Facebook has to infer intent, unlike, say Google Search, which can get it directly from your keywords. FB has built a data halo around its users to try and infer that intent. Hard to imagine them ever giving you control over that additional data they collect around you, since it's their competitive advantage. But also proving to be a double edged sword because it's creeping out their users and other actors are starting to exploit it for political ends.
Mark Zuckerberg Refuses to Admit How Facebook Works
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Re: Mark Zuckerberg Refuses to Admit How Facebook Works
#72I think the questions were also horrible. Watching two days of testimony it seemed only Congresswoman Dingell from Michigan had any grasp of how tracking technology works. My big takeaway is that we need more engineers in congress.
One of my biggest issues with the current political system is that - with few exceptions - only lawyers go into politics. This means that you have people who have never taken Econ 101 setting fiscal policy, who don't understand technology trying to regulate tech companies, etc. I'm not sure what the solution here is, but I think we're asking for trouble when our elected representatives lack a basic comprehension of t…
>We’ve arranged a society based on science and technology, in which nobody understands anything about science and technology. And this combustible mixture of ignorance and power, sooner or later, is going to blow up in our faces. Who is running the science and technology in a democracy if the people don’t know anything about it?
Carl Sagan
Re: Mark Zuckerberg Refuses to Admit How Facebook Works
#73Okay, I guess I'm the contrarian here, but I'm not sure why any of this is surprising, or even a problem.
Facebook users signed up for a free service that allows them to communicate with other people in an enjoyable manner. Facebook even went so far as to make it so enjoyable it's addictive. Free online crack. Facebook users, you're having your fun.
What would you expect Facebook to do to finance all this? They're selling the shit out of you. They sell you sideways to Sunday, then sell your Mom, too.
Why would you be upset, or even surprised? Facebook should be able to do whatever they want with your data if you're gullible enough to use their free service.
Re: Mark Zuckerberg Refuses to Admit How Facebook Works
#74""" Zuckerberg reluctantly acknowledged that Facebook gathers information on people who aren't signed up for Facebook for what he said were "security purposes." """ That's a pretty disingenuous way to phrase Zuckerberg's response to a question of whether Facebook uses cookie tracking for logged-out users. Which of course it does, and it's of course used for security purposes; one has to be able to unify sessions from…
That's not what the question was. The man asking the question wasn't technically sophisticated enough to ask about using cookies, and if he were, he would not have asked that question anyway. The question was, does Facebook collect data on non-users? What that means is, if I have not signed up for facebook, are you tracking my behavior anyway through the like button and other methods?
That, I suppose, would have been a useful question for the Senator to ask. It wasn't the question asked.
Re: Mark Zuckerberg Refuses to Admit How Facebook Works
#75I think the biggest thing is the HUGE disconnect with what people think Facebook is doing, and what Facebook is actually doing. I think the whole point of this is to raise awareness about of the scope of Facebook's data collection-- It's unfathomably enormous. If more average people had a better understanding of what Facebook was tracking, they'd be outraged. Zuckerberg's goal in this was to keep the wool pulled over…
And what's worse is that privacy controls explicitly don't control ad targeting. Years ago I had a long term relationship end. We hid our relationship status and only ended the status a year later. Immediately after changing a status marked "only me" in privacy settings I got bombarded with dating ads. I complained that this was a huge privacy violation and they said "we didn't share your relationship status with the…
> "we didn't share your relationship status with them. We matched you to them because of the relationship status"
Which I'm sure is acurate, that's how advertising targeting normally works.
Some years ago I read an essay about how the words we have limit the kind of phenomena we think about. I think the example at the time was about piracy and "stealing". Before computers existed it was impossible to make exact copies of something at zero cost. Therefore, stealing was morally wrong because if you take one of something, the person you took it from will have one less of that something. With computers the situation is less obvious. If you make a copy of something (say a movie) A) you're not really taking one copy of a movie from them; instead you created a copy of a movie for yourself, B) it's not clear that you're damaging their revenues either, as not all people who make copies of movies would've bought the movies in the absense of the possibility of making copies. Probably a more acurate picture is something in the middle, but the point here was that anti-piracy lobbies knowingly conflated "making copies" with "stealing". We entered the computer era without a morally charged word to describe an activity that used to be impossible, and instead they used one that misrepresents the new situation of things.
I think when it comes to privacy we're in a similar situation. Pre-computers, "privacy" meant that (phrase A) "people won't know attributes of you", and that is absolutely equivalent to (phrase B) "people (in this case advertisers) aren't able to take actions that depend on attributes of you". Post-computers the two phrases are not equivalent: Facebook didn't tell advertisers attributes of you, but it gave them the possibility to make decisions which depend on attributes of you. Conveniently, Facebook understands privacy to mean the former. I suspect the reason for why Facebook got away with it for so long is that we don't have two words that differenciate between the two phrases. We need to once and for all decide if we want the word "privacy" to mean phrase A, phrase B, or phrase A AND phrase B.
To be absolutely clear, I'm not saying "advertisers can only target you, they aren't being given your data, and therefore all is good". The only thing I'm saying is that the word "privacy" is lacking in a post-computers world.
Re: Mark Zuckerberg Refuses to Admit How Facebook Works
#76""" Zuckerberg reluctantly acknowledged that Facebook gathers information on people who aren't signed up for Facebook for what he said were "security purposes." """ That's a pretty disingenuous way to phrase Zuckerberg's response to a question of whether Facebook uses cookie tracking for logged-out users. Which of course it does, and it's of course used for security purposes; one has to be able to unify sessions from…
That's not what the question was. The man asking the question wasn't technically sophisticated enough to ask about using cookies, and if he were, he would not have asked that question anyway. The question was, does Facebook collect data on non-users? What that means is, if I have not signed up for facebook, are you tracking my behavior anyway through the like button and other methods?
Do you mean the like button simply being present on pages or actual clicking of the like button? My understanding is clicking on the like button is pointless unless you're actually signed in to facebook.
Re: Mark Zuckerberg Refuses to Admit How Facebook Works
#77I think the biggest thing is the HUGE disconnect with what people think Facebook is doing, and what Facebook is actually doing. I think the whole point of this is to raise awareness about of the scope of Facebook's data collection-- It's unfathomably enormous. If more average people had a better understanding of what Facebook was tracking, they'd be outraged. Zuckerberg's goal in this was to keep the wool pulled over…
Actually "average people" in my experience very likely wildly over estimate how much information Facebook has about them. The default assumption I've seen non-technical people make is "they know everything". They understand at an intuitive level that when a company provides services for free and is worth so much, it probably uses a lot of their data. When these "average people" are business managers, this leads them…
Your experience "actually" doesn't trump the experience of others, or facts.
Re: Mark Zuckerberg Refuses to Admit How Facebook Works
#78Even Zuckerberg doesn't seem to know, he appears to have lost control of what's going on. Unfortunately, the hearing didn't dive into details to better demonstrate that he can't tell why somebody sees what they see, and who uses the data (inside and outside of Facebook). Also, the whole collecting data "for security purposes" is pretty unbelievable. Does that mean they share information with governments around the world? This can be interpreted as anything.
Re: Mark Zuckerberg Refuses to Admit How Facebook Works
#79I think the biggest thing is the HUGE disconnect with what people think Facebook is doing, and what Facebook is actually doing. I think the whole point of this is to raise awareness about of the scope of Facebook's data collection-- It's unfathomably enormous. If more average people had a better understanding of what Facebook was tracking, they'd be outraged. Zuckerberg's goal in this was to keep the wool pulled over…
Actually "average people" in my experience very likely wildly over estimate how much information Facebook has about them. The default assumption I've seen non-technical people make is "they know everything". They understand at an intuitive level that when a company provides services for free and is worth so much, it probably uses a lot of their data. When these "average people" are business managers, this leads them…
I liked your second paragraph.
But from my experience interacting with non-technical people, your first paragraph is completely wrong. At least from my experience, most people DON'T think "facebook knows everything".
Re: Mark Zuckerberg Refuses to Admit How Facebook Works
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
This isn't just basic cookie tracking. They have an actual profile on you, without your consent, with the people who have you in their address book and even potentially your purchasing habits, from the data they purchase from data brokers like Datalogix. They maintain this profile on you separately from other users, and they make immediate use of it if you create an account. That's why it's called a shadow profile.
How does such a practice differ morally from consumer credit reporting agencies?
It doesn't really - we need to get to a point where all of these surveillance companies are out of business.
Using data about a user with their consent seems perfectly fine. The fiction where this consent can be granted in perpetuity is not.