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Facebook reportedly researching ways to use encrypted WhatsApp messages for ads

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Re: Facebook reportedly researching ways to use encrypted WhatsApp messages for ads

#81

Post by foobarian »

g_p wrote: post #64
beauHD wrote: post #58

I just wish AdTech companies had a system where you could fill out an extensive form, where you openly state what your preferences are, because the targeting seems very skewed and wrong, at least from what I've experienced. Facebook thinks I like rock music, but I really like house music. Facebook thinks I eat meat, but I am a vegan. Facebook thinks I like cars, but I don't even drive. There's no way of telling Faceb…

There's a growing base of evidence in both the US and the Netherlands (from news media websites, I believe), that targeted advertising is effectively a bubble, and didn't yield higher metrics or revenues. In fact I believe in a couple of examples, they saw higher growth and revenues from ads by going totally non-targeted. There's an entire sector now focused on trying to hyper-target ads, on the presumed basis they'r…

Interesting. Reminds me of the analogous process of iteratively improving a model or fitness function and over time ending up with something overfit.

Re: Facebook reportedly researching ways to use encrypted WhatsApp messages for ads

#82

Post by russh »

bastardoperator wrote: post #75
beauHD wrote: post #58

I just wish AdTech companies had a system where you could fill out an extensive form, where you openly state what your preferences are, because the targeting seems very skewed and wrong, at least from what I've experienced. Facebook thinks I like rock music, but I really like house music. Facebook thinks I eat meat, but I am a vegan. Facebook thinks I like cars, but I don't even drive. There's no way of telling Faceb…

Couple this with the questionable junk they're always advertising too. Even when they do advertise correctly it's not anything I would ever consider buying. I left the platform last year and haven't looked back, it's a time suck/waste all around.

I'm convinced that the real target of targeted advertising is actually the ad buyers and not the ad viewers. It's a tool to increase the revenue of the ad sellers.

Re: Facebook reportedly researching ways to use encrypted WhatsApp messages for ads

#83

Post by dunnevens »

beauHD wrote: post #58

I just wish AdTech companies had a system where you could fill out an extensive form, where you openly state what your preferences are, because the targeting seems very skewed and wrong, at least from what I've experienced. Facebook thinks I like rock music, but I really like house music. Facebook thinks I eat meat, but I am a vegan. Facebook thinks I like cars, but I don't even drive. There's no way of telling Faceb…

Facebook kinda lets you do this now. Filling out a preference sheet, that is. Buried in your ad settings is a list of what FB thinks are your interests. You can remove any that don’t match.

Doesn’t always work though. You can remove all “interests” related to meat, and then still get slammed with steak ads after you clicked “like” on an article criticizing the beef industry. There seems to be a shadow list of interests that the user can’t see or edit.

The one combo that does work over time is deleting interests and consistently choosing “Do not show this ad again” for the unwanted subjects. But that’s more work than most are willing to do. I only did it because the ad system is interesting to me and I wanted to see how trainable it is.

Re: Facebook reportedly researching ways to use encrypted WhatsApp messages for ads

#84

Post by endisneigh »

I'm sure end-to-end encryption is great and all, but if a company like Facebook is giving you the client, what difference does e2e encryption make if you're trying to prevent Facebook from seeing your stuff?

Obviously you can see the plain text messages even if it was encrypted, and so Facebook/WhatsApp could theoretically see it too. Isn't this true of any app, e2ee or not?

Adding ads at that point is just trivial - process on the client.

Re: Facebook reportedly researching ways to use encrypted WhatsApp messages for ads

#85

Post by slg »

failuser wrote: post #74
slg wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Of course, this means that advertisers need to be able to trust Apple's impression reporting; And that is why it won't work for Facebook. They have already been caught lying about impressions in a way that ended up destroying companies. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/fac...

Nice to assume that would be a problem for Facebook.

Fool me once...

Re: Facebook reportedly researching ways to use encrypted WhatsApp messages for ads

#86

Post by monetus »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #42
inciampati wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is even more true today, with a decade of research into the ROI of advertising showing that it isn't even making money for those who buy it. What a sad waste of energy and imagination. We can do better.

Can we? As Churchill said, democracy is the worst form of government -- except for all the others which have been tried. Similarly, capitalism is the worst form of economics -- except for all the others which have been tried. I mean, it's obvious to an external observer that a prisoner's dilemma, sub-optimal Nash equilibrium, or other coordination problem can best be solved by all sides cooperating. But the reason th…

I think about how we live in an era of information, not communication, frequently. Have you heard of pol.is or vtaiwan?

https://pol.is/home https://info.vtaiwan.tw

I have a lot of hope, as well as paranoia, that implementations of semantic analysis in those direct referendum/republic programs will generate more rational collective action.

Re: Facebook reportedly researching ways to use encrypted WhatsApp messages for ads

#87

Post by derefr »

MikeUt wrote: post #65
derefr wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no way to match advertising keywords in encrypted content Complete tangent, since this has nothing to do with what Facebook are looking into here, but: If you control both ends of the connection (like Facebook does in WhatsApp), you can match on advertising keywords securely. By doing it client-side, after the text is decrypted. As I understand it, this is essentially what Apple's iAds framework does: all…

> The iAd framework then collects just the impression metrics — how many times each ad was shown to a given user — and then every-so-often batches those metrics out to Apple's servers. If Apple knows how many times you were shown each ad, and which keywords are associated with that ad, then they are able to reconstruct which keywords appeared in your encrypted chat, and how often.

I believe the iAd platform offers fine-grained "eyeball" targeting, but not fine-grained context targeting. The iAds framework knows a lot about the device and its owner; but it doesn't/can't directly read the content of the app the iAd gets embedded into (the "host" app) — only the host app's barest metadata, e.g. the App Store category the host app is published under (e.g. Games vs. Productivity vs. Travel, etc.)

In the case of some apps, e.g. Apple's own News app, the app may opt to feed the iAds framework a "context clue" about the content currently being viewed — telling it the category of content being displayed (e.g. is this a Business News story? An Entertainment story? etc.) But this is just a high-level, categorical identifier attached to the metadata of the item being displayed, with no ability for specific content within the viewport to trigger specific ads.

Apple has a page for exactly what the iAds framework does/doesn't use as an input for its targeting algorithm: https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT205223

One interesting thing I figure I should highlight from that page, for the sake of people who don't bother to click:

> We create segments, which are groups of people who share similar characteristics, and use these groups for delivering targeted ads. Information about you may be used to determine which segments you’re assigned to, and thus, which ads you receive. To protect your privacy, targeted ads are delivered only if more than 5,000 people meet the targeting criteria.

This is, I believe, a move to combat "seemingly-innocent" targeting rules that nevertheless de-anonymize someone, just because that person is weird. For example, if you're the only Tagalog speaker in Cuba, just plain-old Region+Language targeting that every platform supports would be enough to target+track you specifically. So Apple just won't allow "Cuba+Tagalog" unless there are at least 5000 Tagalog speakers in Cuba with iOS devices.

Re: Facebook reportedly researching ways to use encrypted WhatsApp messages for ads

#88

Post by AdSeller »

russh wrote: post #82
bastardoperator wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couple this with the questionable junk they're always advertising too. Even when they do advertise correctly it's not anything I would ever consider buying. I left the platform last year and haven't looked back, it's a time suck/waste all around.

I'm convinced that the real target of targeted advertising is actually the ad buyers and not the ad viewers. It's a tool to increase the revenue of the ad sellers.

delete this comment

Re: Facebook reportedly researching ways to use encrypted WhatsApp messages for ads

#89

Post by blensor »

fshbbdssbbgdd wrote: post #68
blensor wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Telegram does that. I had someone send me a message about our video call we had that day and in the same minute I suddenly received a message from Telegram about their video call features

Unless you were using a secret chat, telegram isn’t e2e encrypted. So there’s no need for them to implement keyword detection on the client side.

No secret chat that I was aware of. It just caught me by surprise that I got an "ad" based on a 1:1 conversation

Re: Facebook reportedly researching ways to use encrypted WhatsApp messages for ads

#90

Post by Lammy »

inciampati wrote: post #33
JohnWhigham wrote: post #30

What's that quote again from that early engineer? The smartest, highest paid engineers, and they fucking work on making you view more ads. We're living in an embarrassing era of massively misallocated resources.

This is even more true today, with a decade of research into the ROI of advertising showing that it isn't even making money for those who buy it. What a sad waste of energy and imagination. We can do better.

Advertising is a way to backdoor surveillance in a post-Snowden era when people are wise to TLSing All the Things. The dollars were never a real concern imo.
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