If the new captain doesn't make the promise, you can't give it much weight, and if it is Facebook, probably no weight even if they did :(
The only privacy claims one may wish to take seriously are those that occur simultaneously with promises never to sell the company.
I used to use a location tracking app called Moves, which was a neat 24/7 location tracking lifelogging tool. Facebook, the very last people I would like to have that data, bought them, and presumably integrated it into my shadow profile.
Special thanks go to to the founders of Moves: Zsolt Szász, Jukka Partanen, Juho Pennanen, Aapo Kyrölä, and Aleksi Aaltonen. Hope you got paid selling private data that belongs to the users that entrusted it to you.
Yes! That's why you should be very very careful who you give your data because you are exactly one acquisition away from the same effect as a breach. Fortunately the GDPR affords some protection here, if the data was collected for one purpose it can not suddenly be used for another.
As for never selling the company: there is one other option: you could give users the option to destroy their data just prior to the transfer. Of course no acquirer would be interested but that is another way of dealing with it.
Such a clause might work as long as it's part of the sale contract to adjust the sale price if any customers take that option.
Nitpick: Rather, it's a condemnation of any data privacy claims; a data privacy practice is a technical measure that (by design if not in reality) makes it literally impossible for the attacker to collect private information in the first place. Nothing else actually provides security in practice.
The only winning move is not to play
So maybe not playing doesn’t really work.
I was thinking, in regards to some grandparent way up there, the same statement “don’t play” might have been true for Oculus in general.
What I mean to say is, don’t sell the company, ever. Then you can “control the outcome”.
Ah, but there lies another fallacy. You really can’t control the outcome even if you try to. Even if you don’t play, likely someone who wants to do the same thing as you, and exploit it, will find a way. Or maybe on their own, Oculus would have never found the right supporter who would honor privacy. Even if they had.. the below could happen.
For example, if Facebook hadn’t bought Oculus, maybe they would have bought the Vive product line from HTC (a bit far fetched) and compete against Oculus.. and then done the same privacy intruding measures.
So even if Oculus had held out and didn’t “play”, they might have been crushed anyway or the privacy problem could have just happened somewhere else.
I’m not saying we should give up trying to protect privacy and “play” the game... but that somehow in the competitive environment we are in, those playing the game are winning more over those who wish not to.
unless they have clear penalties for themselves in their EULA, and no clause that says they can change anything they want at any time. So yeah I guess you're right.
Same. Nothing since has managed the same usefulness (although I suspect this is because iOS has somewhat neutered tracking apps - e.g. both OwnTracks and Gyroscope have significant issues tracking my phone.)
https://theconversation.com/shadow-profiles-facebook-knows-a...
https://www.zdnet.com/article/anger-mounts-after-facebooks-s...
https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/11/17225482/facebook-shadow-...
https://www.cnet.com/news/shadow-profiles-facebook-has-infor...
https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/11/facebook-shadow-profiles-h...
The House Committee interview in the last link (TechCrunch) shows that Zuckerberg does not like to use the "shadow profiles" term, but it's what others use to refer to Facebook's tracking of non-users.
a) If acquirer does X, the seller, Y, has the option to repurchase the company for $1. b) Any future acquirer must agree to the same contract. If it does not, Y must be extended the option to repurchase the company for $1 before the sale.
I don't think anything less could constitute a true promise that the acquirer would avoid X.
Then open firmware.
Then support Linux.
Then ...
You should still stop smoking (for your own good) but that alone won't change the world.
You are in a position to promise something where you have contractually retained control, or at least contractually secured an enforceable promise from the purchaser.
Otherwise, you are in the same position as Joe on the street.
It took 2.5 years for IBM to begin the process of gutting the consultancy they bought, for RedHat I think it'll probably take twice as long.
Getting "company assurance at the highest level" is just as good as is the word of the person at the highest level. There are people for whom their word is their bond, but it's not very common.
They probably don't have the infra set up (yet) to detect they are such SIM cards.
I'd also strongly object to moving the needle even the tiniest amount on Facebook's metrics. They wouldn't force users to do this unless it benefitted them; that's plenty enough reason for a lot of people.
Using some combination of behaviour analysis, flagging new and/or cookie-less browsers, and (I suspect) human review FB have gone to great lengths to try and assure their customers that all humans have one and only one account under their true legal name and biographical details.
They're not very good at that. A pretty big chunk of people I have as friends have fake names, some of them even after me reporting their names for being fake.
