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Facebook Is Going After Its Critics in the Name of Privacy

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Re: Facebook Is Going After Its Critics in the Name of Privacy

#81

Post by chrisseaton »

antris wrote: post #25

I have recently started supporting a ban on targeted advertising. Dividing people into cultural bubbles and being able to spend unlimited dollars on it is dangerous if we are to maintain cultural unity and be able to agree on facts. Also, when your advertising is not public and only visible to subsections of people, it is more difficult to investigate what is going on. Facebook can do it themselves, but do we want to…

What do you mean by targeted?

Is targeting knitters by advertising your knitting needles in a knitting magazine a problem in your mind?

That seems a really silly thing to want to ban, to me, and I think it will actually make enjoying advertising-supported content worse, not better.

Re: Facebook Is Going After Its Critics in the Name of Privacy

#82

Post by KaiserPro »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #42
KaiserPro wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> isnt that close to how Cambridge Analytica happened? Yes, its exactly this. "Facebook changes based on past scandal for the better, and this is bad. here is my 9th grade essay with no research just feeling" Facebook _should_ be held to account. I personally don't think that the advertising is actually that much of a problem. It all has paper trails because they have to pay. Advertising is not the worst part of face…

> "I personally don't think that the advertising is actually that much of a problem" Facebook was used to illegally infuence elections in Uk and break spending rules and because of their closed nature, nobody realised untill a whistleblower stepped forwards. Its a massive problem, and maybe we would not have Brexit without it. www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/uk-politics-44856992 A TV ad, by comparison, is aired publically and…

>Facebook was used to illegally influence elections

yes, the electoral commission found that. sadly its only able to issue a tiny fine. Not only that its being eroded by populists from both sides of the political spectrum. Its not really a facebook problem but an EC one.

This transgression was found by going over the accounts, not by leaks.

> A TV ad, by comparison, is aired publically and you can see it and ask who paid for it.

political TV ads are illegal in the UK. Long may it continue.

We are also supposing that facebook adverts are actually effective. They have the power to somehow corrupt a morally "good" person into someone that votes for the "other side". This is plainly nonsense.

The real issue is that facebook is a warped mirror of society. without rules and order, chaos and bad actors reign. This means "censorship" or if it were treated as the press, editorial standards.

Re: Facebook Is Going After Its Critics in the Name of Privacy

#83

Post by KaiserPro »

tjpnz wrote: post #39
KaiserPro wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

with respect, thats not the issue. With facebook they only collect "limited" information. Its what they do with it afterwards that matter. How is it stored, is it secure, how do they anonymise it, who has access to the raw data, what happens when there is a break, is there monitoring, etc etc etc. They are making a massive honey pot, and we just have to trust them that they are doing good job. (much like facebook....…

Facebook doesn't have the greatest security track record. While it wouldn't be productive to argue that one group is inherently more trustworthy than the other it's worth pointing out (as others already have) that the code is available to the public.

Code being public doesn't mean its secure. See php, django, gnupgp, openssl etc etc etc.

Again, the issue isn't the collection, its the storage, processing and disposal that really matters here.

Re: Facebook Is Going After Its Critics in the Name of Privacy

#84

Post by fsociety »

antris wrote: post #64
cambalache wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of that will work. Sure, have some basic regulatory model for your political campaigns to avoid unduly intervention by foreign actors and similar shady stuff,but that is an small deterrent. You cannot avoid targeted advertising, hell, all advertising is in one way or another targeted. Even if you get rid of advertisement period, you will have to deal with stuff like famous academic Op-Eds, celebrities recommendi…

> You cannot avoid targeted advertising, hell, all advertising is in one way or another targeted But there's a drastic difference in effectiveness. No one would support private ownership of nuclear weapons just because everyone has fists which are weapons also. Hyper-targeted advertising has gone off rails recently and when you can simply buy your way into any specific segment of the population without having to put…

What is the difference between targeted advertisement and targeted content? I’d argue targeted content is more dangerous because the intent of the content is not as clear as for an ad.

Btw the ad library on FB allows you to put scrutiny on those ads. In fact (some) journalists love to browse it to find a shocking ad and write a news story about it.

Re: Facebook Is Going After Its Critics in the Name of Privacy

#85

Post by KaiserPro »

Fnoord wrote: post #65
cambalache wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Elections are very tough nowadays because of how easy people (WHO VOTE AGAINST MY POLITICAL ORIENTATION) are influenced. Let's be honest, none of this were a scandal if Cambridge Analytica would have worked for Hilary or the remain campaign. I dont deny all this stuff influence people, it clearly does, but that is the price you have to pay for having a society with freedom of speech and universal vote. If you want…

Brexit is just an example. Manipulation of citizens is of all time. The danger lies in how precise the targeting nowadays is, together with internet being world-wide and advanced. Its the price we all paid for some of us having a dishonest ML data hoarder. I'm involved in the integrity of elections in The Netherlands. I have a political preference, but I am able to leave that out when I manually count votes. I also a…

> Brexit is just an example.

Brexit could only take place because the political class spent 25 years using the EU as an excuse for everything that went wrong.

The current PM spent his formative years making up stories about the EU to send back to the telegraph.

FAcebook's advertising only works (assuming that it does actually work) if people are receptive to the message. Those messages have to be thought up by someone.

Thats not facebook's fault. thats the fault of political discourse.

The Pro EU side _lost_ because they failed to follow the standard rules of election winning: Make the other side seem like they are going to make you poorer, or less patriotic (or both)

They spent their time shouting at the sceptics calling them racists. Waffling on about economics, never emotion, never empathy, Never ambition.

Much as its comforting to think that the likes of russia, google facebook and china are at fault, its really not the fault of advertising.

Re: Facebook Is Going After Its Critics in the Name of Privacy

#86

Post by fsociety »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #42
KaiserPro wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> isnt that close to how Cambridge Analytica happened? Yes, its exactly this. "Facebook changes based on past scandal for the better, and this is bad. here is my 9th grade essay with no research just feeling" Facebook _should_ be held to account. I personally don't think that the advertising is actually that much of a problem. It all has paper trails because they have to pay. Advertising is not the worst part of face…

> "I personally don't think that the advertising is actually that much of a problem" Facebook was used to illegally infuence elections in Uk and break spending rules and because of their closed nature, nobody realised untill a whistleblower stepped forwards. Its a massive problem, and maybe we would not have Brexit without it. www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/uk-politics-44856992 A TV ad, by comparison, is aired publically and…

That is not true, according to an investigation ran by a third-party https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/uk-politics-54457407 Do you trust the third-party investigation, or a couple of whistleblowers one of which designed the entire system and another of whom sold the system. No doubt CA is a wake-up call for data security and privacy.. but a sales person telling you how freakin’ powerful the system is and how they can control the world with their ML models. Well we’ve all heard that.

By the way it’s not just TV ads to consider. Mail is a huge part especially for political campaigns and NO one has visibility to that. You can’t just cherry-pick one distribution model of advertisements.

Re: Facebook Is Going After Its Critics in the Name of Privacy

#87

Post by mattnewton »

ankit219 wrote: post #33
input_sh wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The plug-in is open sourced: https://github.com/OnlinePoliticalTransparency/social-media-... You can download a release straight from there and import it into your browser. Browsers also do some reviews of the plugins that are in their stores, so every update should be tested by both Google and Mozilla (even if only superficially). I'd say the odds of them managing to pull off scraping anything else without anyone no…

Thanks for the link. I agree odds would be slim, but this can potentially set a precedent for others to do similar things. Imagine, in the future, a new company comes up with similar add-in claiming to scan ads, and take more data than needed. Facebook needs to be careful of that too. (though i think that is not the reason they are shutting this down, just that privacy is favorable to them in this case :)). There has…

What is the alternative? No visibility for the general public into hyper targeted ad campaigns?

If the users are opting into this, isn't that the same argument for letting them opt into the Facebook platform itself? Why must we protect them from NYU and not from Facebook?

Re: Facebook Is Going After Its Critics in the Name of Privacy

#88

Post by mattnewton »

KaiserPro wrote: post #13
input_sh wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The plug-in is open sourced: https://github.com/OnlinePoliticalTransparency/social-media-... You can download a release straight from there and import it into your browser. Browsers also do some reviews of the plugins that are in their stores, so every update should be tested by both Google and Mozilla (even if only superficially). I'd say the odds of them managing to pull off scraping anything else without anyone no…

with respect, thats not the issue. With facebook they only collect "limited" information. Its what they do with it afterwards that matter. How is it stored, is it secure, how do they anonymise it, who has access to the raw data, what happens when there is a break, is there monitoring, etc etc etc. They are making a massive honey pot, and we just have to trust them that they are doing good job. (much like facebook....…

The last part is the crux of this dispute to me. If the users are opting into this, isn't that the same argument for letting them opt into the Facebook platform itself? Why must we protect them from NYU and not from Facebook?

Re: Facebook Is Going After Its Critics in the Name of Privacy

#89

Post by fsociety »

_Understated_ wrote: post #52
Fnoord wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was highly targeted advertising on targets which were highly susceptible to be turned. Whatever they were turned by, doesn't matter whether it was factual or not (cause that is the low standard for advertising). We have Edward Bernays standard of advertising coupled with the power of Facebook available for everyone, including people who lie through their teeth to get what they wanted. Furthermore, there is evidenc…

> It was highly targeted advertising on targets which were highly susceptible to be turned This doesn't gel with me... how many people saw the ads, how many times, and of those, how many were actually influenced by it? Going by my sample size of two (my sister and my wife) they both claim that they never even look at ads that appear on screen. I honestly am calling bullshit on the whole ad industry here... show me ev…

It is bullshit I agree. We all know what the intent is with an advertisement. You don’t have to be a “tech-elite” to understand ads.

There should be more transparency around how ads are displayed on the internet.. but giving researchers full access to a user’s data and their friend’s data is a pretty poor one. Can’t a better system be designed for this?

Content, however, is very dangerous and it’s not clear what a good solution is. It’s not clear what the purpose of content is on the internet.

Re: Facebook Is Going After Its Critics in the Name of Privacy

#90

Post by mattnewton »

KaiserPro wrote: post #10
mcny wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you’re missing the context of this conversation. From a comment in a previous Han post about this > The research participants are voluntarily sharing their ads with NYU. Facebook is objecting.

They also voluntarily shared it with the personality quiz, which were then obtained by CA. much as I dislike facebook on this one, I think they actually have a point.

The users also voluntarily share all this data with Facebook. Why do we have to protect the users from NYU academics, but not from Facebook's business model?
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