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Facebook Is Giving Advertisers Access To Your Shadow Contact Information

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Re: Facebook Is Giving Advertisers Access To Your Shadow Contact Information

#401
post #97

This is exactly the kind of abuse that GDPR is designed to curtail.

Small question: how do you prove it, adequately for a court of law? I imagine that to prove it, you'd have to make several accounts, with several phone numbers, and somehow demonstrate to a judge that the information leaks through. Not an easy task.

Canaries.

http://canarytokens.org/generate

Re: Facebook Is Giving Advertisers Access To Your Shadow Contact Information

#402

As an FB Marketing API developer, this has been available for several years . The way it works, advertisers can send their phone list to FB for ad targeting. However, phone hashes are sent, not clear ones. Personally, as long as the user has an opt-out and opt-in options, I don’t think ad targeting is necessarily an unethical pattern, the blurring lines of ads and recommendations would be actually a pattern that user…

>However, phone hashes are sent, not clear ones. Lol! Phone numbers have less than 40 bits of entropy, it's trivial to break those hashes.

Salt them.

Re: Facebook Is Giving Advertisers Access To Your Shadow Contact Information

#403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's already taken by Uber's self-driving car division.

Not remotely funny.

morbid humor isn't generally expected to have you tittering and knee-slapping.

Re: Facebook Is Giving Advertisers Access To Your Shadow Contact Information

#404
post #295

It’s a cycle. Facebook has been doing nasty shit and apologizing for it since 2003. I’m starting to think they aren’t actually sorry. https://www.wired.com/story/why-zuckerberg-15-year-apology-t...

[flagged]

this is truly a revelation.

Re: Facebook Is Giving Advertisers Access To Your Shadow Contact Information

#405

It’s a cycle. Facebook has been doing nasty shit and apologizing for it since 2003. I’m starting to think they aren’t actually sorry. https://www.wired.com/story/why-zuckerberg-15-year-apology-t...

Right, because Move fast and break stuff is their mantra. I'm surprised that articles doesn't even mention it. Perhaps Move fast and hurt people would be more honest. I think it's rather catchy.

Be Bold is no longer the mantra? Aren't they pretty bold all the time? ;-)

Re: Facebook Is Giving Advertisers Access To Your Shadow Contact Information

#406
post #239

What's facebook's boiling point? My guess is they'll respond, they'll no longer use 2FA #'s for ads, the damage will have been done, and 99% of the population won't know any of it occurred. We'll repeat this cycle when a fresh revelation occurs months from now, as facebook continues to test how much they can leverage for more ad revenue. But none of it is actually slowing FB down. Its biggest dip in value came from d…

As someone who has occasionally runs experiments with FB adverts for various types of business. I feel it's boiling point will be when people and organisations advertising on the platform really start to look deeply into the value for money they are getting on it. I can't tell you the amount of times I've seen organisations throw money at it in return for dubious clicks from markets they never targeted, bot like user…

My problem is how easy it is to "fake" advertising. As in I go to website browse and buy then I get ads after about said product. Is that counted as evidence of a successful add sale?

Re: Facebook Is Giving Advertisers Access To Your Shadow Contact Information

#407
post #61
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this any surprise? Just a few hours ago the Acton article on the front page[0] talked about them doing this in WhatsApp: > Later he learned that elsewhere in Facebook, there were “plans and technologies to blend data.” Specifically, Facebook could use the 128-bit string of numbers assigned to each phone as a kind of bridge between accounts. The other method was phone-number matching, or pinpointing Facebook accoun…

Wasn't one of the conditions to get the deal approved by EU regulators to NOT share any data between services? [0] Did they just restart it because they found reprieve or simply decided to ignore the regulation? Edit. Also this [1]. Does GDPR suddenly open the door for sharing this data "legitimately"? [0] https://www.ft.com/content/951d650e-abf5-11e6-9cb3-bb8207902... [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/…

According to the article it was one of the conditions and they paid ~$100-200M (IIRC) in fines for breaching it.

Which furthers my point, that Facebook will jump on any carrot in front of it.

Re: Facebook Is Giving Advertisers Access To Your Shadow Contact Information

#408
post #239

What's facebook's boiling point? My guess is they'll respond, they'll no longer use 2FA #'s for ads, the damage will have been done, and 99% of the population won't know any of it occurred. We'll repeat this cycle when a fresh revelation occurs months from now, as facebook continues to test how much they can leverage for more ad revenue. But none of it is actually slowing FB down. Its biggest dip in value came from d…

>"...they'll no longer use 2FA #'s for ads..." What are 2FA numbers in the context of ads?

I'm assuming it's meant that a user connects their phone to secure their account, but FB is also using it for marketing etc.

Re: Facebook Is Giving Advertisers Access To Your Shadow Contact Information

#409
post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly like this article states. You can give Facebook a list of phone numbers or email addresses and it will put your ad in front of only those people. Does anyone know how small a list you can target? List of one? List of one plus N number of dead email addresses? Therefore a list of one, but more expensive?

> The smallest audience you can upload is an audience size of 30 people. Also, this audience size needs to be 30 people which Facebook can identify and find. So, if you upload an email list of 30 and Facebook can match only 20 of those email addresses to Facebook profiles then it will reject your list, so in most cases you need to upload a list of about 60 people. You then need ensure you upload a list of only female…

Informative article, mostly about how amoral this salesman is. I wonder if most people in sales think this way. Maybe the article was created solely as an ad for the author's company and the content is all lies. I'd have no way to know with out trying the myself and a fake article would be in complete alignment with the author's value system.

Re: Facebook Is Giving Advertisers Access To Your Shadow Contact Information

#410
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure it's possible to advertise without tracking. We did it for years.

I'd whitelist a true advertiser who ditches tracking entirely and focuses more on advertising content relevant to the page it's going on instead. Chances are if I'm looking at some Python programming page or server setup tutorial I'd be more inclined to click on ads relevant to the page as opposed to a creepy ad of something vague as heck that I looked up on Amazon 5 years ago that Amazon really wants to sell, or wha…

I'd happily attempt a startup/side-project that offers an API for non-tracking advertisements, but I don't think there's space in the market. It'd be very difficult to compete with the existing incumbent advertisers.
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