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Facebook’s Onavo Gives Social-Media Firm Inside Peek at Rivals’ Users

wsj.com

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Re: Facebook’s Onavo Gives Social-Media Firm Inside Peek at Rivals’ Users

#31

Post by flipp3r »

afandian wrote: post #18
teej wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once sat in on a pitch from an antivirus software company who was selling the ability to look at the full browsing history of people who had visited your website. You could see all of their searches, if they visited competitors, and more. Most of the time I get annoyed of the FUD of "they're selling my data!" but this was different. It was true and it was scary.

Why not name them?

If I could take a guess I'd say its likely to be Avast, which has multiple browser extensions that send all your browsing activity to them, while simultaneously offering a service to remove other browser extensions.

They'll even set their own search engine as your default homepage.

Re: Facebook’s Onavo Gives Social-Media Firm Inside Peek at Rivals’ Users

#32

Post by cbaleanu »

striking wrote: post #17

If you can't get by the paywall, Onavo isn't the only thing Facebook will let you get an inside peek at... https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.wsj.com/article...

Interesting find, by using that link, I gave FB some metrics about me and in return they sponsored my visit to the wsj article.

Re: Facebook’s Onavo Gives Social-Media Firm Inside Peek at Rivals’ Users

#34

Post by samsolomon »

A comment on the WSJ brings up an interesting point—if Zuckerberg were to run for president, would he have access to this information? What else could he have access to?

Given the amount of data Facebook has about everybody, I find that possibility worrisome. It seems obvious that a campaign strategist could segment individual states, regions and cities. They could target people based on likes and interests. They could get very granular with messaging—advertisers can do this through Facebook right now.

But what other information could be used that advertisers don't have access to? Application usage, website visits, WhatsApp message keywords?

Re: Facebook’s Onavo Gives Social-Media Firm Inside Peek at Rivals’ Users

#35

Post by 659087 »

samsolomon wrote: post #34

A comment on the WSJ brings up an interesting point—if Zuckerberg were to run for president, would he have access to this information? What else could he have access to? Given the amount of data Facebook has about everybody, I find that possibility worrisome. It seems obvious that a campaign strategist could segment individual states, regions and cities. They could target people based on likes and interests. They cou…

> But what other information could be used that advertisers don't have access to? Application usage, website visits, WhatsApp keywords?

Don't forget "private" conversations on messenger.

Re: Facebook’s Onavo Gives Social-Media Firm Inside Peek at Rivals’ Users

#36

Post by teej »

devrandomguy wrote: post #30
afandian wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not name them?

That would identify the GP to within a small group (the meeting). They probably worked under an NDA. It would be great if an unrelated leak were to happen, though.

I'm not anonymous. You can identify me by going to my profile if you'd like.

To be completely honest, I don't remember. It was 2 years ago and I sit on lots of these pitches. I remember pushing back on them about the methodology, hearing how the sausage was made, and noping right out.

I want my team to be able to spend marketing dollars efficiently but I would never compromise my ethics to do so. Luckily I work somewhere that I can give a justified 'no' and keep my job.

Re: Facebook’s Onavo Gives Social-Media Firm Inside Peek at Rivals’ Users

#37

Post by 659087 »

slackoverflower wrote: post #20

Facebook is very very evil, much more so than Google. SEC/DOJ/whoever needs to step in and stop Zuckerberg.

I think you're deluding yourself if you believe Google is far behind Facebook in the evil department. Both need to be put in their place, but I doubt we can count on the US government to make that happen.

Re: Facebook’s Onavo Gives Social-Media Firm Inside Peek at Rivals’ Users

#38

Post by netsharc »

bogomipz wrote: post #25
netsharc wrote: post #16

Having Xposed and XPrivacy on my old phone, it's really interesting what permissions apps request. For example FB Messenger requests the permission to enumerate installed packages: https://wroot.org/posts/enumerating-android-installed-applic... and IIRC also enumerates running tasks. So it's probably simple to do analytics for the whole phone...

>"Having Xposed and XPrivacy on my old phone," I would be curious to hear your feed back on Xposed oand Xprivacy. Also it sounds like you stopped using them, maybe you could say why? Cheers.

I now have a phone with Nougat, according to the Xposed developers, Xposed doesn't yet work reliably with it. On Marshmallow it worked very well, Xprivacy would show pop-ups when an app tries to do something, you can either allow this, refuse this or allow/refuse for a period of time.

Otherwise, Xprivacy's UI is a bit of a pain, but it's usable...

Re: Facebook’s Onavo Gives Social-Media Firm Inside Peek at Rivals’ Users

#39

Post by caseysoftware »

samsolomon wrote: post #34

A comment on the WSJ brings up an interesting point—if Zuckerberg were to run for president, would he have access to this information? What else could he have access to? Given the amount of data Facebook has about everybody, I find that possibility worrisome. It seems obvious that a campaign strategist could segment individual states, regions and cities. They could target people based on likes and interests. They cou…

When you are active and who you interact with, allowing them to hit you with the "perfect" message at the right time.

Having all your Likes - even the things you've unliked - so they know which celebrities to put in front of you.

Having all of your browsing history+who you interact with and the language you use gives them near-perfect understanding of your opinions on policies and politicians going back the entire life your account all over the internet.

That becomes incredibly simple to manipulate.. as I quoted yesterday:

> "We predicted that our manipulation would produce a very small effect, if any, but that’s not what we found. On average, we were able to shift the proportion of people favouring any given candidate by more than 20 per cent overall and more than 60 per cent in some demographic groups. Even more disturbing, 99.5 per cent of our participants showed no awareness that they were viewing biased search rankings – in other words, that they were being manipulated."

Ref: https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-internet-flips-elections-and-...

Re: Facebook’s Onavo Gives Social-Media Firm Inside Peek at Rivals’ Users

#40

Post by WhiteSource1 »

daenney wrote: post #12
thinkMOAR wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"ethically dubious", i consider it criminal; though they probably got some (lawyer written) fine print to say it is not so.

I would be interested to hear from people with knowledge of EU and US law how shady this is in their respective jurisdictions. I'm having a hard time imagining what they did is OK, but I'm probably wrong.

If you can identify personal data (which if they can tie it to the user's Facebook account, that's pretty easy to do) it's likely (note: not a lawyer) a violation of the EU GDPR regulations (http://www.eugdpr.org/)
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