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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

#41

Post by j_s »

mpcovcd wrote: post #19
wonder_bread wrote: post #14

Sounds a lot like Amazon owning Alexa (the website service), Google owning double click, etc.

I don't think that's a reasonable comparison. Alexa data is public, most of it can be accessed for free, and the rest at a reasonable price. Doubleclick is an advertising platform, it doesn't give insight into competitors metrics unless those competitors choose to share that information.

Does Google not monitor/monetize Google Fi, Google Fiber, Google Play Services, Google DNS, Google Chrome, Google Safe Browing, and on and on and on... (Google Maps, Google Location Services)

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

#42

Post by devrandomguy »

LeoNatan25 wrote: post #28

This was a bad idea when the app was standalone—a no-name Israeli startup snooping into all your traffic—and now it's spyware. This is one major (if not THE) reason not to trust small startups with unclear privacy policies—they are often bought in order to (ab)use the data they have collected and continue abusing it from unsuspecting users. Terrible.

So, as the first tech hire/partner, what can we do to protect our users?

- Expire non-critical data after 30 - 90 days, e.g. activity data, not account data.

- When feasible, have the client encrypt the really private user data, only store encrypted blobs on the server (Protonmail does this).

- Send out a positively worded, subtle email notice to warn the more savvy users of a pending acquisition, as soon as that news is no longer private. Let them disseminate the real sitrep on social media and in the news. We did build a community, after all.

- Propose a data architecture update for great efficiency, in which redundant and superfluous data is cleaned and aggregated, before the big handover.

Are there any other suggestions? I am particularly curious if the laws of any one user's country could be used to complicate or thwart a bulk handover of private user data to a new owner. Europeans, I'm looking at you for advice.

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

#43

Post by yohann305 »

Now THIS is a glimpse of what could happen if internet service providers such as AT&T or Comcast are allowed to snoop on traffic. This could happen in large-scale if we don't keep an eye on internet data privacy. Let's stay vigilant. Upvote to spread the words

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

#45

Post by LeoNatan25 »

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…

One could cynically say that the fake news spreading in this election on Facebook could have been a preliminary test of their algorithm for crowd control. Is such a theory really that far fetched, given news like this?

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

#46

Post by sethrin »

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…

Well, as I've read on this, there is good news and bad news. The good news is that the best predictors of how you're going to vote are already public. Wait, maybe that's the bad news. Either way, as you say one can already do very granular advertising through FB already, but having more data is not necessarily equivalent to having better information, and you're not necessarily trying to market optimally to every potentially identifiable segment. If you knew that peanut-related political ads played really well with left-handed leftist lecturers in LA, you might still not consider that worth taking action on. For most people things like age, income, education, party registration, and parent's party registration are sufficiently predictive.

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

#47

Post by daenney »

WhiteSource1 wrote: post #40
daenney wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/ )

Unfortunately GDPR enforcement is about 9 months away. I don't think it applies retroactively.

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

#48

Post by mpcovcd »

j_s wrote: post #41
mpcovcd wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's a reasonable comparison. Alexa data is public, most of it can be accessed for free, and the rest at a reasonable price. Doubleclick is an advertising platform, it doesn't give insight into competitors metrics unless those competitors choose to share that information.

Does Google not monitor/monetize Google Fi, Google Fiber, Google Play Services, Google DNS, Google Chrome, Google Safe Browing, and on and on and on... (Google Maps, Google Location Services)

None of those are marketed as a VPN or data security apps.

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

#49

Post by wonder_bread »

mpcovcd wrote: post #48
j_s wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Google not monitor/monetize Google Fi, Google Fiber, Google Play Services, Google DNS, Google Chrome, Google Safe Browing, and on and on and on... (Google Maps, Google Location Services)

None of those are marketed as a VPN or data security apps.

I would argue most of Alexa's most import features are not free, doubleclick is still a cloak around the entire digital advertising industry that gives them access to actionable metrics of how websites are doing (i.e. maybe why they've pushed into job search recently).

One commonality among all of them is being marketed as a service for smaller-scale companies while having the double-edged sword on the backend that is most likely what they are really after

EDIT: smaller scale companies and individuals

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

#50

Post by [deleted] »

yohann305 wrote: post #43

Now THIS is a glimpse of what could happen if internet service providers such as AT&T or Comcast are allowed to snoop on traffic. This could happen in large-scale if we don't keep an eye on internet data privacy. Let's stay vigilant. Upvote to spread the words

[deleted]
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