131–140 of 194 posts
Well you have the option of not signing in with your facebook account. Good thing about this market is that there are other options out there and presumably more coming in the future.
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>I know I was targeted by that ad. I know they're just showing me the most general bit of the targeting info that was used to put that ad in front of me. How do you know this? I get ads for male pattern baldness all the time but I'm not even genetically at risk. Half my ads on hulu are for tampons, and no woman lives in my house. Ads really aren't that good. Facebook might've just gotten lucky...
> How do you know this? Because if I head to https://www.facebook.com/ads/preferences/ , they have a wide variety of bits of info on me that permit this exact sort of targeting, and it'd be really dumb of them not to use them. If I head to Facebook's ads manager and create a custom audience, typing "psoriasis" in the box gets me "psoriasis awareness", which consists of 19,402,670 "People who have expressed an interes…
Visited /r/gaming or kotaku? You'll get an ad for a switch.
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> How invasive might this become? Brain-wave-scanning kind of invasive. FB (and advertising in general) will continue to become ever more invasive until it meets a limiting factor. That limiting factor will possibly be legislation (just not in the US because worshiping the Dollar overrides anything and everything else).
Do we know the first thing about how brain waves correlate to any real world properties of a person? If Facebook or anyone else can crack brain waves, ie in a sense "read your mind", it seems like serving ads is the least of our worries, but also pretty exciting in terms of the potential positive applications.
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> How do you know this? Because if I head to https://www.facebook.com/ads/preferences/ , they have a wide variety of bits of info on me that permit this exact sort of targeting, and it'd be really dumb of them not to use them. If I head to Facebook's ads manager and create a custom audience, typing "psoriasis" in the box gets me "psoriasis awareness", which consists of 19,402,670 "People who have expressed an interes…
Visited webMD or a medical site for it? They have a FB Pixel on there, so you're in that audience. Visited /r/gaming or kotaku? You'll get an ad for a switch.
Plenty for Facebook to have creepily accurate targeting without needing a microphone listening in.
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>I know I was targeted by that ad. I know they're just showing me the most general bit of the targeting info that was used to put that ad in front of me. How do you know this? I get ads for male pattern baldness all the time but I'm not even genetically at risk. Half my ads on hulu are for tampons, and no woman lives in my house. Ads really aren't that good. Facebook might've just gotten lucky...
> How do you know this? Because if I head to https://www.facebook.com/ads/preferences/ , they have a wide variety of bits of info on me that permit this exact sort of targeting, and it'd be really dumb of them not to use them. If I head to Facebook's ads manager and create a custom audience, typing "psoriasis" in the box gets me "psoriasis awareness", which consists of 19,402,670 "People who have expressed an interes…
FB ads engineer here. Every time I read these threads, I'm 1. Flattered by how sophisticated HN thinks our systems are (they're not. and we're not that smart. FB's A-team stopped working on ads a long time ago) 2. Entertained by how HN thinks ad targeting works (we don't want to know everything about YOU. we want to know basic info about all of our users.) Hypertargeting doesn't work. Targeting small audiences doesn'…
And that'll be the company line, until there is 'business value'. FB is just investing in facial recognition technology to "help protect you from a stranger using your photo to impersonate you" [1]
Regarding ethics, have their been any meaningful changes since the FTC handed down the $5bn fine for data privacy violations? Or was it just an unfortunate set of actions taken by individuals and aren't representative of the company's philosophy?
Will there be any changes forthcoming when the Illinois class lawsuit alleging illegal collection of biometric data without user consent goes to trial? [2]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/09/technology/facebook-facia...
[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/aug/09/facebook-...
FB ads engineer here. Every time I read these threads, I'm 1. Flattered by how sophisticated HN thinks our systems are (they're not. and we're not that smart. FB's A-team stopped working on ads a long time ago) 2. Entertained by how HN thinks ad targeting works (we don't want to know everything about YOU. we want to know basic info about all of our users.) Hypertargeting doesn't work. Targeting small audiences doesn'…
Having spoken with people who have worked on the FB ads team, and having heard stories of how extensive FB's tracking is, this post seems disingenuous and personally I wouldn't be surprised if the account is sponsored by FB.
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Having spoken with people who have worked on the FB ads team, and having heard stories of how extensive FB's tracking is, this post seems disingenuous and personally I wouldn't be surprised if the account is sponsored by FB.
Please don’t suggest people are astroturfing here. It’s against the site guidelines.
Like if it's HN's policy to not call things astroturfing, fine, I'll accept that. But if it talks like a duck, walks like a duck, and posts in it's own defense for no apparent reason like a duck...
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Not sure if there's a public document as granular as "information X", but that $5b FTC settlement came with a bunch of policies. Also, the "clear history" feature should be rolling out (or maybe it already rolled out in your country) that lets you dissociate any 3rd party info from your profile.
BTW I was wondering about that, I have a recurring reminder to check it every week and months after it was "launched" it still says I'm not eligible (I live in the USA). Do you know when it is actually going live?
So... is anyone actually surprised by this?