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Facebook's tentacles reach further than people think

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Facebook's tentacles reach further than people think

#41

Post by StavrosK »

Splines wrote: post #36
keth wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have acquaintances like that as well. They are usually the "I have nothing to hide" kind of type. :(

Ha - if anybody says that, ask them if they can kindly lend you their phone for a few minutes, so you can browse through their photo gallery, browser history and emails.

"Oooh! How much do you make? How many sexual partners have you had? Have you ever cheated on any of your partners? Ever had an STD? Whom do you secretly dislike even though you don't show it? I've never met someone with nothing to hide before, this is so exciting!"

Re: Facebook's tentacles reach further than people think

#42

Post by killjoywashere »

ghughes wrote: post #22
jacquesm wrote: post #4

The bigger problem for me is how facebook tracks and identifies even people who do not have a facebook account. They simply infer such a person exists from photograps, contacts and other one sided activity and can start to track that person, tie all this information together and then target them with ads even though they never signed up for Facebook. Such shadow profiles are a much larger problem to me than people wh…

Nothing will change until the law cracks down on this. The people who work on these systems are smart enough to comprehend the wider consequences, but they do it anyway because money. Without significant external pressure, there will always be a long line of engineers willing to dial their cognitive dissonance up to 11 and build software that is clearly unethical in exchange for a fat paycheck.

The law will not crack down on this. The politicians stand to gain too much. See The Dictator's Handbook (which is as relevant to democrats as autocrats).

Re: Facebook's tentacles reach further than people think

#43

Post by drdaeman »

devopsproject wrote: post #9
keth wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have acquaintances like that as well. They are usually the "I have nothing to hide" kind of type. :(

An easy disarm is "You are confusing privacy with secrecy. It is no secret what happens in the bathroom. It doesn't mean we are going to remove the doors because people still want privacy"

There are ways to counter this. For example, it can be said that Facebook isn't your bathroom. (Yes, this isn't exactly solid argument, sure.)

Still, I'm absolutely sure it's best to keep private stuff to oneself, and parties you trust. With understanding of full consequences of doing so. If one trusts Facebook, they'd better think why do they do so, as their trust may be misplaced.

I think one of problems is that when users post data they don't even think they send it to Facebook - they believe they send it to their friends there.

Re: Facebook's tentacles reach further than people think

#44

Post by angry-hacker »

ghughes wrote: post #22
jacquesm wrote: post #4

The bigger problem for me is how facebook tracks and identifies even people who do not have a facebook account. They simply infer such a person exists from photograps, contacts and other one sided activity and can start to track that person, tie all this information together and then target them with ads even though they never signed up for Facebook. Such shadow profiles are a much larger problem to me than people wh…

Nothing will change until the law cracks down on this. The people who work on these systems are smart enough to comprehend the wider consequences, but they do it anyway because money. Without significant external pressure, there will always be a long line of engineers willing to dial their cognitive dissonance up to 11 and build software that is clearly unethical in exchange for a fat paycheck.

Name and shame campaigns might beva solution. I don't know how know how I would feel about it it this but it's an opportunity for pressure.

Re: Facebook's tentacles reach further than people think

#45

Post by kromem »

jacquesm wrote: post #4

The bigger problem for me is how facebook tracks and identifies even people who do not have a facebook account. They simply infer such a person exists from photograps, contacts and other one sided activity and can start to track that person, tie all this information together and then target them with ads even though they never signed up for Facebook. Such shadow profiles are a much larger problem to me than people wh…

And how are they hitting that person with a tracking pixel and associating it with the pseudo-account?

It's still creepy, but it's likely more about determining knowledge of the friend graph (i.e. suggesting 2nd degree friends via a connecting pseudo-account) than about ad targeting.

Though yes, as soon as that pseudo-account could be tied to an actual account, Facebook could use passively gathered info to target you.

The creepiest part about Facebook is the sheer volume of facial data paired with social connection data. With access to that, even if you have never been online in your entire life, there's a good chance I could take your driver's license photo and know who you associate with.

Re: Facebook's tentacles reach further than people think

#47

Post by anigbrowl »

jacquesm wrote: post #4

The bigger problem for me is how facebook tracks and identifies even people who do not have a facebook account. They simply infer such a person exists from photograps, contacts and other one sided activity and can start to track that person, tie all this information together and then target them with ads even though they never signed up for Facebook. Such shadow profiles are a much larger problem to me than people wh…

That's actually why I gave up on avoiding it (after leaving my fb account dormant for ~5 years). If I'm being tracked anyway I might as well enjoy the social benefits of the platform, which are not insignificant.

FB absolutely knows more about me than any individual person at this point. I've decided, for good or ill, to accept that and leverage it; rather than feeling upset about my inability to enforce a right to privacy, I've decided it's more important that I should be able to enjoy being myself rather than having to hide everything. If powerful forces wish to abuse that, they can, but I'm happy to have that moral argument.

Re: Facebook's tentacles reach further than people think

#48

Post by anigbrowl »

killjoywashere wrote: post #42
ghughes wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing will change until the law cracks down on this. The people who work on these systems are smart enough to comprehend the wider consequences, but they do it anyway because money. Without significant external pressure, there will always be a long line of engineers willing to dial their cognitive dissonance up to 11 and build software that is clearly unethical in exchange for a fat paycheck.

The law will not crack down on this. The politicians stand to gain too much. See The Dictator's Handbook (which is as relevant to democrats as autocrats).

I've just finished that and second the recommendation - while the ideas have been around for a while, the presentation of them in that book is outstanding.

Re: Facebook's tentacles reach further than people think

#49

Post by ocdtrekkie »

rhizome wrote: post #40
freeflight wrote: post #38

Google does some pretty scary stuff too. I made a point of never giving them my mobile number or any "real information" about me. When a friend of mine added me to his contacts, on his Android phone, he also added one of email addresses to the contact, which is the same one I used to register my Google account. The phone automatically connected the mail address to my Google account and now every time I call him the (…

It occurs to me that I'd like to see some reportage on which parts of the TOS cover these evergreen frustrations. Is it the "share your information with third parties" clause? Is it "to improve Google services?" Something else? Surely every element of surprise can be responded to with "Oh, well you gave them that permission in Section F, subsection 3(n)."

Usually its to the tune of 'by using this service you agree to grant Google a non-exclusive royalty-free worldwide license to reproduce and redistribute' etc.

Re: Facebook's tentacles reach further than people think

#50

Post by jacquesm »

kromem wrote: post #45
jacquesm wrote: post #4

The bigger problem for me is how facebook tracks and identifies even people who do not have a facebook account. They simply infer such a person exists from photograps, contacts and other one sided activity and can start to track that person, tie all this information together and then target them with ads even though they never signed up for Facebook. Such shadow profiles are a much larger problem to me than people wh…

And how are they hitting that person with a tracking pixel and associating it with the pseudo-account? It's still creepy, but it's likely more about determining knowledge of the friend graph (i.e. suggesting 2nd degree friends via a connecting pseudo-account) than about ad targeting. Though yes, as soon as that pseudo-account could be tied to an actual account, Facebook could use passively gathered info to target you…

> And how are they hitting that person with a tracking pixel and associating it with the pseudo-account?

That's the easy part. There are companies that specialize in this sort of thing, as well as in merging profiles from several devices (pc, tablet, smartphone), you can bet that if two-bit advertising technology companies know about these tricks that Facebook does too, and they probably know a trick or two that has not become mainstream yet.

If you want an explicit explanation of how such a link could be made it's a hard choice: too many possibilities.

I've done technical due diligence on about 10 advertising technology companies, node identification in a graph gets easier through two things:

- more known nodes in the graph (Facebook has many)

- more activity by the unknown node (just wait and track)

Sooner or later there is a moment where just for an instant that node can be strongly associated with a real world ID, for instance, a contact in someone's address book, a tag in a photograph and some shared online activity or something as simple as a phone call. At that point it is game over, the contact can now be associated with the device ID on the other side for instance through some running app.

Apropos games, many games monetize by embedding a library supplied by an advertising technology company that wishes to gain access to devices without waiting for the user to visit a website. These libraries leak information all over the net.

https://developers.facebook.com/products/app-monetization

Is one example by FB, there are many more and some of those require permissions that make no sense at first sight until you realize what is happening under water. If you ever wondered why some shitty game requires access to your contacts, location and other interesting bits of data this is it.

It is very hard to stay off the radar of the likes of Google and Facebook, I have a pretty good idea of how this stuff works in the background and I have no clue how I could not leak enough bits for those two companies to tie my online activity to my real world identity in a single profile.

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