Facebook, Google Fund Nonprofits Shaping Privacy Debate • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook, Google Fund Nonprofits Shaping Privacy Debate

#131

Post by rhizome » Tue, Nov 19, 2019, 12:46 AM UTC

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #61

Despegar wrote: post #4

There should be scare quotes around Privacy Advocacy Groups. All of the listed think tanks are for sale. EPIC, an actual privacy advocacy group, is not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Privacy_Information...

How do you know EPIC isn’t for sale? They don’t disclose who their donors are.

What do you mean, "who their donors are?" What is missing from their CharityNavigator?

https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summar...

They're a 501(c)3, they take donations off the front page of their website. Sure, you might be curious who is donating? Or if there are any donations over a certain amount? I don't see any of that for The March of Dimes, either, do we question whether they are "for sale?"

Re: Facebook, Google Fund Nonprofits Shaping Privacy Debate

#132

Post by bryan_w » Tue, Nov 19, 2019, 1:29 AM UTC

sounds wrote: post #109

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So the facts are wrong because rather than selling the data directly they only exploit it themselves for profit? That only holds while ignoring the fact that most of that profit comes from third parties who they're effectively selling data access to (e.g. ads where the profit is from Google's ability to know which ads to put in front of which users, effectively selling that user's privacy for profit). When the argu…

> When the argument is that the privacy groups have a perverse interest in opposing a specific rule because of donations from tech companies, it seems pretty relevant that the tech companies already aren't actually violating that rule. You conveniently left out one of the two companies, and I wonder why you omitted that Facebook has actually been convicted of violating the rule. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-46…

Sigh, all those sources are talking about API access, not packaging up a tarball of their user database and shipping it off. Some of those links are just speculation about early ideas of charging for API access.

In either case, the model for having API access was that the end user would get a nice clear permissions dialog telling them what info they were giving to the third party and having them click "I Agree" before any data was transferred.

Even better, in the case of the device partnerships, you had to login with your FB username and password!

Those articles are the equivalent of saying Apple shares data with Google because iMail can open your Gmail account

Re: Facebook, Google Fund Nonprofits Shaping Privacy Debate

#133

Post by joshuamorton » Tue, Nov 19, 2019, 2:21 AM UTC

Retric wrote: post #127

Spivak wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is still not very different than TV. Cable channels know what demographics of the people that watch their shows and sell their eyeballs accordingly. Hell, entire shows exist to specifically attract certain types of eyeballs. If I pay you $5 to show an ad in front of a certain type of person and you come back and tell me that you did it I haven't really learned anything about that person. It seems hard to say tha…

If I target 21-26 year olds with an advertising campaign, and someone clicks on that add. Then Facebook just told me they think the person at the other end of that click is 21-26. From my perspective they just sold that information. With TV, it’s all vague guess on their part about what kind of content people like. Are the people watching daytime soaps can be 18 or 80, it’s vague topic and time of day based filtering…

If you put an ad, untargetted, with a bikini clad woman in it, you can be confident the person that clicked it is an 18-26 year old male.

Google's guessing of your demographics is amusingly wrong sometimes (you can see the categories it puts you in).

> With TV, it’s all vague guess on their part about what kind of content people like

People with HBO have disposable incomes. People watching Nick or Disney channel are or have children, whose ages and genders can be further refined based on the shows in question. "You have a 8-11 year old daughter" is absolutely trivial to accurately glean from television, and is basically the single most valuable advertising demographic.

Re: Facebook, Google Fund Nonprofits Shaping Privacy Debate

#134

Post by shakna » Tue, Nov 19, 2019, 2:48 AM UTC

jackpirate wrote: post #62

shakna wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

_Can_ any large dataset actually be anonymised effectively? I'm not yet convinced it can be done in a way that can't trivially be reversed by anyone combining it with other datasets. And if it can't be anonymised, then it probably shouldn't be saleable.

The US Census famously used differential privacy in their most recent surveys. They have a quite extensive analysis of the tradeoffs they had to make to ensure everyone's privacy, and there is a fairly large body of academic work that analyzes (e.g.) the economic impact of this privacy preservation. The general consensus AFAIK is that they did a great job. See https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.02201 for the main paper from…

I'm not sure that this can be done with certain datasets, like health data.

If you had access to anonymised health data from my nation, for example, picking me personally out of the records would be extremely trivial, using just two data points:

+ I have an illness that only 1% of people have.

+ I lost my spleen whilst I was in primary school.

Both of those things are actually a matter of public record, thanks to being mentioned in various local newspapers, so it's reasonable to assume someone somewhere has that data.

I believe the general consensus on health data is that you have the age a person was at an incident, and the nature of an incident, you only need to have two or three incidents in your database to de-anonymise their records.

The only way to combat it is to not provide the detail required for the analysis that is exactly what the above organisations wish to do. No profiles, no fine-grained demographics.

And yet, people with rarer illnesses or events than mine will still stand out, so you also need to eliminate them from the dataset, even though they may well be the ones who could benefit most from this sort of widescale analysis.

Re: Facebook, Google Fund Nonprofits Shaping Privacy Debate

#135

Post by pprplt » Tue, Nov 19, 2019, 3:19 AM UTC

FillardMillmore wrote: post #2

This article accentuates the need to always look for the source of the funding when it comes to non-profits, think tanks, and "public interest" groups. Unfortunately, the goals of these groups are not always as transparent as their names would have you believe.

The same goes for all media. Who is funding them, who is running them and what are their goals.

This is why it's important to view a wide range of sources, but who has time for that really.

Re: Facebook, Google Fund Nonprofits Shaping Privacy Debate

#136

Post by soraminazuki » Tue, Nov 19, 2019, 3:42 AM UTC

Spivak wrote: post #130

soraminazuki wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A major difference is that TV doesn't spy on you while online advertisers do. TV targets ads based on the content of the shows, similar to how contextual ads used to work based on the content of the websites they were placed in. They don't try to spy on your each and every move.

This is true but not super relevant to the question of whether paying someone to place an ad in front of certain demographics is selling information. Because sure, Google knows a lot of people and they have a lot of ad space to fill which means they have a good chance at finding and reaching the demographics I asked for but I don’t get any of that information as part of my transaction with them.

Does it really matter if the data is technically being "sold" or not? The fact that any one entity holds an unprecedented level of information about us is alarming in and of itself. As Snowden said in his first interview, all that data is just sitting there waiting to be abused, and the only thing stopping anyone from doing so yet if they haven't already are policies that can and will change in the future. It doesn't matter who has access to the actual data as long as someone does.

If adtech wants to serve us "relevant" ads, that's fine but the intrusive spying has to stop. Plain old contextual ads should be more than enough for that purpose.

Re: Facebook, Google Fund Nonprofits Shaping Privacy Debate

#137

Post by smnrchrds » Tue, Nov 19, 2019, 3:47 AM UTC

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #58

cj wrote: post #8

This quote from the article highlights the problem at hand: > Organizations like the Center for Democracy and Technology, which received at least $960,000 from [Google and Facebook] in 2018, are often quoted in the media as unbiased third parties and influence how policy is developed in Washington as such, despite receiving the tech company funding. > The group supports allowing tech giants to sell user data to third…

The problem with this theory is that it doesn't align with facts. Google and most of the other major tech companies don't actually sell user data. They collect it to use internally. The biggest companies who actually do that are the ISPs, but that doesn't really fit the same narrative, and I doubt they donate a lot to privacy groups. The reason a lot of privacy groups don't try to restrict selling user data is a comb…

> Google and most of the other major tech companies don't actually sell user data

They certainly buy data [0]. Whether they are the seller or the buyer, they have vested interest to make sure the trade can continue.

[0] e.g. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-30/google-an...

Re: Facebook, Google Fund Nonprofits Shaping Privacy Debate

#138

Post by vharuck » Tue, Nov 19, 2019, 4:13 AM UTC

jonas21 wrote: post #111

throwawaylolx wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not very difficult either. For most of these organisations, you can just check their Financials page, and it's very clearly stated. Example: https://www.accessnow.org/financials/ https://cdt.org/financials/ Trusting anything immediately is a bad habit to develop anyway.

Finding the information can be easy, but coming to a conclusion from it is harder. For example, in the links you provided, we can see that AccessNow is supported by Google and Facebook, but also by Mozilla, which is generally considered to be a strong privacy advocate. Similarly, CDT is supported by Google and Facebook, but also by DuckDuckGo and Mozilla. So what can we conclude from this? I'm not really sure. It cou…

4. The lobbying group is not a side, but the field of battle. It may naturally favor a side, but money moves the front.

Re: Facebook, Google Fund Nonprofits Shaping Privacy Debate

#139

Post by Nasrudith » Tue, Nov 19, 2019, 4:31 AM UTC

thfuran wrote: post #80

Nasrudith wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes the facts are wrong and there is a major difference between selling the data and using it. It is like the difference between a salesman asking a bartender what type of drinks you prefer and them having a transcript of everything you ever said in the bar.

>It is like the difference between a salesman asking a bartender what type of drinks you prefer and them having a transcript of everything you ever said in the bar. What? That's a difference in scale, not in kind.

One tells you something relevant to what sort of domain - what to get them. The bartender doesn't tell them about your nasty divorce, trouble at work, etc. Likewise Google doesn't just hand out your embarrassing search history to the highest bidder - because both would be both wrong and absolutely terrible for business.

Re: Facebook, Google Fund Nonprofits Shaping Privacy Debate

#140

Post by SpicyLemonZest » Tue, Nov 19, 2019, 4:44 AM UTC

rhizome wrote: post #131

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know EPIC isn’t for sale? They don’t disclose who their donors are.

What do you mean, "who their donors are?" What is missing from their CharityNavigator? https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summar... They're a 501(c)3, they take donations off the front page of their website. Sure, you might be curious who is donating? Or if there are any donations over a certain amount? I don't see any of that for The March of Dimes, either, do we question whether they are "for sal…

I agree that "for sale" isn't a fair descriptor, of the March of Dimes or EPIC or the EFF. That was mostly my point.

I think it's reasonable to ask some number of questions about the March of Dimes. It's surprising, at least a little bit, that eradicating polio didn't reduce the amount of charitable work a polio charity had to do.