I agree. I've seen Facebook doing shady things but I don't think this is one of them.
As a company they want to collect data for whatever reason (a research project, training data for an ML system, creating a new product, refining an existing one or assessing the overall market). So they built software for data collection and are paying people money in exchange. How is this different from Amazon Mechanical Turk or any crowdsourcing platform which pays people for data?
I admit I haven't seen what the contract looks like but are people suggesting that the end user still does not understand that they are providing user data to be used by Facebook in exchange for money or have no power to decline such offer?
But it's much easier for the press to run click baity titles like "Facebook spies on teens! Again!!" and many folks on HN quickly jump on the bandwagon.
That said, the part of this backlash I sympathize with is if someone hates benefiting FB and have any of their data in their hands but then has a friend who uses this service and uploads all their collected chat conversations to FB.
As a company they want to collect data for whatever reason (a research project, training data for an ML system, creating a new product, refining an existing one or assessing the overall market). So they built software for data collection and are paying people money in exchange. How is this different from Amazon Mechanical Turk or any crowdsourcing platform which pays people for data?
I admit I haven't seen what the contract looks like but are people suggesting that the end user still does not understand that they are providing user data to be used by Facebook in exchange for money or have no power to decline such offer?
But it's much easier for the press to run click baity titles like "Facebook spies on teens! Again!!" and many folks on HN quickly jump on the bandwagon.
That said, the part of this backlash I sympathize with is if someone hates benefiting FB and have any of their data in their hands but then has a friend who uses this service and uploads all their collected chat conversations to FB.
and no, I don't work for them.