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Facebook's tentacles reach further than people think

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Facebook's tentacles reach further than people think

#261

Post by good_vibes »

tuna-piano wrote: post #79

Facebook's dominance is even more pronounced in parts of the developing world. I've met people in Asia (Myanmar and Nepal) who have just accessed the internet for the first time in the past 12-24 months (through their Android smartphones). But they don't know the true internet - they only know the internet through the Facebook app. They use it like we use Google and web browsers. To them, Facebook is the internet. Th…

wow. this is disturbing when you consider the original intent of the WWW, the evolution throughout the 90's and 00's. Only to end up with Facebook being the gateway for potentially billions of people from developing nations.

Re: Facebook's tentacles reach further than people think

#262

Post by shostack »

jacquesm wrote: post #50
kromem wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how are they hitting that person with a tracking pixel and associating it with the pseudo-account? It's still creepy, but it's likely more about determining knowledge of the friend graph (i.e. suggesting 2nd degree friends via a connecting pseudo-account) than about ad targeting. Though yes, as soon as that pseudo-account could be tied to an actual account, Facebook could use passively gathered info to target you…

> And how are they hitting that person with a tracking pixel and associating it with the pseudo-account? That's the easy part. There are companies that specialize in this sort of thing, as well as in merging profiles from several devices (pc, tablet, smartphone), you can bet that if two-bit advertising technology companies know about these tricks that Facebook does too, and they probably know a trick or two that has…

Are you referring to cookie onboarding companies like LiveRamp?

Re: Facebook's tentacles reach further than people think

#263

Post by crucialfelix »

makecheck wrote: post #72

In computer security, every time machines become fast enough to breach the limits of an algorithm we invent something new so that “hard” problems remain “hard” and therefore encryption is still secure. There has been no corresponding increase in the difficulty of invading privacy. 30 years ago, even though you probably “could” observe somebody for a long time and eventually connect some dots about them, it would not…

How about a Scramble Suit as in a Scanner Darkly ? A browser extension that supplies fake events to all the tracking scripts. Fake website visits, fake clicks, fake session duration. Couple this with a network of VPN so that you are appearing in multiple locations, scrambled with everyone else using the service.

Re: Facebook's tentacles reach further than people think

#265

Post by thr0waway1239 »

amelius wrote: post #195
Msurrow wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the EU the law just did crack down on this with the new EU Data Protection Directive[1]. The DPD covers not only EU based companies, but also any company that provides services for EU citizens in the EU (so, Facebook, LinkedIn etc. are covered by this..but also e.g. your little weather app). The new DPD is strict compared to previous regulation, but there are two parts of the directive that a particularly interest…

> The Data Portability concept: A company covered by the DPD is required to deliver to the user all data the company has on the user, in a standardised format. That means Facebook now has to hand out all your data (information, pics, likes, posts,...) for you to use freely - also in other services. I think this in effect means you own your data. I'm excited to see the effect of this one. The problem here is that thos…

Not disagreeing, but I would certainly like some references if you could provide us any. In fact, it would be genuinely troubling if you cannot find any good sources. Here is why: this notion of fingerprinting seems to be an invention of the legal wing, to be brought out as a CYA when these requests were inevitably going to be demanded.

Time for some math:

Since it is only a 0.01% chance, it means you need 10000 discrete pieces of information collected on a single individual before there is a chance of error. If a company indeed has that many pieces of information on you, you first of all need to know that for a fact.

There is a chance the company will counter that this is aggregated probability, as in, with an uneven distribution of errors. If it is indeed aggregated probability, the companies which advertise on these platforms need to demand their money back because for all you known, none of the folks they are targeting are actually correct fits for their ads. Fingerprinting puts the burden of proof on the shoulders of the company that they are indeed allowing advertisers to target the audience they want. How can they be so sure if the errors are unevenly distributed?

In any case, everyone should demand the information anyway, and let us start using this fingerprinting theory as an excellent opportunity to get deeper into the practices of these companies.

Re: Facebook's tentacles reach further than people think

#266

Post by b1daly »

bigbugbag wrote: post #222
b1daly wrote: post #175

The is some kind of disconnect happening here. The tone and content of many comments here reflect an attitude that it's a given that FB having data about, anything, is bad. (Not universally in this comment thread, there are some dissenting views, but I'm reference what I see as the general rhetorical tone.) My guess is that your average civilian does not view the fact that FB is acquiring vast amounts of data about t…

> if it was decided by the executive or legislative branches that it was absolutely essential that Facebook turn over all their data to the intelligence agencies, due to the need to crack down on dissent, social unrest, then, yes this could be bad. This already exists, it's called the patriot act. Snowden showed that the US government has its hands in facebook and google's data. And you may have heard of the foreigne…

While the government has power to obtain otherwise confidential information from these companies, there are still legal limitations.

The laws could be changed to force FB et. al. to provide total access to all the data, all the time.

That's interesting about the lack of media coverage of these data breaches. How does that happen? I would think it would be big news!

Re: Facebook's tentacles reach further than people think

#267

Post by ahmedk92 »

ghughes wrote: post #22
jacquesm wrote: post #4

The bigger problem for me is how facebook tracks and identifies even people who do not have a facebook account. They simply infer such a person exists from photograps, contacts and other one sided activity and can start to track that person, tie all this information together and then target them with ads even though they never signed up for Facebook. Such shadow profiles are a much larger problem to me than people wh…

Nothing will change until the law cracks down on this. The people who work on these systems are smart enough to comprehend the wider consequences, but they do it anyway because money. Without significant external pressure, there will always be a long line of engineers willing to dial their cognitive dissonance up to 11 and build software that is clearly unethical in exchange for a fat paycheck.

"...are smart enough to comprehend the wider consequences"

Smart is not wise. Just complicate what you think people would hesitate to do, and they will get fooled into dong it. Especially if it challenges their intelligence (e.g. algorithms).

Re: Facebook's tentacles reach further than people think

#268

Post by inimino »

nebabyte wrote: post #210
benevol wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How easy would it be for Zuck to just update the TOS to say "encrypted content is against our TOS" and ban you? Zuck can't add any encrypted content to your personal profile, which means he doesn't make any money off you. And Zuck can do pretty much whatever he wants in his castle, I'd say.

Not very, but getting them to outright do so would be an excellent step forward for privacy.

I wouldn't be so sure of that.
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