Facebook let Netflix see user DMs, quit streaming to keep Netflix happy: Lawsuit
arstechnica.com
Facebook Watch, Netflix were allegedly bigger competitors than they let on.

in 2018, Facebook told Vox that it doesn’t use private messages for ad targeting. But a few months later, The New York Times, citing “hundreds of pages of Facebook documents,” reported that Facebook “gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages.”

Surprising? No. Appalling? Yes.

    • RandoCalrandian@kbin.social
      25·
      6 months ago

      And even if it is your key, if you can’t see how they made the lock then you can’t prove other keys won’t unlock it.
      OSS FTW

  • Fixbeat@lemmy.ml
    53·
    6 months ago

    I’ve never had Meta (anything) and I gave Netflix the boot a couple years ago. I encourage everyone to also flee. I think both are a waste and they fucking spy on you. I imagine those lengthy privacy statements gave them permission to do this, but sharing private messages is particularly egregious.

    • null@slrpnk.net
      101·
      6 months ago

      What private info does Meta get through federation with other instances?

      I suppose any DMs sent to Threads users?

      • octopus_ink@lemmy.mlEnglish
        202·
        6 months ago

        My point here is not overtly about Privacy. It’s about recognizing that Meta has been a terrible corporate citizen for their entire existence. We shouldn’t be pretending they are some friendly geeky company that just wants to participate like the rest of us. Even if they were, that’s not possible when you are going to pour hundreds of millions of users into these fediverse spaces all at once.

        They will exploit the fediverse to the maximum extent they can, and we should not be voluntarily accompanying them.

        • Leraje@lemmy.blahaj.zoneOP
          71·
          6 months ago

          That’s an excellent point that I don’t see mentioned very often. Quite aside from the fact that Threads has popular scumbags like Libsoftiktok on it, they have 100 million users.

          The existing fediverse is already struggling to moderate effectively. Various communities on Mastodon have already been exposed to vitriolic trolling and tools like fediblock are struggling to deal with it. Over here on the threadiverse, there have been numerous spam and CSAM attacks which, again, the existing tools are struggling to deal with.

          If even just 1% of the Threads userbase are bad actors, that’s still one million bad actors all at once. Just the weight of numbers alone is going to swamp most instances.

      • Liz@midwest.socialEnglish
        1·
        6 months ago

        Yes, although I think DMs are still visible to the instance administrator. I’m not sure if there’s a plan or what the timeline is for actually encrypting that information.

  • Manmoth@lemmy.ml
    375·
    6 months ago

    Anyone using these services in current year is asking for this. If someone is not computer literate and “has” to use these unnecessary services because they can’t selfhost or whatever they need to recognize that total exploitation of their data is the cost and it will never, ever change unless you own your data on your own hardware.

    I can’t reiterate enough how much the government will never ever solve this problem.

  • Starkstruck@lemmy.world
    22·
    6 months ago

    Does going this far with targeted ads actually increase people’s likelihood to buy something? Like, the value of data you can get on someone has to plateau at some point, right?

    • delirious_owl@discuss.online
      8·
      6 months ago

      I think its about decreasing the costs of Netflix by having the right selection of movies available for a given geography at the right time.

      Anyway this limited library thing is another reason I prefer streaming from torrents

    • pythonoob@programming.dev
      3·
      6 months ago

      My thinking is that on a case by case basis you are absolutely correct but that statistically the gains much average out in the large scale so that it makes it worth it. Otherwise, surely advertising wouldn’t be nearly as big as it is right?

      • krashmo@lemmy.world
        6·
        6 months ago

        I don’t know. I feel like you need to be predisposed to a product category in order for an advertisement to have any impact on you. I don’t give a shit about most of the products I see advertised. They’re gathering all this data on me but still end up using it in stupid ways. So much so that even the stuff I am interested in gets presented to me in a worse fashion than it probably would with random ads.

        For example, I built a new pc about a year ago and to this day I get tons of targeted ads trying to sell me GPUs and other PC parts. Like, cool, you figured out something I was interested in buying at one point but that interest evaporated the moment I made that purchase. Every ad I’ve seen since then has been a waste of everyone’s time and yet they keep showing them to me.

  • bluewing@lemm.ee
    15·
    6 months ago

    Meta didn’t “give” anybody shit. They sold that access. Do you see the difference?

    As always, users are the commodity.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldBEnglish
    151·
    6 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    The streaming business’ demise has seemed related to cost cuts at Meta that have also included layoffs.

    The letter, made public Saturday, asks a court to have Reed Hastings, Netflix’s founder and former CEO, respond to a subpoena for documents that plaintiffs claim are relevant to the case.

    One of the first questions that may come to mind is why a company like Facebook would allow Netflix to influence such a major business decision.

    By 2013, Netflix had begun entering into a series of “Facebook Extended API” agreements, including a so-called “Inbox API” agreement that allowed Netflix programmatic access to Facebook’s users’ private message inboxes, in exchange for which Netflix would “provide to FB a written report every two weeks that shows daily counts of recommendation sends and recipient clicks by interface, initiation surface, and/or implementation variant (e.g., Facebook vs. non-Facebook recommendation recipients).

    Meta said it rolled out end-to-end encryption “for all personal chats and calls on Messenger and Facebook” in December.

    The company told Gizmodo that it has standard agreements with Netflix currently but didn’t answer the publication’s specific questions.

    The original article contains 487 words, the summary contains 180 words. Saved 63%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

  • Syn_Attck@lemmy.today
    4·
    6 months ago

    I want to point out how similar this is to the FYES arrangement which allows close allies to spy on each other’s citizens to skirt the legal blocks of a country spying on its own citizens. This allowed Facebook to honestly say (from a legal standpoint) they didn’t read/use private messages for ads. Because they didn’t say they didn’t sell private messages to other companies for tons of $$$, and let them do the reading and advertising.

    Let’s not forget how similar Facebook is to a CIA program that ended from public scrutiny only a few years prior, and how much involvement Facebook now has with US Government entities.

    If the CIA (or just Facebook) wanted to

    • Kill budding decentralization concepts and

    • Cause overload to the system while Facebook retains ultimate control once everyone gives up or only a few small instances are left

    Threads is how it would be done. Interesting naming coincidence too, as pulling a thread causes the entire garment to become structurally compromised.

  • PikaEnglish
    3·
    6 months ago

    Surprise level: 0

    I’m not sure how anyone expects any form of privacy from any company Under The Meta umbrella. I would be more surprised to be told that they weren’t selling your data to every company that offered to buy it.

    I would say this should be ruled out / illegalized but personally I’ve hit that point where I really don’t think we’re ever going to have any right to privacy in this country(US), and the government itself benefits far too much from the same privacy Outreach. It will just end up being a slap on the wrist or another pop up saying “Hey by using the site you agree to XYZ” or “by making this account you accept to give away your first born child”. But considering the alternative is probably them making the service a subscription based, I’m expecting the majority of their users would prefer it this way.

    That being said, Facebook’s biggest push right now is all your chats are now end-to-end encrypted, so what this tells me is that either Facebook knew this PR was going to get out there and they wanted to do damage control early, or that Facebook is not doing true end-to-end encryption and that it’s still server client encryption between both clients with Facebook holding the shared key.