Facebook's Zuckerberg 'Sympathetic' With Apple's Fight With US Authorities

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg said Monday he was "sympathetic" with Apple's chief executive Tim Cook in his stand-off with the US government over breaking into the iPhone of a mass shooter.

"I don't think that requiring back doors to encryption is either going to be an effective thing to increase security or is really the right thing to do. We are pretty sympathetic to Tim and Apple," Facebook's chief executive told delegates at the world's biggest mobile congress in Barcelona.

"At the same time we feel we have a really big responsibility running this big networking community to help prevent terrorism and different types of attacks.

"If we have opportunities to basically work with the government to make sure there are not terrorist attacks, obviously we are going to take those opportunities," he added during an address at Mobile World Congress.

The controversy emerged earlier this month when Apple refused to help the FBI break into an iPhone belonging Syed Farook, who along with his wife went on a deadly shooting rampage, killing 14 people in California's San Bernardino in December.

Apple claims that cooperating with the probe would undermine privacy and security for its devices, while the US government counters it is a one-time request that will aid an important investigation.

Until now, Zuckerberg - who has been at pains to plug privacy features on the social networking site in recent years - has not spoken publicly about the spat although last week, Facebook issued a statement in support of Apple.

A dangerous precedent?

In the statement, it pledged to continue "to fight aggressively against requirements for companies to weaken the security of their systems," saying such demands "would create a chilling precedent".

Apple has vowed to fight a judge's order that it should create an operating system that would allow the FBI to force entry into the iPhone.

(Also see:  Apple vs. FBI: Is Your iPhone Safe?)

Last week, Apple's Cook also warned that complying with the order would set a dangerous precedent and open the door for governments and even criminals to access sensitive data in the future.

"Facebook and other large tech firms are global, and one of the things that they are concerned with is that when they make policy in the US, that policy is cited by other regimes, including non-democratic ones," Avi Greengart of Current Analysis research firm told AFP.

"There is also the real fear that once you ensure that encryption can be broken, it will be broken, because the tools for doing so will inevitably leak out - and that imperils security for personal information, business information, and transactions."

Consumer privacy 'most important'

Other major firms at the Barcelona congress have also sided with the iPhone maker.

Richard Yu, consumer devices chief for Chinese electronics giant Huawei, said Sunday that privacy was "the most important thing to the consumer."

"We should really protect the consumer's privacy and security. Personally, I support... Tim Cook's idea," Bloomberg quoted him as saying.

Facebook was long accused of brushing aside users' privacy concerns, and although Zuckerberg has strived to win back trust with a flurry of features, the social network is still in the eye of the storm.

Earlier this month, it was given three months by France's CNIL privacy watchdog to stop storing data on people who do not have an account with the social network.

The decision comes after Facebook lost a similar fight with Belgium's privacy watchdog in November when a court ordered it to stop storing personal data from non-users.

On a regional level, the European Union's 28 privacy watchdogs have been coordinating probes into possible violations of EU law by Facebook's policy for handling personal photos and data.

Sponsored link

Internet Features Trai vs. Facebook's Free Basics: 7 Things You Need to Know

Indian regulators have come down hard against Facebook this week, effectively banning the social network from offering a controversial service known as Free Basics.

You may be hearing a lot about Free Basics in the news right now. What is it, and why is this fight halfway around the world so important to Facebook? Here's all you need to get caught up.

Q: What is Free Basics?

A: Free Basics is, first and foremost, an app. People in developing countries rely on Free Basics to access certain digital services, such as health, schooling and financial information, as well as job leads. For these folks, Free Basics is great because it does exactly what it sounds like: grants people crucial, life-enhancing information at virtually zero cost to them. All they need is a cellphone with a data plan. And Free Basics doesn't even count against your data cap, so you can stretch your monthly data even further.

Q: If it's so great, then why does India want to ban it?

A: While Free Basics helps connect low-income people to the Web, some people argue that it comes with a huge trade-off for society. This trade-off has to do with how Free Basics works.

Free Basics is "free" because Facebook has struck business deals with the telecom networks over which the app's data travels. That's how the telecom companies can exempt Free Basics from their data caps.

At the same time, the information and services that you can find on Free Basics come from nonprofits, private companies and other organizations that have also struck a partnership with Facebook. To participate in Free Basics, these groups have to agree to play by Facebook's rules - what it calls the Free Basics participation guidelines.

Q: I don't get it. So, why is India against it?

A: The biggest problem, critics such as the Indian government say, is that companies who aren't a part of the program could get left behind while others who've hitched their wagon to Facebook get promoted to Indian consumers - for free. Free is a very compelling price, and Facebook itself is poised to gain a lot of traction in developing countries where demand for basic digital services is high.

Some consumer advocates claim Facebook has an even darker agenda: To centralize people's experience of the Web so that, for all intents and purposes, they think Facebook is the Internet. The real Internet is much more than that, of course, consisting of sites like Google, Yahoo and countless other independent sites and blogs. But when Facebook and its associated properties account for the vast majority of a person's Internet use, the social network gains a greater ability to track Internet users' online habits, not to mention a big boost when it comes to someday advertising to those people, critics say. (Free Basics doesn't currently come with advertisements.)

Q: What does Facebook have to say about all this?

A: Facebook argues this is hogwash; with millions of people around the world still lacking affordable access to the Internet, it makes no sense why you'd want to restrict a program like Free Basics.

"Who could possibly be against this?" Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a December Times of India op-ed.

In a statement Monday, Facebook said it was disappointed with India's decision, but that "we will continue our efforts to eliminate barriers and give the unconnected an easier path to the internet and the opportunities it brings."

Q: What did India do, exactly?

A: Ah, now we've reached the core of the debate. India's top telecom regulator basically told Internet providers that they can't strike any deals that look like the ones they struck with Facebook and Free Basics. They didn't highlight Free Basics by name. But it's pretty clear who the target of the policy is, given that Free Basics is what sparked this debate in India in the first place.

Indian regulators said Monday that programs like Facebook's "arguably disadvantage small content providers who may not be able to participate in such schemes. This may thus, create entry barriers and non-level playing field for these players[,] stifling innovation."

Q: Why should I care about this? I don't live in India.

A: Virtually everyone who works on Internet policy is watching this unfold. India is one of the world's biggest potential Internet markets, and its decision marks a turning point in a major struggle for Facebook and other tech companies as they seek to gain more traction in developing countries. It also comes amid an intense debate over the same issue in the United States.

In recent months, T-Mobile, AT&T and Comcast have all announced programs or applications that won't count against customer data caps. For example, T-Mobile exempts services like Spotify and Netflix from a customer's monthly data allotment. All this has prompted the Federal Communications Commission to request meetings with officials from all three companies. Verizon also made waves last week when it said that its own, proprietary streaming video service, Go90, would be exempted from its customers' data caps.

Q: And this is bad because it could put rivals to Spotify or Netflix at a disadvantage?

A: That's what opponents of the practice claim. It could even allow Verizon to undermine Netflix itself by having Netflix count against your data cap, but not Go90. On the other hand, industry officials have said the tactic, known as "zero-rating," offers a way for telecom companies to differentiate themselves to consumers and to give subscribers better benefits.

While it's unclear whether zero-rating will be tolerated in the United States, India is signaling to the world that it will not be allowed.

Sponsored link 

Life After Facebook

Just over a decade ago, students at a smattering of elite colleges were debating the merits of a new website called the facebook. It was all the rage at Harvard, naturally, where it had been launched by a sophomore who "literally" made it in a week.

"I'm just like a little kid," Mark Zuckerberg told the Harvard Crimson in 2004. "I get bored easily and computers excite me. Those are the two driving factors here."

The other students on campus were pretty excited, too. Within weeks of going online, the site offering a "visualization of your social network" gained thousands of users, expanding quickly to other schools.

At Columbia, where there was already a social media platform called "CUCommunity" (later restyled to "Campus Network"), there was the sense that The Facebook was trying to usurp a preexisting tool. In an April 2004 column, one student accused Zuckerberg of launching his website out of jealousy.

"Thanks to CUCommunity, our undergraduate body is closer than ever before," the piece said. "But the cowards in Cambridge just couldn't accept that. They had to create thefacebook.com. They had to challenge us."

The Harvard Crimson shot back with an editorial called "Manifest Destiny, Facebook Style":

"Harvard students have a duty to help those at lesser schools - like Columbia and Yale - break free from social life in the social slow lane and bring them up to speed on the superhighway of cool. Clubs, bars, movies moving - all passe, bona fide faux pas in the 21st-century etiquette. It seems as though everyone has forgotten what it means to 'have fun.' While students at Dartmouth, Columbia, even Yale (if one can even call them students) drink beer and frequent parties, we ask of them: have you ever confirmed a friend? Have you ever visualized your friend network? Have you ever been poked?"

To every rival school's chagrin, the Harvard Crimson was right. Stanford students took to it quickly, as nearly 3,000 students registered for The Facebook within a week. Come September of 2004, it appeared that even Columbia was admitting defeat: an article on the front page explored how social rites were changing "in the age of The Facebook."

The rest, as we all know, is history. (Alternatively, it is an Oscar-winning film directed by David Fincher.)

Facebook turned 12 on Thursday. It celebrated this milestone with a self-proclaimed holiday and a blog post reporting that people are more connected than they have ever been before.

On "Friends Day," the data scientists at Facebook announced that we are all a lot closer to one another than we thought.

The adage that there exist only "six degrees of separation" between everyone in the world has been around for at least the last century, when the Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy proposed the notion in a short story called "Chains." Then in the 60s, scientists Stanley Milgram and Jeffrey Travers corroborated the idea that everyone in the world is but six short social connections away from everyone else in the world. It's since been tested repeatedly, with mixed results.

More recently, the theory has evolved into games like "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon," a way for celebrities to score their status in the entertainment industry based on their distance from the actor-musician.

Now, it appears that active Facebook users are nearly twice as connected as they once (supposedly) were.

"Playwrights, poets, and scientists have proposed that everyone on the planet is connected to everyone else by six other people," the blog post read. "In honor of Friends Day, we've crunched the Facebook friend graph and determined that the number is 3.57. Each person in the world (at least among the 1.59 billion people active on Facebook) is connected to every other person by an average of three and a half other people."

The blog post also uses an algorithm to calculate each user's individual degrees of separation. Sheryl Sandberg, for instance, is separated from the rest of the Facebook universe by a meager 2.92 degrees.

Of course, this measurement ignores the nearly 6 billion other living humans who don't use the site, and hence can't truly overturn the long held belief that it's six degrees of separation that governs for most of humanity. But it does raise the question of how the social lives of those 1.59 billion have changed since they joined the site.

Facebook users contemplated this through the hashtag #BeforeFacebookI, and the recollections ranged from humorous to resentful to truly thought-provoking.

"#BeforeFacebookI got a phone call when someone close to me passed away and when something cool was going to happen," a Michelle Orack wrote. "Before fb I didn't realize how big of a scale of insane and idiotic people there are in the world. I liked people and I didn't have a filter or have to worry about who I offended ... On a positive note, I have gained some pretty great friends near and far ..."

"BeforeFacebookI had to remember everyone's birthday," wrote a Debbie Mitchell, "now I don't have to. Thank You FB!"

At least one user felt that Facebook had made him more enlightened.

"#BeforeFacebookI went unchallenged in many of my assumptions about class, race, gender, prejudice, and identity," a Dan Jones wrote. "I did not know many of my friends as well as I do now. . .I was a less interesting person, and a less curious one."

But others feel that they're now exposed to more than they care to know. A 2013 study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 36 percent of Facebook users "strongly dislike" oversharing.

"The level of navel-gazing that defines our lives today seems to reach new peaks daily," Huffington Post columnist Ann Brenoff lamented in 2012. "The irony, of course, is that we practice this form of narcissism with the insistence that we are sharing. News flash: It is not sharing when you post a photo on Facebook of the eggs you ate for breakfast."3

Sponsored link