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Facebook Isn’t Sorry, It Just Wants Your Data

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Re: Facebook Isn’t Sorry, It Just Wants Your Data

#91
post #87
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that people who understand the value of privacy are probably less than 1% of the total population. The rest don't understand or don't care and they are the target consumers of the said corporations. So simply logging out of Facebook or start buying Apple products yourself is not enough anymore. For the same reason I can't buy your prediction about next big successful companies, even if I would like to.

> people who understand the value of privacy are probably less than 1% of the total population Am I so out of touch? No it must be 99% of people who are wrong. What exactly is the value of privacy besides the satisfaction that big tech companies aren't making as much money from me?

> What exactly is the value of privacy besides the satisfaction that big tech companies aren't making as much money from me?

How about knowing that someone is not being deported from a port of entry based on what they posted on Facebook 6 months ago?

Re: Facebook Isn’t Sorry, It Just Wants Your Data

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are enormous amounts of product placement in Netflix's content.

And next, they’ll shoot shows with green boxes and green posters, and it will be filled with targeted brands on the fly. I think that’s the next move as soon as the technology will be ready.

There is already a non-targeted precedent for this. How I Met Your Mother inserted new ads into reruns a few years ago.

https://ew.com/article/2011/07/07/how-i-met-your-mother-reru...

Re: Facebook Isn’t Sorry, It Just Wants Your Data

#93
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people don’t get mad when they see a coke bottle or an Apple product placed in a scene of a movie or tv show. People do get mad when they are trying to watch TV and they keep being forced to watch a commercial.

I couldn't agree more. The new age of "cloud DVRs" is infuriating. I used to have a DVR that worked fine, I could skip over whatever I wanted. Now with the "cloud DVRs" we're back to being forced into watching commercials.

Well I guess I’ll notice the pain when I use DirecTV Now Cloud DVR. I noticed a few years ago Comcast started to even restrict On Demand content. They forced users to watch ads and even disabled fast forward!

Re: Facebook Isn’t Sorry, It Just Wants Your Data

#94
Facebook is the most consistent company I've ever encountered. They have never really changed and have always hit the same notes over and over.

Remember the beacon fiasco? That was the start of the pattern, the fact that they were so baffled by everyone's reaction was so amazing to me that was the month I deleted my account and never looked back. But they haven't changed one bit since 2007.

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

Re: Facebook Isn’t Sorry, It Just Wants Your Data

#95
post #65
post #24

Maybe there's an opportunity here for someone to do to Facebook what Craigslist did to print newspapers. What people want is a way to keep in touch with their friends. But that's not a big revenue generator. So the "social networks" put in ads, "sponsored tweets", and other crap. Then users get fed up and leave. (Doubling down on ads as the number of users drops is called "pulling a Myspace"). A basic friends-only sy…

>A basic friends-only system isn't that expensive to run. The expense depends on what the baseline for "basic" is. I believe today's average consumer would want basic features to include photos and video sharing. (This consumer expectation having been conditioned by previous $0/month social networks like Facebook.) Needless to say, this requires expensive datacenters with petabytes of harddrives. Rising storage infra…

Who said that the nextgen soc platform will need persistent storage? Just remove everything once it's viewed and leverage the clients for storage.

Re: Facebook Isn’t Sorry, It Just Wants Your Data

#96
post #89

It’s very simple: As a consumer, we cannot trust any advertisement company. Their goals are in direct conflict with user privacy. In fact it’s not a wishful goal, it is their business model. Our attention is very expensive and everything is designed around us to grab us by the neck so to speak. Flashing ads, stories and feeds. I cannot, absolutely cannot, trust Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Adobe, Facebook, Visa, Amex,…

I find some of the implications here very interesting. Apple is rapidly approaching the status of being a luxury goods brand. They certainly charge luxury goods prices. This implies that privacy is a luxury good. That isn't wrong, in a strictly factual and financial sense. There's money to be made invading privacy that certainly can help defray device costs. It's possible that some might opine that this might be less…

Pomme is totally lying about privacy. They are just a little more clever in how they portray themselves to the public.

Everything is networked, and anyone with LS (maybe other tools exist, but LS certainly serves my needs well) can see how many times actions are taken in the form of outgoing requests on your primary content-creation/programming device that isn't just a passive device meant to consume content, and few people have the ability to participate as independent producers of gateways. And on a cell, you have zero visibiility at all. Its a different discussion, but the last time I looked, static IP on your "home" connection - $500 one time fee, and reasonable gigabit speeds in the age of new content? $200/mo. It is a farce that in 2018 Northeastern ISPs get away with 17Mb/s. You have to pay another gatekeeper when in principle I am another node on the network and have all the computers I would possibly need to run a high-availability web service.

But back to la Pomme. They specifically push software updates to individual devices when you reach a certain expense level and cause devices to malfunction deliberately so you have to replace it. This has been documented but the IP lawyers shut you down when you start to talk about it because trade secrets.

When they see you don't have AppleCare (or AppleCare+, or AppleCare++, whatever they want to call it) on a device they will deliberately cause that device to malfunction using a device-specific OTA update that causes things like dead pixels, and other visible obstructions that make the device slightly less usable than it was before.

There is no privacy. If the above isn't the ultimate abrogation of privacy then I don't know what is. And if youre a pure Internet company, then you just don't even have to bother with all those gymnastics since the backend code is yours.

Consumers need to start demanding more visibility into what exactly a company is doing. If they knew, I'm sure they would be outraged at the constant lies they are told. The charade has reached unbelievable proportions.

Re: Facebook Isn’t Sorry, It Just Wants Your Data

#97
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are enormous amounts of product placement in Netflix's content.

Most people don’t get mad when they see a coke bottle or an Apple product placed in a scene of a movie or tv show. People do get mad when they are trying to watch TV and they keep being forced to watch a commercial.

General advertising is not a problem. Individually targeted advertising is.

General advertising includes the sign on the door or exterior of the brick and mirter storefront, as well as billboards, magazine/newspaper ads, and product placement in media. It ranges from almost entirely informative (on the storefront) to annoying and off-putting (some billboards, poorly done product placement). This advertising is passive.

Individually targeted ads use extra information about the individual to cater the ad, and thus have an incentive to collect this information. This advertising is active, in that it is bidirectional.

Passive advertising not only still provides some benefit for much less harm, it's also hard to distinguish from purely informational materials in some cases.

It's worth distinguishing these to prevent bike-shedding over details that can be safely ignored when we formulate our arguments accurately.

Edit: s/targeted/individually targeted/ to make it more specific and accurate. That is the theme of the comment, after all...

Re: Facebook Isn’t Sorry, It Just Wants Your Data

#98
post #84
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that people who understand the value of privacy are probably less than 1% of the total population. The rest don't understand or don't care and they are the target consumers of the said corporations. So simply logging out of Facebook or start buying Apple products yourself is not enough anymore. For the same reason I can't buy your prediction about next big successful companies, even if I would like to.

I feel the common rhetoric here is to dictate people what's ok and what's not under the assumption they don't understand. Many people (including myself) are fine with the price we pay for free online services and understand the downsides. I really don't mind companies trying to show me more relevant ads by tracking and analyzing what I interact with in return for most of the products I use being free. Obviously a lar…

I agree with you on that we shouldn't assume that we know what's best for every user. But how big corporations behave is driven by greed more than anything else. Companies like Google and Facebook are becoming more greedy for data by the day and have started to cross ethical boundaries. And personally, I think greed is not good for anybody.

Re: Facebook Isn’t Sorry, It Just Wants Your Data

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a good point about "connect you to people you don't like." I was just thinking the other day about how the people I know in real life are likeable, but their online personalities are petty, bigoted, closed minded, and mean spirited. I don't know who's the real them, the people I know in person, or the person online. But for the most part, I wish I didn't know their online persona.

There's not much to be gained by not flinging poo online when everyone else is doing it. It's not like there's any reward for exceeding the lowest common denominator.

Why should your personal standards be determined by other people? You have complete control over what you say online, there's no reason to compromise your personal integrity.

Re: Facebook Isn’t Sorry, It Just Wants Your Data

#100
post #65
post #24

Maybe there's an opportunity here for someone to do to Facebook what Craigslist did to print newspapers. What people want is a way to keep in touch with their friends. But that's not a big revenue generator. So the "social networks" put in ads, "sponsored tweets", and other crap. Then users get fed up and leave. (Doubling down on ads as the number of users drops is called "pulling a Myspace"). A basic friends-only sy…

>A basic friends-only system isn't that expensive to run. The expense depends on what the baseline for "basic" is. I believe today's average consumer would want basic features to include photos and video sharing. (This consumer expectation having been conditioned by previous $0/month social networks like Facebook.) Needless to say, this requires expensive datacenters with petabytes of harddrives. Rising storage infra…

Good point.

Now a "Freemium" app might work. Text is free. Pictures up to a limit are free. A few seconds of video with an expiration time is free. More pictures, longer video, and long term storage all cost.

Fortnite is "freemium", and bringing in over $1BN a year without ads.

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