook's advertising business from collapsing because it had been built exclusively for desktop computers."

It has more details on what 643 is hoping to accomplish with the help of other app developers, including a timeline as well as a documentary video.

When 643 contacted Facebook to let them know about this website, Facebook threatened 643 with trademark infringement.1

1. http://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...

bertil 7 years ago |

I have read it three times. It doesn’t make sense. I have no idea what is being alleged.

tomtimtall 7 years ago | |

Facebook abused their position against developers. Kind of like if Apple gave developers full access to all details of every iPhone owner to convince them to develop iPhone apps, then when they get developers onboard they start cutting access randomly to devs, and offer some devs lowball offers to sell with the implied threat of “or we’ll cut you off entirely”.

bertil 7 years ago | | |

I can’t imagine that “randomly” makes sense, or that they have proof of anything like that. “Arbitrarily” means that Facebook gets to decide how much of a creep is too much. It’s very confusing to have the same talk about an offer to sell their company: creeps are the last thing Facebook wants on their payroll.

Verdex_3 7 years ago |

The first half of this title sounds terrible ... until you see the second half. "Court Case Alleges" Well, this is the COURT we're talking about, so maybe this is legitimate information. Until you realize that this actually reduces to: "Some guy says (because he think it will get him money)".