5 ms·

> Why doesn't FB just apply encryption on all messages? The same reason Gmail can't work with end-to-end encryption--they want to advertise at you based on mes

> Why doesn't FB just apply encryption on all messages? The same reason Gmail can't work with end-to-end encryption--they want to advertise at you based on message content. I highly doubt there is any government intervention in FB's business strategy, but there seems to be plenty of cooperation after the business decisions are made. (The same is largely true with Microsoft, Google, and yes, even Apple.) It's not really a conspiracy, or a matter of paranoia--it's been very widely reported for a while now, and people just generally don't seem to give a shit (myself increasingly included). EDIT: I do care. But I think (a) people need to take privacy into their own hands, since companies will never be incentivized to do it and (b) we've entered a new cultural era, where the levels of privacy enjoyed in the past are no longer socially normal.

davb 10y ago
> The same reason Gmail can't work with end-to-end encryption--they want to advertise at you based on message content. I wonder how they'd do if they were more open about it. "You're getting Gmail for free because we read your email and advertise to you. However, if you want to pay for a premium account (or Google Apps for Work) then we won't advertise to you, won't read your email and we'll even make end-to-end encryption easy and convenient". I mean, it seems like a good compromise. I'd be happier with the rampant advertising and profiling going on if it was only for signed-in users and everyone was given the choice - use it for free or pay and get guaranteed privacy and no ads.
- blahi 10y ago
  The wording "we read your email" isn't quite accurate. There is nobody at google who goes through davb's emails one by one.
  - merpnderp 10y ago
    Yeah, worse, he's being scored by highly imperfect algorithms.
    - blahi 10y ago
      In what way is it worse?
      - merpnderp 10y ago
        What if he's scored as a threat and reported to the FBI? A human can understand sarcasm, jokes, or hyperbole. An algorithm is going to see scary words and add them to the 'dangerous' score.
        lewiseason 10y ago
        > What if he's scored as a threat and reported to the FBI? Then he'll be referred to a human, who may or may not understand sarcasm, jokes, or hyperbole?
        lazaroclapp 10y ago
        'May not' seems likely, we are talking about the FBI after all ;)
        deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
  - CaptSpify 10y ago
    But they can. I doubt they do, because it's just not practical, but they do have the ability to
    - praxulus 10y ago
      Right, but the phrasing above wasn't "We can read your email," it was "We read your email." What actually happens is more relevant than what they could do if they wanted.
- reacweb 10y ago
  ads is a by product. The aim of google is to build AI. For training AI, it needs access to all the data about you. Maybe, google has already succeeded and the singularity has already happened ;-)
  - _Understated_ 10y ago
    A by product of what? 86% of their profits come from advertising[1]. If that's not the definition of an ad company then I don't know what is. [1] - http://adage.com/article/digital/google-q4-2015-earnings/302462/ http://adage.com/article/digital/google-q4-2015-earnings/302...
    - reacweb 10y ago
      That is not the point. Money is just a mean. Read http://www.artificialbrains.com/google http://www.artificialbrains.com/google http://bigdata-madesimple.com/12-famous-quotes-on-artificial-intelligence-by-google-founders/ http://bigdata-madesimple.com/12-famous-quotes-on-artificial... http://mashable.com/2015/05/12/elon-musk-fears-larry-page/#1xruxWgyCSq7 http://mashable.com/2015/05/12/elon-musk-fears-larry-page/#1... http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2460571,00.asp http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2460571,00.asp .
      - theseatoms 10y ago
        Money is absolutely not a mean. Google is a public company. Money is its ultimate end.
        reacweb 10y ago
        There is a legal obligation to serve shareholders’ “best interests”. It is not exactly the same thing as either maximizing profits, or maximizing shareholder value. See http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-corporations-obligations-to-shareholders/corporations-dont-have-to-maximize-profits http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-cor...
      - 10y ago
- arjie 10y ago
  My intuition is that this will either lead to people going to other providers who do the same but do not mention it or lead to people not caring. I mean, a large number of people here do know that machines scan their email. In what manner do the majority act? That shows us the revealed preference.
- rdslw 10y ago
  It would be a (financially) bad choice for corpo. And answer why, is the same in many similar questions 'why can't corpo do this-and-that'. Here it is (google as an example only, simplified) the answer: * Put two googles side by side. competing. * one is a current one, earning money from ads on you being product, and keeping it under the radar (although in fine print etc etc) * second is the one devised: premium accounts plus free w/ads * wait 5 years and observe by market efficiency evolution which of the (competing) companies wins. The first one. In this specific scenario, the second loses because time and money spent on 'premium accounts' will not be compensated by revenues from it. While at the same time, the first google, spending this capital difference purely on the ads department will make its ads department (here 100% of it) much better than ads part in second company. hereby winning on the market. In general (as the google example is SIMPLIFIED, due to the alphabet scale. Please don't use google apps FOR WORK (emphasis mine ;) as an counter example - it's B2B product :) it is because: we, humans, don't like companies who use fine print etc, yet those companies win case by case with the 'moral, pure pricing and fine ethics' companies BECAUSE OF BIASES AND ERRORS (+) OF HUMAN BRAINS during choice making shopping, exploited day by day. Thats why. (+) read stupidity also known why-I-buy-overpriced-sweets-at-checkout ;)
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - hueving 10y ago
    That analysis only makes sense if that is the only product of the company. Google would still be spending way more on making ads better than a pure gmail competitor just because it shows ads for so many other things.
- mtgx 10y ago
  I think if companies were fully transparent with what they're doing with the data and made sure almost all of their users knew exactly what they're doing with it (meaning, it shouldn't just be in a privacy policy no one ever reads, but it should be actively "promoted" somehow within the service, everytime the data is collected and used) people would be a lot more careful about what data they share through these services. This is exactly why these companies don't want to be more transparent unless they absolutely have to (like what the EU is doing to Google), but it really should be more regulated by governments, because I think it's a very "fair" thing to do - sharing everything you're doing with someone's info. It's not about restricting the data collection through regulation, just being transparent about it. That might lead to less useful information for the data collectors, but people should be informed and it should trump everything else.
JustSomeNobody 10y ago
> (b) we've entered a new cultural era, where the levels of privacy enjoyed in the past are no longer socially normal. Yeah, that whole Bill of Rights thing just needs to go away, right?
- napoleond 10y ago
  My comment was descriptive, not normative.
blahi 10y ago
Uhm, if you look back at history, privacy is a very recent thing. McLuhan has a lot of work around this.
fps 10y ago
End to end means that your computer is the only one that can read your gmail email, because the key is stored on your computer and not in the cloud. The whole reason we all moved to webmail from pop3 is to have access to our mailboxes on any device. If you put the key in the cloud and make it decryptable by some user-known data (like a password), there's very little point in having the key - brute forcing a user's key becomes very simple. Also, any legitimate service provider is going to provide a backup way to "recover your password", which means they have a shortcut to decrypting your data. So you can have one or the other, not both. Either you have simple, easy access to your data from multiple devices, or you have secure end to end encryption.
toong 10y ago
Want to give up on gmail search too ?
bertil 10y ago
> The same reason Gmail can't work with end-to-end encryption--they want to advertise at you based on message content. Facebook can do fine without that information: they have more information than they can develop ad services for at the moment; they could use a lot more engineers though. The goodwill from the dev community in allowing appropriate targeting is far more important to them. Two good examples being location and language: you can advertise for people in a certain place or who speak a certain language, but there are many unserved combinations, like tourists, language minorities and commuters. In my case, I’d love to see ads on learning Swedish: Facebook can see some of my friends speak it, and this is new. Source: worked for Fb, but in Engagement, not the Ads team; offered a lot of targeting suggestions, but most where “presumably not the biggest opportunities (they) could work on”. At Facebook’s scale, we are talking really big numbers.
captainmuon 10y ago
Text advertisements are cheap, bandwidth-wise. I wonder if they couldn't just send everybody dozens of advertisements, and decide on the client side what to show. Or even, download a dozens of MBs of graphical ads with each app update / the first time you visit the site. You could go further and do something like, email sent by people to people is off-limits and will be end-to-end encrypted and not looked at - but (almost) all automatically generated email is fair game and will be processed. Google already does that with Google Now (and shows you your flights, package deliveries etc.). I really prefer them making more explicit what they look at and what not.
- cmdrfred 10y ago
  > Text advertisements are cheap, bandwidth-wise. I wonder if they couldn't just send everybody dozens of advertisements, and decide on the client side what to show. Or even, download a dozens of MBs of graphical ads with each app update / the first time you visit the site. Shh, don't tell everyone about my next project. I think it can be done with images as well sending 5 of them for various demographic groups would be doable and should create enough noise (one tampon ad, a video game ad, an ad for amazon, a mountain dew ad, and a retirement plan ad for example). For those who care not for anonymity, but more for bandwidth they can opt out and only download the ad's they need.

davb 10y ago

> The same reason Gmail can't work with end-to-end encryption--they want to advertise at you based on message content. I wonder how they'd do if they were more open about it. "You're getting Gmail for free because we read your email and advertise to you. However, if you want to pay for a premium account (or Google Apps for Work) then we won't advertise to you, won't read your email and we'll even make end-to-end encryption easy and convenient". I mean, it seems like a good compromise. I'd be happier with the rampant advertising and profiling going on if it was only for signed-in users and everyone was given the choice - use it for free or pay and get guaranteed privacy and no ads.

blahi 10y ago
The wording "we read your email" isn't quite accurate. There is nobody at google who goes through davb's emails one by one.
- merpnderp 10y ago
  Yeah, worse, he's being scored by highly imperfect algorithms.
  - blahi 10y ago
    In what way is it worse?
    - merpnderp 10y ago
      What if he's scored as a threat and reported to the FBI? A human can understand sarcasm, jokes, or hyperbole. An algorithm is going to see scary words and add them to the 'dangerous' score.
      - lewiseason 10y ago
        > What if he's scored as a threat and reported to the FBI? Then he'll be referred to a human, who may or may not understand sarcasm, jokes, or hyperbole?
        lazaroclapp 10y ago
        'May not' seems likely, we are talking about the FBI after all ;)
        deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
- CaptSpify 10y ago
  But they can. I doubt they do, because it's just not practical, but they do have the ability to
  - praxulus 10y ago
    Right, but the phrasing above wasn't "We can read your email," it was "We read your email." What actually happens is more relevant than what they could do if they wanted.
reacweb 10y ago
ads is a by product. The aim of google is to build AI. For training AI, it needs access to all the data about you. Maybe, google has already succeeded and the singularity has already happened ;-)
- _Understated_ 10y ago
  A by product of what? 86% of their profits come from advertising[1]. If that's not the definition of an ad company then I don't know what is. [1] - http://adage.com/article/digital/google-q4-2015-earnings/302462/ http://adage.com/article/digital/google-q4-2015-earnings/302...
  - reacweb 10y ago
    That is not the point. Money is just a mean. Read http://www.artificialbrains.com/google http://www.artificialbrains.com/google http://bigdata-madesimple.com/12-famous-quotes-on-artificial-intelligence-by-google-founders/ http://bigdata-madesimple.com/12-famous-quotes-on-artificial... http://mashable.com/2015/05/12/elon-musk-fears-larry-page/#1xruxWgyCSq7 http://mashable.com/2015/05/12/elon-musk-fears-larry-page/#1... http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2460571,00.asp http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2460571,00.asp .
    - theseatoms 10y ago
      Money is absolutely not a mean. Google is a public company. Money is its ultimate end.
      - reacweb 10y ago
        There is a legal obligation to serve shareholders’ “best interests”. It is not exactly the same thing as either maximizing profits, or maximizing shareholder value. See http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-corporations-obligations-to-shareholders/corporations-dont-have-to-maximize-profits http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-cor...
    - 10y ago
arjie 10y ago
My intuition is that this will either lead to people going to other providers who do the same but do not mention it or lead to people not caring. I mean, a large number of people here do know that machines scan their email. In what manner do the majority act? That shows us the revealed preference.
rdslw 10y ago
It would be a (financially) bad choice for corpo. And answer why, is the same in many similar questions 'why can't corpo do this-and-that'. Here it is (google as an example only, simplified) the answer: * Put two googles side by side. competing. * one is a current one, earning money from ads on you being product, and keeping it under the radar (although in fine print etc etc) * second is the one devised: premium accounts plus free w/ads * wait 5 years and observe by market efficiency evolution which of the (competing) companies wins. The first one. In this specific scenario, the second loses because time and money spent on 'premium accounts' will not be compensated by revenues from it. While at the same time, the first google, spending this capital difference purely on the ads department will make its ads department (here 100% of it) much better than ads part in second company. hereby winning on the market. In general (as the google example is SIMPLIFIED, due to the alphabet scale. Please don't use google apps FOR WORK (emphasis mine ;) as an counter example - it's B2B product :) it is because: we, humans, don't like companies who use fine print etc, yet those companies win case by case with the 'moral, pure pricing and fine ethics' companies BECAUSE OF BIASES AND ERRORS (+) OF HUMAN BRAINS during choice making shopping, exploited day by day. Thats why. (+) read stupidity also known why-I-buy-overpriced-sweets-at-checkout ;)
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- hueving 10y ago
  That analysis only makes sense if that is the only product of the company. Google would still be spending way more on making ads better than a pure gmail competitor just because it shows ads for so many other things.
mtgx 10y ago
I think if companies were fully transparent with what they're doing with the data and made sure almost all of their users knew exactly what they're doing with it (meaning, it shouldn't just be in a privacy policy no one ever reads, but it should be actively "promoted" somehow within the service, everytime the data is collected and used) people would be a lot more careful about what data they share through these services. This is exactly why these companies don't want to be more transparent unless they absolutely have to (like what the EU is doing to Google), but it really should be more regulated by governments, because I think it's a very "fair" thing to do - sharing everything you're doing with someone's info. It's not about restricting the data collection through regulation, just being transparent about it. That might lead to less useful information for the data collectors, but people should be informed and it should trump everything else.

JustSomeNobody 10y ago

> (b) we've entered a new cultural era, where the levels of privacy enjoyed in the past are no longer socially normal. Yeah, that whole Bill of Rights thing just needs to go away, right?

napoleond 10y ago
My comment was descriptive, not normative.

blahi 10y ago

Uhm, if you look back at history, privacy is a very recent thing. McLuhan has a lot of work around this.

fps 10y ago

End to end means that your computer is the only one that can read your gmail email, because the key is stored on your computer and not in the cloud. The whole reason we all moved to webmail from pop3 is to have access to our mailboxes on any device. If you put the key in the cloud and make it decryptable by some user-known data (like a password), there's very little point in having the key - brute forcing a user's key becomes very simple. Also, any legitimate service provider is going to provide a backup way to "recover your password", which means they have a shortcut to decrypting your data. So you can have one or the other, not both. Either you have simple, easy access to your data from multiple devices, or you have secure end to end encryption.

toong 10y ago

Want to give up on gmail search too ?

bertil 10y ago

> The same reason Gmail can't work with end-to-end encryption--they want to advertise at you based on message content. Facebook can do fine without that information: they have more information than they can develop ad services for at the moment; they could use a lot more engineers though. The goodwill from the dev community in allowing appropriate targeting is far more important to them. Two good examples being location and language: you can advertise for people in a certain place or who speak a certain language, but there are many unserved combinations, like tourists, language minorities and commuters. In my case, I’d love to see ads on learning Swedish: Facebook can see some of my friends speak it, and this is new. Source: worked for Fb, but in Engagement, not the Ads team; offered a lot of targeting suggestions, but most where “presumably not the biggest opportunities (they) could work on”. At Facebook’s scale, we are talking really big numbers.

captainmuon 10y ago

Text advertisements are cheap, bandwidth-wise. I wonder if they couldn't just send everybody dozens of advertisements, and decide on the client side what to show. Or even, download a dozens of MBs of graphical ads with each app update / the first time you visit the site. You could go further and do something like, email sent by people to people is off-limits and will be end-to-end encrypted and not looked at - but (almost) all automatically generated email is fair game and will be processed. Google already does that with Google Now (and shows you your flights, package deliveries etc.). I really prefer them making more explicit what they look at and what not.

cmdrfred 10y ago
> Text advertisements are cheap, bandwidth-wise. I wonder if they couldn't just send everybody dozens of advertisements, and decide on the client side what to show. Or even, download a dozens of MBs of graphical ads with each app update / the first time you visit the site. Shh, don't tell everyone about my next project. I think it can be done with images as well sending 5 of them for various demographic groups would be doable and should create enough noise (one tampon ad, a video game ad, an ad for amazon, a mountain dew ad, and a retirement plan ad for example). For those who care not for anonymity, but more for bandwidth they can opt out and only download the ad's they need.