Wake up to Anonymous, @SachaBaronCohen, influencers and academics recommending to delete Facebook. Advertisers must be proud of the $65B they provided to incentivize its horrors.
!!!!! just unsealed, and higher than prior news reports. /1
we learned last Fall in a different G lawsuit (NdCal) during widely reported testimony the number 36% as the share Google paid Apple to be locked in as default search across Apple's surfaces.
But now this was just unsealed from the two key contracts (here is 2014 which even then was 37.5%) /2
Whoa. Facebook had a secret "Project Ghostbusters" (get it?) which allegedly was to decrypt "man-in-the-middle" style Snapchat traffic to copy it. Yellow highlight indicates redactions just lifted in nine unsealed plaintiffs briefs in private antitrust lawsuit. Wild stuff. /1
A lot of new stuff. There was lots of reporting (including Apple threats to boot Facebook) at the time on Facebook's software and Onavo acquisition allowing it to "spy" on competitive apps but I recall the decryption was written as a hypothetical. CEO email kickstarting it. /2
You can read the press back in Jan 2019 spoon fed by Facebook PR to friendlies with no mentions of decrypting SSL then compare to this internal email below sent to Facebook's most senior executives - "currently includes SSL decryption"... /3
TikTok? Y’all are crazy. Yes, it’s a huge problem but hypocrisy. Last year after Facebook worked years to keep it sealed, a court unsealed its secret app audit. It showed 86,961 developers in China had access to all of our personal data…yet crickets. /1 storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.usco…
This is the same app audit Zuckerberg promised Congress after concerns American’s personal data had been readily mined in Russia. Throw in Iran, North Korea, you name it. Press didn’t dig in. A good source told me DOJ and Congress hadn’t ever even seen this forensic audit. /2
Yet Facebook had spent four years trying very hard to keep even the names of the forensic auditing / clean-up firms confidential. Senate Intel Chairs did send a letter, no word on whether Facebook even responded to them. /3
ok, I've now read the NYT response this week to attempts by OpenAI to dismiss NYT's landmark lawsuit against the high-flying AI company.
Put simply, NYT makes it brutally clear on page one how you can tell the difference between the two companies.
Oomph. /1
A few other observations from me. Like NYT's original complaint, it's smart and future-focused on fair value. Where OpenAI made frankly bizarre claims NYT was hacking the platform as it detected OpenAI had its content, NYT is right. OpenAI isn't and can't dispute it copied it. /2
Um, 2022 > 2020 = TRUE. Where OpenAI tried to inject a statute-of-limitations argument that OpenAI's lifting of content was "common knowledge" in 2020, NYT points out that ChatGPT and OpenAI didn't go viral until Nov 2022. /3
That's rich.
Microsoft's motion to dismiss NYT landmark lawsuit against MSFT/OpenAI. The most valuable company on the planet at 3 trillion claims the right to mine (aka 'harness') every work of journalism as part of its 'collaboration.' Comparing it to copying video tapes. 1/6
To be fair, MSFT, and its leadership, were testifying from Australia to US Congress on importance of a free and plural press and antitrust enforcement to support it just a few yrs ago. They genuinely seemed to care now Team Nadella has prioritized its OpenAI 'collaboration.' 2/6
I keep putting 'collaboration' in air quotes as it's an amusing attempt to reframe what is an investment worth tens of billions in which MSFT's CEO literally helped save the OpenAI CEO and company late last year. 'Collaboration' is a nice lawyer spin word for it. 3/6
If you’re looking for positive courtroom news, Meta’s “nuclear” structural constitutional lawsuit v FTC in response to the FTC’s show cause to ban it from surveillance capitalism with minors went very very poorly just now. /1
Meta attempted to argue bias based on a few words in the show cause, not the statute itself, which the court called the “weakest argument” that there would be irreparable injury. A lot of back and forth but no ground given. /2
I bore you with this as the court also pointed out the high bar for irreparable injury in DC court and most small businesses can’t reach it yet risk can mean they go out of business. He said I’m fairly certain ”a few months of litigation won’t put Meta out of business.” /3