Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Dear Facebook: Withdraw Your Cease and Desist to NYU

foundation.mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 31 posts

Re: Dear Facebook: Withdraw Your Cease and Desist to NYU

#3

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

"Facebook claims its motive for threatening Ad Observer is that browser plugins and extensions, like Ad Observer, could violate Facebook users' privacy."

Yes, but so can Facebook itself. And it has, many times. Facebook lacks credibility here. It is possible this research may even uncover further violations of users' privacy as it may reveal levels of targeting not believed possible based on the types of user data Facebook admits to having.

Can Facebook effectively block users from saving and sharing the ads that are forced upon them by Facebook and its advertisers?

Facebook would have to control what users choose to save from their browsers' caches and what they choose to do with that material, e.g., sharing it with researchers.

The legality of "scraping", fair use for research purposes and the general unenforceability of website TOS all stack in NYU's favour.

Laura Edelson, a researcher at NYU's Tandon School of Engineering who helps oversee the Ad Observatory project, said, "The only thing that would prompt us to stop doing this would be if Facebook would do it themselves, which we have called on them to do."

https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/facebook-seeks-shutdown-of-...

Re: Dear Facebook: Withdraw Your Cease and Desist to NYU

#5

Post by nickff »

This may be addressed to Facebook, but it's clearly written for a different audience. Accusing Facebook of impure motives and outright deception may feel good for Mozilla's staff, but it won't convince Facebook to change their stance. And let's not forget, Facebook is trying to draw a clear line against data exfiltration, to prevent another Cambridge Analytica disaster.

I really think this is just more posturing by Mozilla.

Re: Dear Facebook: Withdraw Your Cease and Desist to NYU

#6

Post by [deleted] »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #3

"Facebook claims its motive for threatening Ad Observer is that browser plugins and extensions, like Ad Observer, could violate Facebook users' privacy." Yes, but so can Facebook itself. And it has, many times. Facebook lacks credibility here. It is possible this research may even uncover further violations of users' privacy as it may reveal levels of targeting not believed possible based on the types of user data Fa…

[deleted]

Re: Dear Facebook: Withdraw Your Cease and Desist to NYU

#7

Post by freeopinion »

> Ad Observer only collects information about the ads people see, not personal posts or users’ personal information.

This statement seems to be contradicted within the article itself.

For instance, Mozilla claims the tool is used by a newsroom in Utah, linking to an article titled "ksl-investigates-who-is-behind-the-millions-in-facebook-political-ads-targeting-utah." So presumably the tool identifies the location of the target.

The article also claims that the tool proves that Facebook is still selling discriminatory ads. Does this mean that the tool knows things like race, gender, religion, etc. about the user?

If a user has willingly shared such information with the tool, I don't see a problem. I'm not sure how Facebook would even have any standing in a legal case. But the article does seem to contradict itself about user privacy.

Re: Dear Facebook: Withdraw Your Cease and Desist to NYU

#10

Post by totalZero »

freeopinion wrote: post #7

> Ad Observer only collects information about the ads people see, not personal posts or users’ personal information. This statement seems to be contradicted within the article itself. For instance, Mozilla claims the tool is used by a newsroom in Utah, linking to an article titled "ksl-investigates-who-is-behind-the-millions-in-facebook-political-ads-targeting-utah." So presumably the tool identifies the location of…

I have often seen apps saying things like, 'we don't use any personally identifiable information; we aggregate and anonymize location data, stripping it of your IP address and storing only the region and ISP.' Or whatever. Not all metadata can identify or profile the individual from whom the data were generated.

Here's what they say on the Ad Observer website:

If you want, you can enter basic demographic information about yourself in the tool to help improve our understanding of why advertisers targeted you. However, we’ll never ask for information that could identify you.

If that's the case, then I don't think the statement is false. I tried to find a standalone privacy policy, but it's not in the GitHub readme.

Post reply on HN