Facebook shares shoot up after strong Q4 earnings despite data breach • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook shares shoot up after strong Q4 earnings despite data breach

#181

Post by ihateyoutime » Thu, Jan 31, 2019, 10:23 AM UTC

pavlov wrote: post #44

Facebook is a weird mass-market product because the average American tech industry pundit has very little visibility into how it’s actually used around the world. Take Facebook Watch. Ask a journalist or HN commenter, and they’ll tell you that it’s a content wasteland, a flop, a waste of investment. Here’s what Zuckerberg said about Watch on the earnings call: "There are now 400 million people who use it every month,…

Look at most of the comments replying to this, they all seem written by a clever PR agency trying to frame Facebook as a victim of its bad press.

Re: Facebook shares shoot up after strong Q4 earnings despite data breach

#182

Post by gnomewascool » Thu, Jan 31, 2019, 10:24 AM UTC

kurtisc wrote: post #175

feanaro wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> -Anyone who feels strongly against Facebook will have stopped using it That's a pretty big assumption. People's feelings can and do change based on new information.

I don't think it's an assumption, I think it's a tautology. It's not nicotine; if you're using it you don't feel strongly against it.

> It's not nicotine

Neither is alcohol, nor is gambling.

To be less facetious, I don't see why the claim that facebook can't possibly be addictive, is so self-evident that it's a tautology. I can understand people having different stances in the debate on whether it's addictive, but denying that there's a debate to be had seems completely misguided.

(Also, there can be reasons other than addiction for people using facebook despite feeling strongly against it — e.g. peer pressure.)

Re: Facebook shares shoot up after strong Q4 earnings despite data breach

#183

Post by renholder » Thu, Jan 31, 2019, 10:30 AM UTC

mevile wrote: post #41

Barrin92 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is research being done on targeted advertisement, and apart from the obvious effect of altering your behaviour and your attention, there has been research shown that it can go as far as changing self-perception.[1] So to claim that there is no downside to targeted marketing is simply false. We have very little understanding what sort of effects it has on consumers, and as far as we know they're not all good. Th…

Fair enough, but it's up to each individual to learn about these details and then make a decision if they still want to use Facebook. The media is doing their job reporting on this, and everyone else can learn from this and decide that hey, maybe using Facebook products are not worth the harm. Or maybe they are fine with it and like the relevant ads and continue to use Facebook. If social media makes you unhappy just…

>If social media makes you unhappy just stop using it.

This answer is far too simplistic for the reality of the situation.

For example, what of the people who never used it (or did stop using it) and their correlated shadow profiles?[0] What is the supposed answer, then: Don't give your contact information to your friends? Don't use the internet, at all, because of Facebook Pixel?[1]

...but the bulk-share of the problem, for me specifically, is that treasure-troves of information on people are the ripest targets for either exploit or out-right theft. See the OPM hack[2] for a principle example of such theft and then look at the Snowden leaks, where he shows that was in major tech companies' bases, killing their do0dz.[3]

The potential problems (and their requisite solutions) aren't as simple as you're trying to paint them to be.

To summarise this long diatribe: I don't pretend to have an answer, to be sure, but to say that stopping Facebook usage is sufficient is disingenuous to the realities of what the company does; especially, since data about you is still being collected anyway.

[0] - https://www.cnet.com/news/shadow-profiles-facebook-has-infor...

[1] - https://www.oberlo.com/blog/facebook-pixel

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management...

[3] - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-...

Re: Facebook shares shoot up after strong Q4 earnings despite data breach

#184

Post by dagaci » Thu, Jan 31, 2019, 10:30 AM UTC

nerdface wrote: post #31

The whole market is up due to today's announcement of interest rates remaining the same, not any unique announcement to Facebook.

I'm not sure why this is modded down. There is a general trend up in the market over the past few days, and given that the FB price has recently been displaying a higher volatility than its peers, you would expect the kind of movement you are seeing with respect to the rest of its peers.

Re: Facebook shares shoot up after strong Q4 earnings despite data breach

#185

Post by shrimpx » Thu, Jan 31, 2019, 10:31 AM UTC

cm2012 wrote: post #27

adpirz wrote: post #12

It’s hard not to look at this performance and take away from it that most people really don’t care about privacy. As upsetting as the thought may be to some, Mark’s hypothesis that privacy is no longer a social norm we value seems to be proven more and more right. Despite all the scandals and hearings, their DAU are more than the population of the largest countries on Earth. Short of serious legislation, what slows t…

Since there's no real life downside to FB using your data to show you more relevant ads, people are making the rational trade-off. Privacy issues with FB are ideology based in nature.

Facebook is creepy. They engage in deep cloaked surveillance, capturing as much as technologically possible of people's behavior in the world and mining it for profit. They don't want the people to know how and to what extent they're mining their personal lives, because they know people would be disgusted by it.

IMO the core reason people keep using this shady service is that they've just never been exposed to the truth.

Re: Facebook shares shoot up after strong Q4 earnings despite data breach

#186

Post by simonh » Thu, Jan 31, 2019, 10:33 AM UTC

pawelk wrote: post #167

danso wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how much of that has to do with how much FB knows about you and your interests, and your friends and their interests? With YouTube, I honestly don't get any sense that it uses what Google surely knows of me via Search and GMail, e.g. anything related to Chicago, or germane to my political inclinations or personality. Instead, it seems wholly based on my viewing history. Which has some benefits, of course (I…

> e.g. if I click-through to a flat earth conspiracy video for a few curious laughs, it naively thinks I must have an appetite for more. Every time I'm about to click on a youtube link / watch an embedded video I ask myself if it's worth influencing my future recommendations - which are not great, but not too far off either. If the content is outside my core interests or music tastes I opt to watch in incognito mode.…

I tried last.fm years ago and had to give up. I was on my phone and read about a Swedish prog rock band, thought about how I could get to hear them and signed up for last.fm there and then. The service used that seed to give me a really fun scandanavian hippy rock experience exploring related bands from Finland, Norway and Denmark. It was great for a while, but then I was trapped. No matter what I did to push the service towards a more balanced assessment of my musical tastes, it kept casting me back into nordic psychdedelia hell.

Re: Facebook shares shoot up after strong Q4 earnings despite data breach

#187

Post by renholder » Thu, Jan 31, 2019, 10:34 AM UTC

fma wrote: post #95

adpirz wrote: post #12

It’s hard not to look at this performance and take away from it that most people really don’t care about privacy. As upsetting as the thought may be to some, Mark’s hypothesis that privacy is no longer a social norm we value seems to be proven more and more right. Despite all the scandals and hearings, their DAU are more than the population of the largest countries on Earth. Short of serious legislation, what slows t…

In the beginning, FB was college students only, then high school... Then everyone. There was a FB group with a million users protesting the opening up of FB to their moms and grandmas. Some friends and I created an alternative social network at our university to capitalize. In my opinion it looked better and had more features (before they opened up their API). We were college students only, and had SSL (can you imagi…

>There was a FB group with a million users protesting the opening up of FB to their moms and grandmas.

Eternal September[0] exists everywhere. =]

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

Re: Facebook shares shoot up after strong Q4 earnings despite data breach

#188

Post by mcintyre1994 » Thu, Jan 31, 2019, 10:38 AM UTC

Shinobi881 wrote: post #79

Facebook is taking the opportunity to air some of their dirty laundry. They realize that it takes quite a bit for users to abandon the platform and are probably strategically, leaking some of this stuff.

What stuff are you refering to? They have to report earnings figures, they're a public company. And since they answer to investors they're going to share these stats that put them in a good light.

Re: Facebook shares shoot up after strong Q4 earnings despite data breach

#189

Post by hanniabu » Thu, Jan 31, 2019, 10:45 AM UTC

tossaccount123 wrote: post #146

ham_sandwich wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Always mind boggling to see those margins on that sort of volume. It’s no question FB is one of the greatest money-printing machines ever built. Where does the growth come next though? Do they need to diversify their revenue streams away from advertising? Do they just start paying out dividends or can they really reinvest earnings at a sufficient return to satisfy shareholders?

>Where does the growth come next though I'm amazed they haven't taken a crack at Google with a search engine in their app. Imagine how valuable combining Facebook's data with the user intent of search? A lot of users would never leave the facebook app on their phone if they could get a search engine that's halfway decent. It seems like they are leaving a ton of money on the table as it stands If its too much to devel…

At that rate, they'd be better off going all in with a Chromebook-like product with Facebook OS and a fully encompassed ecosystem.

Re: Facebook shares shoot up after strong Q4 earnings despite data breach

#190

Post by Plasmoid2000ad » Thu, Jan 31, 2019, 10:57 AM UTC

pavlov wrote: post #44

Facebook is a weird mass-market product because the average American tech industry pundit has very little visibility into how it’s actually used around the world. Take Facebook Watch. Ask a journalist or HN commenter, and they’ll tell you that it’s a content wasteland, a flop, a waste of investment. Here’s what Zuckerberg said about Watch on the earnings call: "There are now 400 million people who use it every month,…

Seems like a problem that can be seen quite generally as well.

e.g. Movie X is a flop, because it's opening weekend in US is disappointing. Goes on do excellently Worldwide, especially outside opening weekend. Search engine X is a flop, because it's market share in US is negligible. Goes on to have solid user number in China and Germany.

It's probably not helped by the strong desire to link future performance predictions to easily available metrics, and never re-evaluating these. Just because the US has driven growth and profits in the past for X, doesn't mean it always will... but's it good enough for knee jerk reactions that generate views.