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Facebook’s Surveillance Machine

nytimes.com

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Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine

#161

Post by vor1111 »

mwarkentin wrote: post #154
vor1111 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't Obama's campaign hire Droga5 to do precisely the same sort of ad targeting that CA was involved in? Ultimately, it doesn't seem that CA did anything out of the norm for any marketing analytics company (from what I've read, correct me if I'm wrong).

Did you read the article? They paid several hundred thousand people via Mechanical Türk to download their poll app and then harvested 50M users data for political targeting.

Data they could have acquired directly from FB anyway? It seems like they found a way to make the data acquisition process more efficient (while also violating FB's TOS, which is the actual problem here).

But the point is, the methods CA used to influence voters weren't significantly different from Obama's 2012 campaign.

Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine

#162

Post by 3pt14159 »

mliker wrote: post #153
gfodor wrote: post #141

I was one of the co-founders of an early social VR startup and observed first hand the technical capabilities that these applications will afford bad actors to use for surveillance. You can easily capture voice, body tracking, and interaction data, and basically record a full view of the world through the eyes of another human being. It's quite remarkable being able to record and play back a copy of yourself in secon…

VR hasn’t taken off as promised and the hype is dying down now. The headset is too clunky in its current incarnation. People view it as a novelty item rather than a useful tool, so I’m inclined to believe this won’t be the massive surveillance tool VR proponents think it’ll be.

Eh, it's still in the palm-pilot phase. They'll figure it out quietly over the next 10 years. Machine learning will help figure out what to pull into the headset (things you're about to walk into) or it will intelligently make the game world similar enough in your immediate surroundings to where you don't hit stuff. I could see people hanging out at parks or beaches with these things on. Even going for a swim if the headset is waterproof enough. It will just take decades of work to get there.

Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine

#163

Post by bambax »

capnrefsmmat wrote: post #114
bambax wrote: post #66

> Facebook makes money, in other words, by profiling us and then selling our attention to advertisers, political actors and others. These are Facebook’s true customers, whom it works hard to please. And you just figured this out now? This is like saying "wow, who knew we would get so fat by feeding only on pizza, hamburgers and coke, aren't those companies evil". Well, yes, companies are evil. They don't work for you…

> And you just figured this out now? This is like saying "wow, who knew we would get so fat by feeding only on pizza, hamburgers and coke, aren't those companies evil". No. Zeynep Tufekci (the author of the article) has written about this for years, including a book about social media in political movements ( Twitter and Tear Gas ), a popular TED talk ( https://www.ted.com/talks/zeynep_tufekci_we_re_building_a_dy...…

You're right. What upset me though was the conclusion that it's "impossible" to leave Facebook. Everything is possible, including walking instead of driving, not eating meat, etc. Some things are more inconvenient than others, but if convenience trumps everything and you can't accept to make any sacrifice whatsoever then maybe you deserve to be taken advantage of.

Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine

#164

Post by zeveb »

This isn't limited to Facebook. Yesterday I saw that PUBG just came out for Android. I've heard great things about it, so I looked for it on the Play Store and took a look at the permissions. It demands the ability to read my phone's logs & see running apps. What possible reason could it have for that?

It's a free app. While I know that there are in-app purchases, is Tencent also selling information about me if I install it?

No thanks — I chose not to install it.

The modern web/app/software platform is built on users trading their privacy & security for value, rather than trading money for value. I'd really rather just pay.

Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine

#165

Post by ahartmetz »

It is interesting how much traditional media likes to bash Facebook - they are competing with it for advertising dollars after all... The only thing that surprises me is that it took them so long. Maybe they had to wait until they could do it without opposing public sentiment too much.

That said, I vastly prefer traditional media over Facebook. You can do propaganda on both, but only Facebook has and exploits everyone's personal data. On traditional media, campaigns also need to be balanced to avoid alienating the general public, while on Facebook, extremist ads can target extremist people with no downsides.

Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine

#166

Post by thanatropism »

m_ke wrote: post #143
thanatropism wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just said this in another comment but it so belongs here, I'll try to say it in just one sentence: there was a feel-good narrative to Obama that's just impossible now.

Obama had the Obama 2012 app ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nafYT7_i4as ). Anyone downloading it knew that the goal of it was to help get Obama elected. CA ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpbeOCKZFfQ ) tricked people into giving up their data and used it to spread targeted propaganda. How is this the same?

I wasn't talking about that, I was talking about this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden

Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine

#167

Post by Born_Again »

krrrh wrote: post #142
mark_l_watson wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right on. Another thing that works for me is not watching any news at all on TV except for occasionally NPR. Instead, I like the text only feeds of NPR and CNN, and I try not to read those every day. I do still look at Facebook once a week for about 10 minutes. I do so in a private browser tab, and routinely try to delete FB cookies.

Set up a site specific browser, which makes it easier to sequester all FB cookies and browsing to a separate environment. I use Fluid on macOS, but there are other approaches. http://fluidapp.com

What's the advantage of this over a private or incognito window?

Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine

#168

Post by ashelmire »

hellofunk wrote: post #31

I wish quite badly that the benefit of deactivating FB would outweigh the inconvenience, but FB has become such a mainstay that I'd lose touch with lots of people I really have no other way of contacting. I could say "good riddance," if there is no other way to contact them then perhaps they are not important enough to my life, but that's just not true. Or what about all the local forums (FB groups) in my city that h…

You know, I thought the same thing. But honestly I rarely used those forums. And the people I can't keep in contact with, well... I don't really miss them. I have phone numbers for the people that matter and have resumed exchanging phone numbers with people, which I hadn't really done in several years.

I am part of an organization that uses fb as the primary means of communication. The people that at the top have been pretty obnoxious about me not being on it anymore. But frankly, I see their attitude as pretty toxic and think they should move to a professional method of communication (they are a pretty amateurish / small org).

Sometimes disruption is a good thing. I've been studying a lot more (as a professional dev taking online classes) in the past few months since leaving fb.

Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine

#169

Post by scarecrowbob »

fortythirteen wrote: post #115
bambax wrote: post #66

> Facebook makes money, in other words, by profiling us and then selling our attention to advertisers, political actors and others. These are Facebook’s true customers, whom it works hard to please. And you just figured this out now? This is like saying "wow, who knew we would get so fat by feeding only on pizza, hamburgers and coke, aren't those companies evil". Well, yes, companies are evil. They don't work for you…

> Should we all just leave Facebook? That may sound attractive but it is not a viable solution. Leaving not just Facebook, but Twitter, Instagram, and all other social media of its ilk is an extremely viable solution. It's like quitting smoking. For the first month or so you feel off-kilter, but, after a while, you can't imagine going back. Life is quantifiably better without it. Realizing that I don't need up to the…

There is a certain amount of second hand smoke in the room, though.

1) I can quit my social media, but people are still creating a lot of content with me in it that is being used. I don't need to take a poll about which potato I am if all the posts my friends tag me in are mined for data.

2) While social media is in itself great for cloistering my own community, it's still the case that vast numbers of my compatriots are involved with it and it will continue to be affected by it.

"Just leaving" isn't going to solve either of those problems.

I wholly agree, by the way, that leaving it is a personally good thing. I still use, but I heavily filter it and I have several 0-tolerance policies for unfollowing / blocking / etc. I probably ought to quit, but the crushing loneliness and disconnection of being a 40-year-old, divorced, atheistic remote worker who is quitting drinking make it about my only social interaction short of buying groceries.

Re: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine

#170

Post by bogomipz »

bambax wrote: post #66

> Facebook makes money, in other words, by profiling us and then selling our attention to advertisers, political actors and others. These are Facebook’s true customers, whom it works hard to please. And you just figured this out now? This is like saying "wow, who knew we would get so fat by feeding only on pizza, hamburgers and coke, aren't those companies evil". Well, yes, companies are evil. They don't work for you…

>"And you just figured this out now?"

You realize this is an editorial piece correct? Note the section header at the top of the page. And the format of of op/ed piece includes a layout objective explanations. This is not meant to be a regular reporting news piece. See:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/03/insider/opinion-op-ed-exp...

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